Clear Signals: A Death, a Life, a Remembrance

By Kevin Darnell

CLEAR SIGNALS goes into events, thoughts and emotions surrounding the terminal illness and death of my wife in 2010. It also deals with the ensuing aftermath (May 2010 - May 2012) and various contradictions for the bereaved as I moved through the world then. It flashes in and out of years of history for my wife and for myself, including childhood years. Thus then: the death first, years of history second, a tying together of memory third.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669841692

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Copyright © 2022 by Kevin Darnell.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 09/09/2022

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CONTENTS

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PART ONE

Before May of 2010 I didn’t know what a morning glory was, how one acted, lived, grew. I didn’t, for example, know they, like people, rested through the night. Near the southwest corner of our driveway, twenty-one of them lived. They flowed up from their roots in sand-filled spaces between flagstones. They spilled across driveway and sidewalk. Some nights I went out front under the streetlights to watch the morning glories, purple and shaped like barrels. They seemed to be asleep, waiting, ready to rise with birds of dawn. Maybe they amassed energy for their sunlit hours from stars. Come sunrise they woke up, shapeshifting into funnels, open ears, each one a bluish-purple with five red veins curving inward: at each vortex, the veins converged to a point, a small whitish star.

Suppose the sun could not ascend until the morning glories, fed their nightly ration of starlight, awoke and sent their own light space-ward, the full ninety-three million miles? Suppose little lights from morning glories also take eight minutes to reach the sun whose light reversed reaches earth in eight minutes.

There must be a lot of morning glories on our planet. Maybe the spring sun could not arise until the morning glories did and maybe they, like people, wanted to be seen, simply wished to be known. Maybe all Ruth had to do for them, besides keep them clear of weeds and give them a little water, was see them.

After May 18, 2010, the morning Ruth died, I became guardian of, among the rest of the plants and flowers both inside and out, also the morning glories.

Near Christmas of 2003, Ruth showed me a letter she sent to a vet clinic in Loveland that listed Scooter’s troubles to and through her right beak nostril, which then bled. Is there anything you can do at this stage of the game? Please help if you can.

Scooter, our bright yellow cockatiel, black of eye and red of cheek and crest, was born in May of 1992. She was Our Bird. She was named Kiki at birth, due to her tropical aspect. But her birth name didn’t stick and so Kiki got changed into Scooter because of how she spent hour after hour scooting back and forth along the wooden dowel that ran the length of her cage through its center. She was for us, in a sense, a human stuck in the body of a bird.

Not long before Scooter’s first birthday, one night in spring of 1993, when I rode my bike to arrive at Ruth’s apartment, I saw her daughter out on the balcony, nervously sweeping a flashlight beam over the lawn below. She, Rachel, was watering the outside hanging plant, Scooter standing on her shoulder. Scooter’s wings had already been clipped, but not yet knowing she couldn’t fly, she launched herself off Rachel’s shoulder, striving mightily to stay airborne, fluttered, squawked and landed on the lawn below, now in the cross-hairs of a world of hunters she’d never before known. I would think cats, in particular, would love to taste a bird like Scooter. At least, if I were a cat, I would. Not being a cat, I nevertheless, according to Ruth, posed a threat to poor Scooter. I, as the ugly penis monster was, in Ruth’s opinion, in a special category, for Ruth had, apparently, read Scooter’s tiny mind and dubbed me being thought of therein as the ugly penis monster. Ruth felt that since Scooter was a lady (intelligent, beautiful, driven) she liked her fellow-ladies first and foremost (her Ruth and her Rachel). This conviction was proven beyond doubt when Scooter would often lovingly stand on Ruth’s or Rachel’s head or shoulder and most sweetly chortle and coo. But Scooter wasted no such affections on the ugly penis monster. Thus, we gave each other endless hours of interspecies amusement in this love/hate kind of way. I often combed my hair in a way resembling a bird’s crest when alarmed in some way. Then I’d put my male face close up to Scooter, as close up as I dared, always slightly out of pecking range.

