Resting His Eyes

I hate hospitals. Much like the police, if you have to be around one there’s a good chance something went wrong with your day. The muffled sound of forced quiet, the sharp pang of antiseptic to the nose, the incessant beeping of monitors and machines and nurse station call buttons. The drone of chatter among the staff that skids to a halt once you walk into their vicinity.

Always with that tight-lipped stare through wide-paned glasses. Scrubs and foam rubber shoes the color of gel toothpaste. They ask if they can help you, but really the unspoken question they really want to ask is, “How can we get rid of you?”

“I’m Nick Cavanagh,” I say. “My grandpa, Wilson Cavanagh, is here.”

“Are you on the list—”

“Yeah, they know I’m coming. I think my aunt might be here already.”

The nurses exchange a look.

“She’s probably really chatty.”

One of the nurses gets up and gestures for me to follow. She has a funny way of walking, almost like skating on the waxed floor of the Intensive Care Unit. We get closer to a door I am familiar with. Of all the hospitals, I think, and all the rooms, it’s this room. Somehow it’s always this room.

The doorway is covered with a film of transparent plastic sheeting, like you find at a construction site. A biohazard sign is hanging from the wall. That symbol. Those spikes reach deep into the collective unconscious and tell anyone whatever beyond is bad.

“Here,” she says, handing me a bundle. A paper gown and shower cap. Two more plastic shower caps with elastic to go over my shoes. A paper face mask. “He’s under quarantine, so you’ll have to suit up.” MRSA. Grandpa has had it for years. His house is probably crawling with it. Every time he goes to the hospital they find out he’s a carrier and his room gets quarantined. He probably contracted it sneaking a quick nose-pick one of the times my grandma was in the ICU.

She’s been gone over a year now.

I struggle to pull the shoe covers over my hiking boots and the lugs keep grabbing the plastic, tearing holes into them. The nurse doesn’t seem to notice, and if she does, she doesn’t give much indication that she cares. I wore a similar outfit for the birth of my youngest. An emergency c-section scheduled minutes after they noticed meconium in my wife’s water once it had broken.

I can hear my aunt on the other side of that plastic barrier. A warbling sing-song voice. I call it her bullshit voice. I wonder what captive she’s got trapped inside with her, feeding it to them by the mouthful. The nurse holds the barrier aside and gestures for me to enter the room. She’s not about to follow me in there. I have to wonder if it’s because of the antibiotic resistant disease or because of my aunt.

I walk inside the room and the first thing I see is a big shape taking up most of the bed. A fallen titan of a man, my grandpa lies still. Bags of fluid are connected to him with clear tubing. His skin, once the color of old leather, is now a pale grey. I haven’t seen him for years, but seeing his face, eyes closed, resting stirs up a memory I had of him from when I was little. How he would fall asleep in his black recliner listening to old-time radio programs. When I checked to see if he was asleep, he would answer without moving anything but his lips.

“No, kid. Just resting my eyes.”

Eva hasn’t stopped jabbering since I was in the hall. I expected to see some first year resident or intern (she wouldn’t dare try this with a nurse—they would just stiff-arm her like the Heisman trophy and walk out); but she’s alone. Just filling the space of this small room with her own noise.

She stops long enough to change the topic of conversation when she sees me. She’s not gowned up. She’s not wearing a mask. She would never let the shower cap mess up her hair.

“Oh Nick, I’m glad you made it.” She starts telling me about what happened during surgery. I know she’s telling the truth because her voice is normal again. The music in it has stopped. Maybe for the first time ever, I see that she is concerned. Maybe even scared.

I wonder if she remembers the last time we stood in this room together. A couple years ago when my cousin, her oldest son, lay in the same bed, overlooking the same green courtyard and flat rooftops with the helicopter pad. Jeff had ended a week long bender by chasing several liters of vodka with a bottle of fuel stabilizer. They put him in an induced coma for a week, filtering the poison out of his blood with a dialysis machine. The doctor said the saturation of grain alcohol in Jeff’s bloodstream had likely bonded with the methylene and probably saved his life. We tried to figure out how many other attempts Jeff had made over the years. Car crashes. Alcohol poisoning. Overdoses. One gunshot through the mouth that didn’t take. Double digits seemed like a ridiculous number of suicide attempts.

She holds up a bag underneath a sheet beside my grandpa’s form. The liquid inside is a dark yellow. There’s not much of it.

“His kidneys have shut down. He’s not making urine anymore.”

It isn’t the piss bag that bothers me. It’s his leg. Bluish black, like a slab of dry-aged beef. The scent is peculiar. Amaretto. Once I smell it, I can’t shake it.

“They wanted to take his leg, but grandpa said to try the surgery. He didn’t want to be without a leg. He said he would rather die. The doctor said ‘Let’s shoot from the hip then, and see.’”

I doubt the doctor said anything like that at all. Eva’s voice is a little too melodic again to give veracity to the quote.

“I heard he was talking this morning. Before surgery.”

“Yes. He has a DNR. He told the doc 'no heroic efforts.'” That song is starting to come back. She has probably rehearsed this. “He hasn’t woken up since.”

She leans over the big man and puts her lips near his ear, “GRANDPA! IT’S NICK! NICKY IS HERE.”

Grandpa’s lashes flutter and his head lolls towards us, but he never quite gets them open. His body goes slack again.

