He kissed her over the proposed palliative care bed. It was a smack really and their lips had never met between them this way during their lives and it would never happen again this way. There had been pecks on the cheek but never one on the lips for such length. A smack. Nathan stood on one side of the bed and Hazel stood on the other and they kissed as if it were a marital bed in between… It was like she had given him permission to see and be a part of her death as he had watched her die slowly over the many years he had known her. It was also a celebration of life and their relationship.
Nathan was young and Hazel was old, too old, and the gap was horrendous according to the social norms of society. They would laugh otherwise in repulsion and so it had to be done in a neutral place when the room was empty.
Nathan wouldn’t be the one who would see her off into the netherworld or the wild blue yonder of death. That was for some uncaring nurse who never really knew her. It wouldn’t be sordid except in Nathan’s mind. Perhaps Hazel knew all too well it would be sordid and thus the kiss. A moment of beauty amid the corridors of pain and death and suffering. I think she had felt she had suffered enough and another bout of chemo wasn’t worth facing.
The hospital room in the hospice she loved with the nurses she knew and who cared. Hazel wanted this way and she knew it had to be this way.
“Not a bad place … I heard the other rooms have a view…”
They looked not at the television but each other’s blue eyes and then went to another room. There was another room with a window and a garden outside. There were trees and bushes and no people. That’s what was strange about the place, it was the quiet and the peacefulness it offered.
The moment had passed, but Nathan knew the meaning of the kiss – it was cumulative. They were both solitary souls who loved and respected one another but had been separated by time and age and nature. He would have relieved her of the burden of years without sex if she had asked.
She had tattooed eyebrows from her two or three bouts of chemo. It had eaten away the hair on her head as well and Nathan would flatter her as much as he could. She was ninety odd.
“You look like you’re in your seventies and seventy is the new forty and forty is the new thirty,” Nathan told her a couple of times and she really believed him because he thought it was true. It reinvigorated her for a moment. Her eyes would weep constantly from where they had taken out cancer… Nathan found her beautiful and vulnerable. She had lived a vulnerable life since she was fostered out as a child the illegitimate and unwanted daughter of rich society in Melbourne … and her lifelong stance against abortion was probably correct because the world would have been a lesser place without her.
Her mind could be cantankerous on occasion towards the end as the pain of knowing it would all be over crossed with the jealousy of Nathan’s youth and health. But she loved Greta Garbo, the Sapphic poems and long hours bathing topless on the top of New York skyscrapers with her girlfriends.
Nathan did her shopping for years and he listened to her stories of Catholic school, World War Two at Camp Hill with the Americans, her time as a stenographer in the secret hearings of soldiers who murdered their commanders and would swear blue in front of the court and then get hanged.
She told him about the United Nations where she worked and her friendship with Lucille Ball. She had even been on the set of the movie Mame and Ball had asked her to dress for a party scene where the actress descended down the stairs. But Hazel declined to be immortalised forever in celluloid preferring to chat with the young actor who played the nephew. It was typical of Hazel.
She loved youth, she loved vitality and she loved life despite the nomenclatures it offered.
Nathan had never asked her if she was still a virgin and she said once: “Don’t worry, I didn’t miss out.” She had never married or had children.
As hard as it was for Nathan to say, it was the lemons who looked after him ever since he was a boy. His damaged and closed off psyche knew love but he had no way of ever being able to express it. It was good to learn the lesson of love early and to be brought up on love even if you were unworldly on another level. They were lovers of the mind and their platonic love was one of a lifetime. If you are lucky, you will have many to count as ‘one’ in a lifetime.
“Here, take care. Here’s the twenty dollars. Always ask if I forget to give it to you. I know you’re not mercenary,” she said and there was a kind of throb in her voice, where the volume of sound was missing. It was as though her heart were missing a beat and life itself was starting to drain from her being, or leaving her, just like Nathan left her in that room, since each hospital stay would possibly be the last. This one wasn’t.
Nathan wanted to be there for her because she had no family except a distant cousin and of course the aloof priest to whom she had already left her fortune – Nathan knew that. Perhaps he hoped otherwise that she would leave him some sort of token sum. He took her to the dentist and the doctor, they went to the movies and ate oysters. Always for the sum of twenty dollars.
