Perhaps mad laughter, absurd laughter breaks the indulgence in suffering.
“These cookies?” There were a dozen Oreos and an equal amount of Lorna Doones scattered on the hospital tray. “Are you going to eat these?” Atop the cookies was a meal ticket stamped with a single word: bereavement. The floor nurse hovered, shifting her weight leg to leg, waiting on my response. “Do you mind if I take a few?”
It was against my better judgement to give up what little, in my brother’s dying hours, that this hospital had chosen to give back to us. The numbers mattered here. Over the previous two days, although Don was clearly dying—evident to the staff, his family, and most importantly himself—the hospital refused more than two visitors in the private room at a time. Two would come down and two more could go up. But these next two first had to stand in the guard’s line to secure a pass before heading up. Fine, but that whole process took more than twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, while my brother lay bureaucratically alone.
Forty days. Jesus fasted for forty days in the wilderness.
Forty days. Forty days had marked the announcement of my brother’s cancer, cancer of the esophagus and stomach, to landing him here in these final moments. Don’s tortuous deterioration came so suddenly and so completely as to elicit the absurd. Particularly as this all played out in this hospital. The cancer restricted my brother’s gullet, making the slightest effort of eating or drinking impossibly painful. He was now an unwilling hunger artist. In the cancer’s own ironic twist, the disease would fill his stomach, bloating it with liquids. Painful in itself, but made much worse when the hospital performed imaging tests, inflating the already over inflated abdomen, and then later pumping the fluid out. Obviously, this was the medically and humanely wrong order, but that didn’t reverse the process.
Why? Because that’s the way the orders were written.
In a better moment, Don had asked his children to bring in sodas, brightly colored orange, birch beer, root beer sodas. Crazy, cause he wasn’t going to drink them, but this ridiculous request birthed some happiness: it was enough just to look at the shimmering liquids and drink in the memories.
Bedside, I played with an orange soda, trying to catch the sunlight through it. The first day I was there, the TV hovering over the bed silently played one 80s comedy after another…Caddyshack, National Lampoon’s Vacation, Stripes. Don loved laughing and loved these films, particularly challenging his kids to count how many cop cars were totaled in the movie Blues Brothers. Don and I, we occasionally cracked that we were ourselves blues brothers.
He even mentioned it to his hospital appointed neurologist. A tiny, busy lady with a flittering persona, she had dropped in to do a hasty…and totally unnecessary…billable evaluation of Don’s mind. With the sharp skill of a medical detective, she quickly took in my brother’s condition. “I don’t think we need to do an MRI brain scan. It’s really kind of intrusive and loud.”
Really?
Don laughed.
“And,” this expert conceded, “I can see you’re dealing with other things.”
Deep, absurd laughter.
Eventually, the hospital acknowledged my brother’s hospice request. One would think that might change the numbers, up the person visitor limit, but no. The immediate changes were in Don’s room. The lighting dimmed. A soothing ambient sound, vaguely akin to music, played from somewhere. And replacing the TV comedies, the visuals now shifted to idyllic nature scenes: deers drinking from mountain brooks and that type of thing. A kind of muzak for the eyes.
I took it in. I started laughing. Uncontrollably. I knew this movie: Soylent Green. The hospital had transformed my brother’s room into the suicide chamber in Soylent Green. And as we know, Soylent Green is…
(When I reported the atmospheric change to my waiting family in the now closed hospital cafeteria downstairs, I offered why not just play hospice Zeppelin. “Stairway to Heaven,” my nephew suggested.)
Perhaps I was still laughing when the nurse arrived, eyeing the cookie tray. Alongside these prizes were a dozen black coffees, getting cold. 12 cups for the two-at-a-time visitors. Was this what the doctor ordered?
On a small table a carefully chosen hospital meal was laid out… K’s nameless hunger artist withered away in both starvation and a lack of attention. Although unable to eat, my brother Don died surrounded by the love of his close family. And I want to think, after 40 days of unwanted fasting, he might also have fed off a laugh at all this crazed play of the universe.
“I said, ‘Are you going to eat these cookies?’ Can I have a couple?” She leaned into the table.
I smiled at the nurse. What can you do, faced with that. 12 cups of cold black coffee and a tray of bereavement cookies for two visitors at a time. You could do what my brother would have done: with a shake of the head, laughed hardily at it all.
“Sure, take a couple.” I kept the Lorna Doones for myself. They were my brother’s favorites.