By Gary Paul Kroening
I called Chris today at his home. Actually, I called him at San Francisco General, which has become his home, to see if he was still there. He was not. So I called his house. The phone rang and I thought: Am I going to get "I'm sorry, the number you have reached has been disconnected" — meaning he was already dead — or was he going to answer?
The phone stopped ringing. After about five seconds of silence, he answered. During the time he picked up and the time the phone got to his ear, I figured he must be pretty bad. Why else would it take so long? Death seems to slow things down.
"Chris," I said. He answered with a drawn-out voice, "Yeah." I took a breath and came back with a collegial tone: "God damn, you're home. I didn't think you would make it." Again he said, "Hello." By now I could see that talking to him was fruitless. He was incoherent and probably didn't even know who he was talking to.
He was out of it when I called, and in actuality I had expected him to be dead. I wanted him to be dead. There was no reason to be alive now.
Why does Western medicine do so much to keep us dying longer when Eastern medicine does more to keep people living longer? Can't we get this right yet?
A month or so earlier, I remember seeing him in the hospital, and it was horrid. If you don't have insurance and rely on the city to take care of you, you're in deep trouble. His room didn't smell like a hospital room — it just smelled. Bad.
Chris' arm was bent behind his head, his eyes a yellow, glossy death. I said to him as I held his limp hand, "Chris, it's me — Gary. How are you doing, honey?"
He opened his eyes with great effort, at intervals, and squealed out a moan that was somewhere between help me and kill me. His teeth were coated with bile and phlegm. Looking at Chris lying there — how can I explain? He was drawn and wasted, and the only way to describe him was that he looked like a Nazi death camp survivor. Alive, yet dead. My friend, and yet my enemy.
I felt safe enough to start crying.
I went into the bathroom to get toilet paper and found it to be filthy. Third World filthy. The condition of it stopped me in my tracks. "Not like this," I said to the room. "I'm not going to go like this." I tore paper off the roll, letting the excess fall to the floor and soak up the liquid pooling in the corner.
An "enemy" in the sense that he was dying the way so many of my other friends had. Ronny. Nick. Terry. Ron. Bud. I can't begin to retrace them all. I'm not a nurse, but I have found that the attitude in hospitals is that when people die, they "expire" — as if we were gallons of milk waiting for our shelf date to come up. This thinking diverts the pain for a while, long enough for us to get to the car and collapse.
Chris was always clean, in real life.
Dapper, even — a look I used to call Dapper Dan. Not today. Today he was dying and looked like hell.
I took a letter out of my pocket and put it on the table next to his bed. It was addressed to his mother, whom I'd expected to find here when I left home that morning. Essentially, the letter said that out of everything Chris owned, the only thing I wanted was my black leather jacket.
He had asked me during my last visit from Los Angeles if I "wanted anything." People who know their time is at hand have the opportunity to close their life and assign their memories to others. I told him I really didn't want anything — maybe just the jacket. I had given it to him for his birthday, and he said it made him think of me, which made me feel good.
After putting the letter on the table, I said quietly through my tears: "I'm going to miss you, Chris. I'm really going to miss you." He didn't respond. He just lay there. I think he was already dead and his body had simply forgotten to die.
Ronny had a good death, meaning he did not get this bad. He passed after a long battle. It is remarkable how long people can hold on to a single word of love. That is sometimes enough. The body is such an incredible machine. From the moment the cell splits in two it begins dying, and at times that dying can take 104 years.
Chris was my best friend — a man I could tell anything to. He knew when I was bullshitting and called me on it. What was I going to do without him?
AIDS had made me drag my pencil across too many names in my address book. I've really had it. It wouldn't be so bad if it were swift, but this drum roll to the River Styx is incredibly painful. You know what I mean?
As Chris lay there, my hand in his and tears drying on my face, I stared out the window into the nothing of life, and my childhood came flooding back — the stupid things I used to think, filling my numb and echoing head.
I remember once, in third grade, my teacher let me sleep extra long during nap time. When I awoke, I found I was the only one left in the room; the rest of the kids were already outside for recess. I woke up in a fog and looked at her. She was leaning against the heater and asked me something — then mentioned someone else's name, as if she wasn't certain of my identity. She called me by a name that was not my own. I knew that. But I said "yes." And she said, "You can go outside now." It was like an incantation, or a passage. I knew my name, and that wasn't it. But I said yes, and she let me go. It changed me somehow, I feel.
At times I would be crying in my room and look at the television — always on — and stare at Johnny Carson and his guests, thinking them cruel. How can you be happy when I'm crying in my room, all alone? Didn't they know I was miserable? I'd look into the screen and say, I'm crying. Can't you see I'm hurting? They just kept laughing. Ignoring me, the way so much of the world seemed to.
I used to think that if I were unhappy, it meant someone else on the planet was happy, and that one day my turn would come. I just had to wait. And wait. And wait. I hate to wait.
I thought that when you die, you only get the airspace above your grave to play in up in Heaven.
I thought that at my Grandpa John's funeral, he was going to pop up and say "kidding!" But then my brother told me Grandpa had no blood anymore, and I figured that would make it really hard to pull off. So Grandpa didn't, and we were sad.
I used to think this was all a dream, and that one day I was going to wake up and be eight years old again. Or would you call that a nightmare?
Someone walked into the room and broke my stare. I looked back at Chris, now sleeping, and he seemed so peaceful in a tormented kind of way — as if, while sleeping, he could avoid the pain of dying.
I hated being awake.My tears were stopping as I thought about what life actually is.
Is it about working for Chevron, making $54,000 a year, and being told in a "nice" way that if you get one more promotion you're going to have to get married?
Is it about chasing after people who steal from you but have some inexplicable pull on you anyway? Is it about wanting to come to terms with your family, when no one wants to talk about the issues — not even on their deathbed?
Life is all of this, isn't it?
It was for Chris.
If we make it home at the end of the day with a minimal amount of hate in our hearts, I suppose you can say we "had a good day." If we were treated somewhat humanely at work, and not passed over for a promotion because of what's in our underwear, then we have had a "fair day."
If we come home to a pre-recorded message from Sears about how they can save us money by putting a new roof on — then my friends, we have lived.
Chris was forty years old and should have had another twenty ahead of him. He died clean and sober, which was a moral and personal victory for him, and an inspiration for me.
At times I have prayed for death, and then, if I hear a bump in the night or anything that might represent the Grim Reaper knocking on the door to my soul, I panic. I want life. Is it some kind of joke, this thing called life? Now you want it, now you don't.
It's all in a day's work.
I miss you, Chris, and rely heavily on my memories of you — and hope that they do not diminish with my tolerance for the kind of pain your absence brings to me.
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