November 2020

I received notice today that my friend T has entered palliative care at a private nursing facility. On the one hand, that’s not a good thing. It means that, as I feared, things have progressed rapidly. On the other hand, I am deeply grateful that there is a facility like this, and that they had room for him. This isn’t always the case.

As I said to the person who notified me: Knew it was coming. Not really ready for it.

I drove up to visit my dying friend T a couple of weekends ago. It was a measured risk: balanced against the risks of Covid was the fact that he is dying and doesn’t have much time left. They stopped chemotherapy as ineffective some months ago, which moved him into palliative care. At this point he is still in his home; I don’t know how long he can continue.

He has always had mental health issues. He’s been diagnosed as bipolar, for example. Looking back, it should have been obvious when we were teenagers, although forty five years ago nobody had ever heard the term bipolar, and depression was another word for weak. You just needed to get over it, you know? T was always like that – up and down all the time. He was, and is, bright and creative. He’s an artist and musician, and has a degree in creative writing. But he struggles. He really struggles. And that’s quite outside of the diagnosis of terminal cancer.

We had planned to go up, my wife and I. T likes my wife – when we see him, he brightens and talks at great length. Like many people with his mental challenges, he is a poor housekeeper, and so he is ashamed to have people in to his apartment. For this reason, we always met him at a pub, where we would sit for three or four or five hours, talking.

My wife had a small crisis with her elderly mother and thus at the last moment she couldn’t go. I had a hotel reservation, so I drove in to the interior, away from the coast, up through foothills and then mountains, past crystal glacier-fed rivers edged with robes of golden fall leaves. The sun was out – a break in the rain – and the air was warm with the soft melancholy of autumn.

When I got to the town where T now lives, I phoned him. He couldn’t come, he said. He was in too much pain. I couldn’t come over to see him, he hadn’t had a chance to clean up. It’s just me, I said. Not the Pope, or the President. But as always, he couldn’t be persuaded. So I went to the hotel, checked in, got out my laptop and wrote some.

Sure enough, a couple of hours later he phoned from the parking lot. He owns a 1994 Ford van – it still runs, and I think he paid $400 for it. But he shouldn’t drive. He’s on enough opiate to kill a normal person, and he sometimes gets sudden pain that causes him to double over. But again, as always, you can’t tell him anything.

We went for dinner to an Indian place. T isn’t able to eat much these days – the cancer has destroyed his pancreas and he has to take enzymes. Even then, anything with processed carbohydrates gives him a lot of trouble. But he can eat vegetable curries, and the spices cut through the fog of probably 12 or 14 medications.

After dinner we bought some beer. Not much, a half-dozen local brews. T can’t drink much any more, either. We went back to the hotel, and T said he wanted to stay there that night. There were two queen beds, so I said sure.

We laid in bed and drank beer and talked. We talked of life and death. We talked of regrets. We talked of all the heavy, difficult things that men who have known each other since childhood might speak of when one of them is dying.

And it was like we had not had a separation of 40 years. For a time, I half felt that those 40 years might have been a dream, that somehow I had fallen asleep and dreamed the years, two marriages and children and multiple jobs, houses bought and sold, tragedies and triumphs weathered, and that in reality I had been here the whole time, talking to my childhood best friend T.

He fell asleep for a while. I looked at him. He was more skeleton than man, and yet the face of that boy was still here: the snub nose, the wide face, the angled eyes. Yorkshire blood, he was once nearly as wide as he was tall.

I do not know how much longer he will live. Not long, I don’t think. But I am grateful to whoever, whatever, that lined up the stars to allow us to reach one another again. I don’t know if I will see him again before he dies. Now, though, I approach that thought with a degree of peace. It is a blessing to reach the point of resignation.