terri camPion letting go

My sister was an ICU nurse. Death was her life. Thanksgiving Day, 2009, Huntington Hospital called to tell me that my sister had been admitted with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and was in a drug induced coma. I hadn’t seen or heard from my sister for over a year. This wasn’t unusual.

The seed for our proclivity for distance was first sowed on September 15, 1968 at our family dentist’s office. Every twelve to eighteen months, the six of us would pile into the car on a Saturday morning and make the hour journey to the Main Line. There were plenty of decent dentists around the corner and across the lake in Ridley, but “Dr. Grayboy” came highly recommended to our mother by someone rich. His office was on the ground floor of a marble mansion. The waiting room was the size of a classroom and looked like a museum piece. There was an assortment of turquoise velvet chairs, love seats, and sofas, none of which were comfortable. Interspersed throughout the room were bronze and ivory figurines of nymphs, tigers, and busts and heads of famous dead people I didn’t recognize. A place Louis XIV or XVI—either one—could pass through on a regular day. Behind a pair of large, intricately carved wooden doors— the dental chamber.

It was as cold and quiet as a church. We could hear each other shifting in our seats or turning a page in a paperback book; my sneezes were explosions, my father’s apocalyptic. These sounds were underscored by the drilling, groans, and admonishments from Grayboy’s chamber.

Kara had been complaining of a toothache on the upper right side of her mouth for several weeks. She was thirteen, I was eight. Since she had a real situation and would probably need a longer appointment than anyone else she was last to the chair, after me, our two brothers, and our mother and father. To hold her over and stop her whining, Grayboy gave her a couple of pills for the pain. When I came out of my appointment, she was lying on her stomach on one of the overstuffed couches smiling and laughing at a “Penny” cartoon in an outdated Highlights magazine. Something wasn’t right with her. Penny wasn’t funny! We both knew that. But we read it anyway and never laughed. Kara’s eyes were sparkling and her smile was too big for her face.

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked her.

“Nothing. I’m not in pain. Is that a bad thing?”

“No . . .”

“Don’t tell Mom!” she whispered.

“Tell her what?”

“That I feel good. She won’t like that.”

I looked across the vast room. Our dad was snoring loudly, his head against the back of an ornate chair, slack jawed, the opened newspaper draping his legs like a blanket. Our mother was sitting next to him in the matching chair, a standing cast-iron ashtray between them, engrossed in her book.

“They don’t care,” I said. * * *

After three weeks of treatment for the fibrosis, the doctors had managed to contain the disease and transferred Kara to a nearby rehab facility. While there she seemed to be on the upswing, in good spirits, doing her Christmas shopping online, finding great deals. Ten days later she was moved back to Huntington, this time to the ICU. She had contracted pneumonia. A month later, after multiple attempts and procedures to reinvigorate her lungs and combat the disease, followed by days of “wait and sees” and failures, today, February twentieth, three weeks after her sixtieth birthday, she is to be taken off life support

I arrive at the hospital at 12 noon. I’ve been here so often I’ve memorized every curve of the green-and-white tiled corridors and nursing stations. The atmosphere in the ICU wing seems to be underscored by alarm bells. Emaciated patients roll by on gurneys from every direction, connected to IV drips. My heart is pounding in my ears. I will my eyes forward as I blast Alicia Keyes's “Fallin’ ” in my head to drown out the wails. Kara loves Alicia Keyes.

When I arrive at Kara’s room, there are people milling about, putting on coats and hats, and speaking in hushed tones. The room is dark and shadowy. The only light comes from the digital screens on the machines that surround my sister’s bed. I look around for Abbey, Kara’s daughter, who told me she’d be here. Like her mother, she is a nurse. She works in radiology at an outpatient clinic in Brooklyn. Vinnie, my niece’s fiancé, approaches me.

“Hey Aunt Maggie.” He gives me a hug. “My family,” he gestures toward the huddle of figures, “they always wanted to meet Kara, but never got a chance. This was as good a time as any, I guess.” He shrugs sadly and follows his family out the door.

