Living Will

Abstract

LIVING WILl/Amy Kolen BLOATED FROM STEROIDS given in the ICU, my father-in-law's hands Ue inert on the sheets of his bed on the fourth floor of a Chicago-area hospital: Hospice Inpatient Unit. Touch those hands and you won't feel skin, veins, the natural bumps and ridges of knuckles, cuticles, joints. Instead, you'U run your fingers over what feel Uke oversized bubbles of packaging plastic, bubbles that might explode if you press them firmly with your thumbs. Let your gaze travel up paralyzed and engorged arms, the skin on them stretched tightly Uke a latex baUoon, to sunken shoulders, propped at a gentle angle and exposed in the gaping hospital gown, to the neck and lower part of the cranium and the infected holes where, for sixteen days, he was screwed to his halo and the bed that tilted sharply right to left every sixty seconds to keep his blood flowing. His head, the only part of his body that can move, swivels from side to side when he answers no to a question, such as, "Would you like a milk shake?" Or "Do you have any pain?" "Do you want more morphine?" When he answers yes, his chin tUts up and then down, just a bit, but clearly. He always says no to the morphine and pain and yes to the shake. His eyes cave deep into his face, and his normally large forehead looms over his nose and chin, the bones still sharp and chiseled. More than two weeks' growth of stubble covers his chin. "You need a shave, don't you?" one of the hospice nurses asks quietly , rubbing her hand Ughtly—first her palm, then the back of her hand—across his chin and cheeks. His chin jerks up, then down. His eyes remain closed. He can't see his shrunken torso, covered by a sheet, the outlines of now useless legs so faint that the area below his waist appears hoUow. But the story doesn't begin here. It begins on an unseasonably warm day in Chicago, seventy-five degrees and sunny, though the calendar says it's December 3, nearly winter in the Midwest. It's a perfect day for my mother-in-law, Corinne, and my father-in-law, Gene, to leave their house around noon and drive to the paths along Lake Michigan where they'll walk before lunch at their favorite Japanese restaurant. That walk never takes place. As they head north on McCormick, a 1998 Mazda sedan traveling south tries to pass a truck on the right, but hits it, ricocheting across two lanes of traffic straight into Gene and Corinne's 1987 Toyota CoroUa. Unaware of aU this, I come home around 22 · The Missouri Review 3:30 in the afternoon to find a note from my fourteen-year-old son, Daniel, on the kitchen table. It takes me several minutes to decipher: Happened at 12. Grandma Corinne at St. X Hospital. Respirator. May be broken ribs. No brain damage. No surgery. Critical. She might still be in shock. Grandpa Gene in Y Hospital. Fractured vertebra in neck and knee problems. Able to speak. Uncle Billy at hospital with Grandpa. Another car swerved to miss a truck and swerved into Grandpa and ma. They got rammed into rail. Not theirfault. Call Aunt Martha NOW. I need a minute to catch my breath. I can't call Martha. Not immediately . I need a minute to imagine how she'll sound over the phone and, if she's hysterical, what I might say to soothe her. Less than a week ago we buried BUIy and Martha's eight-year-old son, Josh, who had Canavan disease and died from compUcations of pneumonia. They've just begun to mourn his death. Now this? Gene and Corinne—second parents to Josh and his eleven-year-old brother, David—in an accident and criticaUy injured? I make the caU. After Martha gives me the details of my in-laws being hit head-on near their condo in Skokie and taken to two different hospitals, she says, "Michael needs to get here, and soon." My husband , Michael, left yesterday...