The Event Horizon

We had been four wheeling out in the desert all day long, following the sinuous Agua Caliente Road.  A quick lunch at the abandoned Sundad site, then with cold beers in hand we turned north to pick up the railroad service track at Hyder. It was a warm April day and when I got out of the truck the rail tracks vanished to a distant point, shimmering in a mix of heat and mirage.

It wasn't too far from where I stood that a passenger train had hurtled off the tracks twenty years past, the victim of some pseudo militia sabotage.  Dozens of people were injured in that wreck, and one person was killed--I had been working at the hospital that day and had seen the steady parade of helicopters ferrying bloodied and terrified travelers in from the wreck site.  It was an image that I had trouble settling in my mind--darkness, fear, the ripping and grinding sounds, screams,  cartwheeling train cars, a horrible conclusion of plans, events, speed and time.    I mused now on the interesting illusion of converging parallel lines, brilliant and silver in the desert light; what seems sure and certain and continuous slowly merges together and disappears into a western afternoon so far from the chaos of that wreck.

The image returned to me as I stood in Bill's ICU room, surrounded by batteries of equipment that were keeping him alive.  How had I let it all come to this?  Over and over I heard "He wouldn't want to live like this.  How could you have done this to him?"  I always consdiered myself sophisticated and advanced in the matters of health care; we both had living wills which we thought spelled out exactly our desires to live and die.  But suddenly, here we were; Bill's illness and horrible decline had necessitated a series of decisions in the face of decreasing options; it was like descending into a funnel, straight into hell.  Now there were no choices left, no options, no white magic to pull him back from the edge.  Hospice, remove life support; friends came in tears to make their farewells to an unresponsive, unmoving, unknowing body in a bed.  Make your decisions.   How could you have let this happen?  For the first time in my life I truly knew what it was to feel a heart breaking, being torn in half by grief.

The nurses studiously avoided me; the social worker was supercilious and condescending.  "He lived a good life.  How long have you been married?  Well, you should have expected this, given your age differences."  The fever raged, the white cells climbed, I consulted mortuaries, obtained quotes, retrieved life insurance documentation, wrote emails to friends.

A quiet young doctor approached me.  "There is one last thing I would like to try."  He had never given up on Bill, and I had to honor his request for a new treatment.  The fever broke overnight, but the white cells continued to climb.  Bill's hand was limp in mine; the bones seemed to float separate of their joints, the skin cool and damp.  His nurse circled around his bed like a small blue satellite and numbly I watched her.  "What are you giving him? "" Morphine".  Something burned in my mind like a small comet, a shooting star.  Pay attention.  Pay attention.  "How much morphine?" "Three milligrams every three hours".  Since Bill got sick, all sedatives knock him cold.  "Can we try a non narcotic for his pain?"  "Well, dear, we don't want him to be in pain, now do we?"

I resisted an overwhelming urge to belt this woman into the middle of next week.  "He has a standing order for tramadol.  Can we hold the morphine for a few hours?"  After much arguing and consulting with the doctor, the nurse finally agreed.  I watched, carefully and quietly, my husband's ashen face, as I have for the days, minutes and hours since he became ill.  The sun was setting, illuminating the room with a golden glow reflecting off the concrete walls of the hospital in through the strange and large oval windows that Good Sam is known for.

A black hole is where a sun has collapsed under its own mass, and where the gravity is so intense that even light cannot escape.  But Stephen Hawking proposes that in the strange world of quantum mechanics that a dim light flickers at the boundary of the black hole:  Hawking radiation on the event horizon.  Maybe that is what I was sensing, what was tearing me apart in the face of pulling the plug.  Maybe I was sensing life dancing on the edge of darkness.  There was a flicker of an eyelash, then suddenly Bill was looking at me.  Truly looking at me, for the first time in three months.  We had gone through the black hole, the point of convergence and had come out the other side.