April 2009
When there was no more they could do at the hospital, they moved David to the Connecticut Hospice in Branford, just a short distance down the shore from the Thimble Islands. He had begun to have seizures and had become aggressive. To control him, they gave him anticonvulsants and tied his wrists to the rails of the bed. Julia couldn’t stand to see him like that so when the nurse on duty wasn’t looking, she untied him. The tumor on the hypothalamus had thrown his internal thermostat out of whack, and he sweated profusely despite the cool temperature. When his wrists were free, he immediately stripped naked and tried to get out of the bed. Julia ended up with a fractured wrist, so they tied him down again. She thought, this is it, he’s strapped in for the ride. He was already somewhere they couldn’t reach him, in a delirious, agitated state of mumblings. But she was sure that something or someone was helping him through the churning waters of this passage, because he often said things that implied the hustle of moving with a crowd: “Better hurry!” and “You’ve got to be kidding!” and “Come on!”
Everyone came, even Kathy, who stayed for a whole day at David’s bedside, speaking quietly and singing to him. “So what ever happened to Jared?” Adrian asked Kathy one day.
“I have him in the same nursing home as my dad,” Kathy said. “Now that his parents are both dead, I’m it. One of my daughters visits him twice a week, and I’m there every Saturday afternoon.” She looked down at her hands. “I had to run away from him in order to find my way back. It took years.”
Adrian began to carry a notebook, monitoring and recording every detail of David’s care from doses to times of catheter changes. Everything Julia used to do, but no longer did, because she finally understood that it wasn’t going to be of any use. Adrian’s state of denial lasted a bit longer, and so he persisted in recording David’s mumblings, because, “You never know, this could be useful.” It wasn’t, Julia knew, but she didn’t discourage him because Sue Lorens, the wife of the ten-year survivor, had been right. One has to find ways to pass the time and feel useful. The second thing Adrian did to try to keep himself busy was to volunteer as an entertainer at the hospice. He brought his guitar and wandered around the halls, asking patients and their relatives if they were in the mood for a song. Julia was with him when an old man in a wheelchair pulled on the hem of his shirt.
“Excuse me.” The old man put his hand out like he was begging. “Can you please tell me who I am?” Adrian and Julia looked around. They couldn’t find a nurse.
“Hmm. Well, let’s figure it out,” Adrian answered, sitting on a nearby chair and setting his guitar on his knee. “What kind of music do you like?”
Five minutes later they were all singing “When Johnnie Comes Marching Home” at the top of their lungs. At last the old man raised his chin, high and proud, and cried out, “Edward! First Sergeant Edward McGuiness. A Company, 187th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division!” His watery blue eyes sparkled with pride. The janitor, who had been emptying the garbage in the hall, saluted him, and Julia and Adrian did the same. First Sergeant McGuiness put his face in his arthritic hands and wept with relief and gratitude at having remembered himself.
That same day, a woman requested “Clementine” for her comatose father. She said he had sung this to her as a girl, and she smiled a little as she told them that her father had taken guitar lessons, but that he never progressed beyond a few songs. “But he had ‘Clementine’ down cold,” she said, with a soft chuckle. Julia thought that Adrian would be stumped for sure. How could someone growing up in Puerto Rico know that old American folk song? But he knew it. “I don’t believe it, Adrian. You’re like a human jukebox,” Julia told him.
When Adrian got to the line, “You are lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine,” the woman’s face had crumpled up and she reached over to hold her father’s hand. Adrian had helped move her along the long and difficult road of saying good-bye not only to her father, but to her childhood. And it was through this intense and focused attention on the grief of total strangers, that Adrian Vega became a little more like his father. He stepped into a new maturity; an expansion of the spirit that, by necessity, hurt.
“Keep it up and you’ll be famous, kid!” shouted an old lady in a wheelchair who had been listening to him sing from the hallway.
Adrian kept a constant river of warm Spanish sounds flowing over his brother. Sometimes David surprised them by stopping his thrashing and mumbling long enough to listen, or even mouth a few of the lines. One morning, a week after he’d been admitted into hospice, Julia had buds in her ears and was singing along with her playlist of favorite songs. She was lost in thought as she shaved David’s face. “Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs,” she sang out loud. She was rinsing the razor when David turned his head and sang, “What’s wrong with that?”
