My brother is dying as he lived – stubbornly. He has been in hospice for two weeks and is failing incrementally. On Monday we were swapping memories and he stopped talking on Tuesday, the same day he stopped eating. He lies on his back on the hospice bed, mouth open, eyes staring at the dropped ceiling. He can no longer swallow so he gets morphine syringed under his tongue. Nurses sponge-bathe him twice a day. My nephew and I speculate on how aware he is of his surroundings. We talk to him frequently, hold his hand and sing. I decided to see how he would react to music.
Ken started
clarinet lessons at age six. He was a natural, the sort of guy who could pick
up any instrument and make it sound at least tolerable. On drums and backup
vocals he once recorded demos with a fifties revival band called The Brylcreems.
He eventually accumulated thousands of record albums. I remember in the
seventies when he bought the complete Beethoven by mail order. He was a musical
omnivore. He had shelves of records by Leon Russell, Howlin’ Wolf and Ry Cooder
that I have never seen anywhere else.
First I
played Glenn Gould’s recording of the Goldberg
Variations, the 1955 version, one of our favorite records when we were kids,
followed by the live version of “Time Is Tight” by Booker T & the MGs. Then
the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony, the “Ode to Joy,” conducted by Von
Karajan. My nephew suggested Louis Jordan, so I played “Five Guys Named Moe,” “Beans and Cornbread” and “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie.” Hours of music followed and I wish I
could say my brother smiled or swayed, but he gave no visible sign of hearing anything, though it sure lifted our spirits.
1 comment:
I can only say is, God bless you, Patrick, for your continuing devotion to and care for your brother. Some would say that it is wasted, but to me it brings to mind one of my favorite quotes, from Proust (it's a long one, but I think it fits):
"All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying the burdens of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be fastidious, to be polite even, nor make the talented artist consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his body devoured by worms, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much knowledge and skill by an artist who must forever remain unknown and is barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations which have not their sanction in our present life seem to belong to a different world, founded upon kindness, scrupulosity, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this, which we leave in order to be born into this world, before perhaps returning to the other to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we have obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, knowing not whose hand traced them there - those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only - and still! - to fools."
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