Resolution

ONE

This will never do.

Francis Jeffrey, essayist and critic (1773 - 1850)

At 4:15 pm, hardly anyone noticed when Henson careened out of the Medical Arts Center parking lot into traffic. As he sped through a yellow light, changing lanes, he grimaced at his aggressiveness. Weaving in and out of afternoon traffic through the Victorian district, he slalomed around several downtown squares. Instinctively, he aimed for Pinky Masters, a bar he’d not visited since Leigh, his last significant other dumped him, miffed at his occasional dalliance with an interior design professor from the Jersey shore who’d recently joined the Savannah College of Art and Design faculty.

While Savannah’s south side is constant hustle, horse drawn carriages still set the pace in the Historic District. When Henson finally lurched to a stop at Pinky’s, however, he was oblivious to the serenity of the moss-draped live oaks shading the old Savannah grey brick street.

It began as a day like any other. Now, it was a day like no other. As Henson drained the third bourbon, a frown, reflected in the bar mirror, settled across his face. Vaguely, he imagined himself a boxer, regaining consciousness on the canvas, struggling to suppress the unexpected physical and emotional impact, and deal with the situation at hand.

Henson could not separate frustration from surging anger at the doctor’s insensitivity. He winced when he realized that he’d made the mistake. The doctor had only taken the opening he’d provided. The bastard had no right to destroy me. Hell, a man just gets one chance to learn this lesson. Only the medical community can manage this responsibility. A distraught patient, overwhelmed with questions, forms, and the physical and mental rigors of diagnostics is in no position to control the situation.

Reaction to the neurologist’s glib disclosure was festering into intense anger. The casual destruction of a human’s existence made Henson begin to understand motives behind the brutality of anti-abortion extremists. Surely he was not destined to choose retribution on the neurologist.

Until now, Henson had viewed the information age as a blessing. He had paid no attention to the details of the delivery system, confident that scientific progress was the real battlefield. In his left lobe perspective, each new tool or treatment represented an additional plug in the leaky dike of mortality.

At best, however, medicine is an imperfect mix of research, trial, and clinical treatment; a disjointed search for cause and effect, unpredictably interrupted by the need to act. The ethical dilemma which accompanies each new rapid diagnostic technique was now all too apparent to him, yet he was unable to absolve the doctor of personal responsibility.

Meanwhile, Henson was unconsciously making another unfortunate decision, entering a psychological frontier of keen interest to society, but going alone.

Henson flashed back 20-odd years to the two week interval between Army basic training and Advanced Individual Training. As a guinea pig for MP’s training on polygraphs, he’d learned quickly. Never allow yourself to be hooked up and hear any question which you won’t freely and honestly answer. Once you’ve heard the question, the unspoken but indelible answer can’t be denied.

His shoulders sagged with resignation. There was no way out now. Leaving the bar, the blackness disappeared as he headed home, driving more methodically. Henson was grateful for the liquor. Sleep came easily.

Nausea turned to confusion and detachment early the next morning. Showering and coffee required concentration. Midmorning, the discomfort remained. Henson realized it was not just the drinking. The confusion was mental, he was simply bewildered, not drunk. He had to control this weakness before it complicated his dilemma. Now.

It had happened quickly. A new contact lens prescription did not eliminate the occasional blurred vision in his left eye. His ophthalmologist referred him to a neurologist. The first MRI functional series showed a tumor at the base of his brain, a brain stem glioma. Within minutes of viewing the image, he heard the diagnosis, partial or total loss of vision in one to two months. Perhaps three months to live.

Henson was caught off guard. He was forty-five, in excellent health, by all indications up to this point. The possibility of a serious, much less fatal condition had never occurred to him. A pragmatist, he had expected to identify and cure any unlikely problem, and damn sure not let it become complicated beyond his control.

The diagnosis made sense, he thought, recalling the intermittent ringing in his ears which had become more frequent in recent months. There’s a good chance, he reckoned, that the active tumor is interrupting neural paths relating to my hearing as well as vision. He imagined the self-healing mechanism of the brain stem, on high alert, like an early telephone operator frantically plugging lines into patch panel jacks at random, searching for a lost signal.

His instinct called for damage control, but he had no clue what to do except be careful, another mistake might be his last. Other than images in a file at the neurologist’s office, no record existed, and his condition must not be suspected by others, while he formulated a plan. Undoubtedly, guidance lay in the hands of a few fortunate souls who preceded him in this grim experience but survived, and close acquaintances of those who did not.

