A Much Worse Life than She Remembered
By KJ Hannah Greenberg


Gretchen suffered not from disease, but from a problem with mentation. For reasons which eluded her care providers, Gretchen simply could not stay focused on words. Otherwise occupied, Gretchen ignored her doctors and her family.


It was not so much the case that the high frequency percussion ventilator, prominent among Gretchen’s ICU systems, pulled her attention away. So absorbed was Gretchen with resolving matters of her past that the machine’s rhythmic, mesmerizing sounds did not penetrate her.


Likewise, Gretchen’s challenged physical condition, compounded by hypoxemia, by a ventilation-perfusion inequality in the pattern of her breathing, was immaterial to her as she floated in a cataleptic state. As far as Gretchen was concerned, even the encroaching finality of her melanoma, already metastasized in her lungs, could wait.


Gretchen had had a much worse life than she had remembered. Only her malignancy had succeeded in vaulting her beyond the dreamy childhood she had construed through well-edited photo albums and anecdotes. Gretchen’s poetry and short fiction, as well, were anything but haunted.


Nevertheless, mere moments into her hypoactivity, Gretchen could evoke, with disconcerting clarity, aspects of her formative years which she had believed had been discarded. Her recollections of Dennis, especially, were troublesome.


Gretchen had not pondered, in more than four score, over her first boyfriend’s insistence that Gretchen’s underage sister perform sexual acts on him, nor had she been tormented, during that same lull, about that cad’s abandonment of her following her own deflowering.



Gretchen had forgotten, too, the tributes she had been forced to pay high school classmates as protection against spit balls. She had also not reflected, in a long time, on her earliest intimacy with her husband, Randy, who had been dead for two neat decades. Yet, suddenly, Gretchen vividly visualized their initial contact.



"I love you." Gretchen’s newly minted husband had declared as he thrust at her repeatedly. When he pressed his mouth hard against hers, she could feel his teeth and the strength of his jaw. Her face had hurt for days thereafter.



"I love you" bridal Gretchen had responded, believing the words she gifted. A man and a woman were supposed to say such things to make their interlocked motions meaningful. Clandestinely, Gretchen had cried.



Randy had been so full of desire and drink that he had not heard her tears. All he had exclaimed, at the height of their passion, was that the pin from Gretchen’s wedding corsage was sticking him. Gretchen’s glance at the offending blooms reminded her that those carnations were her mother’s favorite, not hers.



Beyond the realm of the comatose, Little Katie, herself a grandmother, pumped her fists when her dame’s eyelids flickered. Such movements provided hope that Gretchen might still break free of delirium. Carefully avoiding her mother’s tubes and wires, Katie leaned closer. She also checked to see if Gretchen’s lack of acknowledged sounds was due to ear wax.



Gretchen remained disinterested in both speech and common cognition; she was busied reviewing a lecture, presented decades earlier, to the local PTA, on why using coupons increases consumer spending. The smile Katie detected on her mother’s face was Gretchen’s smug satisfaction in telling the local stiff hats and starched gloves: that “cost cutting” pieces of paper, in point of fact, simply feed human stimulus-response cycles, rather than built thrift; and that apparent favors from merchants are devised to increase merchant profits, not buyers’ savings.



Katie moved away when a nephrologist needed to adjust one of Gretchen’s drips; Gretchen had wobbly serum creatinine levels. Unfortunately, while Gretchen was professing the benefits of point-of-sale purchases versus phone orders, the doctor was making a measurement error.



Immediately, Gretchen’s gums began to tinge black-blue. No one thought to lift Gretchen’s lips apart to check her mouth, however. On her part, Gretchen said nothing; she was reexperiencing the moment when she had concluded her first semester of university teaching.



Few had expected a mother of so many children to return to the classroom, let alone to sit in front of one. Only Andrew Walker, a handsome youngster from Hampshire, had bothered to compliment Gretchen on her first term’s worth of burgeoning pedagogy. Nonetheless, Andrew’s praise was discovered to be rhetoric recycled from his usual end of course speech.



Gretchen shivered. Katie pressed the call button. Katie had quarreled with Gretchen’s Cousin Francis, a New Ager who had argued that palliative care ought not to center on pleasure enhancement, but on life prolongation.



Frances, a UCLA biochemist, who specialized in polymerizing protein modules and who served on two different hospitals’ ethics committees, had insisted that dying is for redemption and personal renewal, and that most end-of-life pharmaceuticals are laden with heavy metals. Frances had wanted Gretchen’s pipes to be filled either with coconut water, i.e. "agua de pipa,” a liquid high in potassium, chlorides, calcium, and magnesium; or with seawater and its adjunct mysteries.



In conjunction, Frances thought that Gretchen ought to be sustained by a naso-jejunal tube. Most outrageously, Frances had wanted Gretchen to remain unresponsive.



Katie had instructed the ward’s nurses to stop admitting Francis.



Staff responded to Gretchen’s Code Blue, belatedly. Gretchen passed, without suffering the confabulation Katie had feared. Conventional, perhaps unnecessarily aggressive, care, administered in response to Gretchen’s quiet, fungating tumors, had brought Gretchen to an uneasy peace.


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