Harbinger of Death or Damned Nuisance

by Sylvia Keepers

The nurse, not the regular hospice nurse, but the stand-in named Lori, was by today and said that before people die, they hallucinate, become anxious, and lose bladder control. That’s what my husband’s doing. Does it mean he is dying? If he is, those problems are not permanent, and I can get through them. 

Image credit: Sebastian Marx on Unsplash

What if he’s not dying, though? What if he’s just spouting word salad poetry and becoming more paranoid, and what if his plumbing problem is perennial? And what if this all goes on for months and months or even years? Can that be called dying?

Yes, I know no one gets out alive, but I mean how often will I have to hear him demand his pain meds right now, even though it’s only been twenty minutes since he last took them? Or have him tell me the nurse put a diaper on him that’s supposed to ease his pain, and do I think he has less pain? As if I should know. Besides not living in his head, I’m not much of a judge of pain, starting with mine, which mostly makes me numb.

And how many more rules is he going to think up about how he ought to be treated? There are already so many, I can’t remember them all: a pack of cards’ worth. Bring me three hot meals a day, in bed, at exactly 8, 12 and 6, on the hour, not one minute later, and sit with me while I eat. Just for example.

And about the peeing, the floor is going buckle from the water damage, and the stink of old urine 5 or 10 years down the line, will tell anyone who comes into this house that a man died here. Maybe not all at once, but in agonizing slow-motion. A man whose wife was too busy wiping up puddles of urine, trying to ignore a bunch of useless rules, and trying to make sense of the absurd, to even notice.

No, I don’t really mean I don’t notice. Of course, I notice. I just mean it’s hard to understand the experience when it feels, not like a harbinger of death, and not even like a damned nuisance, but more like a wave that’s come crashing down and we both have to figure out how to live and breathe inside it. I think about that wave, and in my mind, it rushes through the house, leaving it bright and clean.

My husband died three-and-a-half years after I wrote this. Altogether, I cared for him through a 20-year illness.

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Sylvia Keepers

Sylvia Keepers is an 86-year-old woman who enjoys reading, writing, and hiking in Boulder, CO. She also tutors writing. She loves spending time with her 96-year-old partner, who fortunately does not need any special care right now. She self-published an exhaustive (hopefully not exhausting) book on how to help teens read better and think more clearly. Other than that, she was unpublished until recently, when her poem, "A Visit from the Ancestors," appeared in The Braided Way Magazine.