'His Own Exclusive Object'

I’ve accumulated some of the accoutrements of age – bifocals, cane, hearing aids. None embarrasses me and all make life less annoying. I’ve never been seriously ill. I take my handful of vitamins and meds in the morning. I no longer drink and never smoked. Among the last things I worry about is my health. The subject is nearly as tiresome as politics. 

My brother is dying in hospice. He’s now riddled with cancer. The oncologists tell me it’s the liver that will kill him. His skin is yellow and he’s more bones than flesh. He moans a lot and everything hurts. I spend eight hours a day with him here in Cleveland. We haven’t lived in the same city for almost half a century. I’m not squeamish and I find caregiving a natural thing to do, though I’m exhausted by the end of the day. In his lucid moments we talk not about cancer but about random memories of childhood. On Tuesday he remembered Mike, the dog we got in 1964. Memories flooded from both of us until Ken abruptly – what? Fell asleep? Lost consciousness? Flipped some previously unknown switch? Later, out of nowhere, he quoted, quite distinctly, Richard Nixon: “I am not a crook.” He said he saw “scenes from Watergate” on the wall in his room.

 

I’ve been in the presence of two people as they died – one abruptly and violently, the other gently, almost invisibly, in a hospital. As a cop reporter I saw more than enough carnage – suicides, homicides, multiple-fatality traffic wrecks. As I walk the halls of the hospice, I can’t help but look in the open doors. Mostly old people sunk into their beds, some moaning. In the late afternoon by the rear entrance, a dozen men in wheelchairs sit around, almost silently, smoking cigarettes.

 

In “The Convalescent” (The Last Essays of Elia, 1833), Charles Lamb says something foolish and something wise. First, the foolish:

 

“If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick bed. How the patient lords it there; what caprices he acts without control! how king-like he sways his pillow- tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it, to the ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples.”

 

Lamb never visited a hospice or what passed for such in his day. There’s no lording in what I’ve seen. And then the wise, from the perspective of a certain sub-category of patients:

 

“How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man’s self to himself! he is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty. . . . He has nothing to think of but how to get well. What passes out of doors, or within them, so he hear not the jarring of them, affects him not.”

 

Except that the people in hospice don’t get well.