February, 2018

We washed our hands so much the skin of our fingers split and bled. Sanitizer burned in the open wounds. Outside his Medical ICU room we paused, looped elastic bands over our ears, pinched metal strips across the bridges of our noses, pulled at the bottom pleats to hook the masks under our chins—a sideways accordion. Inside the masks smelled of plastic, cloth, breath, snot.

We walked into his room, around the foot of his bed, across to the window, and sat. The room was kept dim. He looked the same every day: head positioned in a backward tilt on the pillow, chin forced down by the breathing tube. His eyes remained partially open and I didn’t know why the nurses wouldn’t just stroke them shut and I didn’t ask. We sat. We got up to shift our balls of coats on the window ledge and sat again. We were smart women—my sister a software writer, I a college professor—but the room was beyond our comprehension: a forest of poles hung with monitors displaying bands of light divided into green, yellow, red; screens with lines slipping across in jagged, unpredictable mountain ranges.

My sister had brought him an early Valentine’s card. “We usually don’t exchange cards,” she told the nurses, who were taking things out of their pockets. “This is my sister from Chicago,” she said for the second time that morning. “He loves the beach,” she said, looking at the card. “We were going to Florida.”

“You’re still going,” I told her. “You’re still going to Florida,” I told him. He was unconscious. His shoulder was so skinny, a chicken wing protruding from the top of his hospital gown. It felt wrong for me to be so close, witnessing his helplessness. He’d been transferred to Yale Medical Center from his small town hospital three weeks earlier, with a possible diagnosis of interstitial lung disease, or flu, or both, or maybe something else. They’d intubated him in the middle of the night, when his breathing was no longer sustainable with an oxygen mask. The last time my sister heard her husband’s voice, it was on the telephone.

“He was a research chemist for 30 years,” she told the nurses again. “He helped develop Chantix—that’s the smoking cessation drug. He retired last year.”

“He’s only sixty-one,” I said. “He just retired. Last year.”

My sister said, “At Christmas he was out in the yard chopping wood.”

A day or days before—before the nurses realized I was family—I’d overheard them talking in the hall: “The guy came in with a cough,” one said to the other in a quiet, slow, grim voice. Soon he would pass the two-week mark on life support.

“Should we move the chair to the bed?” I asked my sister.

No, she wanted to take another walk. We left his room again, washing hands, sanitizing hands, removing masks. The Medical ICU was closed off by heavy automatic double doors that we were not supposed to push on. We were supposed to stand and wait for the surly desk clerk to tap a button. Every day we forgot and pushed on the doors and every day the desk clerk scowled at us. Really? Really? Beyond the double doors were entire families clinging to one another, burly middle-aged men hugging and weeping. To reach the bank of elevators that went down to the main lobby we had to turn one way, then another, then another, and we kept turning wrong and ending up at an alien elevator door. Standing, confused.

“We don’t know where it will go.”

We doubled back and found the right elevators and went to the first floor where eateries and gift shops and ATMs encircled an enormous fountain that reminded me of a peacock tail. “It’s like a peacock tail,” I told my sister, and she tried to see it. She’d lost her gloves but the only pair left in the gift shop was leopard-printed, which wasn’t really her style. “You should buy them,” I said. “I had a pair like that once.”

“We should find a different place for lunch,” she said. “Someplace nicer in town where I can sit and read my book after you go back to Chicago.” We’d been to the hospital cafeteria every day. I got a behemoth triangle of lumpy brown-orange pizza and she got a small cardboard bowl of chili, every day. We sat by the fountain. I watched her put her new gloves into her purse so she wouldn’t lose them. She said, “It’s World War One you like, right?”

“What?”

“There’s an exhibit in town. I saw a billboard. Would you like to go?”

“Sure,” I said. Time passed, and I said, “They have those oxygen tanks that roll around.”

“I was thinking, I could have an elevator installed, from the garage up to Paul’s room.”

“That’s good, that’s good.”

“It would be expensive.”

“That’s okay, you’ll need it. I know you’re worried, try not to worry—he is coming home.”

We went back up, stopped outside his room, washed hands, sanitized hands, put on masks. She introduced me again to the same nurses. She said, “Last summer he was swimming in the ocean.” The nurses nodded. The nurses were young and old and tiny and large—a chaos of body types—faces ranging from craggy to beauty queen. Some of them must have been other things—technicians. They all liked my sister because she smiled a lot and came across as a little shy and looked younger than she was with her dense dark hair and round cheeks. We sat. She tried to recite all the drugs he’d helped develop. She fished a tiny notebook from her purse and tried to write them down. I stood again to shift my coat on the window ledge.

“Do you want the chair?”

“Yeah.”

The chairs were extremely heavy—it took both of us to drag one over by the bed so she could hold his hand and talk to him. The chairs were intentionally heavy, the nurses told us, so that family members could not pick them up and throw them at the medical personnel—family members in the Medical ICU sometimes got angry. We made sure to look surprised and appalled, demonstrating we were well-behaved family members.

“Yeah,” my sister repeated, tired, tentative, and we dragged the chair.

She said, “These aren’t his hands.” They were swollen and dark, bruised catcher’s mitts.

