November 1, 198-
Dear Ruth,
I visited Robert today. I try to visit him as often as I can. He is so pathetic. He’s like a child who doesn’t comprehend what’s happening to him. He tries to be courageous, but often he simply breaks into tears and sobs like a like a child. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to remain courageous when one must die in an institution as large and impersonal as the UC Medical Center where one is alone among a multitude of strangers. The doctors and nurses care as much as they are able, but still they are strangers who know nothing of who Robert is and has been. For the nurses and doctors he has no history other than his medical history. He is a patient, and they respond to him as their training dictates. I know they care about Robert, but I also understand that they must keep a professional distance for their own sake. I told Robert that I would contact his parents, but he said, “I have not seen my father in years and don’t want my mother to come all the way from Texas just to watch me die. Perhaps you could write her afterwards.”
“I’ll do that. I promise.”
“Don’t tell her everything. No. Just that I suddenly became ill and died shortly afterward.”
“Yes,” I said obediently, but thinking that there should be something more. Shouldn’t there be tears, weeping and sadness, Ruth? I do not think we know how much we live among strangers until we die.
Sometimes, I think Robert is almost embarrassed by his dying. For him, it is like having a heart attack in a restaurant and spoiling dinner for the other diners. I think it would be much better to die like the creatures of the forest, either in a life-and-death struggle or at least beneath the sun, moon, and stars. I don’t know, Ruth.
There is one nurse, however, who is different from those who provide polite, efficient care. She is petite. Her eyes are aquamarine and inviting, like the warm waters of Pacific islands. Her skin is fair, the color of summer wheat with a pinkish under-glow. The features of her face are soft and delicate. Her hair, the color of the lighter shades of autumn, is long and wavy at the ends, giving her an ethereal look; indeed there seems to be a holiness about her. Her manner is serene, as if she were more a spirit or mood than flesh and blood. Her name is Candice, and like me, she works nights, which means that she is with Robert when I cannot be with him. There is something mysterious about this slender, delicate young woman. She is very warm and friendly—Robert has told me how kind she is to him—yet there is something elusive, other-worldly about her. Perhaps this comes from working with dying patients. She must have some inner source of strength that enables her to face disease and death day after day. I know I do not have such strength. I’ve been overwhelm by Robert’s dying.
Robert is grateful for her presence. He speaks of her often, says he has told her much about me. He says he sees us as loving and caring sisters. The nurse and the artist. My love, he says, is effusive and unrestrained, whereas Candice’s love is expressed through skillful acts of caregiving. In her bright, seemingly innocent greenish-blue eyes resides a sorrowful wisdom that the nearness to so much suffering must bring. It must be akin to the sorrowful wisdom I saw in the face of the bag lady at the YWCA.
Of course, I wanted to meet Robert’s caring friend once he told me about her. So, on one of my nights off, I went to the hospital. I know Robert rarely sleeps well at night, but I never visited so late. I went directly to his ward. It was quiet—ghostly. I felt ill at ease. I went to the nurses’ station and asked if I could see Robert if he were not asleep. Because of the late hour I expected to be told that I could not visit his room, but the nurse check the visitors’ list and said I could look in on him but not to disturb him if he was asleep. I did and found him sleeping. I sat for a while in the darken room, beginning to wonder why I had come. Was it to see Robert or to see this woman who had captured Robert’s imagination? I felt embarrassed and agitated, so I decided to leave. I stood and for a moment looked at Robert sleeping peacefully. I wanted to hold him, put my head upon his. A great sadness swept through me. I could feel it echoing within me as if I were a dark, empty cave. I had become despairing because I was witnessing the dying of someone I loved. My eyes filled with tears. Suddenly filled with panic I wanted to run from the room, but then a voice called my name, “Christine.” I turned, my face wet with tears. It was Candice. She walked to me and held me as if I were a child.
“So you’re Christine,” she whispered.
“Yes,” I said wiping the tears from my cheeks.
She smiled at me warmly. “I knew right away. Robert has told me so much about you. I’m glad you’ve come though I never expected you at this hour. We should go. He’s been given something so he’ll sleep through the night.”
“I was about to go. I...” I paused as I tried to collect myself.
“I’m off at eight. If you would like, come to my home about nine-thirty, and we’ll have breakfast in my garden.” She knew why I had come. And I don’t know what it was, but something crystallized at that moment. Our expectations were fulfilled. As Robert said, we were like sisters though strangers. Here in Southern California one learns that everyone is a stranger and that if there is to be any closeness, any intimacy, it will have to be with a stranger. So I said I would. As it turned out, she too lived only a few blocks from the ocean.
