By Dean Poling
He’s present, but he’s not here.
He looks at me, but I can’t say he sees me. His eyes look into me. They look through me. His eyes seem locked on some place past this hospice room.
“The eyes may be open or semi-open but not seeing. There is a glossy look to them, often tearing,” writes Barbara Karnes in “Gone From My Sight: The Dying Experience.” A hospice worker has given me the booklet.
“Gone From My Sight” is a short chronicle on what family and friends can expect from a terminally ill patient. It sheds light on the path many hospice patients will take in the days and moments leading to their passing.
This booklet describes my friend’s experiences, nearly detail for detail. My friend is living these words. He’s dying by them.
His skin has lost its pinkness. His flesh has dusked and grayed. He breathes in short gasps. He rarely speaks. He occasionally sips water. He no longer eats. His eyes. His eyes are strangely focused but, again, on something far away. They are not here. They are not now. They see somewhere else.
Pain brings him into the here and now. He speaks. His eyes seek. His body convulses. His fists clinch. Until the nurse gives him morphine, easing the pain of his cancer. Hospice workers are kindness, patience, understanding, competence personified. They are stewards of dignity. They ease my friend’s pain with morphine, with a caress of his forehead, with a kind word softly spoken.
His muscles relax. He no longer speaks. His eyes set sail again for the River Styx.
“Gone From My Sight” is helpful preparing family and friends what to expect from their dying loved ones. But it doesn’t prepare a visitor for his own reactions to a loved one’s passing.
Mine are only short visits. The love of his life, she keeps the long vigil during these painful few days and long nights. She spends her days at the hospice and nights at his bedside. His parents arrive. They sit in the chairs. They wander the hospice. These are the ones making the long wait.
On one visit, I sit alone with my old friend. Just like the old days, him and me. Still, nothing at all like the old days. He watches me with those quiet eyes. They are unlike the animated eyes that usually animated his face. The eyes that dared the world, that challenged it to make him live his life differently than the way he would live it.
He says nothing. This, too, is uncharacteristic of him. He always had something to say. Always. Even when he didn’t have anything to say, he said something.
So, I fill in the spaces, both to break the quiet and speak things unsaid.
I apologize for not being a better friend. A few weeks had passed since seeing him prior to this fast-approaching end — a few years had passed with little contact until his diagnosis with cancer. Even with the diagnosis, I thought he’d have more time. He had thought there would be more time. Yet, if you live life like there’s not enough time, well, then, time runs out, and here we are with little time left. I am sorry, old friend.
I recall a few old times. A few shared memories. I tell him he’s been a good friend to me, a good man to his friends, and a good person in general. I tell him he’s fought the good fight. I tell him he’s fought this thing with a gracious and brave spirit. He took on the hopeless with an indomitable hope. I sing him a few songs. I met him while he sung songs. I had sung songs with him for years. Singing him a few songs in this quiet room seems only right. Of course, if he could speak, he may tell me to quit caterwauling. If he could speak, he’d be singing, too.
I look down at his feet. They are strange-toed things, gray and flat, wide-nailed, sticking out of the bedsheets. I’ve known him 20 years. You would think I’d know him anywhere. But it dawns on me, sitting here, that I would not recognize him if forced to identify him by his feet. I share this with him, with a chuckle, one of the odd observations he would have loved.
I think how much and how little we really know about so many of the people in our lives. The memory of his feet will remain with me.
Then quiet, how old friends can be in the comfort of one another’s company, nothing else need be said: Just a knowledge of pasts shared, of personalities understood. I look my old friend in the eyes, eyes I know well, but seem no longer to know me, or maybe they have moved past me, past us, past this world and onto the next.
In the silence of that room, I say goodbye without speaking another word.
Dean Poling is The Valdosta Daily Times assistant managing editor.
