Goodbye, Good Night: Thoughts From A Dying Journalist (1)
Shelley J Alongi

 

Giving the World to a Cat

Ellis Christopher had always been a voracious reader, but now the book he tried to read lay on his nightstand, abandoned for the moment. He could not concentrate. He had been unable to concentrate for several hours and it wasn’t because of the pain or the difficulty he had breathing. Tonight it was for a different reason. Tonight his family waited anxiously for the birth of a child. It was an irony, sometimes, they waited for a birth and they waited for a death, too. They waited for his death and they waited for his daughter’s baby to present itself to the world crying with all the energy newborn innocence possessed ready to take on the world even if that world was their own, while he, the experienced broadcast journalist who told the world its woes and moderated its discussions, prepared to leave it.

Even now in his last terminal illness, it was still his daughter after all, and if that phone rang, and when it did, if he were conscious and coherent, he would jump up like the spry young man he had been forty years ago and stride confidently over to the desk and pick it up. It would bear the news of a birth and he always had to know. It was the curious part of him; the part of him that couldn’t be quelled by pain medications or tumors, or wrenching illness. No, not tonight.

He lay back against his pillows, and closed his eyes. It would help the time pass; time that was slowly taking his life and bringing another one to account.

He opened his eyes as a soft ball of fir crawled up beside him. His once bright eyes, eyes that had embraced the world with curiosity and wonder and fervor, saw the white cat with the black feet come up and curl up on his thigh. Her head rested at his feet. He didn’t like having the covers over his feet. His covers were light on this hot, summer night. He moved those once bright eyes to the clock and winced only slightly. He took in the feel of her against his leg, her head curled on the outside of his shin. He could imagine her paws out before her, her white head and black nose down on her paws. He laid a gentle hand on her back. He stroked her back near the top of her tail. His fingers sank into her short fir, his breathing grew quiet. It hadn’t troubled him tonight; only the slight malaise of the drugs that prolonged his life, eased him of his body’s desire to stay out of balance, seemed to curl into the extensions of those fingers. He thought he felt his cat purr. He let a smile curl about his lips. He felt the softness of her fir, the flexibility, lithesome quality of her skin, the soft one hundred cotton threads of the sheets beneath him. But most of all he soaked in the fir, the gentle purr, the quietude of her existence here beside him. He tried to move his hand up to her head but even he couldn’t reach her head.

“Ah, little girl,” he rasped in that voice that had been affected by his illness, “tonight it is you and I. Perhaps you don’t know that I wait for a birth and a death and you will be here to see them both.” He felt the weight of her warm body on his thigh and smiled a little. “You are a brave girl coming to sleep with a dying man. But perhaps you are in charge now, little girl. It could be after so many years that when all is said and done, you will be boss.” Candy began to purr. She rubbed her head on his chest. He smiled.
“Yes,” he rasped, “it is true. The baby demands attention, the old man slips quietly away with those who love him around his bed, and you, precious cat, are in charge.” He smiled and felt better.

 There Is A God

“Darling. It’s me, Kim.”

A woman sat beside him now. He had drifted off to sleep, waiting. Sweat shone on his forehead and he shivered, feverish and very tired. His hands lay curled in fists beside him and from somewhere there was a voice saying Kim, Kim, it’s Kim.

“Kim,” he rasped out of his feverish haze. He felt a hand on his forehead, cool, gentle, and sweet. He would miss her…

“Honey, she called,” through the realization that he didn’t want to make. “She wanted to talk to you, but you were sick; asleep.”

“I. The last thing I remember was the cat.”

The cat, and he had said in his voice, a voice that had soothed a nation, “You’re in charge now, little girl.”

“Candy?” said the voice that called itself Kim. The voice like water gently gurgled like a stream, or was it his cough. No, her voice had always been pleasant and now it connected him by a tenuous thread to a world where a cat was in charge and a girl called. Or had she called?

He tried to sit up, sweat running in rivulets down his neck.

“Your pain medicine is here,” she soothed. “Just relax.”

He struggled against the sheet that covered him, his hands fending off the shot.
“Wait.” Before they masked the agony he had to know. “Did she call? Dianne?”

Kim could hear and see the impatience coming from this patient man tied down by his last terminal illness.

“Yes, darling,” Kim said, sitting down beside him. “Dianne did call. It was a boy. Christopher Ryan; seven pounds, twelve ounces.”

Kim got up and left the man’s side and went to a computer that was set up on the desk opposite the sofa where he had slept for the last hour; slept, and sweated, read, hoped, breathed, and waited. She came to his side and put something in his hand.

“A picture,” she whispered. She curled his fingers around it and drew his hand near him, as if she knew she wouldn’t do this much longer. Her hand lingered on his. “Your grand son. Christopher.”

