Which, apparently, was the phrase, “Proximal cause of death: Fatal Sadness.”
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You can’t buy memories. Can you forget about a failure? We sat down and I asked her how she was feeling. She launched into a litany of vague and minor aches, pains, bodily irritations and…ear buzzing. Knowing what I would find, I gave her a physical exam anyway. Nothing of mention. “So, what do you think is wrong with me?” she asked in her extremely thick Vietnamese lilt. “I think you need to get out of this house and find a friend to spend time with,” I quipped. Silence. She started to cry. I used to think that a patient crying was a good thing — it made me feel like I was helping them have a breakthrough. Maybe, but maybe not. She started to recapitulate some of the stories she had already shared with me. She ended differently this time, wondering how her husband had died. She brought out his death certificate for me to read; her reading skills were poor, at best. She stood some 6 feet away, awkwardly alone in the center of a space of carpet distant from any furniture. She appeared to be worried about why and how he died. Apparently no one had told her, she didn’t understand, or she had been too distraught to comprehend what had happened to Frank. “I wonder how he died. Was it because he was sad?” “How do you mean?” I replied, after a pause to consider the projection. “When my son came to clean out his room they threw away all of his medicines.” I was beginning to wonder where she was going with this. TCA overdose? She paused. I waited. “I wonder if he was sad and took too much medicine.” “What were his medicines?” “He had heart disease and high blood pressure. But that’s all.” I didn’t pursue that red herring, and decided to focus on the concrete answers. “It says he had heart disease, heart failure and finally he died from a heart attack.” “Ohhh.” She drooled out the phrase as if she were unsure what those words meant, but was sure it wasn’t what she had been prepared for.
Sierra Sacramento Valley Medicine
Which, apparently, was the phrase, “Proximal cause of death: Fatal Sadness.” “That’s good news, right? He didn’t die from sadness.” My voice rose, looking for a resolution. “Yeah…” she trailed off, then sat down next to me. The progression of these emotional chords stayed away from the tonic I had hoped for. Perhaps this was her new tessitura. She told me about how Frank had been so healthy. Their last night together they had watched television in her room after dinner. “He had salmon, two scoops of rice and a lot of broccoli.” She said broccoli as if that were a very peculiar food preference for her husband to indulge in. She continued, “Later that night he said he was hungry again, so I told him to go to the kitchen. He came back in with a large bowl of strawberry ice cream. He ate the entire bowl. He asked me if he could go to bed now. I said sure.”
Last Requests “He asked me if there was anything he could do for me before he went to sleep. I asked him for an ice cream sandwich and a napkin. He brought it to me. He asked me if he could go to bed now. He went to sleep after that, and the next morning he was cold and didn’t wake up. I said, ‘Get up! You sleep too much!’ But he just lied there on his side.” She mimed a man sleeping on his side with his head resting on his folded hand. She closed her eyes and lied down on the bed very innocently, as if there were any confusion about the description. These are the recantations and reflections we remember after we lose a loved one. These vignettes of character are not the sum total of who the person was, but in my experience, there’s a resonance within these last moments that gives the person who is to die a release. Maybe I’m looking for meaning where there is none, but maybe that’s how we make our lives meaningful to begin with. “Have you ever thought maybe it would be easier just to not wake up, like your husband?”