Norris...out of breath
The scene is this: It is early, a Saturday morning just after dawn, an
end of winter day. This room is quiet, the doctors have taken away the
ventilator, with its noisy pumps and bellows, beeps and whines, and the
notices it had been giving to us as token of our hopes for him.
Now there are no hopes, not for this world. Last night the television
monitor whistled and flashed for the nurses each time there would be a
change in heart rate, pressure, respirations.
This morning the television sound is turned off. The little mountains
drawn across the screen are eroding; the range of heartbeats weaker and
quicker, 123, 127, 140 from time to time the word ‘tachycardia’ lights
up below. Next, irregular hills, ‘Sa O2 plethora’, 87%, sometimes 89%.
Some years ago in another hospital with my son, learning the hard way about
asthma, I learned that the level of saturation of oxygen (SaO2) in the
blood is normally 98% or 99%, below 95% is a worry. The lowermost mountain
range is respirations, 26 now and heaving, each mountain preceded by a
sharp hill, a tiny rise on the screen, as I hear my friend begin the struggle
for his next breath.
I know only enough about these signs to know they say the end is coming.
They are not needed. Norris, comatose, lies abed. The east window of the
pulmonary intensive care ward faces his final sunrise, but his eyes have
been closed now over three weeks, he will not see it.
Yesterday he was decorated with tubes and catheters, IV drips and heparin
blocks; intubated, ventilated, tracheotomized Maximal medical inputs
and interventions. It is so much more peaceful this morning. Instead of
the uncertain lurching between life and living, and death and loss, today
we fold our hands and wait. I read Norris from Waiting for God by Simone
Weil. He doesn't hear me, and I am not paying attention to what I read.
I just want to make noise so that... if he senses anything at all, he might
know that he is not alone. But I think I'm making noise more because I
don't know what to do with this silence. Rather the noisy heroic, if futile,
activities of recent yesterdays, than the waiting for nothing but death.
Wondering if there is anything at all after the silence.
Norris’ dark face is leaning toward me. I notice its asymmetry. More
is on the right side. Hardly noticeable, I used to think a crooked smile,
but I see now, him not smiling, more cheekbone on the right than on the
left. The pneumonia that is victor here is growing deeper, I hear the slow
drowning in his reach for breath. The quiet TV monitor translates the gurgle
into a small vale and rise, then a steep pitch as he sucks air into the
diminishing places in submerging lungs.
At the grave, first days of spring, ground still soft with winter’s
wet, Norris’s grandmother, with great-grandchildren she had not seen before.
Norris’s sisters who hadn’t seen him or each other in years were there,
one with the sad eyes and sideways smile - her brother's face. Not the
reunion that we had hoped for over years with him, but a family's reunion.
Kinsella
the Irish poet has it,
“ Such gossamers as hold
Friends, family - all fortuitous conjunction-
Sever with bitter whispers...
There, newly trembling, others grope for function.”
He has it right about groping. Another wise man said, “Happy families
are all the same, sad families are each unique.” Sad families are all the
same too, he got it wrong.
Norris ran out of breath the final days of winter and we put him to
the ground this first sunswept jacketless day of spring: sorrow and hope,
following their proper seasons.
Joe Ferry
Bethesda