After that, she prompted him all the time, trying to get him to communicate his needs by introducing songs that could help him express thirst, hunger, or pain. When Marcia cracked open a Diet Coke, David started humming the jingle to the latest Coca-Cola commercial. Julia asked Marcia for the can and gave it to David, who happily sucked up the entire drink. The doctor on duty explained that the human central nervous system doesn’t process musical sounds the same way it does the auditory patterns of speech. Musical ability isn’t necessarily affected by damage localized in areas that control language. This is what Kathy and Sister Juana had discovered all on their own in working with speech-delayed children at the orphanage. “If one avenue to or from the brain is blocked, you try another. The brain isn’t a road, it’s a labyrinth,” Kathy added when Julia explained it on the phone. Soon, they could only communicate with David through sign language and music, first popular music and then through nursery songs in both Spanish and English. It was as if, through the songs, Adrian was able to take his brother to a safer place, and still keep him close.
Adrian and Julia’s first kiss was in the elevator of the Connecticut Hospice. There had been ample opportunity, up in the master bedroom of the Griswold house, the night that Julia had nursed Adrian’s wounded head. But they had agreed that it would be disrespectful to start something right under David’s nose. Their resolve was emboldened by the fact that Adrian had a colossal headache, and a few hours later, they were jumping out a window to escape a fire. They had fallen in love again during the trip to Casa Azul—and once that happened, the rest of the trip had been an exercise in torturous self-restraint. They would have dropped everything to be together after the trip, but then David started seeing imaginary little girls and they all knew that it was the beginning of the end.
David had been at the hospice for two weeks when they all gathered out on the lawn. Adrian and Julia were alone in the elevator, standing face to face as it descended to the ground floor. When the doors shut, Adrian took her face in his hands, closed his eyes, and kissed her on the lips. His kiss was so tentative, so restrained, their lips barely touched. “I love you,” he said, and he marveled at the sound of those strange words coming out of his mouth.
“Am I crazy? David doesn’t even understand what’s going on,” Julia said, clutching a pearl on her necklace. “Why am I doing this again?”
“You’re doing it for David,” Adrian replied. “Choosing to honor his parents’ faith, even though faith eluded him, is in itself a kind of faith.” The doors opened and Adrian led Julia out to the lawn. Taina, Doug, Holly, Ray, Julia’s mother, and her three brothers and their spouses were all waiting. David’s bed had wheels, and the staff had rolled him out to the patio, as they often did when patients wanted to get fresh air. The O’Farrells’ parish priest presided over the ceremony. Adrian, handsome in a gray suit, walked Julia down the path to where David was waiting. Adrian gave Julia away and spoke David’s wedding vows for him. Julia wore a white dress and the stud earrings that David had given her for her birthday.
“My daughter-in-law,” Marcia said as she placed her mother’s diamond ring on Julia’s finger. “You were right. Symbols of belonging are powerful.” The priest pronounced David and Julia husband and wife. Julia leaned over David’s bed and kissed him on the lips.
Julia watched over David that day and the next and the next until his pulse slowed by half a beat beneath her touch. Soon, he was no longer able to sing, eat, or drink. Even the flecks of Italian ice that the hospice supplied just sat on his tongue and melted, making him cough. There was a rattle inside his lungs and a bad smell emanated from his mouth. Adrian made the decision to withhold life support. Ray lobbied for, and won, an increase in David’s dose of morphine, and David didn’t recover any awareness after that. He wasted away in a matter of a few days. His jaw became razor-sharp. He got that waxy, candlelit look. But the varying expressions on his face convinced Julia and Adrian that he was on a great adventure. “Not too much fun,” Adrian teased, fussing with his brother’s blanket and combing David’s hair with his fingers. “Remember you’re a married man now, Flaco.” Outside, the still-cold May wind picked up and rattled the glass of the windows. When Adrian looked out and down to the ground level, he saw a blue lady’s hat tumbling across the lawn of the hospice. It danced and floated and spun like a Frisbee before it finally got hooked by the wiry branch of a high tree. When the wind moved the limbs of the tree just so, it looked as if there was someone in it, an old lady perhaps, with her legs dangling off the branches. Adrian noticed that the limbs kicked to a quicker beat than the melancholy gusts of wind would have them move. It was as if they were dancing to the sound of a distant music that no one else could hear.