It's been a strange couple of months. People getting sick, getting biopsies, getting tested. Berkeley legend Betty Ann Webster died, disappointing all of us who believed she was immortal. I've wondered whether it's just a sign of aging; I'm just more likely to know sick people now. But four months ago I was only four months younger, and everybody was doing fine. And some of the recently sick people in my life are, sadly, way younger than I.
It's just my turn in the barrel of fear. I've heard the word "stent" used in conversation way too much recently. It gives me the jimjams; it gives everyone the jimjams.
So I talk to the afflicted, and almost always I say, "Please let me know if there's anything I can do." It's a thing that people say. They say, "I'm sorry for your loss," if an actual loss is involved - would that include amputations? They say, "Everything happens for a reason," and then a large bolt of lightning turns them into a mound of charcoal, and a ghostly voice says, "What have we learned from this experience?"
It'd be great if, for once, when someone said, "Please let me know if there's anything I can do," the other person said, "Well, you could do the laundry. I just haven't gotten around to it, what with half my colon missing. And, look, could you go down to the Hall of Justice and pay this overdue parking ticket? Also, that's a nice coat - could I have it?"
But sick people don't say that, because they know what you mean. You are helpless in the face of intimations of mortality, as we all are, and you wish to assert a common bond of humanity. But telling a sick person, "I assert our common bond of humanity" is just dopey, so you say the other thing, the time-honored formulation, the series of agreed-upon syllables.
"Let me know if there's anything I can do" means that you are outside the circle of people who are expected to do something. I mean, if my daughter called and said she was going into the hospital, I wouldn't ask her if there was anything I could do. We'd deal in specifics and logistics. And I'd probably be there at the hospital, doing nothing in a supportive and meaningful way.
I've seen people spend an awful long time in hospital waiting rooms. They want news. Of course, one person could await the news and use the miracle of the telephone to tell the others, but usually everyone stays around just in case. Usually people pretend to read magazines and walk the halls and check out the vending machines. I have some kind of sense memory of staring at a vending machine while being assaulted by waves of fear.
That probably would have happened if I'd run errands too, but then at least the errands would have been run.
Sometimes there are children to be played with. Playing with children in the lobby of a hospital is very high on the depressing recreations list. I've done that too, although I can't remember whose kids they were.
I know there are people who sleep in hospital rooms with the patients. It's common; nurses bring in cots, and the close relative, parent or spouse or daughter (rarely son), spends the night, sleeping fitfully and feeling helpless. I'm not sure the answer to "Please let me know if there's anything I can do" is "Could you sleep in the same room as my pale unconscious body," but I could be wrong. I think these are folkways more than anything else, rituals from the old country, the things that are done.
Long term, this is not a battle we're going to win. The people we love are going to die, along with people we've never heard of, and the misery will stop only when we ourselves kick off and let someone else do the mourning.
It's all a mystery, and we don't do well with mysteries unless we know they're going to be solved at the end. The template is Sherlock Holmes, who views a baffling array of circumstances and symptoms and says, "Aha!" By extension, we expect doctors to be flawless detectives, and of course they aren't. They work with book learning and experience, as we all do, and, as we all know, sometimes that isn't enough.
Unfortunately, "Sorry, no idea, here's a pill that'll make you feel happy" just isn't enough. And sometimes solving the mystery just means telling the patient what he's going to die from. "Your pancreas will explode in seven minutes, and please let me know if there's anything I can do."
You say I took the name in vain; I don't even know the name, but if I did, well really, what's it to you? There's a blaze of light in every word, it doesn't matter which you heard, the holy or the broken
