Nocturne

by Helen Humphreys

  Right or wrong, I would do it all again.

  I would chase everyone out of that yard.

  26

  This is what I saw when I was out with the dog: a monarch butterfly, lifting above the milkweed in the October field. Between the feet of the butterfly, its wings closed up so that it was being carried by the tips of its wings, was a dead butterfly, another monarch. My initial thought was that the first butterfly was going to eat the second, was taking it somewhere for that purpose. My next thought was that they knew each other, that the living butterfly was a familiar of the dead butterfly and could not leave it, could not abandon it to death.

  The flight was difficult. The weight of the dead butterfly slowed the momentum of the living one, kept it barely airborne, but it struggled on regardless, would not relinquish its burden.

  The mechanics of your death were simple. Your blood pressure dropped, and your heart raced, faster and faster, trying to pump blood through your leaking blood vessels. The flutter of your heart in your chest was exactly like the flutter of this butterfly’s wings as it tried to keep aloft.

  27

  I wrote your obituary on the plane home from Vancouver, on the morning of December fourth. I sat with a notebook and pen, in a middle seat, on a big Airbus, and tried to reduce your spirit to a series of adjectives, your life to a list of accomplishments. I wrote and cried and no one talked to me. I think I gave off such a stench of grief that the people on either side of me just kept their heads down in their books.

  It was easy to know what to say first: concert pianist. You had worked your whole life for that. It was pretty much your molecular structure.

  The list of accomplishments came effortlessly, and even the order seemed to be the right order. Concert pianist, teacher, composer, accompanist, Royal Conservatory examiner, son, brother, beloved friend.

  It was harder knowing what to write about your self. I wanted to be honest, not just focus on your good qualities but include some of your more difficult aspects. Because, like everyone, you were complicated, and sometimes your traits did double duty. Your stubbornness, for example, could be obstinacy or it could be determination.

  Death makes a small story of life because suddenly there’s an end to it, and it can be summed up. Someone can be reduced to a handful of words. I don’t know what you would think of the words I used to describe your life, but know that I am in the business of choosing words carefully, and I never chose words more carefully than the ones I selected for your obituary.

  Brilliant, talented, passionate and compassionate, kind, handsome, disciplined, elusive, and stubborn, Martin loved music, art, new places and experiences, his friends, the West Coast, connecting with life in all its forms, having a beer, and watching the Maple Leafs (even this season). He hated cruelty, intolerance, stupidity, and Toronto winters.

  He died too soon, from pancreatic cancer, and is deeply missed by his parents, Frances and Anthony; his sisters, Helen and Cathy; his many friends in Vancouver, Toronto, England, and Paris. We are lost without his beautiful spirit.

  28

  Most of the patients in the ICU were elderly. You shared your room with a woman in her seventies who had had a stroke. She moaned a lot and flailed around. She was on a ventilator for the first few days, but by the end she was off that and talking in a raspy voice to her family. Her bed was by the window, where I wished yours could have been because you would have been able to feel the sunlight.

  I grew to resent that old woman, because of the noise she made, and because she recovered. Every day she became a little better, and every day you became a little worse. In fact, all the elderly patients on the ward were going to get better, and only you and another young man were going to die. That man, who was around the same age as you, had had a stroke deep in the centre of his brain and he was bleeding out into his brain. The bleed was inoperable and would eventually shut down his cognitive functions. His girlfriend would have to make the decision to take him off life support, just a few days after we would make that decision for you.

  We saw that family every day in the little waiting area outside the ICU where they made us come before we could be admitted to your room. The room had about ten seats in it, and a TV mounted on one wall. A couple of small side tables were piled with out-of-date magazines. The walls of the room were that institutional beige that is so unpleasant to look at if you are forced to spend large amounts of time doing just that.

  On one of the side tables was a phone. When we arrived at the waiting room we were to call through to the nurses’ station, and say who we were and who we wanted to see, and then they would decide whether or not we could be admitted. This process made me nervous. I was afraid sometimes that you had disappeared in the night, or that I wouldn’t be allowed in to see you. But although I was often made to wait, it was only because your dressings were being changed, and the nurses were always apologetic about the delay.

  The man with the stroke had been sent to ICU around the same time as you, so we were with his family for the duration of those ten days you were in hospital. He had a complicated family. His girlfriend was new, and young. He also had a wife, from whom he was separated but not divorced, and children. There was clearly animosity between these two groups of people, and they tried not to overlap at the hospital. If they did happen to overlap, there was often shouting and finger-pointing between the wife and the girlfriend.

  But mostly this didn’t happen. Mostly they came separately, and the girlfriend was there every day, the wife less frequently.

  The girlfriend came with her mother, and we all sat there—us on one side of the room, and them on the other; the space between our two families so little that if there had been a table in that space, we would all be sitting around it.

  I liked seeing them every day. Sometimes we said a few words to one another. Mostly we just smiled and nodded. Often one or the other of us was crying, and we would look away in that small room, to give the crying person some privacy. When you died, and we were leaving the hospital, the mother rushed after us to say that she was sorry and to hug us goodbye.

