The Two Kinds of Decay

Death

When I told my hematologist I was worried about dying, he smiled and said, Look, here is the smallest violinist in the world playing you a Dvoák violin concerto, as he rubbed his index finger against his thumb.

A cancer patient on the ward, a girl a year or two older than I was, had a catheter just like mine, except tiny. Like the thickness of a piece of angel hair pasta instead of the thickness of two drinking straws with big clamps at the ends. And that little piece of pasta could be rolled up and sealed under a plastic patch, and that girl could go swimming.

And she did — in the ocean, on Cape Cod. And got a blood infection, because she had leukemia.

But our hem-onc didn’t tell me she was a nuisance for having ruined her catheter and for having made the surgeon implant a new one, and our hem-onc didn’t tell me the girl was dying, or that he had wanted her to swim again before she died.

He didn’t say it, but I am pretty sure he told her to go to the ocean and get in it and let the water go above the access site, and that if the briny water leaked through the adhesive around the edges of the plastic patch, to stay in the water and swim until she was tired of swimming.

Our hem-onc just told me she had swum in the ocean with her catheter, and that she had got it infected. And he smiled the way we do when we talk about naughty affairs or petty crimes that people get away with.

The fear of death came once, and that was it. It was like getting an immunity to the chicken pox. It never goes away. I am learning not to remember it.

The first time I was brave. I kept grief at bay for a long time. The moment I gave up, then everything — horror, grief, all of it — came in a great rush.

Every other time, I fell into it as if into a soft mat. I yielded instantly, thinking It is here again, this certainty I will soon die, this thing I already know that I have not forgotten for a single minute.