Dignity Always

That night was the third time that pain had interrupted the brief sleep that age allowed. Awakened in the darkness, his eyes closed as if to protect his memories, he tried to calm himself, lulled by memories he projected onto a film, as he fell asleep with a smile in his soul. But that night, he couldn't. That night, pain and insomnia had joined forces.

Lost in thought, he felt old and alone. Eduarda had died two years ago. A part of him had left, the best part, he was sure. Now he was left with the bitterness of waiting. His two children had lives of their own and were far away. He saw them sporadically, increasingly distant, increasingly less. That night, he wished he had them close, wished he could tell them how much he missed them. He looked at his watch. It wasn't even three yet, and the pain and loneliness were already unbearable. He called 911, and a few minutes later, an ambulance was at the door, transporting him to an emergency room. Luckily, it was the hospital where he had dedicated 43 years of his life. He had left 14 years ago, and that somehow bothered him.

When he retired, it was as if the institution, at the turn of the 24 hours, a small step from eternity, had forgotten the 43 years he had walked those corridors, passed through the same doors he now crossed in the opposite direction, doors that now saw him as a stranger, an inconvenience, saw him as a "user." He had always been like that with institutions, without any feelings. With people, it was different; the next day it was as if nothing had happened. They continued to treat him with the affection and deference he had always felt during the decades he had spent there.

However, this state of grace was not permanent, and with the falling of the autumn leaf, he felt bereft of memories. It was no longer just the institution that failed to recognize him; now it was also the people who no longer remembered him.

It was then that he realized that hierarchies endure more than the complicity of position or profession. When he crossed paths with Mr. Henrique or Mrs. Adélia, he greeted them with affection and longing, and in return, he felt the same dignity as always. With his peers, the situation was different. Those from his time had become fewer and fewer as the years passed. Now, it was the younger ones who were at the helm. Some of them had been his students. He felt he had treated them well, as he always did with everyone, especially the younger ones, with whom he liked to melt away. Now, when he needed them, humiliation best described his state of mind. He had ceased to be Doctor Joel Teixeira da Cunha, or Dr. Teixeira da Cunha, and was now being addressed as a crude Joel, or a more polite Mr. Joel.

So, Mr. Joel, how are you feeling today? What brings you here? How can I help? These were rhetorical questions; no one was really interested in knowing!

The feeling of a foreign body in the institution that had been his for 43 years had worsened over the years. Now he was afraid. It wasn't the fear of not being recognized anymore; it was the fear that he would be harmed, that he would be put in a corner to wait for the "Charon" for its final journey. He had saved his money for that journey long ago, but he didn't want to die alone; that was what he was afraid of.

His partner had died two years ago. It was a shock to lose the comfort of someone who had breathed the same air and eaten the same crusts for over fifty years. Now, most days, or in the darkness of night, it was memories that warmed him. Life was about remembering; there was no longer room for new memories.

That morning, he could no longer bear the pain or loneliness, no matter what the cause. Whichever it was, they would always give him a yellow bracelet. A color, a label, a sign—you won't die from this, you'll die with this!

That's how they all stood in the yellow room. Resigned, that was the word that best described them. Resigned to the pain, the loneliness, the light and fitful sleep. Resigned to having resignation as their last tether to others and to life, the ultimate link, the last obstacle to obsolescence.

There weren't many, maybe eight or ten, it wasn't clear how many. Some might just have been companions, but they were all old or had an aged look, as if they were ashamed of some vestige of youth.

Joel found himself reflected in a mirrored surface, a passage to another world, but also a doorway where past and present blended into an image where the scars of the past accommodated the pains of the present. He was old too; the years had passed through him without rest or contemplation. His hair, what little remained, was dry and brittle like an unweeded meadow. His face was furrowed with wrinkles, like a bas-relief recording of his nearly eighty-year-old poem. But of all that his face reflected, it was his eyes that most impressed him. They still had a youthful glow and a youthfulness that clashed with his image and the place in which he was reflected.

He then noticed that everyone there had swollen, bulging eyes, with wrinkles that nearly obscured their vision. He himself had them too. They suggested a bad night's sleep or a shortened rest period, but they could also be due to the tears they had accumulated and were no longer able to cry.

Finally, his time had come. Mr. Joel, office seven! He heaved himself up from his waiting chair and resignedly walked toward the beginning of the end.

He'd been diagnosed with colon cancer, and now he'd have to go through the ordeal of tests, more tests, those that needed repeating, those that were unnecessary but ordered anyway, those that were canceled, those that were rescheduled, and all the others that hadn't yet been rescheduled and were considered essential. A whole profusion of "peepscopies" already laced with voyeuristic overtones, followed by an equal parade of treatments, side effects, new treatments, all in a spiral of perpetual continuity that he lacked the time and health to endure. And yes, he would have to go through this endless ordeal, but he would do it alone. He remembered Tolstoy's old Ivan Ilyich; at least he had Praskovya Golovina's hypocrisy and daughters to cling to. For him, Joel, the path would be much more solitary.

Why did they persist so obstinately in prolonging life? Why do they expect people to live a hundred years or more? To die alone and in slow decomposition, as he felt was happening. He wanted to cry out in revolt.

Because he had nurtured the hope throughout his life that science could bring him closer to the "Grail" of eternal life. Science will never be able to subdue biology, he thought, as it occurred to him that the possibility of death often occurs twice. As a tragedy the first time, and as a comedy the second time. Let us die suddenly! End this proselytizing of death by decay, he wanted to scream!

He was offered surgery, which he refused, and chemotherapy, which he also declined. And he did so not because he saw them as unimportant. He refused them precisely for that reason: because he no longer wanted to survive, because he didn't want to endure the ordeal of a decomposing body. A body in which a heart beats while the brain watches a slow decomposition, as if he were the captain of a ship and the last to abandon ship. He lacked the courage or stoicism of those intrepid sailors. And yes, he missed his Eduarda. He didn't want to make her wait any longer.