I began telling the nurses: “He was her high school sweetheart, they met in the church youth group, they still go to church every week, they’ve been married 39 years, he was fine at Thanksgiving, he went for a walk—he’s never had a health problem before, he was never overweight, never smoked a day in his life, I’ve known him since I was twelve, at first I didn’t like him because he was stealing my sister.” Then decades raced by, with me taking him for granted, me asleep on the high-speed train. “He’s more like a brother than a brother-in-law—he’s always been there. He’s always been healthy,” I said, hearing reproach creep into my tone. I began to understand how a family member might want to fling a chair at these medical personnel: How could they not know what precisely was wrong with him? This was Yale—these people were as smart as people got. They had state-of-the-art equipment; they had funding. He had excellent health insurance; he’d been a cooperative patient. How did none of this matter? All his life he’d done everything right. He was a church deacon, a Scout leader, a guy from a working-class family who’d dragged himself up by the bootstraps, putting himself through college mowing lawns and then earning a doctorate at MIT and working and working like a dog all his life and he was only sixty-one so how was any of this possible? Why couldn’t they help him? The flu? Possibly his lungs. Possibly? Accusingly I said, “Both his parents lived into their late eighties and he was fine three weeks ago”—my voice accelerating to a reckless, chair-hurling pitch. His toes had turned black. The nurses listened to me with sad deliberate nods and forlorn faces, devastatingly kind.

We left and came back, left and came back, left again. The next day, we came back. The hospital was attached to the Air Rights Garage by a slanting walkway. At the security counter we paused for more hand sanitizer and my sister was friendly toward the guard and we walked down another hallway. On the walls of this corridor were paintings by a local artist—a series of brown still lifes; oak tabletops holding pinewood pencil cases, carved walnut boxes, an analog clock in a square mahogany case. Behind the objects were window frames full of shady forest greens, autumnal leaves. We poked along contemplating these pictures as though we were in an art museum, exclaiming our admiration for them, though they were not very good. “This one’s my favorite,” I said, making us stop every time to look at the one with the blue vase. One of the paintings, inexplicably, had a cobalt vase placed among the boxy brown items. The vase was slender and elegant, tall and delicate, fragile and bold in color, empty. “I want to take it home,” I said every time, meaning the vase, not the whole picture. “So well done,” she said, and we stayed and stayed until we had to move on to the bank of elevators that took us up to his room.

The attending physician came in to say we should talk in their meeting room which had comfortable couches. The surly desk clerk was told to unlock the door and she huffed and rolled her eyes. Really? Walking toward the room, my sister murmured, “I don’t like this.”

The attending physician looked like a sixteen-year-old girl on a high school Homecoming Court. She had thick blonde well-cut hair and shiny eyes. She was five feet tall, at most, maybe a hundred pounds. Her hands meandered as she spoke—her girl-sized fingers, uncreased, unveined--spread apart and came together. Under her doctor’s coat she was dressed for date night in a peachy pink blouse with a ruffle and skinny black satiny pants.  But I could not be angry with this young woman, who was so knowledgeable and sad. Several trials, she was saying, unable to tolerate, kidneys failing, atrophy, hadn’t wanted to be kept alive this way. My sister was nodding and saying, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” in a constant stream. “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.”

The doctor said, once life support was removed, it could take several hours for him to die. We didn’t understand this. How could that be? We didn’t ask.

“Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.”

This time my sister didn’t stop to wash her hands or put on a mask. She rushed to his bedside and wailed, “Sweetie! You’re going to see God!” She flung herself across his chest and wept, “—you’re going to meet God! You’re going to heaven—”

I gasped. Surely he could hear her; he could recognize her voice. Did he understand what she was saying? Was he scared?

She whimpered, “They have the best beaches in heaven, the best beaches, you can build me a house on the beach in heaven and I’ll meet you there”—

I yelled, “Don’t!” Or I thought I did. Don’t what? Don’t make him scared, don’t let him go, don’t go, don’t leave, don’t leave me. Firm arms encompassed our shoulders and led us out of his room into the hall, where we could calm ourselves down. We gulped in air and listened to ourselves breathe in gasps and we stood there, side by side, not looking at each other, stalling, we were stalling, but time would not be stopped.

He died within moments off life support, his eyes still open, his mouth agape. People gathered to sympathize, to hug and whisper at us. Go ahead, cry, they said, feel your feelings. We would be okay, they said, but I knew: This death would not make us wise or courageous; it would not make us grateful for life’s little joys or day-seizers. It would cut a gash across our lives and slowly knit into a coarse mahogany scar. This death was some celestial error, inapt, a calamity with no logic.

Two days later, wedged between strangers on a packed flight home to Chicago, I sobbed noiselessly. The flight attendant spilled an entire cup of water in my lap and I didn’t care. Instead, I grew infuriated at the people around me for doing ordinary things: a young guy tapping on a tablet, an old man reading a newspaper, others sipping coffee, looking down. Everyone oblivious, ignorant of what could lie ahead. Someone coughed and I wanted to scream. I wanted to howl and thrash and kick and smash things, because nothing should be the way it was before.

Then Covid arrived, and nothing was.