Kill Me (18 page)

The surgeons all preferred to talk about minimizing risk. After listening to their opinions, I decided that there were three possible outcomes for me. The preferred outcome? Easy, the thing doesn’t blow; it stays stable. The second best outcome? Intervention. Successful surgery. But even the most optimistic surgeons warned that because of the unfortunate location of my aneurysm I would suffer some, hopefully tolerable, amount of brain damage during the procedure. The third option had two parts: (a) The thing blows on its own and I suffer a massive stroke. Or (b) the thing blows during surgery and I suffer a massive stroke.

Not surprisingly, I never developed any real fondness for 3a or 3b.

The minimizing-risk argument screamed at me to go for the surgical option. But I wasn’t like other patients; I’d never been inclined to settle for a life without risk. I was less risk-averse than most people and tougher than most people, and therefore, I was going to find a way to live life my way whether or not I had a flimsy artery in my brain. To do that I would be a better patient, a more diligent patient, a more optimistic patient.

I would wait and watch and I would beat the fucker.

Since I was going to beat it — and also because I couldn’t stand the thought of people treating me as though I was as fragile as a Ming vase — Thea and I both agreed we would keep the news about the aneurysm to ourselves. What was the point of announcing a silent battle against an enemy that would ultimately be vanquished? After some period of time, some period long enough to prove that I could indeed be victorious over some silly bulging blood vessel in my brain, she and I would throw a kick-ass party for all of our family and friends to announce to the world what we’d been able to overcome.

It would be a hell of a bash.

Yeah.

That was the plan.

Right from the beginning, I did my part. Fighting many instincts to the contrary, I became a patient par excellence. Positive attitude? I was Mr. Optimistic. Good patient? If they gave one out, I would have gotten the Golden Gown award. Healthy lifestyle? Exercise and fiber, vitamins and essential oils. I gave up red meat. Yes, I even did meditation and … yoga.

And massage, of course. Massage.

Off-hand massage.

My wrist bones eventually healed. The cast came off. But I kept the secret of my illness from everyone. I made up excuses for the absences I took from work; I explained away my continuing symptoms — the headaches and the nausea — as this stress or that virus.

In the meantime, I was convinced that we could convince everybody I was still healthy.

To complete the ruse, I continued to live my life the way that I’d always lived it.

I called it “fully.”

Thea still called it “recklessly.”

Didn’t matter.

I was going to beat this thing silly.

That was the plan.

THIRTY-FIVE

Ironically, or not, I didn’t give much thought to the Death Angels during the days and weeks after I was diagnosed with the aneurysm. Dying was on my mind, most definitely, but still as an abstract, eventual thing, not as an impending danger. The previous year, at the time I’d completed my enrollment on the side of the road outside Ridgway, I’d been assuming that the arrangements I’d made would never prove necessary, and if they did, that I’d be in my seventies or eighties before I was debilitated enough to need them.

The presence of the aneurysm didn’t change anything, not acutely. I didn’t wake each morning thinking that the day had come that the vessel in my brain was going to blow. That just wasn’t my mindset about life.

The Death Angel insurance I’d purchased wasn’t a policy I’d ever deluded myself into thinking was going to protect me against dying. And no one — not one of the many doctors I spoke with in those months after my diagnosis — had any confidence that he or she could predict when I would suffer a life-ending event or any near-term disabling impairment from the bulging artery they’d found. There was the a-hole in L.A. who thought I’d be dead before Christmas. I’d asked which Christmas. He’d said, “This Christmas.” And a neurosurgeon in Boston who said he’d be surprised if the weak-walled vessel lasted three years. Another one guessed five. One sweetheart in New York said she’d probably die before I did.

Every last doctor, though, reminded me that the thing could blow in the next five minutes.

I used the inconsistency as evidence to convince myself that they didn’t really know what was going to happen with me and my aneurysm. And then I convinced myself that was a good thing.

The one facet of the whole Death Angel enrollment that I did consider during those days — but only briefly — was the fact that I had crossed the threshold that rendered my policy noncancelable.

