They discharged Lee from the hospital so he could die at home. Val drove Julie and I out to his condo. Not knowing what the accessibility would be like, I took my crutches instead of the scooter, and it’s good I did since his unit was on the second floor. There was no parking so Val went and parked across the street and came back and led us upstairs. A young man answered the door of a darkened apartment. Val apologized and he told us we probably wanted 205-B instead of A. So I hobbled down the hall and down the stairs and across the lot and up another set of stairs and down another hallway until at last we were greeted by the woman who I’d met in the hospital last week. She hugged us all and started to weep.
The visit was a blur of women coming and going. They said there was a 24 hour nurse but he was in the back room taking a nap. I wasn’t really aware of much other than Lee’s body. He was propped up on a hospital bed in the living room, facing the door. The walls were covered with concert posters. He was conscious but not lucid, words dribbling from his lips in a stream of slurred glossolalia. I sat next to him for a while as the women flitted about the kitchen. He had lost a lot of weight over the past two weeks and his skin had a grayish pallor. He kept trying to rip his tubes and bandages off and I kept gently pulling his hands away. He didn’t fight me. The skin of his wrists was scaly, his arm hair stiff. I thought of my father, just a few years older than Lee, who at that very moment was in the hospital for another fall. Instead of being there I was here, staring into the face of a man who was unquestionably dying, little more than a shell breathing and muttering and doing very little else.
I’ve been losing more and more friends over the years but somehow I’d never actually seen anyone this close to the end. The deaths had all been sudden and remote and while the shock is awful, this was obviously very, very different. Actually seeing it, smelling the sweet lotion they put on his flesh to mask whatever smells his body was emanating, was a completely new experience for me. I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say much, just gave him some water when he stuck his tongue out like a lizard. He kept trying to scratch and pick at himself and once he managed to throw the blanket off. Suddenly, there was his penis, vulnerable and exposed to the brutal world. I quickly covered him up and held his hand. His wrinkled fingers were soft and dry. He mumbled a word that sounded like "marmalade" but probably wasn't.
At one point a German woman stopped by who made it a point to tell us she was the head of the HOA. It seemed obvious that she was there less from caring about Lee than concern about all the strangers coming and going. She did not linger, and we left as well, after what might have been days or weeks but was probably about an hour. There was nothing else to do or say. He wasn’t opening his eyes, was only grunting occasionally. We didn’t know it but he would be gone within hours. In the hallway outside the condo I found the blackened husk of a dragonfly splayed out on the concrete. I picked it up and pressed it between the pages of my book then slowly made my way back down the stairs.
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