LINKS:

Map of Kansas, the writer's favorite state

Another essay by Margie Davis

Death is not an easy topic in my house.

When I told my mother about the death of a man who'd suffered a number of strokes, she cried, "Who did it?" You say "death," she hears "murder."

My father researches the diets of all the long-lived people of the world. For a while he ate nothing but yogurt, like those Russians who live to be over 100. Hot sauce supposedly kept some other culture going past the century mark; Dad dutifully poured it on everything, even his cornflakes, until he nearly ate a hole through his stomach and had to, literally, lay off the sauce.

When you think about it, he told me, what everybody really dies of is heart failure. This made a big impression on him. He began taking his pulse throughout the day and doing yoga. He walked around constantly with his fingers on his carotid artery and his eyes on his watch. "Any slower and I'd be dead," he'd exclaim gleefully, if a bit irrationally.

He took up jogging. "If you can run 10 miles Monday," Dad explained, "there's no reason you can't run 10 miles Tuesday. And so on." Forever.

I am studying to be a nurse. This summer I was hired by a hospital as a nurse's assistant, doing a lot of drudge work but also getting many opportunities to learn new skills and to have what my job description calls "stimulating interactions" with patients.

The first time a patient vomited into the basin I held for him, I dropped it into his lap and sprinted for the bathroom. When I emerged, sweaty faced and mortified, he waved off my apologies. He'd seen a lot of grisly homicides, he told me, but never got used to the smell of corpses or blood.

"The way the TV shows it," he whispered through his pain, "is nothing like."

He was a cop, dying of cancer.

When I saw his obituary two days later, it seemed unreal that someone so wrapped up in layers of pain and morphine could have been so gracious, so generous.

I read obituaries daily now, always feeling that same stab in my heart when I recognize the name of a patient with whom I have had a "stimulating interaction."

One elderly man held my hand, calling me his wife's name. In Italian he spoke of their life together, of what she had meant to him. Occasionally his eyes welled up; he spoke urgently as if afraid of leaving something out. He stared into my face, murmuring her name; I stood very still, hoping that his wife, who'd been dead for two years, was looking back. It was a moment of intimacy such as my self-consciousness rarely allows me to have with anyone, yet it seemed peevish to deny it to a dying man.

Sometimes nursing students act as sitters for patients who cannot be left alone, but it is not so passive a job as it sounds. Often the patients are going through drug or alcohol withdrawal. They hallucinate, convulse, twitch, curse, beg for help. It can be unsettling. In class, when we were taught to restrain patients, I was the one who brought up the issue of preserving their dignity, but the first time I had to restrain a combative 82-year-old alcoholic going through delirium tremens, I couldn't get the restraint on her fast enough. So much for dignity, I didn't want to get clobbered.

She screamed and struggled and cursed. At times she'd stop to catch her breath and to glare at me. "Who are you to come into my house and do this to me? Nazi! You don't even have the guts to say what you think of me, Nazi!"

"I think you and I are going to have a long afternoon, Mrs. X."

"Untie my hands!"

"Heck no. You took a swing at me. If you hit me, I'm gonna cry."

Her look was contemptuous. "For crying out loud. I've never hit a girl in my life. Untie me!"

"I can't, Mrs. X. You keep trying to pull out your IV and you need to keep it in. I can get you water, juice, ice cream, whatever you want, but I can't untie you. Sorry."

She became innocent and sweet. "There's one thing I'd like."

"What's that?"

"A drink. Whisky. A big old glass with ice. What do you say to that?"

"I say I'm gonna need a big old glass of something after a day with you, Mrs. X."

"Pah. Nazis." She tested her restraints a few times, slept a little, then went back to fighting them, crying out so loudly for help I had to shut the door. Finally, my shift ended. As I gathered my things, she watched.

"Bet you'll be glad to be outta here."

"Bet you will, too." I patted her foot and hoped her recovery went well. I meant it. She spoke to the ceiling.

"You were nice to me. But I never hit you."