Now that the room is clear I see my sister, tiny and pale with a head of short black hair, lying in a steel-framed bed surrounded by hissing and blinking machines. IVs and tubes flow out of her nose, arms, and abdomen. She is breathing through a tube in her neck, a tracheostomy. My eyes orbit the room, avoiding the one place that I’ve not yet mustered the courage to see. I am terrified at the possibility that Kara will open her eyes and say to me: “I don’t want to die!” What would I do? I want to make up for all those times of bitter silence between us within the next few hours, and I know that is an idealistic notion, an unattainable concept.

Grayboy was a cranky SOB, always in a bad mood. Maybe it was just the sight of our family filing into his office on the Sabbath and taking away his day. The only time I ever saw him smile was when he held the door open for my mother as she entered his torture chamber. She pretended not to notice, avoiding eye contact, but she knew. She was a head turner.

After conferring with my mother about Kara’s tooth, rather than do a root canal, which would take another hour and cost more, Grayboy opted to pull it—a top back molar on the right side, number 2. * * *

I rest the pads of my fingertips on my sister’s wrist. Her skin is cool and thin. My heart continues to thump in my head and I try to control my breathing. The machines’ pumping and hissing becomes more aggressive and loud. On a closer look, I notice traces of lipstick, blush, and eye shadow on Kara’s face.

“She wanted to look good for my dad.”

My niece, Abbey, is standing in the doorway in a white wool coat sipping through a straw from a Starbucks Grande cup. Kara and Nick, Abbey’s dad, divorced when she was two.

She crosses into the room and gives me a hug. “He came, we lowered the meds so she could wake up and see him, she waved, then he waved.” She demonstrates with a flick of her wrist. “And that was that. He had to go pick up spices in the East Village.”

She is wearing boots that add three inches to her petite frame and she smells of patchouli. She holds her wrist up to her nose, sniffs, offers it to me. “Mommy’s,” she says. “I thought she’d recognize it and maybe—” She drops into a chair by the bed. These three months have taken their toll, aging her past her thirty-two years.

“What is it with people?” Abbey groans and takes a long sip of her drink. The ice cubes rattle, indicating it’s over. “Well that went fast for eight bucks.” She takes the lid off the cup, shakes it, pokes at the ice with the straw. “We put a call in for a priest hours ago!” She leaves the cup by the chair on the floor and crosses to the bed. She checks the IV drip, the catheter output, and the other ominous apparatuses, then returns to the IV drip.

“You want to let her know you’re here?” she asks.

“You can do that?”

“Why not? I did it for my dad.”

She adjusts the valve on the drip. After a moment I can see a current traveling through the muscles of my sister’s face and her eyes open. It takes another few seconds before what remains of my sister’s life force appears behind her eyes and she takes in her surroundings.

“Mommy,” Abbey whispers. Kara turns to her daughter, a look of terror and confusion on her face.

“Mommy, Aunt Maggie’s here.”

My sister turns to me, her face lights up in a smile. “I love you,” she says with her lips.

“I love you,” I reply softly, smiling, hoping she doesn’t sense my terror. We hold each other’s eyes for a moment.

* * *

Ten minutes! That’s all it took for Grayboy to yank molar number 2 from my sister’s head. Kara emerged from the double doors holding an icepack to her right cheek. She stepped into the foyer and stood under the gaudy chandelier. Her chest was heaving and her face streaked with tears—wet and dry. A stream of sunlight from the small windowpanes on top of the door reflected off the crystals of the chandelier and bounced over her face.

“I need another pill!” she cried. “It hurts so bad!”

I would remember this day as the first step into the hell that awaited my sister for years to come.

“You have to rest,” my niece tells her mother as she holds the valve on the IV.

Kara is searching her daughter’s face for answers to questions she can’t voice. She reminds me of a child waking up in the middle of a road trip, wondering where she is, how she got there, and what is going to happen next.

“You have to rest,” Abbey tells her again. “Okay Mommy?”

Kara is weakly shaking her head.

“I love you,” Abbey says.

Kara mouths the words back. There is something else she wants to say but can’t put into words.

I turn away. How can my niece, who in my mind is still that little girl who ran into my arms crying during thunderstorms or when her father stopped coming home, be so brave? I feel inadequate.

Vinnie enters the room with bottles of water and a feeble-looking man, who is hunched over, clutching a faded cotton bag.

“Look who I found!” Vinnie announces, as he hands us each a bottle. “The chaplain!”

