Last night I got to hold V.'s hand for a long time – about an hour and a half, I guess. The experience is reassuring – her hands are clean and soft, and pleasant to hold, and there is movement from breathing (or perhaps from the respirator, but the effect is the same); the immediate experience is that she is there, that she's still to some extent okay.
The actual facts don't necessarily match that, sadly – although again we're caught in a web of interpretation: small signs (eye movements, her turning on her side) have made her husband ecstatic that she must be recovering, but more definite problems (discovered in H.'s close questioning of doctors, which V.'s husband avoids) have resulted in H., V.'s longtime girlfriend, being very pessimistic that V. is still 'inside' that body at all.
Anne and I, on returning home, agreed – admittedly without really knowing anything about the medicine involved – that both of them seemed to be overinterpreting; that it still seemed as though we didn't really know, one way or the other, and both were making premature decisions based on personal feelings (V.'s husband unwilling to conceive of a world without V., H. clearly defending herself against raising anyone's hopes, including her own, only to have them dashed).
It's a bit like the old battle between experimental medical therapies and 'alternative' ones, especially in serious cases – both have a lot to do with faith and the assertion that if you only believe they will work. And both sometimes work – which means that being allergic to such faith seems almost as silly as overdoing it.
Oh well. The doctors may, finally, today, be reaching some conclusion on whether V. is still with us or not. My own feelings are in three tangled strands – this morning I realized that, not only would I miss her as a friend and as someone hugely fun to hang around with, and especially to eat and to shop with; and also as someone who, when we worked on writing projects together, could keep me honest and working in spite of myself; but that I would miss her even more as someone with whom I could share simple awareness of illness and the threat of death – there's nobody around me these days who gets all of that without extensive translation or cushioning aside from her, and she has made a huge difference in my past five years here by being a touchstone of reality and real experience, an antidote to both drama and clinical detachment.
The second strand: clearly I am upset, whatever control I may have over the expression of it – but the being-upset is familiar, not shocking. In yesterday's class on music about AIDS (the third time I've taught this class), I explained V.'s situation to the class and how complex people's feelings got under these high-pressure conditions – then, no less than five or six times during a lecture where I was playing different kinds of sad and mourning musics (this particular lecture was about classical choral music, so there wasn't much humor as there is in some lectures), I simply lost it – voice cracking, finding myself unable to go on for a minute or so. It all feels like revisiting familiar territory – which is why I have so much control there, of course, and can offer V.'s husband some support; none of this is weird or alien. But there is a lot of grief just below the surface; just like anybody who is new to the idea of death, I'm simply angry and sad that things might change.
And finally, and probably rather irrationally, there is that sense of holding her hand. It feels as though she's still there: and even if they tell me she's not, and turn off the machines, I'm clearly going to think of V. as still present, in some way, for a long time....
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