Lee and me: The end.
Then again when he drank Dad’s morphine, I was at his ICU beside the next day, trying to coax him back. Like a reverse Horton Hears a Who episode…I was trying to reach him way down in Whoville… my voice getting smaller and smaller, diving down deep to where he swam in the Matrix-like world of safety. At least that’s what I imagined: That he created a safe world in his mind, full technicolor with surround sound. In the intervening years between those two suicide attempts, he had molested a child and gone to prison. I had gone to college. Many people wanted him to die. I get it. But I think unlike remorseless sex-offenders, he felt really bad (really BAD) about his repetition compulsion. Hence, his trying to repeatedly enact his own death sentence.
Everyone was surprised when he awoke from the morphine coma. Not so surprised that he was severely brain damaged. Surprised he was still able to talk and think and dream. But not surprised that he dreamed of getting high and unrealistically operating a motorized wheelchair. I asked him a few years ago what he would do if he could operate a wheelchair. He replied, matter of factly, that he’d roll up to the liquor store or bar where pals would put a straw in his drink for him. He hadn’t had a drink for a very long time, yet with no therapy or recovery of any kind his default was the same. I, in the meantime, had gotten sober-recovery and had a ton of therapy.
One day I asked him what he did all day. I could see the TV droning on and hear his ever changing roommates complaining, or sometimes amiable. Lee drifted in and out of time between being fed meals, being cleaned and the other routines that place ran on like a clock over the years. Years and years. “Oh…you know…” he told me, “I think, and remember, and daydream…” Once I started visiting him again, we did a lot of reminiscing about our childhood days – mostly up at our cabin in the Sierra’s where we both felt the freest – away from Berzerkley. Away from the temptations and dangers. He was a very good climber of cliffs and trees (and telephone poles) and he had a good singing voice – kinda Jimi Hendrix-esque. Jimi was his hero. I also read him books and gave him updates on my kids…you know, pretended we were normal.
As a child I was always thinking someone was going to die in my household, especially Lee. Those last ten years in the nursing home, his health crises got closer and closer together. I would get THE PHONE CALL I hated the phone for those calls about my family members; someone’s in the ER, someone’s got cancer and is alone on the streets, someone had a stroke, someone is dying or is dead. Rush, rush Laurie…come help, do something!. The others each perished after a final tragedy. Lee, however, was truly the human Energizer Bunny. ER doctors pulled him back from the edge a stunning number of times.
There was confusion for a while about his DNR. The nursing home social worker got me to get him to agree to one but when barely conscious in an ER, told the attending doctor to do whatever it took to save him. So, she did… then called me “even though he has a DNR…I did what I was trained to do, I hope it was ok?” Yes. Sure. His journey was what it was. Our attempts to control his outcomes simply didn’t work. That said, (and I still feel guilty for what I’m about to tell you) as I drove there, parked and walked the long hospital hallway – another one – I was tired. I was frustrated. Part of me wanted to be free of him. He was still in critical condition, so I held his claw-like hand and let him know I was there, and he could “let go…be free”. His response “I don’t want to be free! I want to live.” Could he sense the hypocrisy?
For a while after another ER visit, they put him on hospice. Stopped all meds, got him an end-of-life-more-comfortable-mattress. The special hospice social worker and a minister came most days…but then he woke up and started yakking again. Then went many more years laying in his bed-boat of time, drifting.
