My friend is dying. Does she have to go like this?
Why can’t she fight?
Do not go gentle into that good night. The light’s dying, and I am remembering this poem now. I’m not in Italy, where the poem was written, nor Wales, where the poet was from. I’m right here in my friend’s one-bedroom apartment, on a chair she’s hastily cleaned off, sipping her raspberry tea, and listening as she tells me that she will end treatment for her cancer.
“I don’t want to die,” she says. “But nothing is working. It’s exhausting.”
It’s her decision, or so I think now. It’s hard to think at all; my mind keeps slipping away; I think of silly things. I admire her teacup, a design I think she got years ago, in Montreal where she told me once she lived for many years.
Is she planning to give her belongings away? I don’t dare admire the porcelain out loud, just in case.
I think of anything to not hear my friend talk of this. Her place is wrecked, piles of clothes and paper everywhere, and this makes me think she’s already given up; she sees her life as over. She’s putting things in order the way you’re supposed to then, at the end.
Hers isn’t much of a life now, I know. I saw her last weekend, too, and her face is paler today, her arms thin and birdlike under her shirt. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to go? The soul flying out of you.
Her eyes are less sparkly, too, as if they’re planning their future dimming, their future darkening. The treatments are getting a bit much, she’s said.
And it’s true, I think now; she’s been sending texts in which the letters are jumbled or missing; putting the meanings together is like an old school séance, a few mumbles from the medium and you’re telling a tale from beyond.
Now, from a sofa draped in blankets she glances over — do I get what she’s saying? — and I can feel my hands tensing as I try not to reach for her in the way I want to, as if I could pull her back fully into the land of the living, her body grown thinner and ethereal suddenly flushing with healthy colour in my clutching grip.
We all make our own choices, and death is one of those. I am in pain sometimes, but not like she might be. “We all have to go,” as my doctor said once, sighing over another woman’s file.
Another friend texted when I told her: “is she resigned?” she asked of my sick friend. “Or is she angry?”
My sick friend isn’t angry though, not any more. It’s me. I feel it. I feel that strange kind of anger you feel at death, at those who open their doors to it, who watch the cloak sweep up their steps, who hear the scythe tapping and don’t turn the lock. I will miss this woman, this friend I have known for ten years; I don’t want her to do this, to die, to stop fighting.
I feel rage: Rage, rage, against the dying of the light, wrote that poet, and this is what I want her to do. But who am I to ask it? This is a strange anger, easier to feel it than to feel the other emotions, surprise, pleading, and a wish for something, anything to be different.
“Of course I don’t want to die,” my friend says. “I think it’ll just be a gentle slowing down.”
Do not go gentle, I think, but maybe this is the way things are; the light fading on my friend’s face, and her body wasting away. What good does fighting do? We all have to die. But I want to beg, too. This week my friend is back in hospital; another, last treatment before she stops them. All my strength I would give her. My strength, my anger: Please, I think. Do not go gentle. Do not go.
