Love and Will: Twenty Stories

A Friend’s Death

He gets a disease and suffers from it and dies. Before that Kirt visits him in the hospital several times. Once when Chris went in for tests to see what was giving him so much pain. Other times when he was in the hospital suffering from the disease the tests showed he had, and then the last time the day before he died. Kirt also visited him at home between the times he was in the hospital and also met him at a coffee shop once, but Chris got so sick there that Kirt had to take him to the hospital.

Chris was sitting up in bed the first time Kirt saw him in the hospital. He said “I know I’m very sick, even if they don’t know what I got yet. But it’s not in the head. Meaning it’s not in my mind, because the truth is I think what I got’s going to spread to my head. But that’s not here nor there now. Right now I know I’m very sick in the liver, in the stomach — one of those organs around there and maybe a couple of them. I know it’s going to kill me but I don’t know when. I’m almost sure I won’t be around in a year or so, and my real feeling is I won’t last six months.”

Kirt told him “The worst thing you can do is diagnose yourself. That’s what we have doctors and pathologists and people like that for. Ninety percent of the time the patient’s wrong in his self-diagnosis. What I’ve heard is that about sixty to seventy percent of the time the results from the tests turn out to be much better than what the patient predicted they’d be and that about twenty percent of the time the results aren’t as bad as the patient thought. It’s fear that makes you think it’s worse than it is. Just go through the tests, try not to worry about anything, don’t build things way out of proportion, think you’re going to get well and feel better and that what you have isn’t so bad and in fact is nothing, and your chances of something not being wrong with you will greatly improve. It has something to do with the body’s chemistry, I heard, but don’t ask me to explain what exactly that is or how it works. All I know is that if you think positively about your health, you’re already a few percentage points — maybe even ten to fifteen percentage points — better off than if you think the worst about your physical condition. And eat well, do what the hospital people say, sleep well — all of it adds a percentage point or two to your getting better and staying healthy from then on.”

“No,” Chris said. “I know it’s bad, I know it’s terminal, and I can’t face it. Maybe if I had had years and years to get used to it, but coming so suddenly, I just don’t have the courage to die.”

The next time Kirt saw him was at Chris’s home. He said to Kirt “Well, I got the test results from the doctor this week and I turned out to be absolutely right. What I have is fatal. The word is that people with my disease and in the form it’s taken and rapid way it’s progressed, usually don’t last a year. So, unless a miraculous cure’s discovered in the next few months — and the researchers working on it aren’t even close to one — I’m on my way out for sure. I can’t face it. I’ll never adjust to it. I’m going to get crazier and crazier in the head because of it. Long suffering and then death are the two things I fear most. What should I do? Tell me, you’re smart — what should I do?”

“Think that everything’s going to be all right, and I mean that,” Kirt said. “Think that the doctors, for all they know, could be wrong too. Think that they’ll find that the most important test result that came back was wrong. Or that one of the treatments they give you will work a hundred percent. Or that they will discover a miracle cure for your disease in the next few months and one that will take effect immediately on you. Listen. Even if you told me now that only five percent of those who have your disease survive after a year, think that you’d be one of those five percent. You will live and eventually be healthy, believe me. I know it in my bones and everywhere else inside of me that you’re going to pull through, and you have to believe that too.”

Chris was admitted to the hospital a week later. When Kirt saw him there, Chris was suffering terribly. “Nothing they give me stops the pain,” he said. “The experimental painkiller that was giving me some relief apparently has hurt more people than it’s helped, so they took me off it for the time being till they test it out some more. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat. They’re putting me on I.V. Please don’t tell me I’m going to get better. I’ve done nothing the past few months but get worse. If I’m going through this much pain without anything much to alleviate it, what should I expect to come next? I’m also as scared as I ever was not only of dying but of being dead. My brother, who to him spent a considerable sum to fly here, couldn’t take my complaining and morbid talk anymore and flew back to France. You’re in charge of running things for me if you’ll do it. These are my instructions: I want to be kept alive no matter what. Life support systems and experimental drugs and treatments, if the more proven stuff doesn’t work, all the way. In the end, anything they’ve never tried before but want to start on someone, give it a shot on me. Only after I’m flat and out dead do I want the systems turned off. I’ve written all this down and my last wish to you is to carry them out.”

Kirt said “Believe me, it’ll never come close to being that bad. I spoke to the doctor in charge on this floor and she’s very hopeful the present treatments will work on you and that a complete cure will be found in a year or two. And she swears nobody’s said to you that your condition is terminal.”

“They haven’t because I told them not to, but I know it is but don’t want to know for sure. That’ll make it even worse for me in the head. But if they did tell you there was no chance in the world for me, and I’m sure they have, you wouldn’t tell me, right? Because you know I don’t want to know, and besides that, your philosophy is to keep the patient thinking positively. And how could I think positively if the most positive person I know tells me I’m going to die in a few months? But you will carry out my instructions, won’t you?”

“They won’t be necessary, but I’ll do anything you want.”

In one of Kirt’s next visits to the hospital, Chris was lying on his back in bed. Tubes were in him, he could barely speak. He paused after every few words and most of the time Kirt had to strain to hear him. He did manage to say in one spurt “I told you so, didn’t I? On a stack of bibles: it’s everything I didn’t want.” It took him about a half-hour to say “Don’t bury me belowground. You mustn’t. A steel casket, thoroughly sealed. If steel isn’t the most airtight and impenetrable casket going, then get what is. I want nothing coming into my casket ever, or at least while my body’s still relatively intact. I want to dry up to almost nothing before anything’s able to get inside. Maybe in a hundred years, maybe in two. Tell my brother that when he returns for the funeral. Insist. I’ve signed and given to my lawyer a power of attorney putting you in total charge of whatever there might be of my estate and all the funeral arrangements and things once I’m gone. But my brother might fight it, and being my only blood relative and a battler when he sees what he thinks is waste, he might win. You’ve my original instructions?”

