My Sunday Feeling-The Thanksgiving Edition

I got the call a week or so ago that Aunt Ginger was in the hospital in Searcy. She had just undergone emergency bypass surgery. A tiny woman, Ginger had been in poor health for some time due to obstructive pulmonary disease. We didn't know she had heart problems. That was the reason for the quick trip to Searcy from Heber, a trip that got her admitted immediately.



On Sunday, she seemed to be doing better. But by late Monday night the word from the hospital was that she had taken a turn for the worse. I got up there Tuesday morning. I looked through the glass in the little family room there at the hospital where he had spent the last two nights. Uncle Ralph was sitting in a recliner staring into space. I went on in.


" Boy I sure am glad to see you," he said as he stood up to give me a hug. " I was afraid I was gonna have to do this by myself."



"Uh-oh.." I thought. " Do what?"

"What's going on?" I asked.



" I talked to the doctors this morning," he said. " They say her lungs are filling up with fluid. They can drain her off but it won't do no good. They will just keep filling up. And now her kidneys aren't working. They say that they can keep her alive for who knows how long but that she isn't ever going to be OK."



" What do you want to do?" It was mainly a rhetorical question.



" Ginger and I talked about this last week. She told me if she wasn't ever going to get better that she didn't want to be hooked up to a machine. The doctors told me it ain't no use....."



I just let him talk. My Uncle Ralph is not a complicated man. But this was the biggest decision he was ever going to make in his life and so he needed to work it all out in his head. The poor man, being exhausted as he was, must have repeated the substance of his conversation with Ginger at least 3 times over the next 45 minutes. Each time the story began with " Ginger and I talked about this last week...."and each time I acted as if I were hearing it for the first time.



Finally he said, " Let's go tell the nurses." We went back through the electronic double doors to the ICU. As we approached Ginger's room I could see her. Her eyes were fixed at a point in the heavens. She was struggling mightily to breathe, her small chest heaving up and down. Dear God in heaven. It was time.



" I want this to end," Ralph told the nurse. " Ginger wouldn't want this."



" I understand," she said as she squeezed Ralph's arm. "We have to get permission from the doctors to start the process and we can't turn the machine completely off without the doctor being in the room and ordering us to do it."



So back we went to the family room to wait for the call. Ralph collapsed into the recliner. He put his head in his hands.



" You're doing the right thing," I said. " Even if she miraculously survived, she would be in a nursing home somewhere on dialysis. Her lungs have to be damaged even worse now and God knows if her heart would ever get better. You would have to think she would be bedfast even if she survived."



" No. She wouldn't want that," he said as he shook his head back and forth in his hands." No. I promised her I wouldn't let that happen."



About that time, the phone rang. It was the nurse. It was time.



Ralph stood up. He smoothed his hair back and put a plug of tobacco in his jaw. I opened the door.



"Ready?" I asked. He nodded.



We stopped outside the double doors. We looked at each other.



" You got any advice?" he asked.



I said the only thing I could think of.



" Deep breath through your nose." I said. " Hold it. Exhale.'



He did it twice. I put my hand on his shoulder as I hit the button. And we went through the big doors together.

***

I stayed in the doorway as Ralph said goodbye to Aunt Ginger. The nurses began shutting down the machine. I felt a hand on my shoulder. It belonged to the man who introduced himself as the chaplain of the hospital. I introduced myself as the nephew.



" Bless her heart," he whispered. "Bless her heart."



" I know. This is pitiful," I whispered back.



" Do they have any children that I need to call?"



" No children. They married each other 'late in life' as they say."



" How did they meet?"



" I'm sorry?"



" How did they meet? I'm always interested in people's stories."



" You really want to know?"



" Sure. If you don't mind my asking...."



" Not at all. Get this. They first met when Ralph went out there to do a bushhog job on Ginger's property."



The chaplain's face lit up in delight.



" I'll be. What a wonderful story," he said.



" Yeah," I said. " She invited him back to the house that night for a chili supper. The rest, as they say, is history."



" I'll be," he said, still unable to suppress the grin on his face despite the sadness of the scene before us.



We stood there in silence for a minute with his hands in his pocket. After awhile he leaned over to me.



" I guess he did a good job," he said.



" I guess so," I replied.



***



And so Thanksgiving 2008 was a sad one. We mourned the loss of a life and it grieved us to see Uncle Ralph in such pain. But I am thankful for Ginger and a life well lived despite her constellation of medical problems. I am thankful to have been a small part of the love story that began after an invitation to come for supper to the guy that cut her yard.



We all hope for a peaceful death. We want to slip away in our sleep surrounded by our friends and our loved ones. Unfortunately, our technology can keep us from a dignified end unless there are people surrounding us in those dreadful moments when we are but an adjunct to a computer to give us back our humanity. Like I said, Ralph is not a complicated man. I am thankful to have been an unlikely witness to his determination to carry out his wife's wishes not to be kept alive by artificial means even as it broke his heart in the process.



And so I will always remember Thanksgiving 2008. I will always remember and be thankful. Because two days before Thanksgiving, in a hospital room in Searcy, I caught a glimpse of the sacred.