  Unexpectedly, we had a lot of company in that place of fear and grief. There were those families in the waiting room who were suffering through the same ordeal. There were the doctors and nurses, particularly the nurses, who were with you every day, sitting in the room with you, changing your dressings, monitoring your vital signs. The nurses were amazing, and you would have especially liked the nurse who had the same name as one of your old girlfriends, and who came back on her night off just to check on how you were doing after you’d had to have the second emergency bowel surgery.

  You would also have liked the anesthetist, who came to talk to us when Mum and Dad were at the hospital, to say how sorry he was that you had died. I asked him if you had been afraid, and he said that you just told him to make sure you didn’t feel any pain. But clearly you had had a conversation with him, and I’m sure, knowing you, that the conversation was also about him in some way. That is why he had remembered you. He was impressed enough by that encounter to want to share with us your last fully conscious moments.

  The surgeon who performed the second emergency operation took the time to reassure me that your cancer was a complete fluke, that it wasn’t a result of genetics or lifestyle. It had simply happened, without explanation or cause.

  Now, when people are afraid of entering that death tunnel, whether it is their own impending death or that of someone close to them, I tell them that although it may be devastating, they won’t be alone. They will have good company—people who, while they may not know the individual who is dying, will fully understand the situation. This, in itself, is immensely comforting. In this place where you feel nothing but alone, you are not alone. And it makes a difference. It makes the unbearable less so.

  29

  This is a story I always wanted to tell you, to write to you, but I never did. It is a story of the last time I was in Italy, when I went to visit Keats’s apartment
in Rome. It is a story about dying, one that would have appealed to your romantic imagination, and a story that might have given you a measure of comfort. So, I’ll tell it to you now.

  It is a long climb up the stairs to number 26 the Piazza di Spagna, to the two small rooms and the tiny terrace let to John Keats in the summer of 1820.

  This is the room where Keats died at the age of twenty-five. There is a narrow bed and a view out the window of the Spanish Steps. In the room there are white daisies embossed on the pale blue ceiling, a marble fireplace. When Keats was in this room there would have been the easel and brushes of his friend, the artist Joseph Severn, and perhaps vases bristling with flowers, the smell of coffee, the sound of church bells.

  At the bottom of the Spanish Steps is a marble fountain in the shape of a sinking boat. The middle of the boat is filled with water, the two broken ends sticking out from the pool almost at right angles as if the boat has snapped amidships. As the day begins and the people of Rome start to move the city from slumber, it seems that the men and women climbing the long flight up from the fountain to the church at the top of the steps are ascending out of the wreckage, walking up from the water and the ruined boat, towards salvation.

  When Keats came to Rome in 1820 with his friend Joseph Severn, he felt he was already dead because his great love, Fanny Brawne, had refused his offer of marriage. He believed it would be too painful to continue contact with her while he lay dying, so forbade her to write or visit him. “I have already died,” he said when he left England and the love of Fanny Brawne. Those final weeks in Rome were what he called his “posthumous life.”

  After Keats died, the rooms and furniture were scrubbed down to erase any lingering traces of the TB that had killed him. Now his death mask stands by the bed, a lock of his wheaten hair under glass nearby. There’s a page in his own hand, also under glass, miraculous in its intactness because Severn destroyed a lot of Keats’s poetry and letters by cutting individual lines out to send to the women who wrote begging for something in his handwriting.

  From where Keats lay in his bed he would have looked out the window and seen nothing but sky, a small, blue box of sky. The colour might have changed very slowly, as the sky held light or leaked it. The wind might sometimes have rattled the window.

  The Spanish Steps were constructed by Francesco de Sanctis in 1723 to 1725. They were intended to broach the steep Pincian Hill and to connect the lower Piazza di Spagna with the upper Piazza di Trinita dei Monti. They were designed on a theatrical scale, with a straight flight of steps flanked by a pair of convex staircases. The design includes broad landings and a series of curving flights. One can climb straight up via the central staircase, or proceed in a slow, winding promenade to the top, stopping along the way to lean over the balcony railing and gaze down at the fountain below. The staircase is believed to be based on the sweeping moves of a dance—the Polonaise.

  The Spanish Steps are crowded on summer nights with people moving up and down the staircase that echoes the dance. Below the human noises there is the shuffle of the fountain as the boat sinks and sinks, and the water empties from between its bones.

  Keats could not bear to be read to while he was on his deathbed. He did not believe in the comfort of religion, nor did he believe in life after death. He did entertain, sometimes, the romantic fantasy that life was the dream and that death would be the awakening from that dream.

  Keats knew that there is an undeniable lyric truth to life. This is to be found in nature, in gesture, in love. He knew this when he tried to match his line of poetry to the bend of the river grasses, or the song of the nightingale.