Kirt kissed him on the forehead.

“Disease, you’ll get my disease.”

“Nonsense,” and he patted Chris’s hand.

“I’ll get better, yes? Oh yes, I’ll get better. I’ll be jumping around like a jumping jack in a few days.”

“I wish you would get better. And you can, you know. People have come back healthy and strong from the most extreme states of sickness and lack of strength, not that your condition has gone that far.”

“The doctors don’t say that to you about me, do they? No, don’t tell me what they say.”

Kirt saw him in the hospital the day before he died. Chris couldn’t speak. He wanted to write something to Kirt, but couldn’t hold the pen. When Kirt came back from a snack in the hospital cafeteria, Chris was in a coma. He never came out of it. His brother was there. He spoke to Kirt in French, Kirt said he couldn’t understand but a few words, his brother cried in his arms. “The poor man,” his brother said in French. “So young. So terrible. So unnecessary.”

The next day the brother had someone call Kirt to tell him in English that Chris had died. There wasn’t any problem with the brother over money or the instructions or anything like that, and Chris was buried inside a steel vault aboveground.

Kirt went to the aboveground burial site a year later. Rented a car and went alone. He’d been thinking a lot about Chris the last week, hadn’t been to the site since the burial, and wanted to pay his respects and see if the vault was being looked after. He stood in the corridor in front of Chris’s vault. It was one of about three hundred vaults in this wall of the building, and he had passed several similar corridors to get to it. No plaque was on Chris’s vault. The only way to identify it was the vault’s number. Chris hadn’t left instructions for a plaque or memorial of any kind. Kirt wrote the brother about it a week after the funeral, the brother wrote back that he’d get one installed with Chris’s name, birthplace and dates, but that seemed to be the end of it. Chris had no relatives in this country. Kirt had been his one friend for years. His former wife and stepchildren wouldn’t see him in the hospital, when Kirt called them to say how sick Chris was, or come to the funeral. The only other attender at the funeral besides the brother and Kirt was Chris’s business partner, someone Chris distrusted and who he said distrusted him. The woman friend he had for two years, but split up with a month before he got sick, said she’d like to visit Chris in the hospital, and when Kirt called her again, would like to come to the funeral, but she was working on a project for her firm that was tying her down day and night. Chris’s lawyer was out of town the day of the funeral. His personal physician said he never went to the funeral of one of his patients unless the patient happened to be a relative or close friend. Several people Chris had done business with said they were too busy or unwell to come. Chris’s landlady said he was a good tenant, always paid his rent on time, never caused a fuss, but she hardly knew him. Kirt had called her to say Chris had died and if she’d like to attend his funeral. He had wanted more people to be there other than Chris’s partner and brother and he. Only Kirt and the brother were at the burial, other than for the minister and the workers who put the casket into the vault. Half of Chris’s estate, minus the funeral and burial expenses and whatever bills and debts Chris had, went to his brother and the other half was split between his university and the foundation doing research on his disease. All of this was stipulated in his will.

Kirt wrote a poem the night before and read it standing very close to the vault. “‘Kirt I miss you, Kirt I.…’ Oh my God,” he said, “I put in my own name.” He crossed out his name, wrote in Chris’s, and read from the poem again. “‘Chris I miss you, Chris I kiss you. I’m sorry, sorry, a dozen poems, a hundred plaintive groans, can never say how much. You were a relatively successful but very lonely man. I wouldn’t want your success if such loneliness depended on it, and I doubt you wanted it that way too. I wish we had leveled with one another more. The aftermath is always filled with regrets, but what are we going to do? Patterns, grooves, et cetera. I was proud to be your friend. Obviously, I can’t write poetry for the life of me, but right now I feel I can only say what I have to this way. Life has been a dark place for me too without you. I didn’t know how good a friend I had till you were gone. I think I’ve contradicted myself somewhere there, but so what? I wish more people had come to your funeral. It might have meant there was a little more happiness in your life than I’m convinced there was. What else can I say? Tomorrow I will sit on a bench there, if there’s one, and be silent for a minute after I read you this poem, and then go. I’ll be back. There is a lack in my life as there was in yours.’”

He tore up the poem, stuck the pieces into his jacket pocket. There were two benches nearby but he didn’t sit. He put his hands in front of his face, closed his eyes, leaned his head against Chris’s vault, cried, remained still like that for several minutes after he cried, left.

As he was walking to the parking lot, a man he had never seen before came alongside him and said “I was standing several graves, or whatever you want to call those things, over from you when you were inside before. I don’t mean to intervene, but we seem to be walking in the same direction to lot B. That must have been one hell of a person you visited just now. One really wonderful person. My condolences, no matter how long a time that person’s death might have been. Though because this cemetery, or whatever it is, is so new, it couldn’t have been more than seven years ago.”

“It was only last year — this week’s his anniversary. And he was all right as a person, not great — I don’t want to lie to you. But thanks.” He patted the man’s back and got into his car. He backed up, pulled away and saw in the rearview mirror the man waving at him.