Mortality in London
“Christian…how’s your finger?”
I paused for just a moment, hoping my hesitation wasn’t apparent. What to say? What to say to a man I barely knew, the man of my mother’s stories, who by her account was a lover of life and family and action? A man who was now confined to a hospital bed, unable to move the left side of his body, the effects of surgery clearly visible by the indent in his temple, like a piece of bruised fruit.
I berated myself in that half-second for making assumptions about his state. Part of me argued that it was reasonable, since the consequences of a stroke varied wildly from patient to patient. But my conscious wouldn’t let me off the hook that easily. It was true; I had assumed that, at best, N would only be able to mutter a few incoherent phrases. His first words to me recalled an injury ten months prior, an injury that had hampered me for the entire duration of their short stay in Montana. N was clearly there mentally. I didn’t know what to say.
“Doing fine,” I managed, after the infuriatingly long second. “How…how are you doing?”
“Holding up,” he said. His eyes fluttered and jumped from me to his wife and his sister.
I sat, feeling numb, and watched as N’s wife, Anne, went bustled about fixing pillows and sheets and preparing food. There was no resignation in her actions, no outward sign of frustration or self-pity. She poked and prodded at him with her words, the kind of challenging small talk that was part concerned spouse, part therapist, part drill sergeant. Her voice was brimming with care, of course, and the love that comes with decades of marriage, but it held something else as well. As I listened it became clear just how much Anne was struggling to get him to pull out of himself. How are you feeling? Can I get you something? What would you like to listen to tonight? Well, that’s not an option. Here’s what we have. Nothing? Okay. How was physio? That’s better than last week. Still more work to go.
For every ten of Anne’s questions, N gave one answer, often a half-answer. His eyes found the wall more often than they found her face, and as we slowly and methodically raised crisps from the bag to his mouth, his right leg moved incessantly, bending and unbending with a mind of its own. There was no pity in her voice; just the sharp, concrete-solid tone that refused to give ground to this situation. No, Anne would not be beaten by this struggle, and she would be damned if N let himself be eaten up by apathy or fear or depression.
“Anyone can love a thing because. That’s as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.”- A Wise Man’s Fear
Half an hour we sat and spoke, and in that half an hour I became more acutely aware of my own mortality than any time in my life. N was in his mid-fifties, perfectly healthy, when the stroke hit. There were no warning signs, nothing to indicate that one morning his life would be irreversibly changed. I wondered: what separated me and him? Why was I free to get up and move around as I pleased, not a prisoner in my own body? Nothing, really. It wasn’t lifestyle decisions, or age, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn’t God. This was what weighed so heavily on my mind as I wished him well and walked out of the ward — that fact that what had happened to him could happen to me at any moment. I wasn’t any safer than the next person. Who’s to say the cosmic raffle won’t call my name the next time I sit down for breakfast?
This information was coarse and mealy, and it took a great deal of chewing before I could swallow it without grimacing. Even then it sat in my stomach, rancid and unagreeable, desperate to push it’s way up and out with force. I didn’t come abroad to deal with my own mortality. I was only in London for a few days, to rest and relax before I traveled to Europe. My mind’s eye envisioned a future filled with second thoughts and hypochondria, followed by a profound disappointment after I’d squandered my spring break by not taking any chances. Why, why was the world so unfair? I felt bad leaving, traveling, when a man who loved life as much as N did was bedridden and frustrated. It didn’t seem to be my right.
It pains me that this is the first story I have to tell, but it’s important. As I continued on my way to Belgium and Italy and Holland, I would be struck on occasion by the thought of N and his situation, and the perspective it provided me soothed many of my moments of childish temper and listless apathy. It brought me an appreciation for life that in the waning days of the semester before break I had lost in the heat of routine and self-pity. It wasn’t an easy encounter. But it was necessary, and propelled me forward into Europe with a yearning to experience everything to the fullest.