The rule that Lizzie had stressed that day at Papaya King was that once an enrollee had received a diagnosis of a potentially fatal or disabling illness, or had suffered an event — the Death Angel euphemism for a stroke or a heart attack, I think — or received injuries that were likely to result in serious disability or death, the agreement with the Death Angels became irrevocable. My memory was that we’d discussed it a little, maybe even argued about it a little, and that I’d ultimately agreed without too much thought, and without any determined protest.

In the natural course of aneurysms like mine, a significant proportion of people die from rupture. Another significant proportion become severely debilitated from rupture. The ones who choose surgery on aneurysms in awkward locations, like mine, inevitably suffer deficits. Those simple facts meant that I had probably crossed the line into the domain of the irrevocables. I had no choice but to accept that reality.

But it wasn’t a big thing to me. As a Death Angel client, I had always thought that I was in for life.

Or death.

I just never expected the issue to become real so soon.

I knew the only line left to cross was the one that would put the target on my chest.

And that was a line that I had drawn myself during that impromptu meeting on the side of the road outside Ridgway: the line that marked the client-derived parameters and initiated the provision of end-of-life services.

When, oh when, would I exceed those parameters?

Something else I had never thought about much was exactly how the Death Angels would complete their end-of-life activities. The specifics, I mean.

The mechanics.

How — exactly — would they kill me once I’d suffered a threshold event?

Think about it. How would someone make a stranger’s death appear accidental, not too unexpected, without raising suspicion from the victim’s family, or the police, or …?

I guessed that back when I enlisted them, and I figuratively signed on the figurative dotted line, I was assuming that the logistics of causing my life to cease were their problem, not mine.

But soon enough, it seemed, it might be mine.

How the hell were they planning to kill me?

Damn good question.

What was most surprising to me, however, during those post-diagnosis weeks and months was that the presence of a Death Angel on my shoulder didn’t provide much comfort. I didn’t find myself with any inclination to drop to my knees and thank some deity for my prescience in signing up for the quick-exit plan.

THIRTY-SIX

Once the shock of the news had worn off, Thea and I were both glad that we had a reason to focus our energy on the bulge in her belly, and not the one in my brain.

Amniocentesis had revealed that we would soon have two daughters, not just one.

Cal was almost five then.

Her older half-brother, Adam, was seventeen.

Death wasn’t done begging for my attention, though. Connie’s death came suddenly late in 2004, interrupting my cross-country quest for second opinions. Adam took the train north from Cincinnati to join Thea — who had just entered the final trimester of a difficult pregnancy and shouldn’t have been traveling — and his sister, Berkeley, and me for his uncle’s funeral in New Haven.

Connie had been a converted Quaker, and the funeral was a traditional Friends send-off that consisted of a zillion people jamming into a New Haven meeting hall sharing reflections and stories about Connie’s remarkably generous life.

The service was much more spiritual than it was religious. I found it comforting.

Adam, I thought, seemed stoic.

Felix spoke in Spanish when he chose to stand and reflect on Connie’s life. While Felix talked, my son leaned over and placed his lips near my ears and translated every word for me. Adam’s warm breath on my flesh felt like a caress. It was so distracting and so comforting that I remembered almost nothing that Felix had said.

Late in the service I spoke, too.

My brother’s nephew waited to speak until the end, until the room had been quiet for a few minutes. Adam’s eloquence about his uncle, and the depth of his understanding of the meaning of his uncle’s life, gave me chills. He was the last to stand and consider Connie’s life that day; no one in the room would have dared to follow his lovely soliloquy with one of their own.

My son never cried during the service. Not once.

I never really stopped.

In the succeeding weeks, as the birth of his new half-sibling grew closer, Adam mounted a spirited long-distance lobbying crusade from Ohio to continue the nascent philosopher-inspired naming trend that we’d started in our little family. He was advocating that we call the new kid “Wittgenstein.”

“ ’Vitt’ for short,” he’d said in a call to Thea, pronouncing the
W
like a
V
. “How cool would that be?”

I’d had to go online and Google the name to learn something about Ludwig Wittgenstein — early twentieth century, Austrian, logician — the particular philosopher who’d inspired Adam’s naming campaign. I spent about five minutes trying to understand anything at all about Wittgenstein’s contributions to the grand oeuvres of anti-metaphysics and the logic of language before I got a splitting headache.