He looked at it; his eyes grew moist and he caught an already shaky breath. He looked again as if to memorize every detail of the little innocent face. So, he thought to himself, he couldn’t find the energy to force out the words, there really was a God.

Slipping Away

Sometimes he slept fitfully and sometimes he slept not at all. There were some long nights when his chest hurt and he felt ill from the chemo therapy; mostly exhausted since most of the time he could keep the nausea under control by those little tablets you put on your tongue or even a shot once in a while. If he felt especially ill he would lay back and pretend he was in some far away place; a peaceful lake, gurgling water, the yellow an gold and crisp reds of autumn leaves comforting away the imbalance of life and death; the spirit that was strong and wanted to live, and the body that rebelled, divided, grew ill, calmed, some times was cooperative, and sometimes not. Tonight was a middle of the road night where he felt ill enough to close his eyes and relax, but just well enough to dream; to dream of a past that had been a good one; full of happiness and hope, sadness, gentleness, trouble, quiet moments, love, loss, balance, reconciliation, and redress. Life was a funny thing, especially when one was losing ones life through a breath, through a day, each day was one last day, one last chance to correct some imbalance, to say “I love you” or to guide someone, to sooth someone, to love someone; to hate someone.

The house lay quiet now; the nurses would not flit in and out during his last days unless he called for them. There was a button he could push for pain killers, but tonight simply closing his eyes held those demands at bay, and so he lay here, quietly breathing; gently, slipping away.

Dreams

He couldn’t say he had a bad life. It had been a good one. A young, spry boy turned into a curious adolescent, who pursued dreams, not all of them reachable, but all of them his dreams; his personal, unique dreams that no one knew about; at least not till he could put them into words and putting them into words was important. Dreams that saw him struggling over a typewriter at first, before the advent of more advanced means. He wrote small articles about how he felt, and then he read them aloud, practicing for something; practicing for what? For fame? For obscurity in a world of fools? A perfectionist, a quiet, striving perfectionist who wanted everything and yet developed and honed the skills that allowed him, eventually, as a middle-aged Adult to get those dreams. He had a lot of learning to do, to hone those skills, to teach himself his craft, to perfect it, and now, end up, after a lifetime of telling stories, writing stories, loving stories and even building upon his own stories, living out his last days; his own story. Yes, he loved his life. It had not been perfect. His death would not be perfect; but it would be as his life had been; good, a little surprising, and yet, rewarding? Could death be rewarding? Lying here waiting for the banshee to come, to call for him, to gently speak his name in the soft impatient voice, just as he was about to say what he had never said, to admit to the person he loved that he had forgotten, ten years ago, to say thank you for something, to call him, to take his hand and hold the curtain of life back for him to exit onto an unforgiving stage; something unknown, something as natural as birth; as natural as the day his mother presented him squawking and protesting into a cold world; a world that he would learn to interpret and try to make sense of; as natural as all that, and somehow it didn’t feel quite natural. How did it feel exactly? Was it calm and quiet now like the body of his cat lying here, breathing effortlessly. Now he coughed and tensed and tried to pull a breath from an oxygen tank, to open those diseased lungs and breathe. Somehow the effort succeeded and he relaxed.

You still have life left in you if you have the will to breathe, to exist. The thoughts were slow. The mental energy it took drained him and he lay back and gently petted Candy’s quiet fir.

“Ah, little girl,” he rasped again. “You are a lucky cat. You will live; you will hunt and live and I will not see your end. But you will see the end of a man once full of life and energy, and confidence. Today you live and I die.”

Truth

They hadn’t been married ten years when they found out he had lung cancer. There is never a good time to learn that you have lung cancer. There’s never a good time to learn this, especially if marital happiness comes later in life. Plenty of money, plenty of breaks in life, a successful career, a nice house, a place to come home and crash after a long assignment, or just to crash after a good glass of wine and a date with a woman you might want to ask to marry you. A good place to crash after one divorce and two children, and just a place to go when it’s all done and you just want, for an hour or two, to drink a strong Cognac and forget the world. Even if you don’t’ want to forget the world, even if you’re reading a book about your next assignment, a place to crash is a good thing to have.

When you finally find a woman who can stand your idiosancracies and she yours, lung cancer isn’t a good thing to learn you have.

In the white sterile room that was the doctor’s office, looking at the outline of the human body with its systems clearly marked, cardio vascular, circulatory, reproductive, all those things that everyone learned in high school, or at least where the schools were giving children these days proper education, Ellis Kristopher wondered how he would face the truth. How could he face the truth when the truth was that one in four people died from lung cancer? Suddenly a man who had led so many up to the very altar of truth and made them face it, measuring them against its lofty standards, felt compelled to step slightly away from the truth. In a burning, quiet place in his soul he did obeisance to it, and he tensed and bit his lip, and sighed.

