A Carnival of Losses

by Donald Hall

  Three days later I felt warm and the thermometer read 100 degrees. Kendel stopped by and heard me panting with short quick breaths. I telephoned Dr. Jordan’s office. His nurse Koreen told me to dial 911. Kendel called 911 and they told her my name and address. I called Linda without answer. The ambulance came and attendants strapped me to the same old gurney. I persuaded Kendel not to come to the hospital but to lock up the house, set the security system’s alarm, and telephone everybody. In Emergency my clothes were peeled away to expose my body to inspection. Again I was an object subject to brutalities and banalities of attention. My wristwatch vanished together with the button that summoned volunteer firemen. I lay in a room bare except for metallic devices. Men and women examined what they always examine and reexamine. Somebody attached small round discs all over my torso, extruding wires that led to a box. Somebody spoke of UTI, which appears to mean urinary tract infection. I remembered a catheter. A nurse arranged a pole beside me with a bag of liquid dripping through a needle into my arm. Everyone vanished. For the moment I didn’t love solitude. Maybe in April someone would find a desiccated corpse.

  When I thought I heard footsteps in the corridor outside my closed door, I shouted, or I tried to shout. The door opened. It was Linda! I reached up to see if she was real and detached a wire from my chest, which bled a little. Kendel had telephoned her, and now she crawled into bed with me and my equipment. I told her I had been abandoned. She left the door open and I caught sight of a male figure in the corridor. When I yelled, he turned and Linda leapt out of bed. The man assured me that soon my room would be ready, and unhooked something massive and aluminum from the wall beside me. He disentangled it, rolled it toward the bed, removed a metallic cover, and it became a TV. He handed me a control listing networks and numbers for cable. I pressed a number for news, although I would be dead for the election.

  When I left the same hospital a week before, I watched my room be cleansed of me. Everything I had touched was discarded or sent home—miscellaneous water cups, a pink receptacle for dentures, my dental plates, the tube of glue that stuck dentures to gums, a box of Kleenex, two plastic piss bottles, the clothes I arrived in, my wristwatch, my push button, and my glasses. Items I could not carry with me, like the bed and the floor, underwent industrial cleansing. And now I was suddenly pushed into a newly sanitized room for the rest of my life. I calmed down and Linda left me, drove back, and slept at the house where I used to live. A nurse leaned over to repair my chest wire.

  The next morning of confusion I was assaulted by a man, probably a nurse, armed with electric clippers. I should say that for a dozen years I had worn a full beard that curled itself monumentally around my face’s moonscape of wrinkles. Until a decade ago, I trimmed and brushed my hair and my beard, but in the spring of 2007 Dr. Jordan had me rub testosterone on my chest every morning. Head hair and beard hair erupted, enlarging me into a monster of mythic grandiosity, a blotched blob of pale skin in a shaggy gray-brown aboriginal forest. When I did poetry reading after poetry reading as poet laureate, my beard was rewarded with standing ovations. Twice Ireland invited me and my hair to read, in Galway and Limerick. When a back-home photographer accomplished a masterly close-up of my beard and me, my editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt asked me to write a book so that she could use my photograph for the cover. So I wrote Essays After Eighty. And now on the morning of the first day of my latest dying, someone was clipping off my beard. Did he think that a demented ninety-year-old hominid had wandered into New London Hospital? I bit his hand.

  The days, the days. The doctors wore on, the nurses wore on. On Sunday I watched the worst Super Bowl in history. I tried to nap. I tried to read, but after scanning one Economist paragraph I couldn’t handle another. I would never read again, as I would never write again. At night I stared at nothing while the night nurse, poring over the computer, figured out my nighttime meds, which were never the same two days in a row. How long would it take to die? No one told me what was happening. No one was in charge of my body. I slept, I woke for tests or medication, I lay abed, awake and senseless, my grotesque mouth hanging open. Every day Kendel brought mail, which accumulated unattended on a bench. Carole came to visit, Philippa and Jerry, Andrew and Natalie, Allison and Will. I summoned energy and it wouldn’t answer. Dr. Jordan dropped by and told me that I had congestive heart disease. He didn’t speak of treatment. My mother died of it at ninety, a month short of ninety-one. In her Connecticut house she had lived through congestive episodes for ten years, gasping alone until she dialed 911. Each time the ambulance deposited her for a week at the New Haven Hospital. Jane and I drove from New Hampshire to welcome her back to her house and stay with her until she strengthened. Now when I returned to my house, who would take care of me until I didn’t strengthen?

