The Death of an Actress

The death of an actress

                        So beautiful, so gentle, so graceful, so out of this world

Dana: it’s like her whole her life is still swirling around. She is my dear ex-wife. A beautiful portrait was propped on the wall besides the hospital table.  Everybody has reasons to see her walking and talking again. Kind of she is still alive.

She was swept of her feet. She didn’t know it. It seems awful to me: she was a complex creature with tremendous complicated programed movements, a whole complex of coordinated actions and thinking and what I was watching now for was her eyes movement, hoping to see a feeble vibration of her eyelids that would prove to me that she was still alive. Before she had a stroke and then she had a seizure. I never examined her eyes so closely. Nobody would believe that she could survive the stroke and bounce back to her life ok but me. She was such a good woman, so trustworthy, so reliable. She had been hit by this calamity for no reason. “She’d come back to her senses”. I take her hand in mine. It is heavier than usual. After she’d come back from her sleep I’d have to tell her how much I love her, that I loved her all my life. The whole thing is to have her realize that this is the whole truth; she was the love of my life… She still looks beautiful even with her tongue twisted by the feeding tube.

The nurse arranges her pillow up a little bit to help her mouth close, which didn’t happen. “She’d be better tomorrow”, she says. 

Everybody is waiting to see her waking up from her seizure. The doctor talked to my daughter yesterday and told her that the seizure didn’t wipe out any additional spots of her brain besides what the first stroke did already. It is encouraging. I look at her as she is lying on her back with her beautiful head propped up on the raised pillows:  she looks relaxed though there are lots of tubes and wires connecting her to devices that trace her body’s work. 

Then, to our surprise, the doctor calls us in her office and shows us the two gray zones on Dana’s brain, one on the left side and another on the right side… “Those two bright circles are blood bubbles. Your mother’s movements and her knowledge have been severely affected, practically destroyed by the strokes… She is going to vegetate for a while if we keep the life support on”. The doctor was mistaken yesterday when she thought Dana had a seizure. It was another stroke… 

Who’d dare to define what life is and what life is not. People talk about her past and to make sure they are understood correctly they avoid repeating the doctor’s diagnose: “She’d keep living like a vegetable…”

The doctor is giving us an advice, to prepare thoughtfully her burial and to put in order her things and fulfill her desires if we knew of any. It sounded so cold and so cruel. My daughter is telling me that her mom expressed her wish not be kept alive on a life support if she became unable to take care of herself. I believe it to be true.

Dana is lost. We lost her. There are no hopes that she’d bounce back and be ok. I couldn’t make any comment on her behalf. I thought also that we didn’t have enough money to keep her living with a life support on. My daughter, Oana, and her husband, Tom, don’t see any value on keeping her alive with the help of the life support. They already decided that there was nothing else we could do but remove the life support and wait for her to pass away while breathing on her own. I left before seeing the nurse removing the feeding tube and the tube that sucks the liquids from Dana’s lungs. For me, the idea to keep her alive for as long as possible, matters a lot... After so much suffering I inflicted to my ex to see her living longer before drifting to oblivion was a big deal. I wanted to beg for her forgiveness. To keep her alive was part of it. 

She shouldn’t have been hit so brutally by fate. People are talking about fate as if it wasn't God's want. If what happened to Dana was God’s design, such design surely sucks. Angels are rummaging through the lists of people that would eat their last supper. Same stuff that happened to Jesus... I felt filled with rage. An innocent woman, pure as a saint, torn to rags… What’s left of her would probably keep going for a couple of days, like a defective watch, and then stop…

Next day I came to the hospital still thinking that she might come back to life. By the time I got to the hospital Dana’s life support had been removed. I would like to believe that this was the right thing to do since otherwise - the doctor said - she would live paralyzed and unconscious forever. Would she have enough strength to fix her hazy mind and get back? She could still see and hear, I hear the echo of doctor’s talk. She couldn’t move her limbs, I thought, but she may see and hear when I call her and ask her for forgiveness. The rest of her was gone. Moreover she could move only her right eyelid. Her swollen tongue is still hanging out of her mouth. “It got bruised by the tubes inserted in her throat. It needs a couple of day to get healed”.

On the wall above her bed there are still two boxes that display her living signs like her heart bit and pulse, I guess. One of the devices is beeping continuously. The box that controls the morphine decanter level is also beeping. I know very well about such decorum from movies. Those beeping sounds, I think, harbor danger. By the time I reached the nurse lounge my mind runs wild. I return to the room with the nurse that shuts off the beep. It looks like my ex-wife is trying

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 28.11.2013
ISBN: 978-3-7309-6509-2

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Widmung:
To Dana, in memoriam