Oneness

I was in the hospital a few weeks ago for uncontrollable pain and vomiting.  While there, I also developed sudden and profuse vaginal bleeding, which I discovered in the middle of the night and which freaked me the fuck out.  It turned out the blood thinners they automatically give patients to prevent potential clots that can result from lying around all day long had aggravated the mets in that part of my body and they had begun to bleed.  I was there for four days since they put me on a pain pump and then had to transition me off in lieu of the Fentanyl patch and since we had to wait for the bleeding to gradually subside.  The hospital is a desperately lonely place when you know you are dying.  Unlike my previous hospitalizations, this one was…empty, futile, pointless; it was devoid of all joy or hope or life-affirming possibility.  I had birthed no babies.  There had been no surgery to successfully remove cancerous organs and tumors.  There wasn’t even a promising clinical trial that necessitated the forced observation, confinement and attachment to machines.  No.  I was there simply because my body was deteriorating, beginning the process of dying, and I couldn’t handle the physical turmoil that was causing without medical intervention.

The minutes stretched into long monotonous hours, broken up only by the occasional text, phone call and visitor.  But I didn’t feel like talking and mostly ignored those who reached out to me. Why should I talk to anyone?  Communicating with others just reinforced the isolation I had been feeling for weeks, ever since the scans had confirmed the clinical trial wasn’t working, reminding me of the ever thickening  high wall that existed between me and the rest of the world.  It reinforced the fact that I was stuck, literally and figuratively, in the hospital while they were out and about, shopping and meeting friends for dinner and kissing their kids good night, that I was dying while they were living.  It was a foreshadowing of what was to come.  Soon, I would be dead and everyone else would continue to live.  After the requisite period of mourning, everyone would go on with their carefree, joyous lives and eventually I would become a mere distant memory, more often than not forgotten in the wonderful business of their lives, and then lost forever to the amnesiac power of time.

I finally told my best friend of 24 years that I was in the hospital after two days because I felt like she should know.  I skipped over the medical details and the results of the most recent scans in the hospital (which of course showed more growth but nothing to explain the pain).  Telling her would make no difference.  It would simply assuage her curiosity but it wouldn’t fix me.  Besides talking and thinking about me was invariably depressing for both of us.  I quickly changed the subject to talk about her.  She is an actress, and after years of trying, she had landed her first significant role in the pilot of a televised series.  It was a monumental achievement and I was so very proud and happy for her.  And yet…I felt so very sorry for myself  What I wouldn’t have given to change places with her, with just about anyone for that matter, in those minutes, hours and days.

What was I to do with all the jealousy, bitterness, sadness and loneliness eating away at my heart just like the cancer was eating away at my muscles and organs and my very life force?

I’ve always believed in talking through my problems as a productive way to release negativity.  I’ve always believed that expression is preferable and healthier than repression, that every heartache and emotional pain I had heretofore experienced could be understood by another human being and that another human being could always make me feel better about whatever the problem was by virtue of that understanding.  Marital problems, stress at work, inadequacy as a mother.  But facing Death hovering at this proximity to me was not like any other problem I had ever known.  Nobody knew what to say to make me feel better.  Nobody could offer me solace or consolation.  In fact, another friend said, “I’m really sorry.  I don’t know what to say.”  Of course, nobody knew what to say since nobody around me was actually dying.  Not even trained mental health professionals knew what to say since they had never known what it is like to die and whatever they did manage to say seemed hollow and trite.  Not even those with metastatic cancer could comfort me because most are not as far along in their disease as I am, and those who are as far along are holed up somewhere in their loneliness or denial or some combination of both.

And then I realized that I still had to actually die, that my suffering was far from over, that I had to actually watch my body further deteriorate, that I had to actually know more intense physical (and emotional) pain, that I had to experience the actual failure of one or more of my organs,  Possible labored breathing and then oxygen deprivation from constricted airways as the lung tumors grow bigger.  Possible bile build up and resulting hallucinations from blocked liver ducts.  Probable starvation as my bowels became obstructed.  How I longed then to fall asleep and slip into glorious oblivion, to not care about anything anymore, to just sleep and rest.  But there was no sleep and no oblivion and no rest.

And then I thought of my friend Rachel, who died of colon cancer last November.  She must have felt the same loneliness I felt in all those weeks she lay in bed, too weak to do anything, as her tumors consumed her liver.  And I thought of my friend Chris, who died two years ago who wondered in his last days as he suffered with pain why his body was still holding on to life when his heart and soul were ready to leave.  Even at the end, as inevitable as his imminent death was, it still seemed unreal, unbelievable to him.  I thought of my friend Carlyle who expressed to me her fear and belief that she would not live to see another Christmas with her three young children, a fear and belief that turned out to be justified.  Yet, her deep faith in God eased her fears.  I thought of my friend Leta who I spoke to two weeks before she died and remembered the anger and bitterness in her voice when she told me how she was shutting everyone out, except for a select few.  We joked and laughed with scorn about the Slutty Second Wives our husbands would marry.  I thought I had an inkling of what they were all  going through but looking back I know now that I had no clue.  How could I?  I was so far away from death relative to them.  Looking back, I’m ashamed of the inane, vapid and entirely inadequate words of advice and comfort I offered.  I knew nothing.  But now, now I understood much better.

I had gleaned fragments of their experiences of dying, as well as those of countless others I have encountered during these past four years, through phone and messaging conversations, through their own occasional words on support group forum postings, through the accounts of their caregivers.  And now, in those fragments, I saw myself and a comforting oneness in our emotions, in our envy and sense of surreality and incredulity and rage and fear and grief and loneliness and, in an unexpected contradiction, our readiness and desire to die.  And it was in that oneness that I drew blessed solace and consolation.

It then dawned on me as I lay in that hospital bed that rather than offering a sparse and fragmented look into my dying experience (as others had offered to me), I wanted to offer and leave behind something more coherent and complete for the world, such that when your turn comes as you face death, whether it be from illness or old age (for you too will die as hard as it may be for you to believe), you will not feel as lonely and sad as I did, and you will also hopefully know a oneness with me.  And perhaps that sense of oneness will ease the pain of confronting your own mortality.  I reject with every fiber of my being our culture’s fear of acknowledging, speaking of and thinking about death.  I seek to bring the experience of dying into the light, to demystify it, to make it less frightening and taboo, to confront it and the myriad of conflicting emotions that come with it with clarity and honesty.  This is my goal for as long as I am able.