“We asked for a priest,” Abbey says, clearly irritated.

“They don’t have one,” Vinnie says.

“In this whole hospital there’s not one priest?” I ask, joining Abbey in her irritation.

“Yeah, but there was an emergency,” Vinnie answers, then shrugs. “Go figure.”

The chaplain takes one step into the room, his eyes focused on my sister.

“Is she dead?” he asks.

There is a moment of silence as the three of us look at each other. Stunned? Horrified? Vinnie steps into a corner of the room and turns his back to us, trembling with laughter. Abbey answers the man, “Not yet. They are waiting for the DFLST papers.”

“What?”

“The decision to forgo life-sustaining therapy,” I explain.

The chaplain takes a step closer to me and points to his right ear.

“Say again.”

I sigh. “She is not dead.”

“No?” The chaplain swipes a thin black yarmulke from his bald head and opens his bag. He pulls out a crucifix, a small, leather-bound, dogeared prayer book of sorts, and a small jar, the label of which I recognize as Tiger Balm. He places each item on the table by Kara’s bed. He then takes out a red and gold silky beanie and slaps it onto his bare scalp.

“What’s her name?”

“Kara,” Abbey says.

“Harry?” he asks.

“Kara!” Vinnie shouts.

“Huh? Laura?”

“Kara,” I say.

The Chaplain fumbles with his bag and pulls out an orange sticky note and stub pencil, the kind they used to have in libraries by the card files. He turns to us, his pencil and scrap of paper ready, his palm the writing surface, “Can you spell for me?”

Once he finds the right page in his missal and lifts his crucifix, the three of us join hands and bow our heads as he leads us in a prayer. He keeps forgetting and mispronouncing Kara’s name. He can’t understand us when we remind him and has to refer to the note still sticking to the palm of his left hand. Vinnie and Abbey are nearly passing out from stifling their laughter. I think I see a smile flash across Kara’s face.

As he is anointing her wrists and face with Tiger Balm, a boxy silver-haired woman in Minnie Mouse scrubs enters the room holding up a paper—the long-awaited DFLST.

“I finally got the printer up and running,” she says as she hands it to Abbey to sign. The pen doesn’t work. The woman bangs it about, smacking it like a catsup bottle. “It’s the only one I got. It’s been working fine all morning.”

We all fumble through our bags and pockets. In putting away his props, the Chaplain has unearthed another stubby pencil from his bag and hands it to Abbey.

“Seriously? You can sign this document with a pencil?” I ask the woman, who is unwrapping a Certs from a piece of foil.

“No problem unless someone erases it, and that’s not gonna happen.” She pops the Certs into her mouth and coughs.

Both Abbey and I sign the document. The chaplain has gone, and a bouncy redheaded nurse in turquoise scrubs has arrived for the night shift. She plops her ample butt into the one empty chair. Now we wait for the doctor who will enact the DFLST order to arrive.

“He’s so busy! It’s like Grand Central Station here every day,” says the redhead. “Bonnie,” she says, “but you can call me Bon-Bon. So, where you all from?”

Conversation ensues about where we all live, where we used to live. I tell her I live in Brooklyn and that I work in Manhattan. She then starts a rant about the one time she was on a subway and someone in another car got mugged and that was in 1982 and she “hasn’t been on a subway since!”

“It’s really the best way to get around the city,” I say.

“Never go, not since 1982.”

I’m the only one engaging in a conversation with this woman, which makes sense. I’m the closest in age and of the same sex. Bon-Bon and I stop talking and observe Abbey, who has been keeping check on Kara’s vitals and is now gently massaging cream into her hands and arms.

“Tsk, you’re never old enough to lose your mother, poor kid, ” Bon-Bon yells across the room. “Make sure you get those chin hairs! I tell my kids, don’t you dare let me lie on my death bed with chin hairs growing nuts on my face!”

My niece gives her a blank stare.

Bon-Bon turns back to me and Abbey throws her a crazy wild look that makes me smile. She smiles back.

“Your mother still alive?” Bon-Bon asks me.

“Yes.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s in a suburb in Pennsylvania. She and Kara—”

“Clashed like bulls in China?”

“Sorta.”

“Well, tell me something I don’t know. I got two grown daughters. How’s her health?”