One who sets out to acquire historical information of an emotional nature finds that people carry it like a dormant, contagious disease. If a fertile conversation can be established, the unseen germ can be cultivated into an iteration of the original occurrence; meanwhile, the investigator can be drawn into the experience.

It takes creativity and patience to be an investigator when your mortality is at stake, Henson realized as another restless night passed. At daylight, he woke with a dry mouth and shuffled to the kitchen, stopping in the hall to scratch his back on the door jamb, eyeing the refrigerator and wondering if he was ever going to clean out the fridge and remove all the notes and postcards on the door. One Post-it caught his eye, library books.

Why return books now? He trudged down the sandy driveway to the street, sidestepping branches which had fallen during the rainy, windy night. The paper box was empty. Henson looked back at the house through the mist, then toward the blinking caution light at Quarterman Drive. No cars in sight. He decided to walk and pass the time until the morning paper arrived.

He walked eastward on Suncrest Boulevard to Nillson Drive and back, then toward Point Pleasant. Something was missing. He shivered when he realized what it was. By now, he should have heard the rhythmic creaking of a bicycle chain, a comforting sound he’d come to take for granted when he walked before daylight. Many times he had stepped aside into a yard and let the unseen cyclist pedal past him in the dark, announced only by the raspy mechanical sound of a dry chain and sprocket. He turned back as he reached Hwy 80, where a white wooden cross and wreath marked the site of a recent pre-dawn collision where a motorcycle recently killed this neighbor on the bike he’d heard but never seen. From the obituary, he knew she had been an elementary school teacher. There is something about the untimely death of a teacher of children, whether it is Krista McAuliff or an anonymous neighbor, that bodes heavily on a man’s spirit. Henson would not walk there again.

TWO

There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.

Christopher Morley, American

journalist (1890 - 1957)

The Wilmington Island branch library is no place to make conversation at 10:00 am. on a weekday, Henson realized as he paid the fines for three overdue books. He surmised that it amounted to the cost of the books, more or less. Librarians and meter maids are the only civil servants who pay their way. He perused the Sunday New York Times, always a cornucopia of current thought and events, wishing he could have home delivery on the island. Finally, one elderly man dropped in. A weathered ‘80's Towncar and a Dodge conversion van with Georgia Bulldog colors arrived. Henson wondered, don’t these guys have a golf game, or did their wives take over the computer and drive them off the web? He killed time until noon, not recognizing anyone, but finding conversation easy to generate with the few bookworms who dropped by.

Among the library patrons, Henson was able to initiate several conversations and subtly steer them without appearing morbid. An unexpectedly high number of contacts had been brushed by the reaper. Practically everyone he engaged was acquainted with someone who had been diagnosed as terminal, several knew the experience first hand.

A real estate developer had been told to put his possessions in order at age 52. Now 66, with no detectable cancer, he recalled only bewilderment at his diagnosis. Henson wondered if such uncanny stability could have enhanced the man’s resistance.

Gene Walbridge, a retired college professor, recounted his wife’s quiet acknowledgement of bone cancer. They had an unspoken understanding not to discuss death. She died while he was patiently feeding her, during a lengthy blood transfusion.

An ex-hippie, Navy fighter pilot who’d resigned himself to living off of his parents on a sailboat with his dog, recounted how he became distraught, covering his anguish with a hell-raising binge lasting weeks. His cancer remained in remission. The sailor rambled between liberal innuendo and plans to single-hand the boat to Culebra, find a mooring and vegetate. Henson surmised that the close encounter with death had honed this man’s desire for meaning in life, but he was relying solely on inheritance and ego to deliver it. Henson refrained from advising the guy to donate his boat to a church and get religion. Donations mean nothing to boat people anyway, since they don’t pay taxes. The sailor was already getting loud, drawing attention in the library. Henson figured the guy’d punch him out if he didn’t condescend. Ciao, Captain. Enjoy the Caribbean.

More testimonials came from two firefighters in white tee shirts who were attracted by the sailor’s dog that was tied to the flagpole between the library and a fire station. Extricating himself from the conversation with the firemen proved more difficult than with the sailor. These guys must be bored to tears, he thought. They wash the same two trucks every day. The body contours must get as familiar to them as an old lover. He decided to return to the air conditioned cloister of the library for more input on coping with his dilemma.

Few common threads were established from his conversations with survivors of serious illnesses, some of whom had as long as twenty years to reflect on their experiences. A few had accepted reality stoically, some internalized their fate dogmatically, bolstered by faith, while others experienced a period of unrestrained revelry, until the realism hit; they had escaped the wrath of their disease. Against heavy odds, a thin uncertainty had prevailed in their favor.

