Morphine

 I'm afraid I spoke too soon the other day when I wrote that Dad's version of cancer fortunately comes without much pain, and that therefore we would probably never have to touch the morphine supply in the refrigerator. 

Yesterday, he started rubbing his scalp more frequently in the spot where the tumor is located. We asked if it hurt, and while—in his current mental state—he does not reply to any question with something so simple as a "yes," that appeared to be the gist of his response. 

He had already taken two tabs of Tylenol that morning, so we weren't sure what else to do. We called the hospice nurse, and she said it was time to break out the cool blue liquid that had been delivered to us as part of dad's "comfort kit." 

A lot of the instruction on day one of hospice revolves around this potent and emotion-laden substance. They tell us that using morphine doesn't necessarily mean the end is near. They try to break our culture's automatic mental connection between morphine and death. 

But I can't deny that getting the bottle out of the fridge felt like a break-glass moment. We had reached some fundamental turning-point; there was no way back from this dark bourn. 

I also felt, more selfishly, a certain curiosity when I eyed it. The drug belongs to the dread class of opioids that have wreaked such misery on our society in recent decades. It is essentially the same stuff as heroin or oxycontin. Milk of poppy. 

It seemed to me strange that this substance that is so tightly controlled and tabooed in our society could suddenly find its way to our refrigerator; and that my dad—the most straight-edge and drug-free person imaginable—should be about to consume it.

The morbid privileges of the dying, I guess—let them envy such who dare. 

And most of all, what came to mind for me, was the substance's symbolic freight. I thought of that immortal poem of Heine's—called simply "Morphine"—in which the drug is personified as a close kin to gentle death—a comforter, but one whose comfort pales beside that final rest that only his brother can bring. 

Morphine, he writes, is—

the one who’d take me confidingly in his arms –

How soft then, loving, his smile, how blessed his glance!

Then it might well have been, that his wreath

Of white poppies touched my forehead, at times,

Drove the pain from my mind with its strange scent.

But all that’s transient. I can only, now, be well,

When the other one, so serious and pale,

The older brother, lowers his dark torch. (Kline trans.)

Dad, in recent days, has come to speak in similar terms of death. Two days ago, he told the hospice nurse that he hoped his process of dying would not last "weeks." And according to my sister, some of his first words to her this morning were about how he was ready to "check out of this pop stand." 

Meaning the Earth, this timeline, this mortal plane. 

My dad's mind, too, in his sickness, has begun to look to the second brother as a source of greater and more lasting solace than the first. 

As an Epicurean character says in Anatole France: 

Happily there is a remedy for these evils. Let us say no more; I await the lady whom I have never wronged, for never have I doubted but she was gentle and true-hearted, and I have learned by much pondering how peaceful and secure it is to slumber on her bosom. Many fables have been told of her bed and dwelling-places. But I have not believed the lies of the ignorant crowd. So it is, she cometh to me as a mistress to her lover, her brow garlanded with flowers and her lips smiling. (Allinson trans.)

Dad has never been morbid in his thoughts. More than anyone I know, his default mode is joy and hope for the future. But he was also clear with us from the beginning that he did not fear death, and would be ready for it when it came. 

He spoke truly and has kept his promise, as I had no doubt he would. 

"I don't mind dying. There was something before me and there will be something after," dad always says. Life will go on in new forms—the life that he did so much to foster and nourish in me and others. 

I have often, in my adult life, felt a certain guilt that one branch of the human family tree came to a terminus in me. I have not had kids myself, nor do I intend to. And perhaps, somewhere in the clouds—as James Merrill once put it—"a Father Figure shakes his rod / at sons who have not sired a child[.]" 

But dad has never mentioned this to me in his dying, nor does it seem—on even an unarticulated level—to be something that troubles him. 

I was reading B.S. Johnson's last, posthumously-published novel See the Old Lady Decently, this week—and in the preface, he is quoted as saying something about his mother's death from cancer that strikes me as profoundly true, having been through this experience now myself:

"The debt one owes one's parents, which I had thought one paid by having children oneself, I now see is more nearly paid by having to watch the mother die." Or the father, for that matter.  

My dad, at any rate, doesn't seem to view me as someone with a debt still unpaid. In one of his more lucid moments the other night—perhaps one of the last he will ever have—he told me "I love everything about you" and "I wouldn't have made it this far without you, of that much I'm certain." 

Yes, dad believes in passing on the torch of life from one generation to the next. But the ways we each can advance this process don't have to be so literal as having kids outselves, for him. 

Instead, as near as I can understand it, I think his view is something closer to Samuel Butler's bio-theology—his view that, as living beings, we all make up a greater entity known as life whether we plan it that way or not. 

As he wrote in "God the Known and God the Unknown": 

We call the octogenarian one person with the embryo of a few days old from which he has developed. An oak or yew tree may be two thousand years old, but we call it one plant with the seed from which it has grown. Millions of individual buds have come and gone, to the yearly wasting and repairing of its substance; but the tree still lives and thrives, and the dead leaves have life therein. So the Tree of Life still lives and thrives as a single person, no matter how many new features it has acquired during its development, nor, again, how many of its individual leaves fall yellow to the ground daily. The spirit or soul of this person is the Spirit of God, and its body-for we know of no soul or spirit without a body, nor of any living body without a spirit or soul, and if there is a God at all there must be a body of God-is the many-membered outgrowth of protoplasm, the ensemble of animal and vegetable life.