He had been sick for a while, in pain, coughing, having trouble breathing. His voice, on a good day, was as he and others remembered it. On a bad day it was raspy when inflected with its usual timbre. Now he sat in the office with Kim, holding her hand. He felt her hand, smoothes, manicured, warm, still, clammy, cool. He squeezed her hand with his even cooler hand an she squeezed back. Maybe she could feel a cut on his pinky he had gotten trying to cut an apple, nicking his finger with the knife. His finger didn’t hurt anymore; today what hurt was his chest, and he was determined to get through this. Her hand responded quietly; there were no words between them.

How did you face up to the fact that you could be dying? Did you just come out and say “I’m dying?”

Perhaps that was just the thing to do. Admit you were dying. But he didn’t’ want to die; he wanted to live; at least on a good day he wanted to live.

If he was going to die, well, that still might be a few years off anyway. He had kids to get through some hard years. Melissa was in college, and Dianne was married.

He had gotten a late start in life. But alas, today, he did not think so much about the children. The children would survive. Damn it, if he had anything to say about it, he would survive, too. A sudden swish of anger like a quick interruption in breathing swept through him. He was an emotional man. Not out of control emotion, but, well, darn it, he wasn’t even sure that he had cancer yet. Everyone else got it. Deep down, before he went to the doctor with the initial discomfort, he wondered only slightly if it were possible.

He turned tired blue eyes to look at Kim. She sat staring straight ahead at the human body almost as if concentrating on the anatomy chart would help stave off the truth. It struck him that perhaps this woman that he loved, truly loved with an ache sometimes, could face up to the cold steel of the truth more than he who had led a nation to it, could.

His body was deteriorating, she lived with it. She knew.

He sat back in his chair not wanting to know. For a moment, he would let it all wash over him, he would not try to make sense of any of it. He would wait and listen.

The revelation wasn’t unexpected, then. The doctor came into the office, almost with a harried expression, almost as if he didn’t have time. But then he looked down at his patient and saw the two hands clasped together and fell into a chair. He sat down and opened the chart and made the pronouncement. He had small cell lung cancer. What did he want to do about it?

They shook hands with the doctor and walked out to the Mercedes. He had always liked a Mercedes.

“I’ll drive.”

His pronouncement was cool, crisp, delivered today in a voice less raspy than on some other days.

Kim did not argue with him.

He looked at Kim, then focused on the traffic that prevented his exit from the sacred halls of his own personal truth. Somehow focusing on a task always helped him to make some sense of the incomprehensible and so now he waited for a break in the traffic and took his place in the queue.

“I’m hungry, Strag.” Kim said after a long silence. He put his right hand over hers, chuckling a little in a familiar, understanding kind of way.

She had called him Strag. They both had this insane liking for the work of Douglass N. Adams. When on earth did Ellie ever get time to red Douglass N. Adams. He laughed a little bit now. “The Delhi then?”

“Okay,” she said. “You’re up for it?”

“Don’t know,” he said. “But we’ll go anyway.”

“IF you’re not sure…”

“We will go.”

His tone was calm, authoritative, quiet, reassuring.

“Yes,” she responded. “Alright then.”

Somehow eating sandwiches and drinking iced tea happened as it usually did with them. They sat across from each other and stared into each others eyes and somehow both felt as if they were under water. He took her hand and led her out to the car after the meal and said nothing. The logical place to head now was home. Besides, what did an ill man say to his healthy wife?

They sat in their driveway for a moment. They looked at each other and got out of the car. On the steps to their house, behind some trees, they hugged each other and cried.

Mistakes

To say his first marriage had been a mistake would be a disservice to Donna, because God knew that she had been a good one. The problem was that he didn’t see it till she had divorced him and he was left to come home all alone to his place and be without her. It wasn’t even that he was so horrible of a man. He didn’t beat her or abuse her; God knew she wouldn’t have stood for that. He didn’t cheat on her. He wasn’t perfect, though. A few times in his younger days before he settled down and realized that he could lose everything, he sat at the bar with others in his craft and drank himself silly a few times; till he woke up one morning after a bad experience with some Tequila and decided that really he had had enough of that. He couldn’t report the world falling apart as it was in those days with a hang over and a bad memory of he wasn’t sure what had happened the night before. Suddenly to feel the way he did one morning…well sometimes now on his worst days when the anti nausea drugs didn’t quite do their job he might have thought it was the same. but then he had so much more to lose than his cookies or imagined cookies. Sloshed on the front stairs of his home that morning decided him against drinking, forever. He wanted to report the story, not be it.

