Hans Remembers His Own Father's Death

Hans' father was most comfortable being treated like any other hopeless case.  (He was, after all, quite enamored of his own suffocation).  To be in-valid was the appropriate expression of his ambivalence toward life.  Bed sores and skin rashes, even the bright blue and purple of the catheter bruises were well worth the art of slow acceptance.   In fact, as he made his peace with the various symptoms, they seemed to go away.

The cough had subsided some, just lately.  But the blood in the phlegm was still vivid in the viscous yellow pool.  It was as though someone were throwing eggs against his tonsils.  There they cracked open and rolled off of his tongue to be coughed into his own neatly folded handkerchief:  embryo, still-born but staring up at us from its one sanguine eye.  This was accusation.   This was the persistence of despair.  The elder Hans believed in nothing so much as he did his own demise.  

The words had become the congestion in his lungs.  Just as his heart had slowly become clogged with feeling, the massive air sacks sucked ideas from the atmosphere and respirated only his fears, his regrets, his frustrations.  His doctor was sympathetic but too old, too jaded to be sincere.  And while he had suggested several courses of treatment, he was careful not to advocate.  This was for the best; none of these methods appealed to the patient.  He knew, as did this Marlboro-smoking physician, that not one of the possible paths could promise him anything that he might call a cure.  This pretense on the part of the doctors, the nurses, was a habit with them.  It was what once had been called a bedside manner.  A bedside manner...

Hans Sr. had listened to them thoughtfully, patiently, sometimes unable to hear the doctor's voice over his own weesing.  With effort, he had shaken his head;  he wanted no part in the idle curiosity that consumed the hospital staff.  A man unashamed of his body, an actual nudist with a membership to a seaside colony, he nevertheless could not bare the idea of playing "body" in the amphitheahter  of an operating room.  It would be indecent to lie there cut open, uncouth to be seen as an exhibit and unsettling to receive anything that felt like any kind of preferential treatment.

.