  For months I had worked with a lawyer on a new last will and testament, to include my grown-up grandchildren along with my children. My friend Jeff White had found me the lawyer. We corresponded, we talked on the phone, he visited and we talked. Now I feared I would die before I signed it, and Kendel arranged for the lawyer to drive to the hospital with the document and two of his staff as witnesses. On February 10 I alerted nurses and staff to the event, and inside my hospital room put my initials on fifty pages, my signature on three.

  Each day someone—a nurse, a physical therapist—helped me learn to walk again. Walking deserts you in extreme old age. Twenty-four hours after an ambulance, you cannot move your feet. Along with learning to walk again, insofar as it’s walking when you push a rollator, I touched briefly on my old professional life when my literary agent dropped by. Soon she would become my literary executor. Wendy Strothman and I spoke of a Donald Hall memorial in New York City. For half an hour I listed and unlisted speakers. Most were dead.

  The next day was Friday, and I could walk, pushing my equipment. My UTI had concluded, so they removed my antibiotic drip. My breathing was normal and so was my BP and my blood sugar. A nurse brought up the subject of discharge. I had not allowed myself to consider discharge. Sure, I wanted to get out of the hospital, but Linda had flown off to see a friend in Florida. Would visiting nurses come to my house? What was the hospital doing? What was I doing? I telephoned Philippa to pick me up and drive me home. The hospital struggled through discharge, retrieved my old medicine bottles, and provided new ones. I dressed for the unhospital world, putting on the clothes dragged off in Emergency. A nurse pushed me in a wheelchair to the hospital exit, Philippa following with my rollator, the medical staff waving goodbye. Prominent among the crowd I saw the man who tried to shave my beard. He wore a Band-Aid on his hand.

  It was extraordinary and terrifying to push my rollator into my house and sit upright in my blue living room chair. Philippa drove to Hannaford’s to shop for food. When she returned, she started to tuck things away in my refrigerator and discovered that the refrigerator had died instead of me. Everything in the freezer had thawed. What remained of Philippa’s birthday chili, as well as my soggy anthology of Lean Cuisine and Stouffer’s, was fit not for supper but for the dump. Philippa did the dumping and went home to telephone Sears. How did I get through the night? I got through the night. Kendel brought me a breakfast sandwich. A new refrigerator arrived, followed by Philippa with new chili. Medical assistance appeared from New London as a visiting nurse. “Have you any pain?” I never had any pain. The nurse measured my BP and vanished. I napped. I looked at the pile of letters. I rollated between two chairs, estranged from the world of what had happened.

  The next day, a physical therapist named Angela came to examine me and work me out. In the bedroom she had me raise my legs to the ceiling, then stood me at the kitchen sink, my hands grabbing the stainless steel edge, to kick forward twelve times, backward twelve times, twelve times left and twelve times right. She walked me, pushing my rollator up and down the length of the ground floor, bedroom through living room through kitchen, back from kitchen through living room and hall to bedroom. “You have to walk.” She worked me
out three days a week.

  In the kitchen one day Angela pointed to a further closed door that led into the unheated toolshed and onward toward my grandparents’ 1865 woodshed and outhouse. “Where’s that go?” We entered the old toolroom, cluttered with last autumn’s leaves, with its abandoned icebox, woodbox, saws, sickles, drills, shovels, and scythes. According to the season, skunks, garter snakes, squirrels, chipmunks, and rats skittered through. Beyond was the woodshed door, and as we approached I remembered: there was a garage where the woodshed used to be! From the toolshed floor to the garage surface slanted a cement ramp with wooden rails close on each side, so that years ago in winter I could walk to the Honda without undergoing ice or snow. Yes, yes, I had backed my car into the garage door! Again and again. After I totaled the car I forgot I had a garage.