The tequila experience was stupid. It was the same classification in which he had put his first marriage, or at least, the way he had treated it. He had treated it in just that way: stupid, and lost her. There was no sense in telling her now, was there? She was married happily no doubt somewhere to some minister in a parish, raising kids and teaching high moral standards and loving her husband who probably loved her, too, and here he was, well, he had had his name in the neon lights and his butt in a pickle, sometimes, both at the same time and divorcing Dana had been stupid. No, she had divorced him, after all. He was the one who spent way too many hours on his job; coming home late at night, alcohol free, but intoxicated with the world as it fell apart or came together, or tried to do both at once. Too many hours, and the gold grew cold in her wedding band as one of his favorite country artists said, once. The woman in her needed the warmth of a man and he didn’t give her enough and in those days, drunk with excitement about archaeological digs and American politics, scandals, plagues, love, hate, and everything in between, he wasn’t’ man enough for her and she went off and found someone who was. That’s all, when he thought of it now in the midst of radiation and chemo treatments, on those days when he could think about them, that it boiled down to. But it hurt and it hurt enough for him not to make the same mistake twice.

Homework

When you learned you had cancer, that was just it. No more wondering, no more waiting, no more hoping, praying, or thinking that you didn’t really feel the way you felt; that it wasn’t just a passing ache or pain coming on with age. He had, all throughout his life, always taken things as they came, after he had decided to take them. Somehow, though, all his research was more important for other stories, and was finally important enough for him. So he sat down and read about chemo therapy and its after math and the treatment for the treatment and he knew that four out of five people with lung cancer died. He had had to hide behind walls when sudden gunfire erupted on assignments so he figured that so far he had been lucky. He, as he always had done, curled up on airplanes with a nose buried in a book, sitting in coffee shops observing people and reading, waiting in lobbies, waiting for his wife to come home from shopping, breathing between parties and charitable dinners and such, did his homework. Whether it was over things that mattered, like the overthrow or rearranging of governments, the demonstrations and corporate sponsorship of American politics, or the simple stories that drove him, he would, by God, do his homework; and he did.

The Treatment

It robbed a thinking man of his power to think when he was hooked up to a chemical cocktail that would kill good cells and hopefully bad ones and make you sick all at once all in the name of the cure. He went to bed; except bed wasn’t comfortable. The floor wasn’t comfortable either. There was no comfortable position when you lost every meal you’d eaten for the past forty years over a matter of days with your gut all tied up, all because one wanted to live. It didn’t leave much time for reflection, those days. The faces and the eyes of young therapists who came in and said “Hello Mr. Christopher how are you today?”

Do you think, he wondered when he could think again, that a person who knew the kinds of troubles they were about to administer all in the name of shrinking a tumor would have the balls to say how are you? They could leave me with some dignity, they could, say, hello Mr. Christopher what kind of day is it today? No, maybe that wasn’t a good question, either. Maybe that question wasn’t fair, either because they probably knew that no matter what kind of day he was having today, by the end of it he would probably wish he was dead, even if he was trying not to be. They decided to treat him aggressively, and when he didn’t sleep, or when the chemo didn’t strike, as he said, and he wasn’t looking for relaxing ways to get through the next dose, or dissolving those little tablets on his tongue, then he tried to put things in order.

9 Paying Your Debts

Putting things in order wasn’t always the easiest thing to do, even on a good day. When he had a good day, he sat outside in his back yard and looked at his neighbor’s fence. He sat down and sometimes Kim sat with him. Sometimes they sat hand-in-hand an said nothing. She knew, with the intuition of a woman who tried to understand, that his eyes were in another place.

“It’s Donna,” she said once.

“I have precious little energy some days,” he admitted. “It is Donna. I suddenly feel bad for her.”

So Kim got on the phone and found her number. There was too much to tell, and what she learned was that he didn’t need to talk to Dana, because Dana had been killed in one of those plane crashes that he had talked about on some days.

Well, there was that chance, to say he understood and just wanted to say that he had been wrong even if they hadn’t seen each other for thirty years. Then, of course, he said to himself, writing down something on a piece of paper, if it had been meant to be that he say anything, she would have been around to hear it. So he thought about the next thing.

He had a friend in Idaho that he owed money to. If one was going to die shouldn’t one try to settle one’s debts?

“Kim,” said the man who had told newsmen and women what to do for so long, “go find Jerry and write him a check for $500.”

“Five hundred?”

Kim probably wouldn’t believe the story if he told it to her but the look in her eyes made him laugh a bit. A smile played across his face, and his eyes lit up.

“When I was younger,” he said, “we had a bet going about who would get married first. This was right after my divorce. I swore I’d never marry again. It was too complicated, you know. I had work to do; I wanted to be foot loose and I wanted all my time, but I wanted to be with a woman, so we had a discussion an he told me I couldn’t last without finding someone and not just to go and se on occasion, he said even though I didn’t think so, I would get married. He was right.”

“Okay, darling, but five hundred dollars?”

 

 

Go to part:2 

 

 

Copyright © 2009 Shelley J Alongi
Published on the World Wide Web by "www.storymania.com"