Before I moved to Vermont after my last divorce (three so far – yeah, intimacy and trust are hard for me), I made sure his paperwork reflected FULL CODE, which means that all medical measures are used to sustain life. Just like on the popular doctor’s show where the genius leading man refuses to give up, tries this and that to keep the heart beating, or get it beating again. After that I got THE CALL that he had COVID there was a crazy scene of trying to have a harried staff person find him in the chaos of the hastily thrown together COVID wing. I Facetimed (the new verb) with him. He seemed very calm. He went blind after that, however. Then two years ago, I got THE CALL and this time it really seemed like it was the end. He had phenomena, was unconscious, his body temperature was tanking. That time I flew right out there, sat by his bedside again, patiently waiting. Talking to him as if he could hear me (the Whoville-thing). Anyway…he woke up. That time, his speech had deteriorated some. I think maybe he’d also had a stroke. I realized though that I couldn’t do the cross-country panic-flight again. I got his end-of-life stuff in order before coming back; the mortuary, the cremation, where to send the few paltry items in his bedside table. Then just before Thanksgiving this year, two years after arranging things, I got THE CALL again. His blood pressure was tanking, they shot him up with some cocktail in his neck. They gave him antibiotics by the bag full…and he stabilized. Then he went back to the nursing home for two weeks. Fourteen days later, I got THE CALL again. This time, everything was failing. The nice ER doc was doing her best, but she said he was “very, very sick” I felt my anger spike. I didn’t need the kindness-code-language reserved for family members unfamiliar with death. I wanted to know one thing and one thing only, ‘…is he really going to die this time?’ She finally revealed they’d just put him on a ventilator. He hadn’t even needed that when he had COVID. There was my answer. He wasn’t going to make it.
But this ending was complicated by the next doctor trying to get me to take him off the life supports. To rescind the FULL CODE. “Why put him through CPR at the very end…let him have peace…” he kinda argued with me, bullied me with logic. I said OK to no CPR, for a few hours. Until I got back in touch with my brother’s spirit. When he is down, down deep, he wants to know that someone up there is pulling for him. To him, crazy heroic measures feel like love. That’s how messed up our childhood was. And frankly, his quarter century in full medical care was the happiest he’d ever been. So, I rescinded the rescinding. He wants FULL CODE…he gets FULL CODE. The next morning his heart stopped, they gave him CPR for ten minutes and he came back.
The night before (well at 2:00 a.m.) I’d had the nurse put the phone next to his ear (even though “he can’t hear you”…she emphasized in a “you’re inconveniencing me” tone). But she did it. I had a nice Whoville conversation with him (she’d walked away so I just kept talking). I told him that I loved him (yes, after all he was my last remaining family member from the core group, my blood brother, my burden, my for-better-or-worse-secret-keeper-helper and told him that I admired his incredible will to live. I really like living too! We had that in common for sure. Anyway, I imagined the Golden Winged Ship in the Hendrix song Castles Made of Sand…coming for him at the edge of the sea, like it did for the girl in the wheelchair. “and it really didn’t stop..” Jimi crooned. I had always imagined her getting beamed-up to it, like to the Starship Enterprise. I told my brother it was coming for him…finally.
I took a shower after the CPR resurrection. When I got out, THE CALL, the final call came. His heart had stopped again. Before going under the hot water and steam, I’d finally said to that overnight doctor not to do CPR a second time (that doctor agreed to give him a pain reliever drip – the other ‘take him off supports’ doctor said it was contra-indicated…asshole). That was it. No regrets.
Then it slowly settled onto me and into me… seeping through my own dream-brain at night, making my limbs heavy when I awoke. I noticed a stark hollowness, sort of like loneliness-hypothermia. I’d read a book not long ago about tragedies that occur during mountain climbing. It can actually be detrimental when the group is tied together because the kinetic force of the bodies weight sliding multiplies, and ice-axes are ripped out of the gloved hands of the lower down climbers. The yawing cliff below for my family was a dark edge I was always backpedaling away from as hard as I could. But once Dad fell, the chain reaction took Joji, then Larry, then Kim, then Mom, now Lee…all over the precipice, all away from me for good. In some of these real-life survival stories, good friends and comrades chose to cut the rope in order to save themselves. A cold calculation said “it’s them AND me, or them OR me…” In some metaphysical way, as Lee dropped over, the ragged edged rope just finally snapped. I’m not going over – but I’m alone and I hope I can get down off the mountain.
I was really exhausted right up till Christmas. But I have very good friends here. Sober women friends, and my daughter is turning out to be the bestest roommate I could hope for. I have momentum pulling me up. I went out dancing on a ticket I bought a month ago. As always, I danced right up front. I danced hard and soft and swively, with abandon, and in a fat groove. I sweated, flopped and whipped my curly hair to and fro. I survived another sad, sad death. And we’ll see…but I think I’m going to more than survive.