“See?”

“Why don’t you go get something to drink,” I say. I put a hand on her shoulder. I can feel skin and sinew stretched tight over bone. She hugs me and the mass of her confirms my suspicion. Anorexia. She wipes a tear from her eye that never formed and walks out of the room.

The Old Man was what dad always used to call him. The room is finally quiet now except for the beeping of the machines, but I don’t notice them. Those big hands that remind me of my dad’s. Black nail beds and a dark lacquer of years of skinning knuckles behind hiding places in greasy motors. More like a bear paw than anything any human has a right to have.

Over the smell of gangrene, I smell my own breath inside my mask. Coffee. It’s all I’ve had so far today. I had planned on stopping for a breakfast sandwich somewhere until I heard Eva was here. Mom told me Grandpa was awake and talking just this morning. I was going to ask if he needed anything. I was going to ask how the doctors were treating him. Tell him about the job interview I had scheduled for the afternoon. About the kids and how they were enjoying playing in the sprinkler and that two out of three were going back to school next week.

Being around him and my dad and my uncle always felt like standing in a forest of the tallest trees. Big men with dark hair and blue eyes. Too many years in hospitals with bad lungs meant I would never grow to such heights. I wanted to tell him I loved him, even though he was always so cold. How I wished he had taught me the secret to making those willow whistles for the kids. We ran out of time.

Grandpa lies there now, just resting his eyes.

I take in all the details. The way his thick fingers twitch with his pulse. The gentle rise and fall of his chest. The gurgle sound I can hear at the end of each breath. I cover up that black leg with the thin sheet, but it does no good. Once I’ve seen it, I know it’s there. Maybe he knows I am here. He could be glad. Maybe my voice was the last he heard instead of the trilling of his daughter who was probably digging through cabinets for his Will before she came here.

It’s been less than a minute since Eva has left us alone. A quiet moment with Wilson Cavanagh and its gone. The plastic rustles and a slight man, younger than me walks in. He isn’t masked up either. His degree and his white coat will protect him. He shakes my hand. Soft. Small. Not like the calloused mitt of the Old Man in the bed.

“You’re the grandson?”

“Yes.”

“Your aunt is a character.”

“Yeah, sorry about that. It’s the Eva Show.”

“We really did all we could. Last night I told your grandfather what the risks were and he said he understood. He’s not going to recover. His leg is a like a dam holding back a lake of poison. It has already begun to filter into his body. Without kidney function, he will not last long. We can give him some medicine to make him more comfortable.”

The doctor hands me the clipboard. I recognize my grandpa’s signature on the page. Below is an empty line where the doctor indicates my signature is needed. I scratch my name onto the page with the doctor’s pen and hand them back.

“Is there anyone else who would like to come see him?”

“I can see if my dad is on his way. He’s a couple hundred miles out. How long would he have?”

“A few hours. Maybe the end of the afternoon.”

I call Dad on the cell phone and he answers. I can tell by the hum of the motor and the sound of the wind that he's driving. I explain to him what the doctor told me.

“My sister? Is she there?”

“Yeah. She’s actually being pretty well-behaved. I might have actually seen her care for a second.”

Dad laughs a little. “I don’t reckon I need to be there. It sounds like you’ve got it covered.” His voice catches. “We can let him go. I don’t need to be there to see it.” It was that last bit that spoke volumes. He didn’t need to see it. He couldn’t bear to see it. The last moment he would see his father alive. Like refusing to read the last pages of a book so it never has to end. I think of the way grandpa’s eyes fluttered. How he tried to lift his head. I’m glad Dad won’t have that memory to carry around with him.

Eva returns with the doctor, her voice ringing like Christmas bells, carrying on about some damned thing. She’s really into Red Strings and the Kabbalah these days and doesn’t miss an opportunity to show just how intentionally she is living. Last year it was traditional Chinese medicine.

The doctor glances me for a moment, looking right through Eva.

“Dad says to let him go. He doesn’t need to suffer anymore.”

“Okay.” He produces a syringe from his pocket and inserts it into a port on one of the IVs. That’s it. It is done.

“That will help keep him comfortable.” It’s always that word, I think. Comfortable. No, comfortable was that big black chair with the duct tape on the seat and arms. The red pistachios and Old Time Radio. A heat lamp over him to keep warming up that paper-thin skin. Comfort was the pans of eggs sizzling in bacon grease that probably killed him. Piping hot instant coffee in a stained mug.

I throw the pile of contaminated PPE into a bin near the door. Everyone parts ways. Eva says she will keep me posted. I promise to come back later on. I want to say Something.

I get choked up during my job interview to the question of “What was a challenging moment you’ve had in your life which you’ve had to overcome?” Going to a job interview right after signing the DNR papers for my grandpa was what I chose. I probably shouldn’t have told them that. They probably wanted to hear about team building or training snafus. It doesn’t matter. I’m numb. I’m bracing myself for the last goodbye.

By the time I get home, my wife got the call that Grandpa had passed. My aunt was going down through the call list. No need for me to come by the hospital. Arrangements had already been made. Not even enough time for Dad to have made the three hour drive. Grandpa wasn’t even in the hospital anymore. Not that much of him had been there anyway. At some point he slipped away, never even trying to open those eyes that were just like mine.