By Kathryn Stinson
“I’ll be good. I’ll be the wife and keeper. I’ll do anything just to live.”
– Kate Baer, After a Psychic Tells Me I’m Going to Die
We all expect to bargain, but that isn’t how it works.
When I was a hospice volunteer in my twenties, I sat with a heart patient, Vic, so his wife could go to church on Sunday mornings. It was fall, and we sat on his deck and watched the red and yellow leaves drift down from the oaks and maples in his back yard. They seemed to fall in slow motion, and I thought, maybe this is what it’s like to be dying. Maybe time slows down. Then Vic wrecked the mood by asking if I had a boyfriend, then telling me what he’d do to me if he were my boyfriend, or actually, if he could physically do so much as get out of his chair. Then he lit a cigarette and told me his nurse said his oxygen tank might explode if he kept smoking right next to it, but he didn’t believe her.
Vic was desperate to die, so thin he was wearing his wife’s jeans. And she was a tiny thing, run ragged by his constant demands, even before he’d gotten sick. He’d been told he had six months to live twelve months ago, when he could still walk from the kitchen to the bathroom without getting winded. He’d taken up crafts just to have something to do with his hands, ground up used, smoke-dingy candle wax in a spice grinder and poured it into new containers, then gave me several ugly candles to take home to my parents when I visited for Christmas.
At his funeral, his wife was elated. She hugged me and said he was finally out of pain, but I’m pretty sure she meant she was, and I didn’t blame her. I went home exhausted and ran a bath, and when my smoke detector started beeping out of nowhere, no smoke in sight, my first thought was, dammit Vic, you dirty old man, get out of my bathroom.
The next patient I was assigned to, a sweet and much-loved lady by all accounts, died five minutes before I first arrived. Her niece said she’d been preoccupied for a week, convinced there was a taxi just outside, asking over and over who it was for. Finally, someone told her maybe it was for her and she died minutes later. I found myself with a free couple of hours now that my services were no longer required, so I went home and took a walk around my neighborhood. A spring shower popped up out of nowhere, and I passed a man looking up at the sky, laughing, caught without a jacket or an umbrella. He shook his head, looked at me and laughed harder, shrugged like we were the luckiest people alive, and maybe we were.
Luck is all it can be. It’s not about being good. Vic was proof enough for me.