“If you want to call me I’ll give you my number,” said the priest, and Nathan could see him change his mind in his head as he added: “Call the office first and then I will get back to you.” Nathan was cynical enough to still be disappointed in him since he kind of expected it. An Indian giving priest. Here have a soul and I’ll take it back. The whole religious aspect was Indian giving.
When it came to the night she had to got to hospital for the last time which was a couple of months later, she was obstinate and argued, for the ambulance wasn’t taking her to the Methodist hospital but to the Catholic one and it was not the hospital they had kissed over. That room would be for someone else. Business as usual for some.
Nathan couldn’t understand the commotion. Neighbours had called the ambulance as she couldn’t get out of her chair and Nathan’s phone was turned off and he was too drugged out and asleep to hear others in the apartment block where he and Hazel lived. If there was anyone who didn’t respect her wishes it was that neighbour who had helped take legal proceedings against her for simply cutting down a plant. There had been a stand-off for an hour and the neighbours and the ambulance people were losing their cool at that old woman eaten by cancer and defiant as she had to make one of the most important decisions of her life.
They took her to the wrong hospital… and in the end she went willingly and smiled and joked as the stretcher was loaded to cart her away.
It was April and it had recently been the pair’s birthdays, not that Nathan really took notice of the seasons since he was more of a shut-in, especially in terms of the outside world and his psychic mind which had never been opened properly. It was always hot and humid in Brisbane anyway or so it seemed, so, at least, the hospitals air-conditioned their patients to death.
As the next few days progressed, Nathan tried to save her; he fed her with a spoon, massaged her shoulder and tried to keep her spirit buoyant. He brought her biscuits and chocolate but what was only fluid on her knee which made her unable to move that night from her chair turned out to be enough for the the doctors to put her in palliative care. He couldn’t believe it.
“I love you,” Nathan told her.
“And I love you too, sweetie,” she would say, or darl, or pet – really, it was sweetie.
Palliative care was not a place of hope, it was not a place that Nathan would like to remember forever and he would block some of the conversations which happened there. He certainly didn’t want to end up there, since he would rather overdose fatally or swim out to sea or drive out into the desert. This fucking place … where the patients bitched about the other patients, where the nurses bitched among themselves about the other patients and if you wanted peace you could listen to the radio put on some annoying station you didn’t want for hours on end, by someone who didn’t really like you.
“She’s away with the fairies,” said one woman, long after Hazel stopped eating and drinking water, as Nathan held her hand and she sat in bed and proceeded to wither, curl up and die. It was oh so fucking beautiful…
“She needs pyjamas,” the nurse told Nathan as she was practically naked under the rubber or plastic sheets they had placed upon her almost tent-like due to her incontinence.
“No, she doesn’t need pyjamas,” another nurse told him.
Okay, she doesn’t, and he would go home confused as to what their problem was.
“Why didn’t you bring pyjamas?”
“Your friend told me she fucking well didn’t need any.”
The same thing happened when Nathan was put down as next of kin and the cousin claimed to have that right. It was ridiculous. She had no dignity as pneumonia set it. And you could hear her cough and they were large coughs throughout the building as the pneumonia started to kick in and she still had the strength. She didn’t want to know or acknowledge anyone anymore if you want to call that being away with the fairies – and the slightly effeminate alcoholic and drippy priest dropped by as well to talk about his upcoming trip overseas and how he probably wouldn’t be there for the end. The lawyers sent flowers, no doubt charged to her estate and they rotted in the corner of the room just the like vultures were at her funeral.
She opened her eyes once and said: “I forgot you were there” and Nathan couldn’t stay forever, as the process was taking forever and he felt guilty for that.
If Nathan felt he had done anything good during those last few days it was to get Lucille Ball’s daughter to call her direct to her room. And it happened after some emails and it was after that Hazel felt it was time to depart as she took off her glasses and hearing aids and accepted the wonder of pneumonia. Had it been a good thing after all to arrange that call?
The last time Nathan saw her before she died, he held her hand and she had recoiled from him. Perhaps he had been too clingy, he thought and remembered the ending of some Gillian Anderson movie where her dead hand seemed to say fuck you to you all. House of Mirth?
It was the wrong hospital…
He broke down once when he sat with her distant cousin and the nurse who had confused issues over the pyjamas came into the room to see if she needed dinner.
“I’ll leave you alone you probably need a moment to yourself,” was the stock answer to the question of whether anyone cared about Nathan’s love except Nathan.
