She stared at him. His face was sweaty, both bloated and drawn at the same time. His breathing was labored; he pulled in air with desperate heaves, as if he could never get as much as he needed. When she was sure he was fully out, she said, “My friend, there is no such thing as fate.”
Then one morning she came in and there were two hospice nurses in there, women attending to him— but no; cleaning up the scene.
One looked up and saw her and said, “I’m sorry, he’s gone.”
“No!” Mary said.
That one nodded at her, the other shook her head.
The one who had spoken said, “They often slip away when no one’s around. Seems like some of them want it to be that way. A kind of privacy, you know.”
She was not upset, as far as Mary could see. Not even alarmed. This was her job. She helped people at this point of life, helped them get to the end with a minimum of pain and distress. Now this one was gone.
Mary nodded absently, regarding Frank’s still face. He looked to her like he had when he was sleeping. She had been coming by for two months. Now he was very still. She took in a big breath, felt herself breathing. Felt her heart beating. She was confused; she had thought there would be a struggle, a final clutch at life. She had thought it always went that way. As if she knew anything about it. It had been a long time since she had attended a death; and there hadn’t been that many.
“We can take care of him now.”
Mary nodded. “Give me a moment with him,” she said.
“Of course.”
They left. Mary arranged his stiff curled hands on his chest. They were cold; his chest was still warm. She leaned over and kissed him very lightly on the forehead. Then she picked up her pad, put it in her bag with the rest of her things, and left him. She walked out of there and wandered over to Bahnhofstrasse, and turned toward the lake.
She walked the handsome prosperous streets of Zurich both sightlessly and seeing things she hadn’t noticed in years. Mind skittering, feelings blank. The chipped heavy stone blocks that formed the buildings flanking Bahnhofstrasse. They were amazingly regular geometrical objects, not perfect, lightly pocked and nobbled to give the faces of the buildings texture, but regular in that too, and set so perfectly that it was hard to imagine the process that would manage to accomplish it. In the end it had been the human eye, the human mind. Swiss precision. Buildings from a time when stone masons still did most of this kind of construction by hand. Artists of a very meticulous aesthetic, maybe even fanatics. Monomaniacs of cubical form. Stolid. Permanent. Many of these buildings had been here since 1400. Their stonework repaired probably in the nineteenth or twentieth century, but maybe not. Maybe set in stone for good.
Unlike a human life. A mayfly thing, a wisp of smoke. Here then gone. Frank May was gone. Well, now she would never wake up one night to find herself being murdered by him. She shook off that thought, shocked by it. The one who lives longest wins. No. No. Never again his spiky rebukes. The pleasure in an Alpine day, the rare moment of peace, the dark brooding anger, the ceaseless, useless remorse. He was released from that at last. Thirty years carrying that burden, manifesting whenever he let down his guard.
A PTSD sufferer. If that was really the way to think of it. Weren’t they all post-traumatic in the end? So that it was just a way of pathologizing being human? Martin had died on her just like Frank— hospice bed, painkillers, suffering through the final breakdown of his body’s functions, the end of his life, at age twenty-eight, when they had only been married five years; wasn’t that trauma? It most definitely was! She could see all that as if it were yesterday, and of course sitting with Frank had brought it all back in ways she hadn’t felt for years. So wasn’t she post-traumatic too?
Yes. But PTSD meant someone whose trauma had been— brutal? But death was so often brutal. Violent? That too. Shocking, bloody, premature, evil? Something cruel and unusual, so that the person who survived it couldn’t get it out of their minds, kept having flashbacks to the point of reliving the experience, as in some nightmare of eternal recurrence? Yes.
Maybe it was a matter of degree. Everyone was post-traumatic, it was universal, it was being human, you couldn’t escape it. Some people had it worse, that was all it came down to. They were haunted by it, stricken, disabled. Sometimes it was bad enough they killed themselves to get free of it. Not uncommon at all.
What a thing. Death and memory. Martin had been young, he had struggled against death with a kind of furious resistance, with a sense of injustice. Right to the end he was never reconciled to it. Long after he had lost consciousness for the last time his body had fought on, the lizard brain in the cerebellum rallying every last cellular spasm to the cause. Those last hours of labored gasping breaths, what used to be called the death rattle, would never leave her. It had gone on too long. She seldom thought of that, she had learned to forget most of the time. This was the key, maybe, that ability to forget; but she dreamed of it sometimes, woke gasping and then remembered, as of course she always would. One didn’t forget but rather repressed. Some kind of boxing up or compartmentalization; what that meant inside the