  Looking at the ramp, for the first time in two months I felt somewhat aware of the world outside me. I began to feel like moving instead of sitting still. Maybe I was going to die, but not right now. When Linda returned from Florida, maybe she could back into the garage. Could I squirm down the stepless ramp to the passenger door of her car? Could she drive me to dinner at the Millstone? From parking lot to booth, the entrance was flat enough for my rollator. Could I eat five stuffed mushrooms? Four? After Angela left, when I lay down now, I was actually sleepy. I had known for months that I would miss Allison’s wedding on October 1. If I stayed alive, even barely alive, what would I wear? I asked Kendel, who told me about T-shirts online that were printed with bow ties and red roses. At my next September birthday, if I had one, Philippa could give me black sweats without elastic cuffs. I was astonished as slowly my death began to recede. I could do everything but write. Two days later, Dr. Jordan paid a house call and we spoke about the Red Sox and palliative care. By now I had no trouble breathing. By now Pam, my trainer, could work me out again, twice a week.

  Carole and Steve Colburn go on holiday twice a year, and in March I felt well enough to undergo their absence. They flew to Florida’s panhandle. The visiting nurse came once a week, and my BP was acceptable. Angela reached the end of Medicare’s permitted physical therapy. When Carole came back I was writing twelve letters a day, telling everyone that I wasn’t about to die, not yet, but that I couldn’t write my book anymore. Carole began housekeeping here when Jane was alive and well, twenty-five years ago, because I wanted Jane to make poems, not to do the laundry. When Jane took sick and died, I needed help all the more. When Carole this time returned from Florida, she remembered that in the past I had complained about not writing and had learned ways to trick myself back to work. She had known me to move to a different chair for writing, or into a different room, or to switch white paper pads for yellow ones, or to try out a pen with purple ink. I found a pink pad and a green pen. I sat at the dining room table and glanced over a list of topics from six months ago. I sat for an hour and didn’t write a word. The next day I wrote five yellow legal-sized pages. Five days and one essay later, when Ira Glass invited me to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, an hour and a half away, it did not depress me.

  In 1998 Ira Glass had interviewed me for an hour on his public radio show, This American Life. It was not three years after Jane’s death, and her dying was my only thought all day every day. On that program we spoke of nothing except Jane’s death. He was the best interviewer of my public radio life, better even than the great Terry Gross, Diane Rehm, or Garrison Keillor. Glass was utterly attentive, alert, intelligent, responsive, and eloquent. When I left his Chicago studio in 1998 I felt shriven, I felt clear, I felt elevated. Word of our program spread, and Glass sold tapes and CDs, sending me royalties. Then a few years ago he wrote me about a stage adaptation of This American Life with dancers and Glass himself. He needed permission to include my poem about Jane’s “Last Days.” A radio program on the stage? Dancers? The mind boggled. The boggled mind and its Boston publisher gave permission. I received further royalty checks from Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host. Now a Lincoln Town Car dispatched by Ira Glass would drive Linda and me across the state to a performance in Portsmouth. Glass had thought of my family and provided tickets for my son and my daughter with their spouses, and for Allison with Will. When our driver deposited us at the Music Hall’s door, Linda led me to an accessible pisshole, always an issue for the disabled. On the last day of April we sat in the front row to watch the show.

  You should have been there. A girl in a tutu, who turned out to be Anna Bass, held up a piece of cardboard labeled ACT ONE. Two dancers, Anna Bass and Monica Bill Barnes, danced their way onstage. Dressed alike, they moved unpredictably and in unison. They were charming and pretty and funny, and their choreography was narrative and intelligent. So was Ira Glass. So were the objects that cluttered and uncluttered the stage, concealing and revealing dancers, or sprouting an immense arch of balloons linked together, three hundred or so. Everything was snappy, especially Ira, dancing with Anna and Monica. He is not a dancer and he danced. Mostly he talked, sounding as if he improvised. The dancers’ simultaneous steps accorded with Glass’s talk—yet what did Glass say? Everyone listening laughed profoundly but no one remembered anything two minutes after, when everyone collapsed again into another Atlantic of laughter. What was Three Acts about? Good question. Maybe it was about what it was like to live on earth. At the beginning we entered the lives of Monica and Anna. Later we heard the brief radio voice of a man who undertook selling himself to his wife. We heard wit, we heard intelligence, we heard surprise, we heard sentences and saw bodies leap to combine thought and beauty with comic extravagance. We saw Anna and Monica dancing while each held aloft with no hands a full-sized wooden chair, a dowel gripped between teeth. Impossible! Afterward they revealed to Linda that the wood was balsa.

