“No,” she says. “Sorry. Patients aren’t allowed out there. Just family members. Isn’t that ridiculous?”
One of the children with the picnicking family is breaking off pieces of waffle fry and tossing them over the railing. The mother is holding him on her lap, but hasn’t noticed. She is talking urgently on the phone and keeps glancing back in at all of us patients in the treatment area. A grandmother looks on from across the table, smiling and clapping with the child each time a chunk of food disappears over the rail. At chemo, I can never find my center anymore. It’s like a big, empty ocean.
17. Fire Alarm
“What do they do to you at chemo?” asks Benny as I’m snuggling in bed with the boys before school. Every morning while John is in the shower, they both run from their room and climb in here and we power cuddle. Freddy has me draw pictures with my fingers on his back that he has to identify. Benny behaves like some kind of baby animal that I have to guess each morning.
This morning, he keeps sniffing and scrunching his nose and wagging his bottom and making little yipping noises. “A baby fennec fox,” I say. “Nice, Mom!” he exclaims.
Don’t get too excited: I have an inside line. He’s been a fennec fox the last six days in a row.
“So, they put me in a chair and they give me medicine,” I tell them, sketching my fingers over Freddy’s back. “It’s actually not too bad.”
Both of the boys dislike chemo days because when they leave me I’m pretty normal and can help them fix their waffles and everything, and by the time they get home from school I’m pale and cranky and want to be left alone.
“I would escape,” says Freddy. “I would get Benny to pull the fire alarm and then I would run out the door when no one was paying attention.”
“But I want the medicine,” I say. “Just like when you were in the hospital and we wanted the medicine to help with your diabetes.”
“Oh man. I always forget that part,” says Freddy. I’ve just finished sketching a hot air balloon on his back. “Is it a heart? I mean, not a heart symbol but like a real human heart with veins coming out of it?”
“No. But I like yours better,” I say, erasing the smooth skin slate with the pads of my fingers.
18. Advanced Directive
More suspicious country: What would Montaigne make of signing a will or an advanced directive or a health-care power of attorney—of the notaries and their poised stamps and the smell of coffee brewing; the documents and their copies of copies of copies; the fresh black ballpoints scattered on the board room table?
John and I take the elevator to the nineteenth floor of the building where John used to work in private practice. I have worn a sundress but I am suddenly very cold and longing for a sweater. Our friend, Adam—an expert in handling estates with dozens more zeros than ours—works at the firm and is standing there to greet us when the doors open.
Adam and his wife, Melissa, are close enough friends of ours that we have considered them possible guardians of our children. Their kids are our kids’ best friends. I went to grad school with both Adam and Melissa; John and Adam later survived law school together; our four boys were all born at the same time; we live around the corner from each other. We vacation together, spend Saturday evenings cooking in each other’s kitchens, hug and feed and reprimand each other’s kids as if they were our own.
“Ugh,” says Adam when he sees us. “Hi. Sorry you have to be here.”
“If they’re lucky and smart, everyone ends up here eventually,” says John.
Adam’s assistant is printing endless stacks of papers and we swivel in the cushy office chairs as she finishes. “Can I get you all a Diet Coke or anything?” she asks. We do not need a thing.
“So, do people actually ever do really insane things in their wills,” I ask Adam as we wait for everything to be collated, “like give their estates to their dog or a waitress at the coffee shop or bury it on a desert island or whatever?”
“Yup,” he says, and not one more word. Adam knows all the best secrets in town and wouldn’t tell a single one if his life depended on it, even when he’s had a lot to drink.
Both Adam and Melissa are trained as poets, but I question Adam’s instincts as a fiction writer.
“I don’t love all the drama in my job,” he told me once at a party. “The feuds and the illegitimate kids and the spurned ex-wives and the twenty-year-olds that suddenly stand to inherit millions of dollars. I try to just block it out.”
“Are you crazy?” I said. “I would be taking detailed notes. I would be entertaining Melissa all evening. I would be making millions of my own dollars writing shelves and shelves of the most juicy, sordid best sellers ever.”
“Yeah, I’m thinking you might not make it as a lawyer for very long,” he said.
Perusing the documents, Adam has to direct us to some tough questions before we can sign: the world’s darkest quantitative reasoning test. “Check next to your preferred option,” he says.
I want to receive BOTH artificial hydration AND artificial nutrition. I want to receive ONLY artificial hydration AND NOT artificial nutrition (for example, through tubes). I want to receive ONLY artificial nutrition AND NOT artificial hydration (for example, through tubes). I want to receive NEITHER artificial hydration NOR artificial nutrition.
Then: “Initial here if you prefer SHALL. Or here if you prefer MAY,” he says in his calm voice, just like: Do you all want wine or a beer?
In the case that I am incapacitated, my health-care providers MAY withhold or withdraw life-prolonging measures or SHALL withhold or withdraw life-prolonging measures.
I look at John and kind of shrug and initial next to SHALL. May or shall. I may go for a stroll on the moors later. I shall be late for tea.
But of course: no. That is not it at all.
“Why does our common language, which is so plain in its other uses, become obscure and unintelligible in contracts and wills?” asks Montaigne.
I have an inkling. I’m sure Montaigne did, too, if he lingered at all on that thought—the tennis ball careening through the cool morning, our heads turning ceaselessly this way and that. It is exactly like the immaculate conference room, the stacks of papers, the brewing coffee, the notary and witnesses in waiting, Adam in his tie.