I’m suddenly ablaze in light. All my worry has come down to the decision of compassionate, reasonable human beings. I would hug these medical heroes, including the hospice nurse, if they were present — virus be damned.
By Ed Davis
The following is an excerpt from Hindsight: Untold Stories from 2020, edited by Steve Fowler.
The call, when it comes on July 28, draws me from bed, as I always knew it would.
“I just checked on your mother and she’s not responsive.” A pause. “She’s already cold.”
The word cold will haunt me later. Right now I’d like to know — is she dead? However, I’m accustomed to contradictions and partial answers from those who’ve cared for my mother at the nursing home where she has lived for over thirty years. If indeed it’s the end, it’s been a long time coming. There’d been a false alarm several years before, and I’d sped from my home in southeastern Ohio to southern West Virginia to make it in time. On the way, a doctor called to inform me my mother had aspirated and might not make it. But she did, and I got to stay by her side in the ICU. I’m about to ask for clarification when the aide adds:
“We’ll call you back as soon as the doctor gets here.”
I resign myself to waiting a little longer to know for sure.
But the call, that chilling word — cold — has increased my stress level to twelve on a ten-point scale, paralyzing me while my wife arises, commiserates, and we slowly begin our morning routines. But before I’ve brushed my teeth, I know it might be too late to prevent…but I can’t let myself imagine.
Decades ago, my mom, mentally ill all her life, had signed a form before witnesses at the home saying she wanted all measures taken to save her life. Now I imagine the “heroic measures” of a full code on my glass-fragile, 90-pound mom. I’m horrified by the thought that her body might be assaulted in her last moments on earth. Not my mom, sufferer of schizophrenia for at least the past two decades; who’d done the best she could for me after my father fled for good when I was in fourth grade; who, while she could’ve considered me a burden, gave me unconditional love. It is my moment to show her the same.
I must act quickly, but before I can, the phone rings again. It’s the hospice nurse. “They’re taking her to Bluefield Community. The ambulance is on the way.”
Thank God I enlisted hospice services months earlier. Fingers trembling, I call the hospital receptionist who transfers me to the ER nurse. I explain shakily the directive and entreat her, as I did with all the other authorities, to reconsider. Now here it comes: the same explanation I’ve gotten for the past several years. It can’t legally be undone.
But the nurse doesn’t say that. She says she’ll talk to the attending physician and call me back.
Even though I’m heartened a bit, the wait is hell. This is the culmination of mine and my society’s terrible failure. I’d talked to a lot of sympathetic folks, including government agencies, trying to rescind the directive she’d made when, clearly not of sound mind (she’d never been of sound mind in my lifetime), she’d signed that form. We’d let her choose the least humane option, not imagining the nightmare scenario ahead, clueless that my then-robust mom would live to be 93 and become a shell of her former feisty self.
Since then, I’d rationalized that she would die peacefully in her sleep — isn’t that what we all hope for our parents (for ourselves)? Which is no excuse. In front of witnesses, I should’ve been of sound enough mind to have explained clearly, patiently, lovingly, what she was signing. It would’ve been hard for a lot of reasons. Would I be seen as trying to deny my mom’s right to have her last wishes honored? Did I want to refuse her the same health care everyone should be entitled to? The outcome might’ve been the same, but I could’ve tried. Things might be different for my beloved mother, for myself, right now.
As minutes pass, I recall how quickly she declined, following the illness that landed her in ICU years earlier (one of so many illnesses, falls and accidents that I’ve forgotten what happened that time). Gradually I realized she no longer recognized me. I still kissed her cheek, held her hand and spoke to her, disciplining myself not to ask questions she could no longer answer, though she tried, usually just repeating my words. Dementia? Worsening schizophrenia? It didn’t matter. The last remaining fragments of her mind, weakening for so long, had seemingly dissolved. For at least the last two years, I knew I’d been visiting her body, her mind long fled. Surprisingly I accepted it, almost as if I were visiting her grave. Almost. I still held her hand and it always felt warm.
My phone rings, ending my reverie. It’s the ER physician on duty returning my call. “Mr. Davis, since you expressed your wish to the nurse, along with me, that’s two witnesses. We’ll fill out the DNR form so it’s ready before your mother arrives.”
I’m suddenly ablaze in light. All my worry has come down to the decision of compassionate, reasonable human beings. I would hug these medical heroes, including the hospice nurse, if they were present — virus be damned.
“Thank you,” I breathe.
Before noon, the doctor calls to say Mom has passed peacefully. My mental image now morphs from the horror of the full code to my mother’s withered, still body contained between clean, crisp sheets awaiting transport by Seaver Mortuary to her home town ten miles away. I am grateful now that her sister connected me with Seaver two decades ago to “take care of everything.” They do. Geographical distance as well as the immeasurable existential distance caused by the pandemic means that I am entirely dependent on the kindness of professionals in my native state — folks whose Appalachian accents used to be mine. Not strangers now, not fellow West Virginians; somehow, they are kin.
Steve Fowler is a high school English teacher and former magazine editor, whose work has been featured in Hudson Valley Magazine, The Valley Table, Northern Colorado Writers Anthology, and Social Media: The Academic Library Perspective. He lives in the Hudson Valley region of New York State with his wife and son.
Ed Davis has immersed himself in writing and contemplative practices since retiring from college teaching. Time of the Light, a poetry collection, was released by Main Street Rag Press in 2013. His latest novel, The Psalms of Israel Jones (West Virginia University Press 2014), won the Hackney Award for an unpublished novel in 2010. Many of his stories, essays, and poems have appeared in anthologies and journals such as Leaping Clear, Metafore, Hawaii Pacific Review, and Bacopa Literary Review. He lives with his wife in the bucolic village of Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he bikes, hikes, meditates, and reads religiously.
