Imagine

All the undone things

The yearning

Ambivalence

The bluntness that now cannot be prevented
It roars

Andrew. In that mysterious limbo of intensive care, the blood sepsis, the pneumonia. The losses. Of ability to move, to stand, to raise an arm, to flick a mosquito off a leg, to turn down the television, to control the inevitable drooling. To manage his own bowels. Intubated. Breathing with ‘assistance’. Unable to speak.

With eyes that see through everything we might think is in the room, Andrew sees beyond.

Yesterday, Peter said
He was entirely present, aware, trying to speak, no doubt about it.
He grabbed my hand and rubbed my hand on his face.

Timothy said
One of his legs was slowly inching towards the edge of the bed. He couldn’t stop that leg from falling over the edge and he couldn’t move the other one. He couldn’t turn over; he couldn’t tell anyone. Anything.

His conscious being arrived in this condition, a full stop. The palsy, the speech aphasia and then, he fell over. Now tethered to hospital cords, needles, bottles and tubes, Andrew can only say ‘hello’ when he chokes on his own spit.

He’s tumbled
through
a gaping, splintering crack

Full brain radiation when he was 18

And now the jig is up, and Andrew has to pay the piper
For the consensus medicine they blasted him with
Now, after a lifetime of increasing palsy
Weakness, personality disorders
He’s somehow still alive
Or, his heart beats, and he’s conscious in his way
What way?
We have to imagine!
He can hear, he can feel, he can see,
One way
Inside-Out

He just has
to be
in his body
In the present moment, shackled
to bleeping technology
and administering nurses who
won’t help him to the toilet
who instead, will clean the diapers afterwards
when they can fit him in

He is our brother, So
We are cell mates, roped together
By his own words, uttered when he could still speak
Do everything possible
He is reported to have said
To his ex, who holds the keysAnd belief. The belief that his personal suffering has any meaning.That God intended it.
The repeated, the familiar God’s will
The assumption
That Andrew is part of a holy plan
Pray for him, as a solution to everything
Just wait, it will be revealed
in God’s time
When He closes a door, a window opens
It’s a Mystery
Heaven beckons

We are grasping for meaning like we have never grasped; anything to absolve us of the horror of  his what? reality. The depth, the hole of his must-be loneliness.  The care center where he is being held, where he lives days of hours in the town where he grew up. The hospital where our mother died? He’s in that place now.

Myself, I lived in another country for most of Andrew’s life, so I could only wonder what he did to earn that? One of my sisters knows all the details, but I don’t need to listen to them because no one deserves this. I helped him learn to walk, decades ago, when he was a baby. I too, changed his diaper. Then, his heart was strong; he had thumping room for hope.

Even angry, entitled, even maybe? what? Even Visions of grandeur. Impractical. A musician. A grease monkey, he worked on cars. He wrote and sang songs that leaned on cliches, but it was never enough to elicit approval from any of his brothers.He wasn’t always kind. But stubborn! And that’s not really a fault, is it? It’s a necessary fucking rebellion. Imagine a donkey, the definition. You have to see that rope around his neck, or in his jaw. And someone is pulling on it, against all the forces the ‘stubborn’ creature can muster. The donkey knows how captive, how slave, how no agency he is/he has. Except to resist. To demonstrate his will, contrary to those who imprison him. He used to say if you were a Hicks, you had the gene: The anxious-to-act in-an-advisory-capacity gene.

For each one of us, his six sisters and the six brothers still alive, there is so much distance between our living and his existing. Who can visit him? Between his thousands of hours alone?

A few have traveled the hundreds of miles. Held his hands, talked to him. Wheeled him into the garden to witness the spring. Connected through a glance, a stare, the squeeze of his hand. Sometimes, a speech, because that’s all you can say when it’s a one-way conversation.

And by the way, he owns nothing. Anything that was his when he arrived in the ‘Care Center’ has been sold. Or stolen. Everything we’ve sent him,

Whatever

When this was true, when an email was all we had:

Andrew is no longer septic, he still has pneumonia, he is still on a ventilator. His numbers have improved but although he opened his eyes and blinks occasionally, he is unresponsive. He does not follow movement with his eyes, he does not respond to touch or sound.

Yesterday at the passport office, “Why do you need this so soon?”