Although I was half-sure that Adam was only half-serious about the name he was espousing for our baby, I had thought I might find a clue why Adam had gravitated toward Wittgenstein in particular, but ended up just being grateful that he wasn’t lobbying to call my new kid “Schopenhauer.”

“Schop” for short.

Thea put an end to what morphed into a rather extended naming negotiation by belatedly admitting that Berkeley had indeed been named after her mother’s alma mater on the gentle rise above San Francisco Bay and not after the late British empiricist. Adam accepted Thea’s change in position graciously; he immediately embraced the idea of college-inspired baby names, and started lobbying to have us call his new sibling “Yale” in honor of his recently deceased uncle Connie.

It wasn’t lost on either Thea or me that Adam had chosen to honor yet another philosopher. And an ethicist, at that.

Thea had begun crying when Adam made his “Yale” suggestion to her over the phone. I heard her say, “That’s so sweet. I’ll think about that, Adam. I’ll think about it seriously. I will.” Then she handed me the phone. Her free hand was on her swollen belly.

“He wants to call her ‘Yale,’ ” she said to me, the phone’s microphone palmed in her hand. “He wants to name her for Connie. You talk to him. I can’t.” After she’d handed me the phone, she wiped away a tear.

I did talk with him. Adam didn’t offer to talk with me too often then. But I loved talking to him.

He was dead serious about naming his new sister Yale.

The holidays came and went. The New Year started. When she was born a week early, we ended up calling our second daughter, our
new
daughter, Haven.

Nothing for short.

Adam thought the name was great.

So did we.

Cal’s two cents? She thought we were all spelling “Heaven” wrong.

Later that year, as summer ripened into fall, Thea and I felt the time had come to tell Bella that it would be our privilege to pay for Adam to go to college. Bella, who struggled to connect one payday with the next, was thrilled with our offer.

Adam wasn’t as grateful. He was even more skeptical about my money than he was about me, and he was supremely skeptical about going anywhere for a formal education.

“You’ll meet people like your uncle Connie. Inspiring people,” I told him. “And make friends for life.”

“Yeah?” he’d said, unconvinced.

“Yeah.”

He said he’d think about it.

A while later Bella called Thea and said that Adam had decided to give college a try.

I was ecstatic. I volunteered to coordinate the logistics of his college search. I was shocked, and relieved, when he accepted.

For a wondrous few months during what, had he ever attended high school, would have been the winter and spring of Adam’s senior year — he was, he pointed out with mock pride, valedictorian of the Class of 2006 at Bella High School in Cincinnati, Ohio — I was at a strange intersection in my life. I had a daughter starting kindergarten and a son searching to find the right college. In the course of the same week, Thea and I would sit in the small chairs in some kindergarten classroom assessing the fit of a local school for our daughter, and then I would board a plane — an airline plane; Adam still wanted nothing to do with my jet — and meet Adam in some region of the country for a frantic three- or four-day tour of the local elite colleges.

I considered myself a young man. But because I’d spent most of my adult life living under the illusion that I had become a father late, I had always imagined I’d be a much older man before I had the responsibility and joy of helping a child of mine choose a college. When Adam and I headed out to visit schools, I found the time with him on the college-campus road show to be a rich terrarium of discovery. We both learned about colleges. We sat through mind-numbing admission presentations at schools from Pomona to Penn; we took unbelievably unrevealing campus tours in college towns from Palo Alto to Princeton.

We learned how Swarthmore was different from Williams, and why Duke was no Washington University, and vice versa.

We also, I think, learned about each other.

We didn’t grow closer during that time. Adam made it clear that wasn’t an option. I was left to accept the role of financier and observer of my son’s life and to his process. But what seemed initially to me like a cursory, shallow, impatient — read: adolescent in all its pejorative connotations — process was actually a winnowing procedure for my son that was as personal and thoughtful and as idiosyncratic to him as would be picking out the right hat. The day we said good-bye after the last of the college visits was over, he was still treating me like I was a father he hadn’t met until he was fourteen, a father who had spent a chunk of a lifetime not knowing that his son existed.

