The Fear of Not Dying

Rage! Rage against the dying of the light!
Do not go gentle into that good night.

— Dylan Thomas

7:50 A.M. and my father, heavily sedated and johnnied, is being prepped for the first angiogram of the day at the local hospital. He’s got angina, and can’t do much of any-of thing without the pain flaring up. Given a choice, he’d rather be home fighting off an attack with coffee and Tylenol than lying here, about to get word that his cardiovascular system is truly a mess. I’m sitting in a hallway waiting room, trying to kill a couple of hours in a too-long morning with a book of German philosophy.

I glance up as my father is gurneyed down the hallway by a charmingly tough nurse, cracking jokes about double Valiums and the embarrassing truths revealed while under its influence. For a moment, the hallway is full of noise and chaos, full of rattling and quick chatter and motion. But just as quickly, they enter an elevator and disappear. So soon, and silence descends again.

And for the first time I notice two ancient figures — Howie and Eva — parked in wheelchairs just beyond the nurses’ station. Put there to be sociable, I imagine, to spend time beyond the blank walls of their solitary rooms. But they do not talk to each other — they don’t talk to anyone; they only sit and gaze down an interminable hallway, staring that thousand-mile stare.

After a while Eva’s frail, staccato voice calls out, “I got to go to the bathroom.” It echoes down the hallway. I am embarrassed, so I don’t look up until she repeats her need. I see no one to whom she is speaking, no one else in the hall except Howie, who begins to rattle the tray on his wheelchair. “S-s-s-s-uh,” he says

“I got to go to the bathroom,” Eva repeats.

But there is only silence in the hallway.

“I got to go to the bathroom.”

Her voice, with the singular inflections and rhythms of old age, does not vary, does not change in pitch, tempo or tone. It is pure statement, without any expectation of having effect. Like casting a line without bait, like talking to one’s self.

“I got to go to the bathroom.”

Finally a green-coated woman comes out of a room and into the hallway. “I just played phlebotomist, so you can play nurse,’ she says with exasperation to a comrade just out of sight, but certainly within earshot of Eva. A comrade who evidently has been ignoring Eva.”Not me,” this comrade says.

The green-coated women shakes her head and disappears into another room. Eva calls out once again, and Howie just rattles his tray. “Suh-suh-suss,” he says.

“I got to go to the bathroom.”

And the two of them, in this one-flew over-the cuckoo’s nest atmosphere, suddenly frighten me more than death. There is the stink of cruelty in the air, a foul smell, an old smell much more familiar than I want to admit, and this cruelty is twofold. The one is the cruelty of the nurses, who will not treat Eva as a human being, and the second is the one the makes us turn to religion, or to political causes, or when the cruelty is so very great, to despair. The former is an everyday human cruelty, the kind we have acclimated ourselves to when we pass beggars on the street, when we feel self-righteous standing on principles. The kind we can live with.

But the latter cruelty seems supernatural, springing from the proposition that either there is no God or there is a God, but an impotent one, an impassive one. For what kind of a God would let Eva persist? What kind of a God wouldn’t take her?

The cruel proposition: that either we must, or are let to, degenerate, wind down, revert, break down, become depleted of health and mind and body. And dignity. That cruelty which, without the intercession of death, is our unalterable fate. The green coated woman, now back in the hallway, confers with her unseen colleague. “I got to go to the bathroom,” Eva persists.

“But Eva, you just went to the bathroom five minutes ago,” the green-coated woman says.

The response stupifies Eva. She hesitates, uncertain for a moment. It is as if she is teetering. And then stubbornly, stubborn as a mule, like Sisyphus pushing his rock back to the top of that peak, she intones simply: “I got to go to the bathroom.”

The green-coated women sighs. She says, “Eva, I think I’m going to wheel you back to your room.” She walks behind Eva’s wheelchair, and then asks brightly, a false brilliance that sickens and demeans everyone who witnesses: “Are you ready to go for a ride?”

Howie shakes his tray violently. “Ss-ss-s-suh,” he says. “S-s-ss-suss!”

Eva is suddenly whisked behind the desk and down the darkened hallway. Where she will no longer remind us that she is still —goddammit — a person. Wheeled to where she can no longer upset Howie, himself reduced to rattling a tray, inarticulate not only because of the black evening he will have to face again tonight, but inarticulate too because he cannot be lost in that blackness. Once and for all.

Father in heaven, I suddenly pray, I never expected this. The thoughts begin terrify me. Bring me a good death, I think, nearly aloud, words poised on my lips. And there may be no father in heaven, I continue, there is only for certain my father on the cold metal table with doctor probing his future, looking for an answer. But I know the answer — there is no good death and no good living end. As I cannot pray for death and I cannot pray for eternal life, so I start to pray that it comes to me quickly when it comes.

Dylan Thomas had it wrong — the night is neither good nor bad. It only precedes morning. Day after night after day. So I pray secretly to my father, I cannot fathom the odds, except to be certain that each of our days will come. And if — when — it must be, go then, just go. When it comes, please just go.

Sometimes this is not such a terrible prayer.