“She’s fine. She just doesn’t like to travel.”

“You think her heart isn’t breaking right now, losing a daughter? No matter how much you don’t like your kid, you never stop loving them. Your kids aren’t supposed to die before you!”

I can’t decide if this conversation is comforting or disturbing.

“Damn, I could use a cigarette! In the old days, we had a lounge we could go to and light up. Now we have to wait for the elevator—can’t even take a few puffs out the window or the fire escape.” She drags herself out of the chair and out the door.

I join Abbey at Kara’s bedside and softly run a brush through Kara’s hair, which is surprisingly thick with very little gray.

“How are you holding up?” I ask.

“All right.” Abbey slowly shakes her head and continues attending to her mother. “It’s just so irritating, this place.”

I don’t know what to say. * * *

The pulling of her tooth that day in the fall of 1968 set off a dynamo effect in my sister’s mouth. Each year there were more cavities, root canals—yanking. Because my mother refused to take her to any other dentist, she’d have to put up with the pain until the next appointment, which sometimes was several weeks away. Kara was willing, as long as she had medication.

It started happening to me when I turned thirteen: cavity, root canal, yank, pain meds.

The euphoria from the meds made our life brighter and more bearable, and we dreaded living without them. Kara would feign other ailments—menstrual cramps, migraines— anything that couldn’t be proven a sham. When our mother finally caught on, Kara pressed me to do the same.

“Why should I? You hardly shared the pills you got last time!”

“What are you talking about? I gave you half!”

“You gave me three pills!”

“I really did have cramps, I thought you’d understand.”

We shared a bedroom. She was the only person in the family I could talk to—most of the time.

“You could at least try.”

“Mom’s gonna know and what if she hits me?”

“She’s not gonna hit you. Don’t be such a baby. You’re a good actress. Better than me.”

That’s how she got through me and through life— flattery. It got her everywhere.

My mother did hit me. She then did everything she could to keep us apart, even giving us our own bedrooms and putting our brothers into one. It didn’t work. It only strengthened our bond, our distrust of our mother and of everyone else in the family.

We were addicts. I stopped all medication once I got my teeth under control. But there was weed, and for one semester at college, every Friday my roommate and I would wash down a tab of “windowpane” acid with tequila sunrises.

“My highs were social!” I’d scream, whenever Kara would start on her Twelve Step shit that she never got through.

“Whatever makes you feel good about yourself.”

When she wanted to make a point that she couldn’t put into words she’d take a long drag off her Salem. We knew each other too well. She never tried to quit smoking. “I don’t need another failure in my life,” she said.

Whenever our conversations took this kind of turn, one of two things could happen: One of us would either slam down the phone or stomp out the door, depending on whether the meeting was in person or not; or we’d proclaim our love to each other, our mutual distrust of everyone else in the family, open a bottle of wine, together or separately depending, and we’d get drunk and eventually resume fighting until we were sick and tired of being sick and tired. Kara coined that phrase. * * *

After another two interminably long hours the doctor arrives with a small posse of white coats. There are other papers to sign before they can begin the unplugging. Fortunately, there are two working pens. Afterward the nurses draw a curtain around my sister’s bed and place chairs on either side for Abbey and me. Bon-Bon plops a box of tissues in each of our laps. I take hold of Kara’s right hand, Abbey her left. The unplugging begins. Other nurses, doctors, aides, who have cared for and gotten to know Kara pop their head in to say goodbye. They all say some version of the same thing: “Kara was so kind to us; it is so sad; she is so young.”

Abbey and I offer them tissues.

My sister’s hand is beautiful, spotless, soft, her fingers long and elegant. In the past years whenever I saw her, her fingers looked clubbed—a symptom of the fibrosis, we later learned. She would wear fake nails in dark shades of purple and blood. Now her nails were natural smooth moons, longer than my own.

“Her nails are perfect,” I say.

“I gave her that QT serum. When she could, she put it on every day. Then the nurses did it when I wasn’t here.” My niece chokes back a sob. “I should have come more.”

A tsunami of guilt and regret rushes through me. “You were here for her. It’s me who didn’t come enough. I should have been here more.” Kara’s face looks worried or pained. Is she picking up my thoughts? I smile, trying to look beatific, as one should look when at another’s deathbed, I read somewhere.

