Today’s column will grab your heartstrings and pull hard. It’s about a man who is facing his own death. It’s also about the losses he has sustained, which have stripped him of the reasons most people need to make living worthwhile: marriage, children, job, home, property, money, health.
But most of all, this column is about hope. Hope? The hope that today’s story will increase your awareness of the fact that you already possess the single, greatest gift of all — you are alive.
Why is it so hard to keep a basic appreciation for being alive? The human brain is wired to detect and avoid danger. Survival is its priority. This has caused an unfortunate side-effect: non-threatening events like good health, a good marriage, or the fact that you are alive, are taken for granted by the brain. This means that it is hard to hold onto an appreciation for the gifts we have been given.
What can you do to develop a greater awareness of, and appreciation for, life’s most precious gifts? Let’s see if this story can help to answer that question.
Our story begins with a man who is faced with the likelihood that he will not survive emergency surgery. He is bleeding internally; his large intestine has a gaping hole in it and bacteria — like an army invading a defenseless city -— has spread throughout his abdomen. There’s more — his left lung is not functioning, and his body is exhausted from six months of fighting cancer.
His mind? His mind is like a racing motorcar which slams the outer wall and spins wildly out of control. No, No, it’s more like a courtroom brawl where two opposing attorneys banter and battle back and forth. “Your honor, he wants to live.” “No, your honor, he wants to die, and I’ll tell you why — he has nothing left to live for.”
Intensive Care Unit: Sensing a close brush with death, the man seizes the control box and jabs the red center button. When the nurse arrives, his shaking hand gives her a thin ribbon of paper. “Call this number and say, come here now!” Whose number is on the paper? His girlfriend or neighbor, his father or friend?
It is 4:12 a.m. The black zone of night. I knock my cell phone off the bedside table. “This is the ICU; your brother Eric needs you now.” My voice, singed with hot acid, coughs out, “I’m on my way.”
ICU: It’s sort of like the cockpit of a fighter plane, where the pilot is surrounded by luminous dials, neon-blue monitors and the lime-green flicker of high-tech gadgets. An ICU symphony of mechanized melodies catches my ear: drip, drip, of IV fluids, hisses of oxygen, the feint, whispy breath of a one-lung man.
He opens one eye, then the other: “Did the nurse fill you in on my condition?” His words are measured and slow, with large gaps between them. I have a flashback: he is a six-year-old kid, whose smile reveals many missing teeth (This is not my brother, this is a skeleton man). I bob my head, once, twice, thrice. Eric reads my mind, “You want to know why I called you?” One, two head bobs. “You’ve never lied to me.”
He closes his eyes. Something is working its way up to the surface. “I’m done. I’m going to die during surgery. It’s not like I have a reason to live — no wife, no children, job or money, and a body wrecked and useless.” I remember he is left-handed, I take this hand and ask him, “Eric, do you want to die?” His eyes open, then shut. “No, I want to live, maybe six weeks more.”
I’m racked with sobbing. “Why?” Eric opens both eyes and says, “just to be here, to see another day — to open my eyes after surgery and look out that window to see the color of the sky.” He crashes into deep sleep.
“Eric, wake up, it’s time to go.” A nurse takes both his hands and tells him, “See my name tag? You need to remember my name, my voice, my face. When you wake from surgery, I will be holding your hands like this. OK?” When she leaves to collect his chart, the eyes of two brothers lock together. “Dick, what just happened?” “Well,” I beam out, “I think she knows something we don’t.”
Five hours later, my sister and I are holding his warm hands. He will live for three more months, and in that short span of time, our relationship will be re-built, which in turn, will act like a broom, sweeping away past peppercorns of anger, and the dusty cobwebs of old hurts. Our closeness will be restored to the way it was, when two small boys dashed through the front yard sprinklers, laughing on a hot summer day.
I wave with my fingers, as I leave his room. I try, but fail to see what he is looking at, as he gazes out of his window and smiles. What has he found, that keeps me searching? What knowledge does he hold, that escapes my grasp? Is his radiant smile about happiness, or is it a divine connection? What do his eyes see, that mine cannot? What color is the sky?
Dr. Richard Elghammer contributes his weekly column to the Journal Review.