Nathan left that final evening and the nurses made their usual snide remarks upon departure such as: “She probably doesn’t know what year it is?” Anything to get a rise during their boring shifts.
He blocked the words but wanted to turn on his heel and say: “You fucking women … rave, rave… hatred, hatred… fuck you!” But he didn’t. And afterwards he would feel that anger in others who told them of their experiences in similar wards around the country.
Hazel had the last rites possibly for the second time. The first time from the priest who had the will changed and then from another. At least the church’s heart was in the right place. The second time was the young black African priest and Nathan watched as he gave the rites to her. She sat painfully up against her pillow and spoke.
“I accept the Lord Jesus Christ as my God and Saviour,” she repeated, or words to that effect. The priest nodded at Nathan, who stood outside the door, his eyes welled at this very personal moment. She took the Lord honestly, truthfully and with the passion Nathan had so admired her for… Perhaps he could ask for no more.
The call came at two am or so and Hazel was dead. Dead liked she had longed for in her other friends who had died at home in bed or in front of the television set. An ill-advised ambulance trip had ruined a dream of rose petals on a palliative care bed … She wanted red petals painted on her coffin and even the funeral director denied that along with the white roses which sat upon the casket.
Nathan had misheard the doctor when they said it wasn’t necessarily more cancer in her leg and he felt that he alone had doomed her to palliative care. It was like he had actually given her the kiss of death by cutting into a conversation like he usually did. He had just assumed she was dying. Meanwhile all the calls to the Catholic Palliative Care line were fruitless after they told Nathan that yes she could hypothetically die with dignity at home.
A couple of seasons passed and Nathan couldn’t understand their greed for fortunes in these places and their neglect to really care. The whole experience had been a series of last rites.
“Has she got private health cover?,” asked a doctor so happy when she agreed to use it even if the government would have paid for it anyway. Too happy, although it was probably an unselfish need of funds for the hospital’s bottom line. From his perspective.
A few months passed. And Nathan watched the sun come and go as he went three times a week to water the garden… Was that the point? To really care? On this Earth, when we are so sure, some of us, there is nothing but hell on it and within ourselves. He watered that fucking garden like a saint or something, caring for it recklessly with his time … perhaps it was just to show what they were really like…
It was perhaps obvious to himself there had been no rapture yet in Nathan’s life, no applause for his failure, no respect from the God within the others either where he lived or in the hospital …
There was no sign of God for long, long stretches anywhere. The tart comments people said if they were meant to be positive, well they weren’t, as the meaning was lost and they belied the fact they were really, really negative comments as a result. They had no meaning, it was just talk. To even speak them betrayed the fact of no respect for the nature of inner peace and letting things be – Is that God? Is that nature? Is that respect for another human being.
“Who gives a fuck arsehole,” they would probably say.
Nathan would ask for a sign over the years but it always sounded like the ending of that movie The Ninth Configuration where someone had placed a medal of something somewhere in the back of a car and Scott Wilson thought it was a sign from God.
Instead he washed the dead rat left behind on Hazel’s patio with the hose as he kept those plants alive that spring. He had done so for the past decade and revived some to the point where they had thrived… Was there a meaning in that?, he wondered about meaning without words as the lawyers and the church decided what they would do with the place.
There was a mass of flowers around a small statuette of a little girl in the garden and there were several bees there which had come to quench their needs and beyond the fence there was the occasional bird. Nathan’s eyes settled on the three or four bees that sat on these white and purple flowers. Two of them sprung forth and began to circle each other quickly and then even quicker like some sort of whirlwind with their wings asymmetrically spread apart. Then they joined almost in a kiss before they made a final circle and disappeared forever. Neither above nor below…
Nathan thought this optical illusion of nature was perhaps The Rapture! He was kind of astonished by what had happened in front of his eyes and the dead eyes of the little girl statue. The Christians spoke of the rapture, dreamed of the rapture and lived for the rapture, some of them anyway. But perhaps its ancient myth began here in the gardens of antiquity and they had forgotten the meaning of it all; it was all a part of the sun, Earth and sundry miracles we call nature. They loved each other to death and ascended. Wouldn’t that be nice? Into thin air… Just like Hazel. Just like all of us. And for a moment Nathan’s troubled soul found solace still in Hazel’s garden where he thought he really did care and belong… Until the church padlocked the gate and the garden withered and died along with any sweet memories of a woman and her heart of gold shut and closed down by the church.
Cult Film Alley 