As minutes tick by, the hissing and groaning of the machines trickles to a whisper. Kara’s chest lifts and lowers like a stutter. I’m expecting each of her breaths to be the last, but she continues on as it closes in on an hour.

Abbey breaks the silence, groaning, “Why is this taking so long?”

“Yeah, I thought once they pulled the plugs—” I’m having trouble finishing my sentences.

“She’s holding on,” Abbey says, as she studies one of the monitors. “I thought she would go quicker after seeing my dad. She was waiting for him.”

“She’s worried for you, maybe?” Hoping this is the correct response.

“Mommy, I’m gonna be fine,” Abbey tells her. “It’s okay, you need to rest.”

I close my eyes to give my niece privacy with her mother and to try to memorize the feel of my sister’s hand in mine.

“How could she not know she was sick!” My niece is suddenly angry. “I begged her to stop smoking!”

Bon-Bon appears from behind the fortress of machinery.

“What’s going on?” Abbey wails to the nurse. “Why is it taking so long?”

“It’s almost over,” Bon-Bon says.

My heartbeat is thrashing through my body. It’s an effort to keep from falling off the chair. Abbey has calmed and she and Bon-Bon are watching the monitors. The green and red lines are horizontal, flat. My eyes are blurry with puddles of tears. Since the unplugging I’ve not said anything aloud to my sister. All my feelings and love, I’m hoping and believing, are being communicated in waves of color and light through my thoughts and touch.

“That’s weird,” I hear my niece say.

“You gotta let her go,” Bon-Bon says.

“I’m not touching her!” Abbey yells.

“You, the aunt—”

The aunt?—So much for our heartfelt conversation. I look up at Bon-Bon.

“I can’t call it until you let go,” Bon-Bon says. “Look,” she points to the screen, to one blue, undulating line.

“You see that? That’s your pulse. You gotta let go.”

I gently peel my fingers from around my sister’s hand. I let go.

Vinnie, the doctors, nurses, and aides fill the small curtained area as we all watch the monitor, as my pulse leaves my sister’s body.

“That’s it,” Bon-Bon says. “Time of death 10:48.”

John Walser

berliner Jazztage (1969) monK

Monk: big rings: starts with applause and Satin Doll and his black suit is an inkspill and his right thumb nail is wide as a bar: and the inside of the piano: a series of lines and circles: gold: is the sunlight right now on the pine tree across the street: a block over: and no one is on stage: and you have to love technology that I can watch what I didn’t know existed until only four minutes ago:

Sophisticated Lady: and a slow camera circles him: and the bench is brown red leather and he has already begun to sweat and I was alive back then and in thirteen years I would find in his angular sounds the beauty that just keeps growing: how he spurs silences:

Caravan: his beard is grey filaments.

And his left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing in the most magical way: and I never before noticed how large his fingernails are: not long, but broad and deep as a score: and not even halfway through the set and he’s pouring sweat that turns his suit, his beanie satin creeping deadly nightshade and he attacks the notes like pigeons flying in wingsnap formation against the hard glint sun reflecting off a dozen windows at a dozen different angles and Goddamn I want to yell out the window at passing cars, at people walking home: February twilight pretending April warmth: Goddamn. Caravan. Get in here and listen to this. You’ve never heard anything like this before.

John Davis

route 91 harvest music Festival

Las Vegas, OctOber, 2017

song that should have calmed forever that was sung with bodies sobbing running in our ears when rain happened seeped into our souls the calm of dawn flashes of shivers inside our skin already the bullets had scattered ashes why were we going what did we wear unprepared as we were for years the breathing gone in exile gone the cold entering our clothes rain happened and the pond of red overflowed can we say the green of calm was gone because the calm didn’t happen never happened in the song the arms were ours the legs were ours the years of happy beers nothing mysterious about fears we might have feared we would not find them bind them to a calm we could country swing to our souls poised as moonglow and winter with our secrets summer with our runs of laughter rain happened are you with me rain happened and the flood happened and then the flutter red and the pond of red are you with me when rain happened a fashion on the land that stranded passion emptied bodies the way a flood empties the balm of calm rain happened are you with me it was never silent until it was