'When You Desperately Need Other People'

I was the designated driver for the wedding in Connecticut. It was 1991. One of my passengers was a fellow reporter at the newspaper in Albany, N.Y. The other was a friend of the bride and groom who made me think of Alexander Pope. The name of his diagnosis I don’t remember but he was very small and used an undersized wheelchair. I drove a sedan and lifted him into the passenger's seat, adjusted his seatbelt and stowed his chair in the trunk. 

Along the way we stopped at a diner so he could use the bathroom. I lifted him from the car, carried him inside and seated him on the toilet. I was strong but had never carried an adult male – he was about my age – in so intimate a manner. (My son at the time was almost four, and roughly the same size.) He was utterly unembarrassed and I tried to take my emotional cues from him, which helped. We repeated the routine at the church and then at the church hall where the wedding reception was held, and at the same diner on the return trip. At the reception, I remember talking to him about the American historian Francis Parkman, whom he was reading at the time.

 

For decades I’ve been reading Dr. Bert Keizer in The Threepenny Review. He’s a Dutch physician and author of Dancing with Mr. D: Notes on Life and Death (1996). Here is a passage from a 2023 column, “On Loss,” that reminded me of Connecticut. Keizer describes one of his patients:

 

“With the help of a sliding-board and a rope from the ceiling, she still managed to get from her bed into the wheelchair without help. And in that way she could use the toilet too, without having to be ‘hoisted across like a sack of potatoes.’  But when she turned eighty, she lost this last straw of independence and wanted her life to end. People who walk around, who wash and brush themselves when they feel like it, board a train or a plane without giving it a thought, even pee and poo without having to ask anyone to place them on the seat, and who moreover wipe their behind in their own fashion—such people do not realize what a terrible thing it is when you desperately need other people all of the time to help you perform these tasks.”

 

No wonder we have so many writers who were doctors – Keats, Chekhov, William Carlos Williams, Walker Percy, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Oliver Sacks, among others. The job descriptions overlap. Both specialize in human beings.

 

[Read Keizer’s “The Language of Non-Fiction,” published in 2000 in Publishing Research Quarterly.]