No, that’s not true. It has nothing to do with the season. It has everything to do with Ken.
(See
“Missing Person” July post)
It’s as if
his physical body and his mind are at war. Sometimes the cancer has the upper hand, and seeking relief
from pain is the issue that sets him apart. A need to be comfortable. To be able to walk around while others are
sitting. Small adjustments. Other times his mind takes him away from
reality and pain isn’t what’s foremost.
When he asks
me in the middle of the afternoon or in the middle of the night–it’s random–“What’s
happening?” or “When are we going home?” or maybe: “Where is everyone?
Is someone else here?” I can feel tears pressing just behind my
eyes. That’s where they are most
of the time, pressing, filling my head and ready to materialize at any moment. Other times he knows just where he is. He hasn’t failed to recognize
anyone. Could it be that's still to
come?
Ken used to
say in no uncertain terms that he would never want to live if his mind were slipping
away. Yet he is. His body is slipping away along with
his mind. It is also clear that
the person he was, the person who would not want to live with a mind that was
slipping away, is not the person he is now. This present person
doesn’t have ideas like that. This
person lives in the now. He
accepts what is, because there is no other reality. When that other guy, the one from the past, appears–and he
does sometimes, with full awareness–I feel it like a knife wound, the full
tragedy of it. Is it better to
forget?
People lie
and steal for drugs like oxycondone and percoset. They’re looking for peace, joy, thrills, happiness,
calm–something better than what they’ve got. They take the drugs to get high. Where is the land of “high” anyway? Why couldn’t those same drugs Ken takes
for actual physical pain make him high?
High would be nice. High
would be good. Do they bring
peace, joy, thrills, happiness, calm?
No! All they do besides
mitigating the pain is make him groggy, sleepy. They push the pain into the background. Until the dose was increased he slept
less during the day. Now he sleeps
more. Much more. Sometimes I see him sleeping on the
sofa and he is all folded in upon himself, as if the air has gone out of him. An image of Stephen Hawking comes to
mind, and I shudder. Would it be
better to be in more pain but awake?
No! Isn’t it better to have
less pain and sleep more? No! It is a trade-off about which there is
no real choice and no happy result.
We sit on
the porch and look at the sun setting behind the mountains. The view fails to soothe. Jokes fail to connect. Stories fail to make sense. Ideas become fragments of thought. Conversations are haphazard,
unsatisfying. I point out a stick
bug outside attached to the screen, an unusual sight. He turns to look at it with an appreciative smile, but his
admiration of small living things is only half there. It wasn’t more than a month ago that I was away for a good
part of an afternoon, leaving him alone, not something I do these days. Worried that he had been alone for
several hours I came back home to check and found him having a lovely
time: his microscope was on the
rear patio and he had been absorbed in examining a bug. This is how he always was, and I knew
that at that moment on that particular afternoon he was okay.
 |
| Walking stick on the outside, my hand on the inside for scale. This bug hung around the outside of the porch for days. |
Strange
things happen: I make a lemon pie
and Ken cuts slices that he places on pieces of toast. He gets up early one morning and starts
to make coffee but in distraction fills the dog’s bowl with instant
coffee. This entails a visit to
the vet for induced vomiting. At 3
AM Ken wakes up, gets dressed and heads downstairs. We watch a DVD of “House of Cards” but Ken finds it makes him
anxious, walks out. (To tell the
truth, this reaction doesn’t seem all
that odd. I get the same feeling
about our current political reality.)
Now and then he forgets steps of personal care. He becomes obsessive about small things,
like locking the doors, folding notes into small squares, closing the sun
umbrella, tying up the hammock when it’s windy, tightly wrapping up the package
of bread on the counter. I realize these are small protections: they are ways of keeping things safe. It reminds me of how he long had a
habit of putting important things in “safe” places. Things like a Christmas gift, tucked away so securely that
when the date arrived he couldn’t find it himself. Security. Funny.
