A Place of Hiding

The patient comatose and the family gathered round the bedside watching her at her most defenceless. She lies immobile and not even conscious, unable to communicate no matter what’s in her mind.”


Ruth felt the call of tears but she didn’t reply to it. Fearful that she might, she simply nodded.

“That’s an image from a long time ago,” the doctor told her. “Of course, we can make it a present-day image if that’s what the patient wants: a carefully orchestrated slide into a coma, with death waiting at the end of the descent. Or we can control the dosage so that the pain gets dulled and the patient remains alert.”

“But if the pain’s too great, the dosage has to be equal to it. And I know what morphine does. You can’t pretend it doesn’t debilitate.”

“If you have trouble with it, if it makes you too sleepy, we’ll balance it with something else. Methylphenidate, a stimulant.”

“More drugs.” The bitterness Ruth heard in her voice was a match for the pain in her bones.

“What’s the alternative, Ruth, beyond what you already have?”

That was the question, with no easy answer that she could accept and embrace. There was death at her own hand, there was welcoming torture like a Christian martyr, or there was the drug. She would have to decide. She thought about this over a cup of coffee, which she sipped at the Admiral de Saumarez Inn. A fire was blazing there, just a few steps off Berthelot Street, and Ruth found a tiny nearby table that was empty. She eased herself down into a chair and ordered her coffee. She drank it slowly, savouring its bitter flavour as she watched the flames lick greedily at the logs.

She wasn’t supposed to be in the position she was in, Ruth thought wearily. As a young girl, she’d thought she would one day marry and have a family as other girls did. As a woman who moved into first her thirties and then her forties without that happening, she’d thought she could be of service to the brother who’d been everything to her throughout her life. She was not meant for other pursuits, she told herself. So be it. She would live for Guy.

But living for Guy brought her face-to-face over time with how Guy lived, and that had been difficult for her to accept. She had managed it eventually, telling herself that what he did was just a reaction to the early loss he had endured and to the endless responsibilities that had been foisted upon him because of that loss. She had been one of those responsibilities. He’d met it wholeheartedly. She owed him much. This had allowed her to turn a blind eye until the time she’d felt she could no longer do so. She wondered why people reacted as they did to the difficulties they’d encountered in childhood. One person’s challenge became another person’s excuse, but in either case their childhood was still the reason behind what they did. This simple precept had long been evident to her whenever she’d evaluated her brother’s life: his drive to succeed and to prove his worth determined by early persecution and loss, his restless endless pursuit of women merely a reflection of a boyhood starved of a mother’s love, his failed attempts in the role of father only an indication of a paternal relationship terminated before it had a chance to bloom. She knew all this. She’d pondered it. But in all her pondering, she’d never considered how the precepts governing the role of childhood worked in lives other than Guy’s.

In her own, for example: an entire existence dominated by fear. People said they would return and they never did—that was the backdrop against which she’d acted her part in the unfolding drama that became her life. One could not function in such an anxious climate, however, so one sought ways to pretend the fear didn’t exist. A man might leave, so cling to the man who could not do so. A child might grow, change, and flee the nest, so obviate that possibility in the simplest way: have no children. The future might bring challenges that could thrust one into the unknown, so exist in the past. Indeed, make one’s life a tribute to the past, become a documentarist of the past, a celebrant of it, a diarist of it. In this way, live outside of fear which, as it turned out, was just another way of living outside of life. But was that so wrong? Ruth couldn’t think so, especially when she considered what her attempts to live inside life had led to.

“I want to know what you intend to do,” Margaret had demanded this morning. “Adrian’s been robbed of what’s rightfully his—on more than one front and you know it—and I want to know what you intend to do. I don’t care how he managed it, frankly, what sort of legal fancy-dancing he did. I’m beyond all that. I just want to know how you mean to put it right. Not if, Ruth. How. Because you know where this is going to lead if you don’t do something.”