Jed Wolf

I never thought I’d want friends around my death bed. Even after spending a recent decade visiting my parents in nursing homes among doctors and staff while getting to know other residents and their family’s stories, I never imagined needing others able to love me in my final hours until seeing my friend Doug a few days ago.

Despite being home-bound on oxygen, his ongoing cancer treatments, disintegrating lungs, sky rocketing blood-pressure and chronic pain, many of Doug’s friends are avoiding him. Some might be afraid to face their own mortality while others suspect he’s being melodramatic and would rather not indulge him. Though I admit to wondering the same thing at times, I believe anyone in their mid-fifties in as bad shape as Doug has a right to act however they want. After being treated for stage four lung cancer no one deserves to be punished like a child.

Though unlike her, visiting Doug Markowitz brings up complex emotions associated with my mother’s death a few years back. His beat-up oxygen tank reminds me of my father who’s body disintegrated after cancer treatments, but mostly Doug’s abandonment awakens memories of my demented mother whose only visitor thought she was a drama queen.

The suspicious dirty looks she gave me were memorable but her pathetic expressions waving goodbye were searing. I told myself I inherited her stagecraft and refused to believe anyone could suffer that much. Though I dreaded dropping in, I couldn’t turn my back on her and though visits with Doug are haunting, they’re necessary. Attending to anyone with cancer stirs up difficult feelings but ignoring them is cowardly and cruel.

Despite singing in nursing homes for many years, Doug’s breathing tubes still freak me out. I hate emergency room moaning, expect only cadavers on gurneys and find the concerned hush in waiting rooms irritating.

Having never experienced it, I’ve always hated coddling. My mother’s glaring concern for the nasty staph infection my dirty habits picked up at age nine which blocked my windpipe and preempted her tennis game felt justified. I recently re-visited this discomfort being cared for after nearly dying on an operating table.

However, after being around my formerly sexy and vigorous friend Doug now dragging oxygen around looking worse with every visit, I’m writing this in case I get Alzheimer’s to urge friends or strangers to keep singing to me despite what I may say. Please don’t abandon me if I get cancer no matter how dramatic I act or how conflicted you feel. Maybe I’ll wander off when the time comes but unlike both of my stoic parents, I want friends around to listen to me complain, talk me down and hold my hand. For God’s sake don’t make our journey about recovering the person you knew, make me do memory tricks or tell me you’re proud of me.

No one took my mother’s suicide threats seriously until after I believe she deliberately face-planted herself onto the vinyl floor of her final memory care place.

I never would’ve realized my part in her life-long misery until sitting with her near her end. She was saddled with me during what she considered to be her best years, and I plodded through mine trying to convince her to be happy until too late for either of us to change, her coma finally made us stop. Examining my guilt about my mother through visiting Doug is a terribly healthy way to heal.

It’s hard not to feel complex emotions while driving nearly an hour to be with him. Now that he’s unable to do most things or even pay attention to Netflix, there’s little to talk about. With nothing to make fun of or discuss about gardening which he can no longer enjoy, I’m afraid I’ll glaze over. Even with his propane-like oxygen tanks and puffy grey skin, I remain awake by reminding myself he might die sooner than later. I’d much rather we lie down on soft grass together gazing at clouds, but the hour floats by and that’s all it takes around once a week for now, to make us both feel appreciated.

An avid fisherman until his skin cancer diagnosis, Doug often included friends this time of year on his near daily trips and regularly prepared delicious fish fries for us. He saved huge frozen bags of filleted bones and guts for me to bury beneath my fruit trees, but now he can barely walk fifteen feet. I tried to illicit his loud laugh with stories the other day but most subjects simply well him up because he misses friends.

I’m sure some of them think I don’t know him as well as they do and they’re right. All I know is though he’s endured major losses and drinks too much, unlike members of my family, he never sounds sullen or depressed even when he calls drunk to say he doesn’t expect to wake up. His accessible emotions have always made him easier for me to be around than most. He’s wise and can still provide good council when sober and I believe he’d remain so more often if he had a reason.

With social distancing no longer an excuse for my own seclusion, I recently joined a local choir and regularly practice with my new friend Danny, who I learned was raised in a loving home. We were making headway slogging through an “Agnus Dei,” the other day when he had to take a call and after, was unable to concentrate. When he told me he’d received bad news about a terminal friend, I blurted out a bit like a teenage girl, “Oh, I have one of those,” until his welling up shut me up and I’d learned he’d been a hospice nurse for AIDS patients for many years.

Wondering if it was the grim reaper or just the holiday season seeping in too early through our church music, neither of us could continue singing and Danny left. Instead of pondering our vastly different coping skills or the nature of God, I felt the sudden urge to know why Joshua destroyed the walls of Jericho and the roots of other biblical stories we’d been bellowing on about. After googling “Misère Nobis” and “Propter Magnum Gloria” I realized I’m rather content wandering the earth like a “Motherless Child” as long as I can sing glorious music on occasion, but what will Doug do now that he can no longer fish?

My grandmother threatened suicide as did my mother, and I received a suicide note from a kind unattractive illustrator I met in the YMCA sauna who got me a job at the advertising agency where he worked. After growing up in a tin shack as a boy in Mexico and being repeatedly raped by residents of his town, his fragile nature belied the horror stories he told me drunk one night.

Still too young and awkward thirty-five years ago to know what else to do, I’d planned to distance myself from him at work, but he never showed up or called. Concerned, after a few days I returned to his apartment, pounded on the door then called the police. The note I received in the mail the following day described his loneliness, how ugly he felt and how much getting to know someone like me meant to him. Ashamed yet relieved, I chalked his suicide up to his problems and not my own.

After dreaming about the Mexican for the first time in thirty-five years last night, I called Doug this morning to check in and he told me Walgreens was having a 90%-off-everything-summer-related sale. Apparently, he’d gone there and drained a bank account filling a car full of beach balls, toys, umbrellas, and boogie boards.

If he has enough energy, he plans on dragging everything to the beach to give away to strangers and their children. When I asked him if he’d be wearing a dress like Baby Jane Hudson, he said it was not likely, but his daughter will be there if the need arises to talk to parents or cops.

I’d write a song about Doug’s rented and battered oxygen tanks, but my song-writing days are over. However, I might bring a camera to the beach and make a YouTube video to memorialize the event and set it to choral music if Doug and Steffi will let me.