by Tanner J. Willbanks
Once I was afraid of love, but when it’s your brother those things change
-Jon Bon Jovi, “Never Say Die”
“I’m dying.“
That’s what he says. I know it, obviously, but nobody has really said it. Yet, here is BJ, my friend, sneaking an illicit cigarette on the no smoking patio at the hospital(with me serving as lookout), telling me, in no uncertain terms, that he is, in fact, dying.
“I have a 10% chance that this poison they are pumping into me will affect this fucker, but when have you and I ever ended up on the right side of the odds. If there was a 2% chance of getting kicked in the balls 15 times in one day, I guarantee you I’d be at 17 and you’d be at 16 by the time that day ended.”
There is something refreshing about the matter of fact tone in which he delivers this bit of news. It isn’t glibness. It isn’t denial. It is the stark fact that he realizes that there are certain people in the world who things go right for and he is not one of them.
“Why do you think it is that people who end up on the wrong side of the odds are always drawn to each other?” He asks this question as he tosses the cigarette, still lit, off the balcony to fall the three floors to the parking lot.
“Because we can understand each other. We know that, unlike the others, we’re never going to truly make something of ourselves. We are what we are, and there is nothing we can do about it.” He smiles at me as I say this. We both know that the fact that we are satisfied with less than the “haves” but more than the “have nots” is something that confuses people.
“Only profession for people like us to rise above mediocrity is writer. You’ve got to entertain people by detailing the way our lives are fucked up. Plus, I want something nice written about me after I’m gone.”
“You don’t have to wait that long.”
*
He is larger than life to me. Our very first meeting was the sort of crazed affair that you read about in Jack Kerouac novels, but never really experience. He held a shotgun next to my head and taught me the different sounds that it will make when loaded and unloaded.
“Seriously, man, if you are ever in a hostage situation you have to know the difference between these sounds. Knowing if the shotgun is loaded or unloaded could be the difference between life and death. Do you understand?“
Why I would ever be held in a hostage situation, I had no idea, but listening to him explain it to me, I was absolutely certain that this was information that could one day save my life. Still, thinking back on that first meeting, the large quantities of alcohol consumed, the lessons on proper gun safety, the discussion of what would make the best tactical hideout when the zombies came, I can’t help but remember how he approached each aspect of the conversation as if it were the most important thing he ever talked about, and that I was the most important person he had ever talked to.
*
It is the first time that I’ve set foot in a hospital as a visitor, not as a patient, in over 8 years. During the last year of my mother’s life, I spent at least one week a month sleeping in the uncomfortable fold out chairs that pass for guest beds in hospital rooms. I spent so much time in the hospital cafeteria that the cashiers began to give me an employee discount out of pure pity. I was through with hospitals. When my mom died, I promised myself that I would never again step into one unless it was because I needed immediate treatment.
I kept that promise until now.
*
We sit in his hospital room for several hours. We joke. We laugh. We talk about how tired he is from the chemo. But we never go back to the elephant in the room.
He is dying.
“I like having you here. You give me somebody to talk to so that I am not just sleeping the entire fucking day.”
Slowly, the most vibrant personality I’ve ever known is being reduced to nothing more than a hibernating bear. He tells me he slept from 11 in the morning until I got there at 5(and that wasn’t including the full 8 hours of sleep he achieved the night before).
I like being here for him too, no matter how hard it is, because I know that it makes things a little bit easier. For him. And for me.
Barring a major win for the underdog, he will be gone before August. Thirty-one years old and here he is fighting for his life in a hospital bed. Thirty years old and here I am fighting right alongside him.
*
I remember many nights in hospitals with my mother, sleeping in those horrendous chairs, wondering if she’d make it through the night as her heart rate dipped into the low 30s. I had learned very early on in my mother’s illness just how to read the monitors that she was attached to. I knew a sinus rhythm from tachycardia. I could tell when her oxygen saturation levels were reaching a dangerous low. I was able to give updates to the doctors on rounds almost as well as the nurses in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit that had become our second home. You learn these things to make it easier on you. When you are losing everything, you hold on to the smallest thing that makes you feel normal.
There isn’t the same urgency now. And I don’t think of those moments when I am here by his side. It is later, in the middle of the night, when sleep hides, that I’ll remember my mom’s dying years and I wonder if I can go through this again.
*
I had been prepared for my mother’s decline. She was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease when I was five years old, so I lived with the idea of her possible death since a very early age. When her heart troubles began I was fifteen. From that moment on, I became the primary caregiver for a terminally ill woman. Spending the majority of my teenage years as a chauffeur between doctor’s appointments and cardiac rehab should have prepared me for the inevitable death that lay at the end of her story. But I don’t think you’re ever truly prepared to have somebody you love die.
At least with her there had been warning. She and I had spent many years saying goodbye, making funeral plans, even going so far as to discuss exactly what music she wanted played at the service. When she died, it wasn’t so much about shock as just an overwhelming sadness. We planned for that event for years.
Now we don’t have that luxury with him.
*
“I don’t want to die in a hospital. I want to die at home. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah. I wouldn’t want that either. You want to be at home surrounded by the people who love you. All of us there. Except maybe not for the actual moment of death.”
“No, I want you there at the moment of death. I want to give on last epic speech before I go. I’ve already started writing it.”
Of course he has. This is the man who has developed one of the most intricate survival plans for the “inevitable” zombie apocalypse(he has contingencies for other types of apocalypses too) that has ever existed. He has given us each tasks, codewords, and even developed a special text code to alert us to the need to haul our asses to the nearest rally point post haste. Why wouldn’t he have started writing his death speech the moment he found out that he might have cancer? This is the man that made the Boy Scouts look ill prepared.
*
I’ve been through the grieving process before. I know the routine. I also know that nobody should have to start grieving when the object of their grief is still in their life. It is exponentially harder to deal with grief when you still see the person you are grieving on a regular basis. This is the cruelest part of slow, terminal illness. You watch people slowly slip away to shadow.
The first time I did it I watched my mom lose all will to even continue trying. She went from one of the most hyper, some would say manic, personalities that I have ever met to a woman who, routinely, didn’t even bother changing out of her robe for a week straight. She stopped wanting to see people. She stopped wanting to be around her friends, her family, her pets. I watched her die years before she actually took her last breath.
*
He welcomed me into his dysfunctional family. None of them were truly related, but they had a bond that was deeper than blood. As their de-facto leader, he had final say over whether or not I would be truly accepted. When he turned to the photographer at our Brian and Mina’s wedding reception and said “I want a picture with just the Paloopie”, I knew my place and began to walk out of frame. He humbled me at that moment when he said “Where the hell do you think you’re going? It’s initiation time.”
That picture is on my mind as I sit with him in the hospital room. Even with him simulating anal sex on me in that frozen moment, I can’t help but smile every time I see it, with our whole family together.
*
Until I heard that he was in the hospital, I hadn’t seen him in almost five months. It seems impossible to me at this moment, but I hadn’t thought of him much in that time either.
Today I can’t think of anything else.