“Don’t put me out with the trash…”

His smile meets mine from the corridor, as I gown and glove to see him.

“I’m not contagious,” he tells me, weakly, his face still a smile, one nevertheless showing concern, even if his only contagion is he himself, his life, what he learned along the way, what he, my new friend, may now teach me.

“You’re not contagious,” I say immediately from the doorway, knowing that he is thinking only of the cancer, that wolf, the one as real at his throat as the central line taped to his jugular, and me, myself, thinking mere MRSA, mere VRE, bugs as ubiquitous in hospitals these days as charts or IVs, so common as to be irrelevant, certainly now, now in the face, the very face, of this man, this one man, and this cancer leaching his one life.

“The hospital has rules,” I say, arms into gown; “I have to abide by them,” hands into gloves; “I’m not worried, nor should you be worried,” me, stepping into the room, finally and quickly closing any space between us.

“How are you, my friend?” I ask, my gloved hand reaching for his, his own as bare, as warm, as human as his God first made it, that hand his mother once held, and this — both of us so well aware, both the sons of mothers killed young, so very young — the day before Mother’s Day, “How are you feeling?”

Go ahead.

Go ahead and dismiss him as yet another disheveled 57-year-old, any better days long behind him, one of those prior-to-his-hospitalization, living-in-his-own-care, living-in-his-own-car guys, and this, in a Wal-Mart lot, at that, a dog his only companion, a dog loved and loving to this, a bitter end.

Go ahead.

57, just turned, looking 77, and that generous.

Found by whomever in the car he called home.

Brought to the hospital. Noted to have a blood pressure of 60/30, something you wouldn’t want. Hemoglobin 5, and ditto on the you-wouldn’t-want-that list. Badness, in a familiar term familiar to physicians, lurking, with more tests pending. An interesting patient. And, from any patient’s perspective, you never, ever, want to be interesting to a physician.

But whatever you’re now thinking, none of that matters.

Not the necrotic, metastatic cancer in his belly, as in tissue dead and tumor spreading from somewhere. Not the fact that he is the very vision of cachectic, as in skin over bone. Not his anemia, that ebb of a blood pressure, his critically low potassium level, not anything anyone but a physician might care about, at least by the numbers physicians so care about.

“Don’t put me out with the trash,” my new friend suddenly tells me. “Please, don’t put me out with the trash.”

His face is all eyes, eyes the color of sky.

Eyes as blue as the bluest June meeting mine, my one hand covering his, my other embracing his face, the two of us a kiss, my yellow gown papering my bent form, white sheets shrouding the little left of the man who’d been, the two of us carving pietà from the room around us, from time itself, from all of time.

And his face shrunken by cancer to bone. His teeth rotted by time, by disease, maybe, it might be thought, by meth — and who cares, who cares now.

But those eyes, those blue eyes.

Listen to him, and you only guess at what those eyes have seen…

“I’ve made a lot of mistakes…”

“A marriage gone wrong,” he goes on, me letting him talk, my own plan to get home early after rounding, now nobody’s undone plan but mine, a plan all at once abandoned, as I let him talk — and talk.

A girl he loved. A girl at 17. A girl he, of course, had to love.

And children.

Later, a farm in Ohio, a farm lost, lost to another woman who took him for what he was worth.

A job in Iowa. Lost, too, with lost benefits. The flood in Cedar Rapids in 2008, it taking anything left.

And then a car.

A car suddenly a home.

And those kids, also lost now, so sadly lost. And his eyes saying that, just that. One son local, who can hardly bear to see him, even now, especially now. Two other sons in Afghanistan, both wishing dad dead.

And now this. Those sons all but getting their wish.

Cancer that would make Christmas of a PET scan, and no joyeux Noel in that.

“We all make mistakes,” I tell him, after he tells me that he had done that and more.

“I’m no angel," I go on to confide. "Just ask my kids.”

His face tilts to mine, skin stretched over bone, lips taut over teeth only remotely teeth. And those eyes, those eyes, my one gloved hand on his, my other on his shoulder.

And my own eyes, I confess, all at once a lover’s…

“Don’t put me out with the trash…” he pleads. “Please, don’t put me out with the trash.”

“I won’t,” I promise, meaning it.

“I trust you,” he says in a whisper, his hand tighter on mine. “I trust you,” the voice ever so stronger, those eyes again on mine, those blue eyes.

Twenty minutes later, note dictated, orders written, I leave the hospital, into Saturday, into sunshine, into May and all its warmth, toward the car that will take me away from this, from all of this, and me, me weeping as I walk.


© 2011 Dónal Kevin Gordon