Old
Beetnik
Doom.
Double doom. Final doom.
Already,
because of a persistent pain in my abdomen, that fancy word for belly, I had
been worried enough to email my current Tiny Doctor and tell him about it.
Kaiser lets you email so they don’t have to hear your voice quaver. My doctor
said to come in; we’d talk. I did and we did and he asked me questions that
went into those embarrassing realms of pee and poop and I was happy be able to
answer quickly and no-problemo-y, so we ended up deciding to keep a watch on
things.
So I
watched, or rather, felt how things were going and they didn’t go any better.
Instead of only feeling the pain when I rolled onto my stomach at night, I felt
it while I was sitting or standing or driving or any thinging. So I wrote back
to him and told him that. And he went straight down Medical Highway and ordered
some tests and a cat scan. Bam. So I added a piece to my own concerns that he
was worried too. Nuts. But also, good, because we could get to the bottom of
this pretty quick and I
could go back to my ordinary paralyzing worries instead of adding the anvil
weight of the new one, my imminent death.
And then
on Sunday, I did that usual thing one does every day, sorry to mention it, but
I pooped. Not being a voyeur, actually being slightly prissy about such things,
I didn’t turn to watch it go away, but out of the corner of my eye I caught a
color that was better off on a Titian painting. Red.
I washed
my hands and went downstairs, astonished at how calm I felt.
So this is it, I said to myself. Hmmm.
I walked
outside to my reading brother and broke his concentration with my, “You know
the two worst words in the English language?”
“What?”
“Bloody
stool.”
We
looked at each other, longer than usual but not dramatically, movie-like long.
“Why not?” he laughed. We both knew that it was because it was
one more thing to be added to the list of things that have recently gone awry
in the household.
I went
into the house and sat down at the computer table in the British Reading Room
and looked at everything anew. What about the books, those beautiful, wonderful
books that are staring back at me? Will I have time read them, re-read them?
Who will I give them to? I swiveled to the hummingbirds at the feeder outside
the window. “Buh-bye.”
I looked over at the bulletin board with all of the family and friend pictures
tacked to it. How long would it take me to take them down and put them in
envelopes and add a nice little letter? I could get bankers boxes from JDM
Packaging, and start filling them up with these things. The couch is too
squishy; I could donate that to GoodWill. The writing. What do I do with all of
that? I stewed a bit. Thought it might be a fine time to nap. Figure out who to
write Last Letters to. Tell everyone how much they mattered to me. Apologize
for dumb things. You know. Wind things up.
I went
into the living room and joked around with Mark. It’ll be all jokes from now
on, I figured, jokes and backrubs and movies. Will I have to have one of those hospital beds around the
End? It’ll take up too much room in a living room that is already too crowded
with stuff. I mentally rolled my new hospital bed around the house and couldn’t
fit it anywhere. Nuts, then, no hospice. And still the problem of the
books and the photographs and the artwork from as far back as 1955, those awful
but now funny posters I did in high school for the band concerts where I didn’t
know how to make hands and the trumpet player seemed to be playing trumpet with
his sleeves. The big, chesty ballerina that looked to me now like a drag queen,
one-legged at that. I had painted her leg up so high that it disappeared. These
were priceless, surely. Would any one even want such gems?
I mulled
and looked, looked and mulled. I was waiting to fall apart. Doesn’t one fall
apart as soon as they know they are dying? It bothers me that I can’t solve the “one” and “they”
thing, still. Now I wonder if I’ll ever have time to do so.
Afternoon
showed up. My brother walked in and disappeared into the bathroom. After he
came out, he stood by my table. I looked up at him and he was grinning.
“Not
likely that we both came down with cancer on the same day,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s
the beets.”
“No, I
already thought of that. It can’t be. We had those two days ago.”
“Doesn’t
matter. There’s no possibility that you and I both have bloody stool cancer at
the same time. And lemme tell ya, my results just now are the same as yours.”
“Oh my
god.”
So. No
bankers boxes just yet.
I was
kind of impressed by how calm I was, just the same. Maybe it takes longer than
one afternoon to fall apart.
When I
told this story to Adair, she said the first thing a person had to do when
faced with her demise, before thinking of where to give away the books and
artwork, was to plan the memorial service. Who would give the eulogies, what
music to be played, who to be notified, etc. Sounded reasonable. I’ll keep it
in mind.
