Last Rites

by Dennis Green

As a lapsed Catholic, I doubt that I’m eligible for a priest, but I’ve been receiving the blessings that really matter. Many of my Chums have sent the most encouraging messages I could possibly imagine. Before the tremors in my hands get so extreme that I can’t write anymore, I want to get down a few more thoughts.

I had a really bad moment in the hospital. My blood pressure was collapsing, and medication was actually boiling out of the IV in my hand. “You’re killing me!” I screamed at the nurses, “You’re killing me!” That’s when they put me in the ICU.

But now, back home, trying to get some rest between agonizing sessions of dialysis, it comes to me: I’m dying. Pure and simple. Dying. And no one is killing me. On the contrary, everyone I come in contact with is trying to help me stay alive, even by wishing me well.

My mind scans all its resources, looking for that inner peace I so desperately need. Occasional attacks of self-pity wash over me, leaving me shaken to the core. Those are the worst moments, exactly the opposite of inner peace.

It occurs to me that I should have gotten that fourth and final tattoo, the one reading in Chinese characters, “Inner Strength.”

My father knew he was dying, and the process lasted five years, but he was utterly at peace. And that’s what I’m looking for. It comes to me, briefly, and when it does I am so utterly quiet and comfortable I almost weep.

Long before this medical emergency, I was thinking and writing a lot about mortality. That’s probably a natural consequence of growing older, or having a chronic illness or even a near brush with death. But then, mortality was still an abstraction. At the moment, it’s so near at hand I can feel its breath upon my neck.

“Out of his misery…” That’s one of the feelings I had when my dad died. And the deepest sense of that phrase comes home to me now. I could detect and appreciate only some degree of the misery my dad was experiencing. When we chatted on the phone, he sounded as though he were drowning in his own fluids. But I’m sure now that my dim understanding of his distress was feeble indeed.

I have moments now when my hands shake violently, I can’t keep my head up or my eyes open, my mind goes numb and the world around me ceases to exist. Or an attack of itching skin sends me into convulsions it is so vicious. In an instant, I’m wondering whether there is something I’ve done to bring this on, or to make me deserve it.

On the other hand, I’ve been told that someone on dialysis as I was for six months, who gets better and off dialysis, will inevitably, eventually relapse. And I recall that my kidney disease — renal tubular acidosis — is genetically inherited. Both my mother and her brother suffered from kidney stones.

My premonitions have always been on target. A mystic once told me that I have psychic powers and should use them. Well, the premonition now is that the end is close at hand, and that’s okay. But I’m not praying to God quite yet, “Put me out of my misery.”

©2010 Dennis Green