Some were content to have notice, quietly they went about settling their accounts. They gamely marshaled all of their abilities to patiently arrange their final social events. All the survivors he met appeared to be avoiding their brush with death, reverting to their pre-diagnosis mentality. None seemed driven to criticize the doctors’ actions or their own involvement. Something had erased their emotion, along with the grim sentence. Henson intuitively knew he did not fit any of these molds. This experience was not to be dismissed, to the contrary, it was destined to shape the rest of his life.

Assuming that all who had been seriously ill had wrestled with the suicide option, Henson probed for details, but no survivors admitted having those personal feelings. Just as well, he thought. He possessed willpower of iron, but had no interest in dying by his own hand. Anyone opting for suicide apparently has no understanding of probability, quality of life, or creative solutions to manage a personal crisis. Taking his own life seemed as illogical as buying an out-of-town raffle ticket, when you never intend to return. Must be present to win is a condition which has no posthumous meaning.

Henson guessed that the underlying premise of Russian roulette is not understood by the desperate people who attempt it or by the psychiatric community, however, the odds of this act of desperation recreating a final window of quality time were zilch anyway. How many desperate people had spun the cylinder and put a revolver to their head, never realizing that their apparently irrational act had a vague basis, a futile attempt to re-introduce uncertainty and regain control of their lives?

What were the chances that any of the survivors would have opted for doctor-assisted suicide, had the opportunity been convenient, Henson wondered? He reasoned that assisted suicide was perhaps the most repulsive, unethical medical practice. These mutants of the medical profession must be the most loathsome contingent. Cold creatures, willing to confront you with the time and details of your death, then offer to guide and chaperon you through your own murder. This was not the type of assistance he needed.

It was noon. Meeting people here is a no-brainer, he thought, but the place reminded him of a wax museum. He’d learned a bit, but now he needed conversations with people who could lift his spirits, not spinster librarians and bored paper mill retirees.

He retreated to the Piggly Wiggly to buy salad and sandwich makings. Two checkout lines were open, both busy bagging microwaveable food and bottled water for young women. Several were wearing shorts and glowing with a fresh blush from a tanning booth. Maybe the best place to meet women is a grocery store, after all. He could see himself, calling across the checkout lines, Clerk, please put that one on my bill.

Yes sir, do you want the green stamps?

How embarrassing could it get? Of course he did.

Henson made two ham and cheese sandwiches with Dijon mustard and Tabasco, adding lettuce and a tomato slice as a shortcut to making a salad. Washing down the last bites with a Miller Lite and surfing between CNN, Prime News, and Fox, he noticed that the picture was not clear. He disconnected the VCR and ran the cable directly to the TV. No better. He made a fist and peered through the small, irregular hole formed by his curled thumb, a trick he’d learned from junior high school days when he built a pinhole camera. The pinhole should focus at all distances. He tried to see detail of the rough, platy bark on a large pine outside the window. No luck. The blurred vision was settling in, he reluctantly admitted. Sitting transfixed on the couch, listening to the soft rustling of shrubs beside the house moving in the breeze and the muffled, metallic tunk, tunk of the old aluminum sliding framed windows tipping in their channels as the wind gusted, he remembered he’d agreed to get a haircut at 2:00 pm.

City Snippers will never become a chain, Henson mused as he shoehorned his car between Beth’s and the current customer’s car, blocking a portion of the old brick sidewalk on Jones Street. City Snippers is the opposite end of the spectrum from franchises which seek out malls where the upwardly mobile impulsively succumb to grooming far more often than appearance justifies. Beth’s clients include elderly ladies who keep a diary to know it is time for a do and businessmen who appreciate a regular reminder call. Beth keeps scissors and a comb on top in her purse like some Savannah women carry pepper spray. She’s cut men’s hair in offices, in a chair of a sidewalk cafe, and on a barstool in practically every downtown pub, even trimming one proprietor, until the grapevine leaked this to his better half and she promptly curbed the practice.

While Beth shampooed and massaged his scalp, Henson’s eyes roamed upward to the dusty grille of the window unit air conditioner and the drooping poster of a bronzed Adonis pinned to the ceiling. He did not dwell on the slightly blurred images, preferring to shrug it off due to the intense kneading Beth was giving his scalp. He closed his eyes and drifted. Do good ideas originate in the shower while you’re waking up, in the barber shop, in a scheduled