Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

“Most people—” responded the doctor earnestly.

“Well, we’re not most people, thank God,” Winston interrupted.

“What happens when we take him home?” I asked, wanting to clutch my stomach and rip it out. “He just sits in a wheelchair with a lap robe, unable to see, to speak or walk, to think—for the rest of his life, however long it is that he lives?”

“A vegetable,” said Bill, studying his watchband with fixed interest. “He won’t even be able to see the stars at night. He loves the stars.”

“Most people,” the doctor tried again, “would be grateful to be able to take their fathers home at all. Even if his mind isn’t as acute as it was, things won’t be as bad as you anticipate. It’s like having a pet—a cat or a dog—around the house. I’ve known cases where the woman of the house told me she was happy to have someone to take care of—”

“A pet!” we exploded. “Doctor, you have to be kidding! A cat or a dog! Woman of the house to take care of!”

And that was the end of it. He moved on to make his rounds.

“I do not believe what I just heard,” I seethed. “I did not hear it.”

“Wait till Mummy hears about this,” said Winston, shaking.

Bill’s laughter began again. “Spooky dialogue,” he said. “Guess saving someone’s life is all he thinks of. Guess he thought he did enormously well from the surgical end of the thing. Absolutely bananas conversation. They’re even more bananas than we are.”

But that didn’t seem to matter. It was more and more horribly true that Father could be less and less relied on to recognize all of us all of the time or, at the scattered moments when he did, to make any sense. However, on those increasingly rare occasions when he did make sense, there was a single sentiment that he expressed lucidly, vehemently, and with unremitting clarity of articulation. He wanted to go home.

Father lay immobilized, wrists bound down with strips of sheeting in case he might gesticulate and displace a tube or two, in his adjustable iron hospital bed for about four weeks.

Then Pamela, outraged and horror-struck by the barbaric customs in this country when it comes to death, spoke up. It was another of those dramatic morning conferences.

“Children,” she said after the doctor had left, “please help me. In England when someone is fatally ill—My father died at home. He was very old, and when he became ill, that’s where he wanted to die. And of course we respected his last wishes. The situation had some dignity. He was surrounded by the people who most loved him, in his own bed in his own house. But this—I don’t understand.”

I was grateful. After all the empty proselytizing for life at any cost and the emphasis on stuffing everything handy into that life even at its end, with total disregard for the quality of the end itself, it was nice to hear a sane voice.

I broke the silence, swallowing hard: “The problem is that euthanasia is illegal.”

“Unless we take him out of the hospital,” said Winston. “That in itself would be a form of euthanasia. They couldn’t stop us from doing that.”

“What do you think, Bill?” asked Pamela. There were tears in her eyes.

Bill unraveled himself from the tangle of some sort of labyrinthine inner contemplation.

“Well,” he said slowly, “my guess is the surgeon is not going to go for that one at all. Don’t forget, his reputation’s at stake. But a certain amount of time has passed since the operation—so Father is out of his responsibility or jurisdiction.”

And so we got over that stumbling block, and Pamela, with our thankful consent, took Father home.

But first she had to make the agonizing decision to sever Father’s lifeline. Some lifeline, Bill and I remarked to each other. To us it looked like a cocoon of man-made webbing spun over and under and around Father’s body to pin it down to the hospital bed, a closed circuit that conducted God knows where or why a pitiful trickle of God knows what. We didn’t trust it any more. We had begun to suspect that Father’s lifeline really led neither here nor there, maybe nowhere.

It had taken us the month since that second operation to admit it. Plenty of time for me not only to think about what was happening right in front of my eyes, but also to look back at everything that had ever happened and to imagine everything that was to come.

It was a new experience, although one I hated. Well, I thought, you should be grateful for the chance to know (much more than you ever wanted to) about the mysteries of death as they relate to yet another member of your family. The titular head of it, in fact. Just thinking that way made me shiver. Well, I comforted myself, this time you’ll be able to follow right along, assimilate all the medical expertise, see for yourself that the mysteries of death are really exaggerated. See it all as a long, exploratory, circular journey where the end runs into the beginning like the great serpent that coils back on itself and swallows its own tail. You know very well that the process of dying is part of the process of living. This time, at least, you can observe firsthand the natural conclusion to a first-rate life (only why does it have to be my father’s? And why, if it’s so natural, does it seem so artificial?), a life that’s just going by the book, doing what it’s supposed to do in the end: shed its last trappings one by one, the way a tree sheds its autumnal leaves.

This is a good opportunity to observe firsthand all the miracles of nature. Remember when Mother used to say that, years ago, on the farm in Connecticut? Remember Agnes the cow calving? Stewart the dog being run over? Chickens flopping with their heads left