Before my fist even motioned to knock, the door flew open and out stepped a drained yet angelic face who at first glance, appeared to have had a hit of that celestial dust just prior to my arrival. Had she been in my ER, I would have taken her pressured speech, rapid hand gestures, and intermittent pacing for addiction or for mania. She had neither.
The spaghetti was in the fridge. It must be heated for 32 seconds and served immediately with only two dashes of salt. Otherwise, he wouldn’t eat it. There was an organic smoothie that needed to be re-blended if he refused the homemade-from-scratch spaghetti sauce. And if I failed to tempt him with her nutritious concoctions, there was always vanilla ice cream in the freezer as a last resort. She hoped I was okay with cannabis as he needed it for his pain and to stimulate his appetite. He couldn’t afford to lose more weight.
Making mental notes of the litany of directions and details discharging from her lips at rapid speed, I was reminded of the first time I reluctantly left my infant daughter in the care of another. This woman was a protector and certainly his savior but try as she might, he wasn’t getting out alive this time. His life had been full of addiction, homelessness, incarcerations, and audacious escapades. But it was metastatic pancreatic cancer that would be her brother’s demise.
In his condition, how Jim had managed the arduous, 15-hour journey by air to come live with his sister was beyond me. I surveyed his tall, gaunt, oxygen-dependent frame, coupled with his massively-swollen belly and legs that were weeping from where the liquid under his skin was so tight. There was a rumor circulating that he almost died in mid-air but convinced the flight crew to continue on. Jim assured me later that it wasn’t death that was coming but a massive turd. All the pain killers, mixed with his disease process, made bowel movements nearly impossible. He didn’t realize his shrieks from delivering two weeks of festering waste could be heard from the tin can of a toilet at 30,000 feet.
While re-tying the red, Hell’s Angel-looking bandana around his forehead, he calmly assured his hesitant little sister that it was fine to leave him for a few hours and to take a much-deserved respite for herself. Caregiving takes a toil and Jim seemed to know that he was not an easy patient, no matter how much gratitude and love they held for one another.
Once she reluctantly took her leave, he grinned and pulled out a board game. Since I was there as his new volunteer doula through hospice and not as his doctor, he figured getting to know each other over the game of “Life” was irreverently appropriate, given that his would be ending soon. Jim was a wild man and I loved every hilarious, tragic, and cunning story that spewed from his lips as we struggled to read the rules of the game.
“Well, they are all made to be broken anyway,” he laughed as he mused about his life in jail and his regular stints with no home. It had made him tough and street-wise. We gave up on understanding the detailed directions and just talked about Life: his, not the one in the cardboard box, although he mentioned he had also lived in one of those once.
“If you ever lose your way or just get tired of sleeping outside, find a Salvation Army. Tell them you are an alcoholic and ready to clean up your act. You will get three hot meals a day and a roof over your head,” he coached, “and stay away from the meth and the tweakers. They will take your teeth and your money.”
He paused as if he had an even bigger life lesson to share but instead turned straight towards his death.
“You know what I really want? If I had one last dying wish, you know, like a death wish?”
His question startled me. He was the first dying person I had known who just volunteered that information freely. And since we were just getting to know each other, I didn’t think it was my place to pry just yet. But he had opened the door, so I sat all ears, begging him to tell me. I couldn’t imagine what a man with such an adventurous and tumultuous life would say.
“I would like to ride a horse, one last time. I’d like to feel that raw freedom again. But not just any horse. I would like to ride a white horse. And I want it filmed. You know, so I could look back and relive it my last days. And so my people could see it when I am gone. That’s a good way to be remembered and die,” he ruminated.
In slow motion, he waved his right hand in front of his skeletal face. “Ol’ Jim, galloping along in the Hawaiian breeze with the ocean in the background. I can just see the movie playing out in my head. It’s silly, I know. I can barely walk across a room, much less even get on a horse, let alone ride one. And hell, not sure where I would even find one or someone crazy enough to film it.”
Imagining an invisible zipper clamping my lips shut, I did my best to just listen without blurting out my plan enthusiastically, with delight. Getting up a dying man’s hopes and then dashing them to pieces was the only thing holding back the secret I so desperately wanted to share with him.
There was no possibility he could have known what I had been doing only an hour prior to our visit unless he was clairvoyant. Unplanned, I had run into a new friend from hospice just a few hours before my first meeting with Jim. And, she had invited me on the spot to come see her new land. She was ecstatic to show me the place that would soon house her three beloved horses.
When I arrived, she was beaming and almost in tears as she talked about how she just knew how healing her horses could be for someone that was dying. She knew they were special and meant to help others. She had a strong vision that she would be one day helping terminal patients right here on this land, with her bare beauties. It all sounded like a lovely dream at the time and probably far off in the future.
And now I imagined that she must be the psychic one. Sitting before me only an hour later, a terminal man was asking to ride a horse as a last dying wish – his death wish, as he put it. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the serendipity of it all. To top it off, I had just bought a birthday gift for my husband. It was a huge surprise, something he had been coveting for as long as I had known him: a drone. It could easily record this last ride. It just meant I would have to break my long tradition of never giving early birthday gifts.
The awe must have shone on my face as Jim’s musing drifted away and he looked at me quizzically. Did I dare tell him?
There lay all the pieces of the board game in front of us. All I had to do was position them together perfectly to make his wish happen.
The real puzzle was to figure out if I could get all the contestants to play along together on this wild ride called the game of Life before Jim’s ended.
Image: DepositPhotos.com
