February 2, 2009

VISITING FRED

Every Sunday I visit with Fred. He’s still, as they say, hanging in there. He no longer travels from the hospital bed in his bedroom to the hospital bed in the living room, and the living room now has a big empty space where the hospital bed used to be. He was falling down too much, and even though he’s faded to 115 pounds, he’s still difficult to maneuver should that happen again. All his time is spent in his bedroom, in his bed, with his PlayStation and his VCR movies, all of which he’s watched several times.

Some weeks I make him something to eat, or I sit out in the living room while he sleeps or plays, or I rub cream on the increasingly fragile skin on his head and chest. I always wear gloves for this process, and I’ve mastered the art of getting the gloves on and off again without cross contamination issues.

But yesterday Fred just wanted to talk, so I sat on the portable commode, the only seat that faces Fred, and we talked. The seat was down on the commode, in case you were wondering.

Fred’s hoping for another six months, when his wife turns 50 and his passing will leave her with a bit more security. His wife and her mother tell him he has less than a month however. These things are wildly unpredictable of course. He has no pain, he tells me, and he’s breathing okay, though of course he’s on permanent oxygen. He says it’s more for the placebo effect of knowing it’s there than anything else. I’m not quite sure I believe that, but I go along with it.

Fred makes a lot of jokes and laughs a lot, even though he’s frustrated. He’s irritated that he can’t take care of himself, that his legs don’t work, that he can’t get outside and go anywhere.

He asks me if it’s true what he’s heard about the current economic crisis. He says he’d just heard about it, he had no idea things were that bad. How would he know?

He tells me he’s going to be buried in a veterans’ cemetery in Portland and that, oddly enough, his wife will later be buried on top of him. “I’m not sure I like that,” he tells me, “It’s too much like the Germans, digging trenches and piling people on top of each other.”

He’d rather just be cremated, but it’s not what his family wants, so he’s going along with it. He says it won’t matter to him anyway, once it’s gotten to that point. I tell him the story of Stew’s cremation and how we dispersed his ashes in the Sound last year, and that I still have some of them. Am I not supposed to talk about death with a dying man? Fred likes the story though.

Fred as a young man was a troublemaker, one of those boys who breaks into things and vandalizes because, as he says, “there was nothing else to do.” Likely excuse, I tell him, and he laughs.

He’s had a haircut recently, a good thing, since I was having trouble, on previous visits, with rubbing cream into his dry scalp because there was so much hair to work through. It’s now back to the short Marine cut that he’s had for so much of his adult life.

“Were your ears burning yesterday?” he asks me, and I ask if he’s been telling stories about me again. He laughs. I’m impressed with how well he’s holding up with the talking and laughing, though sometimes he searches for words and he can’t quite find them. But his energy level is high. He was talking to someone about the military yesterday, how he was, as a Marine, put in charge of loading an Air Force plane, and he had no idea what a pallet was at the time, and he would have just shoved everything in haphazardly, so he’d asked an Air Force sergeant to show him how it was done, and he learned all about pallets and loading planes. I like that about Fred, that he’s willing to ask how to do things he hasn’t done before. It seems a natural enough thing, but there are many of us who neglect to do that.

He starts to get tired eventually. No surprise there – I’m surprised he was this talkative. It takes a lot of energy, something Fred has in short supply. I ask him if he’s ready for a nap, and he lowers his bed, and I make sure he’s comfortable. He grasps my hand and thanks me for talking with him, and I tell him I enjoy it. “Don’t believe 90% of what I say, it’s b.s.” and he laughs, and I respond with, “Then it’s much like talking to my husband!”

I turn out the light and go out into the living room while Fred falls asleep. His wife returns home ten minutes later, and I tell her I’ll see them both again next Sunday. As I’m leaving she’s waking him up to take more medication. Structure is one of the ways she holds on.