"No, ma'm. I'm quick."

"And I'm an old drunk."

"You're a tough old bird."

"I'm an old drunk. But I don't want to die drunk."

Her obituary was short. She had been a wife, a mother. She belonged to no clubs, no church, had not worked outside the home. There was no address for flowers or donations, there would be a private service. Yet there had seemed to be more to her than those few lines of type. I hoped she had at least got her last wish.

Recently I sat with a man only a few hours from death. "I don't know what's going on with the family," his nurse told me. "A lot of weird stuff. He's a no code; we're just keeping him comfortable."

The man looked shrunken into the bed. You could see he'd been a big guy before his last illness had wasted his muscles and drained the color from his skin. He wore an oxygen mask through which he took slow, shallow breaths; occasionally he'd moan and take a deeper breath. A woman sat at his side reading a People magazine with Princess Diana on the cover. She looked up when I took the man's vitals.

When I asked if she was a relative, she gave a surprised little laugh. "Me? No, I'm married to his nephew."

The nephew, a small copy of the uncle, balding pate and pale eyes, opened the door a crack and squeezed in. He did not go over to the bed. "Everything okay?" he asked me.

"He's holding his own."

The nephew tapped his wife on the head with one finger.

"Cut it out," she snapped, swatting at him. "Idiot."

Their giggling seemed grossly out of place.

They had an animated conversation about someone named Earl who had taken the dying man's car and who was at that very moment apparently putting mile after carefree mile on the vehicle. The wife nodded significantly at the bed. "I'll tell you one thing. He never gave that car to Earl."

"The point is," said the nephew, "is the car part of the inheritance or not? I'm going to go make me a few phone calls."

A few minutes later, the patient began to gasp. His body struggled in the bed. I ran for the nurse. When we returned, the woman was still at the bedside, engrossed in the details of Princess Di's death. When the nurse asked if she'd like her to page her husband, the woman seemed genuinely puzzled.

"Whatever for?"

The nurse whispered that the man didn't have much longer and the woman looked horrified. She nearly fell out of the chair getting away from the bed. Nervously she rolled up her magazine. "Listen, do you mind if I get out of here?" We thought she'd gone to get her husband, but neither of them came back. The nurse paged them, but we didn't see either of them again that night.

So the man died with two people he didn't know holding his hands and praying over him. I kept trying not to think about how this was the first time I'd actually felt the pulse in a person weaken and stop altogether. When it was over, the nurse said, "He's passed," and we stood with him a moment longer. We carried out the needed tasks slowly and quietly, still whispering although there was no longer any need. He still had an IV needle in his arm; when I pulled it out and the tape stuck a little I muttered, "Sorry," automatically.

I meant to watch for his obituary, but forgot. I wondered if Earl had ever returned the car.

My sister Sue stopped by our parents' house recently and learned that Dad had taken his last uncle to the hospital the previous night. Was he okay? she asked.

Well, no, Dad said. He guessed he'd died.

"You guess?" Sue repeated. "Weren't you there?"

Dad said that when the nurse told them it might happen any minute, he and Mom stepped out for a cup of coffee.

I could imagine the way my sister stared at him. "Let me get this straight. Your uncle's dying and you go for coffee."

"We thought he'd want to be alone at a time like that," Mom said.

"Can you imagine what the nurses must've thought?" my sister asked me.

Actually, I can.

At my parents' house in Kansas there is a good view of the sunrise; it spills out over the pastures flooding the dark sky with pink and rose and coral light. I get up early, make coffee and sit in the kitchen, facing east. As soon as it's light enough to see, my dad gets up. He comes out in his jogging shorts, shoes in hand.

"Gotta get a few miles in before it gets too hot," he says, and takes off up the road. He runs with the curious shuffle he developed himself and which he claims will let him run "forever." Head down, arms pumping, he carries a stick in case he runs into that pack of idiot dogs five miles away at his turnaround spot. I watch him running west, away from the rising light, slow but determined to outdistance the pulse animating his terrified heart.