Adam didn’t do things my way at any stage of the journey, but I was able to recognize, and even momentarily accept, that he was doing things the way he needed to do them.

The following August, and the actual beginning of college, arrived quickly.

Adam had been accepted to six of the seven schools to which he had applied. He’d only been turned down by what anxious parents like me called his “safety” school, his backup. The one he was almost certain to get into. Adam considered the rejection a badge of honor. He decided to attend Brown — if you had asked me to rank his favorites, I wouldn’t have put it in the top three — and was scheduled to start classes just up Interstate 95 from New Haven in Providence. Adam had asked Thea and me not to go to Rhode Island to drop him off, so Bella had driven him to Providence from Cincinnati a few days before school began and had helped him settle into his dorm. His new roommate was a lacrosse star from Virginia whose father had been a lacrosse player at Brown.

When I told Thea about Adam’s first Ivy roomie, I bet her that the first thing Adam would learn at college was which end of a lacrosse stick to hold. He confirmed my suspicion in an e-mail he sent that evening marveling that there was actually a sport played with a “jock strap at the end of a stick.”

Despite the fact that I was aching to talk with him, I didn’t call him right away. The long interlude of relative stability I’d been enjoying with my aneurysm was over. I’d begun experiencing serious fatigue on a daily basis, and the headaches and nausea were growing more and more persistent. I wasn’t confident I could keep the fact of my illness out of my voice, and I remained determined that Adam not learn about my condition.

The neurosurgeon in Denver I was seeing — I’d chosen him because he was the one who creeped me out less than the others — had my head re-scanned, and told me matter-of-factly that the bulge was bigger. “It’s not stable,” he said. “We’d like it to be stable.”

Yes, we would,
I thought.

“Bigger?” I asked. I had an image of a water balloon in my head.

“Not much. Fractions of millimeters.” He paused. “But you have to know it could rupture at any time. You could have a bleed on your way home tonight. Or tomorrow.”

I didn’t like the fact that I was a patient for whom “bleed” had been transformed from a verb into a noun. The thin-walled excuse for an artery in my brain wasn’t holding up its end of the bargain I’d made with my denial.

To make a complicated medical situation simple, an unstable aneurysm wasn’t a good sign.

After my appointment, I reiterated to Thea that I didn’t want Adam to know about the aneurysm.

Thea was, as always, a step ahead of me. “He can’t blame you for this. This isn’t reckless.”

I feared she was wrong. Adam could blame me for this. And it was a little reckless. But she didn’t know about the reckless part. The Death Angels part.

“You have to reconsider surgery, babe,” Thea said.

“Yes,” I said. The neurosurgeons were saying the same thing. I’d consider it and reconsider it until rocket ships were making daily flights to Mars. But I knew it wasn’t going to happen.

My circumstances — and my Death Angels — made that choice impossible.

The next day I got a call on my
Ob-la-di
phone as I was sitting in my Denver office pondering my fate.

No greeting. The voice in my ear was female and familiar.

Tender, too.

“You’re right on the line now. With any more new symptoms, the threshold will be crossed,” she said.

I thought,
God, you people are good
. “Lizzie,” I whispered.

“I bet they’re pushing surgery harder, aren’t they? Your docs?”

“Yes.”

“Well, consider this, Yossarian: It’s a classic catch-22,” she said. “If you choose not to have surgery, the aneurysm will soon bulge a little more, and you’ll get increasingly symptomatic. And if that happens we will, of course, kill you.

“Or the aneurysm will rupture. Sooner rather than later. Given its location in your brain, you’ll likely die if that happens. If you don’t die, you’ll be severely impaired. And if that happens we will, of course, kill you.”

She paused to let the weight of that scenario sink in, or to steel herself for what she would say next. “If you do choose to have surgery, assuming it goes well, you will undoubtedly suffer some deficits from the procedure. And those deficits will almost certainly exceed the parameters you’ve set to trigger your insurance to kick in. And if that happens we will, of course, kill you.”

“Lizzie,” I said again.

“If you have some business to take care of, I suggest you take care of it.”

She hung up.

I thought she’d sounded sad.