  In that room where there was no writing and no reading, Severn sketched the dying man, in fact made some of the finest drawings of the poet when he was on his deathbed. Perhaps Severn’s sketching was a comforting presence to Keats. Art, although no longer of urgent relevance to his world, would have been his familiar.

  Severn, afraid that he’d fall asleep one night and that Keats would wake to darkness and think that he had died, devised a system so that the poet would have continuous light. He fastened a piece of thread from the bottom of one candle to the wick of another, and in its guttering state the dying flame would ignite the thread and travel up it to ignite the wick of the next candle.

  It is said that John Keats awoke at the exact moment the flame was travelling up the thread from one candle to another, and that in his excitement at witnessing this spectacle, he woke Severn to tell him of the success of his invention.

  At the end, we are all far from home. We are far from home, and what we hope for is that someone will fashion us a light, so that we too will not have to wake in darkness.

  30

  When I look back at your dying, I am still astonished by how quickly everything moved, how much of a scramble it was to adjust to the rapid and unrecoverable changes.

  At the end of July you were diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer, stage 4B, the cancer having metastasized into your liver. Your symptoms prior to this had been a backache and some acid reflux when eating. The first doctor you went to see prescribed muscle relaxants for you, never thinking to send you for a CAT scan because you were so healthy. By the time you went to see the second doctor, everyone had convinced you that you probably had an ulcer, since you had had one when you were a child and your stomach still sometimes bothered you when you ate.

  At the beginning of September you started chemo, in hopes it would shrink the tumour on the pancreas and take away some of the pain, and extend your life by a few months. Your initial diagnosis had been death in three to six months, but there was a possibility that you could survive a year or two.

  At the end of September you went into hospital in Toronto for a weekend to treat a bowel blockage. You were dosed with morphine to unclench the bowel, and rehydrated because you kept refusing to drink any water and were always suffering from dehydration.

  At the end of October, when you had a bit of a reprieve and weren’t feeling quite so ill, we went to New York for a few days.

  At the beginning of November, after the first round of chemo had ended, you moved back to Vancouver. On November twenty-second you went into hospital. On December third you died. On December tenth you were buried.

  At each stage you struggled to keep up with the changes the disease was causing, and we struggled to keep up with you. The ground was always slippery. Sometimes things would remain the same for a few days, but then they shifted again, and again, and the landscape became completely unfamiliar. You said to me once that the cancer felt like a wild animal was eating you from the inside.

  The doctors who treated you also used metaphors to describe what was happening, and it made me realize that they had fashioned these metaphors to avoid having to say anything directly, probably to avoid feeling their patients’ raw pain. A metaphor is once removed from the experience. It’s safer. It’s a story, an image, something to focus on to avoid thinking about what it really means.

  The doctor who gave you the initial diagnosis, after the first CAT scan, said, “The horse is already out of the barn.” You said, What exactly does that mean? and he just repeated the phrase to you, instead of having the courage to say, “You’re dying. There is no hope. You probably only have a few months. You can do chemo to reduce the symptoms, but it will not change the prognosis.” He did say, “You should probably get your affairs in order.”

  The pain doctor at the hospital where you went at the end of September said that there was a big difference between dying when elderly and dying in the middle of life. When you’re old there is a natural winnowing of life in preparation for the end, a slowing down. “But when you die in the middle of life,” she said, “it’s like a train going off the track at full speed. You don’t know how to slow down.”

  The ICU doctor at the hospital where you died had a metaphor that I could tell he was very proud of, a uniquely Canadian metaphor. Sitting on the edge of the conference table where he had gathered us t
o talk about your condition, he mimed a canoe stroke.

  “We’re all in the canoe together,” he said at the beginning, “and we’re holding our own against the current, even though we’re fighting our way upstream.”

  At the end he said, “The current’s just too strong. We need to think about letting him go.”

  After you were dead, from the corridor I saw the doctor through his office window, miming the canoe stroke for another rudderless family.

  31

  When you were in hospital for the first time, at the end of September, you were happy. The pain you’d been feeling from the bowel blockage was eased by the morphine. Your dehydration was cured with a fluid drip. You had a private room with a whole wall of windows and your own bathroom. I could live in here, you said when I came to visit. I knew what you meant, that all you’d ever really wanted was a small, clean, bright, orderly space in which to create.

  The hospital was perched on the edge of a valley and the windows overlooked the tops of the trees and the wide swath of green that continued over to the opposite ridge. We couldn’t see the river at the bottom of the valley from the windows, but I knew that it was there because we’d played in that place when we were children. The river was where we had swum and caught fish, where your Queen’s Jubilee towel got swept away during the flooding after a rainstorm.

  You kept the blinds fully open, night and day, and you awoke each morning at dawn, and for each of the two days that you were in that hospital, you wrote a poem about the sun coming up.

  You had not written poems before, had not undertaken any art form aside from composing for and playing the piano. But there was no piano for you to play at the hospital, and I think that creativity was a force in you that had to be satisfied, and that while you were lying on your back in a hospital bed, writing a poem about the dawn was something manageable.