  Where could my interview fit in? My memory of an hour in 1998 did not include anything amusing, anything light—only devastation as Ira Glass extracted my distress and grief without limit. In Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host how could our dialogue display itself? On the stage Glass pivoted toward me, knowing where I would sit, and introduced me to the crowd. It was a moment for me to stand, but I can’t stand except by hanging on to my rollator. Glass pretended to push a button, and I heard my voice, recorded eighteen years earlier, speaking a poem about Jane’s final moments and final words. I spoke of helping Jane to sit on a commode, wiping her bottom when Jane could no longer move—and when I looked away from Jane for a moment, she had somehow crossed the room. Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass, dance costumes concealed under plain cloth, mimed the impossible movement. Jane’s voice—my 1998 voice quoting Jane—lamented, “No more fucking. No more fucking!”

  In the Portsmouth Music Hall, for six or seven minutes, the uproaring audience slid into immaculate silence. No one coughed, no one sneezed, no one appeared to breathe. After levity’s brightness a porous and textured darkness covered every seat in the theater. Silence extended into silence, and Ira Glass gestured toward me again. I wiped new tears away. Listening to every fragment of my old speech, I had inhabited the original moment. In a theater by the Atlantic, among an audience of a thousand, at the age of eighty-six I entered the grief of my mid-sixties in another century.

  Now I understood how death and desolation fit into the riotous joy and laughter at the Music Hall in Portsmouth. The emotional intricacy and urgency of human life expresses itself most fiercely in contradiction. If any feeling makes a sunny interminable sky, the feeling is a lie and the sky is a lie. If at a moment of sun a part of the landscape collapses in earthquake, then feeling may establish itself. In any apparatus of art, there is no north that is not also south—not in Gilgamesh, not in Doonesbury, not in Henry King’s “The Exequy.” Paradiso validates Inferno. Yes no. No yes. Several times in my life when I have concluded a poem, satisfied with its language, I feared that it failed because it thrust in one direction only. Several times I have later discovered that the love was so overwhelming and so monumentally carnal that in my poem love suffered death. Mortality interrupted ecstasy
to embody emotion. W. B. Yeats has the Bishop tell Crazy Jane to live in a heavenly mansion, and Crazy Jane responds, “But Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement.” Catullus told Lesbia, “Odi et amo.” Only the wrenching apart permits or reveals the wholeness. Enantiodromia. Up and down. Down and up. Way way down, way way up. A carnival of losses.

  At the curtain there was no curtain. Ira Glass waved the printed word CURTAIN amid a thunderstorm of confetti and the principals bowed. The audience stood, except for one who couldn’t stand, and applauded with a gusto that endured and endured. The audience seemed as astonished and overwhelmed as I was. I had been told that I could go backstage at the end, but almost immediately backstage came to me. Linda rose from the seat beside me and Glass sat down. My children approached. Beside me suddenly were Monica and Anna, happy dancers and—everybody talking—stage managers and grips and lighting engineers and choreographers and goodness knows who else, an ecstatic conglomerate. I talked, I talked, I talked. Certainly I had not talked for a year so much or so energetically. Before the show my family had gathered for dinner together, and now I talked with Andrew, with Philippa, with Allison. I told or tried to tell Ira Glass how astonishing I found his dancers, his radio host, his or everybody’s theatrical invention, sight and sound, motion and emotion. I tried to tell him what he had done, the north-south of riotous joyous laughter followed by vast grieving silence, the two making one.