And at light's end...

He’s only 25 years old. My daughter’s age.

But he’s dying, and there’s nothing I, just one of his doctors, can do to stop the dying.

We’re talking a good kid, a kid until March just living his life.

A kid not unlike most 25-year-olds.

Not unlike my daughter, my own 25-year-old daughter.

Hanging with friends. Living. Loving Iowa’s Hawkeyes. Never thinking the inevitable. Until three months ago, when a foot drop signaled, not just a problem, but the inevitable.

His tumor, his glioblastoma, is right now doing what glios do.

Making his brain its brain.

Short-circuiting everything that makes any 25-year-old a 25-year-old, let alone anyone, anyone.

But his smile.

His smile makes you think that tomorrow could truly still be tomorrow.

With all the promise of another day.

Another day to go to classes.

To text friends. To catch a round of ultimate Frisbee. Complain about cafeteria food. Wonder who that girl is. Whether she might be his.

But the boy, this boy, is dying.

And this morning, this boy—and, Lord knows, he’s still but a boy—curled to half his height in the bed, so soundly asleep after radiation that I cannot wake him, his shaved head the only glimmer in the darkness of this, his room, too likely his last room.

“I don’t get to make the rules of the world,” I tell him, one hand on his, the other on his shoulder. “If I did, you wouldn’t be here…you’d be doing what my own kids are doing. You’d be just twenty-five…doing what 25-year-olds do…”

Again, that smile.

That smile, in that darkened room, even if then just half a smile, a night-light from the door to his bed.

And, at light’s end, this boy, curled in that dark around this, his unwelcome death…


© 2011 Dónal Kevin Gordon

I Don’t Want to Die…

Who does.

Not you. Not me.

At least not yet.

Most patients I see in the course of most weeks, even if dying, only want to go home. Whether to some home you and I might think of as home; whether to a care facility; whether to the care of some caring son, daughter, sister, or, even more poignantly still, a mother, a father.

One and all, those patients all want to go home.

And you, who, wouldn’t?

Your home. Your room. Your bed. Your death. Your way.

For those of us in the business of shepherding the dying, ours is too often about the shepherding.

The dying itself is, after all, for the dying themselves.

Far be it from us to intrude.

And yet we do.

Want this?

We’ll crush your chest; we’ll crack your ribs. Not like TV, I tell patients.

Want that?

That tube down your throat. That tube to a machine. And you no longer you afterwards, even if you are, somewhere, still somehow you.

I don’t want that, most say.

“I’m 87,” one tells me, just the other day. “I’ve lived a long life. I’m done.”

And who am I, the palliative care doc, to say otherwise?

I’m not 87.

I’m not willing to say that my life, at almost sixty, is a long life. I don’t yet know when done is done.

Her choice, then, is not my choice.

“And if you die now. If you stop breathing now. If your heart all at once falls silent…”

Then, by your choice, I, standing nearby, stand nearby.

Watching death do what death does…

Me, cradling the rope to your small boat…

The pond beyond. That larger pond. And my hand opening…

The rope slipping from hand, my hand, slipping from my hand for good…

For good.

Surely, for good…



© 2011 Dónal Kevin Gordon