She gave me her address and phone number and told me to go home and get some sleep. But I did not wish to go home. I was in one of those moods—where the world seemed foreign and strange and every person in this vast sea of humanity is a wayfarer. The medical center is so vast, so modern, and so impersonal. I longed for the sea air and the sound of breaking waves. I longed to be away from the lights of the city so I could see the distant stars that strangely became friendly companions. The streets of the city were quiet and dimly lit in steel-blue incandescence.
At the pier a few old sea birds had their poles out, but Mr. Rieneau was not at his usual spot. Yet no one had taken it. So I stood where he always stands and sought the line where the sky meets the sea, but it was hidden in the darkness of the night. Again, I thought of Robert dying all alone in that huge, impersonal complex. It seemed so unnatural. Would it not be better to await death in some wild place among the primordials of nature as companions. You believe that all of nature speak to us if we listen. Is that what you do on your outings into nature, listen to the air, sky, and water, to the plants and animals. You said that they speak not just to just the ears but to all the senses. The moon, sun, and stars, mountains and deserts speak silently. You once said a rock has wisdom if one will only listen to what it has to say. I believe you. I always have. Here, the ocean speaks to me. On the pier I see and hear it. When I walk barefoot where the waves reach the sand I touch and smell it. I even tasted it when I went surfing. I don’t fully understand what it tells me but desperately want to. Mostly it tells me to return to my home among its siblings the deserts and forests.
I don’t know. Here I exist in a state of confusion. Perhaps that’s why I need Candice to nurse my ailing spirit. Perhaps she can give me what even wise Mr. Rieneau can’t give. Who is she, this woman who spends so much of her life among the dying? How is she able to endure the deaths of men, women and children she knows only by name? What must she think—more importantly—feel? How does she protect her soul from so much death? It is impossible to endure this life alone, Ruth. I love the sea, but it does not love me. I worship the stars, but they do not even know I exist. I can understand why even today so many people need their God in heaven. But I am unable to believe. I stand alone before my world.
You and I have never been believers, have we, Ruth? We have confronted the world on its own terms. You especially have been willing to accept the world’s indifference and even respond by embracing it and giving to it the love it lacks. You have been my teacher in this. And when I needed love, when I needed a heart to be near, you gave me love and your heart to keep me warm during the cold, dark nights. Now I have found another woman like you, who comforts Robert as he returns to the mysterious night from which he came. Oh Robert, my poor Robert, I wish you did not have to die. I wish none of us had to die. Is our love enough to compensate?
A black man who sometimes talks with Mr. Rieneau brought me coffee. He knew my name.
“Here you are, Christine!” he said in a rich deep voice that seemed as old as the voice of the sea.
“You look cold standing there. Would you like my coat? I grew accustomed to the cold long ago. I’m Jason, a friend of Mr. Rieneau.”
I thanked him for the coffee and said it would be enough to keep me warm, that sometimes I enjoy feeling the cold air. I told him I knew he was one of Mr. Rieneau’s fishing friends. So Jason and I talked awhile. He had never married and had no children. I had never thought before of men who never marry, except for monks or priests. Men who spend their entire lives alone—but now I can see how life might just turn out that way for a person.
“Too old to work and too grizzled to play, I come here to the pier and fish when I need to get outside or to talk to someone. And I like being out at night. It’s peaceful. The day is too full of busyness.”
As a young man he worked loading barges on the Mississippi. Then the war came. He served in an all-black tank battalion named the Black Panthers. After the war he worked at odd jobs. Wanted to be a truck driver but because of the unions it was hard for a black man to find a job with a first-rate trucking company. Eventually he was able to find work with the railroad as a sleeping-car porter on passenger trains.
“It was a good job,” he said, “because we had our own union, but it didn’t leave much time for a family. Still, those were the best years of my life. Being retired is mostly doin’ nothin’. I’ve got plenty of money and plenty of time, but sometimes I get restless and take the train to Chicago where my sister lives. She’s all the close family I have. Had a brother and another sister, but they’re gone. A travelin’ man ends up alone, Christine,” he said with a big smile and dark, sad eyes.
My own life seems so small in comparison. I told him that I was glad to have had the opportunity to talk with him and thanked him for the coffee. “Anytime,” he replied.
So my days are filled, Ruth, here among so many strangers. I think I will rest a little before seeing Candice.
Love,
Chrissie
