I’m not proud that I took up so much of the family’s
precious time with Claire. But I’m proud of that cigarette, and haven’t had
another one since.
When she died, too young, Claire Burton was a well-known
feminist sociologist. The family set up
a scholarship in her name, if only to make sense of her death. To make her live on, to wrest some meaning
from her tragedy. It’s what we do, often. We flounder, we rail. We try to honour the dead.
Twenty-plus years down the line I visit my partner’s
bedside. He is much improved since
experiencing what we must call a medically induced stroke, though I give thanks
it was a relatively mild one and came about for the best of reasons, to shrink
the tumours that had spread from his prostate, although they didn’t know then
of the one lurking deep in his brain.
They hadn’t looked at his brain.
The belief has been that prostate cancer can’t spread there. The truth is that we don’t know enough about
prostate cancer. Even the doctors are
learning.
Since they figured out what had gone wrong, my partner has
been put on a drug called dexamethazone, the aim of which is to reduce the
swelling around the tumours without triggering more bleeding, as happened on the
androgen inhibitor. A side effect of dexamethazone is a ravenous hunger, which is good in a way since he’s lost
so much weight. He has been craving
sugar. Can’t get enough of it. Four paper packets in his coffee
(‘Black as night, hot as hell, sweet as sin’, he says, quoting Balzac), endless cookies (also in
packets, two at a time), and chocolates.
I bring the chocolates. He goes
through a box of Cadbury miniatures in less than two days. It took many days to persuade the hospital
staff to let him have those four sugars in his coffee – ‘Sugar is bad for you,’
they say. This doesn’t wash with
him. He is a former scientist, the body
turns everything to sugar in the end, he says.
They are confused by this.
Informed as we are nowadays, we still resist science, and are bundled up endlessly in tangles of
myth.
When I’m not visiting him I’m making adjustments in
preparation for his homecoming. The
occupational therapists are amazingly ingenious, and they agree that this is the place he should be. In a beautiful old building, the flat has high ceilings and plenty of light. Though this is not the easiest accommodation, not
what might be prescribed for a patient whose mobility and stability are not what
they should be. There are stairs. The flat is tiny, the floor uneven. Something of a challenge for a walking frame. We’ll be getting a small one, not the large one advised. The rehab
doctor, a nice man but with a perpetually worried look on his face, is
confounded. There are concerns for his
safety, of course.
But life is not safe, entirely. If it was, it wouldn’t be life.
There are books about this.
One, by Atul Gawande, is recommended.
So much is now being written on the subject. We are waking up, waking up to dying. This isn’t an altogether pleasant awakening, especially for those of us fortunate enough to have lived in societies where the fact of death has tended to be ignored until, forced to confront it, we relentlessly combatted it. For what a
trick had been played on us! To give us this wealth of experience, this miracle of consciousness, only in the end to
have it snuffed out.
I have no answers
for this. None of us do, really.
All I know is I’m eating a lot of chocolate. And sharing it with him.