Ruth sometimes referred to Scooter simply and unceremoniously as the winged lizard, since birds hail from the reptile family. Thus, a lizard who could fly. Or, who at least imagined she could fly whenever necessary. And when else might it prove necessary for tender and sensitive winged lizard to be terrorized into flight save when facing off with the formidably-ugly penis monster? Maybe though, sensing her clipped wings could not carry her to safety, she resorted to the next best thing: rearing up her yellow enraged head and bringing it down like a meat-cleaver, hissing and pecking and wanting a piece of me, or better yet, my whole head in one gulp.

I was driving home and crying, she said when she got home, telling how when Scooter was given her fatal injection, a little yelp came out of her. Crying over this goddam insignificant bird, she said and started crying again.

During Scooter’s last days, she sometimes wandered disoriented along my leg, while I was on the couch, rubbing her stressed beak, with its blackish growth, on my pants, chortling but subdued, as though trying to itch what could not be scratched. She seemed to be aimlessly roaming over my leg and unable to get her bearings, unable to tell north from south.

Maxwell’s, the commercial greenhouse Ruth worked at for a few months, though rigid about how many bathroom breaks it allowed its workers, didn’t enforce the wearing of protective gloves. Ruth didn’t wear them because she liked to be in touch with earth and dirt directly. She probably knew how foreign soils can carry nasty shit. Can lodge under a fingernail. Can wait a long time. Waiting maybe in her finger, inside it, unseen, unsuspected, unknown, eager to grow and travel. Oh yes, she ought to have known: plants drenched in Asian soil were bad news, they could make you very sick.

Maybe she forgot. In respect of her sensing green things and how best to help them grow, she was smarter than God. Smarter than God in one sense and dumber than dirt in another. It angered me no end, her passionate concern to see how Scooter may have contracted her fatal illness, her bird-bodied squamous, rather than attend to her own human squamous cancer, if in fact squamous cancer it was. She believed that she possibly gave her own squamous to Scooter.

I felt tremblingly pissed, pissed in my bones and cells and blood. Even so, this deep diving anger was not at this time clear in me. It was rather only the merest hint glimpsed sideways and then gone. But it did not fit anywhere because Ruth’s later serious illness appeared to have nothing to do with something so trivial as a finger problem: I mean, that by the time Scooter died, her finger thing seemed to be fixed and left behind. Or maybe Ruth believed if she gave the squamous no more attention, it would go away. Maybe it did and her cause of death in 2010 was not related.

(5/18/2010)

With her death, I felt thrown hard through time, forward, backward, sideswiped. I had something taken away that could not be put back, as also I had something given me that could not be taken away. This did not happen here at this juncture, but many months after. This all happened in a point that took me months and years thereafter to catch up to. This one point later became as many points as could fit inside a sphere, close to infinite. But isn’t the infinite not also, in its way, finitely-bound? And how could any finite have no infinite attached?

Oh SO young. A neighbor said to me on the street. It unnerved me, angered me, I didn’t know why. I kept silent. I had nothing to say. What could I say?

During the periods centered around these medical reports and opinions to follow, I had not yet been exposed to the tearing away from the world of one beloved. I had not yet been exposed to blinding sorrow, and had only the vaguest clue what it might be, let alone how I in particular might face such. This blinding sorrow held its own release and resurrection, its own escape from a kind of mindless darkness into a pain-filled but wonder-fed light: the curse became the blessing, the bad fortune the good. But all this was not yet, it awaited. Many hours of a strange kind of limbo remained before me, many walls to climb over, tunnel under, go through.

To cross a chasm twelve miles deep, but only three feet across, I could not see the three feet I had to jump across, but only its deepest depth. Suppose I went to jump over but tripped and fell in? It would be a long way down. And to cross a chasm twelve miles long, but only three feet deep, I could not see I could cross the chasm along itself, I saw rather an unleapable distance twelve miles long. I was forced to set out, to explore truths directly. I didn’t know what these were, where these would lead, how I would progress from there.

Our last contacts in this life were relatively quiet and matter-of-fact, but arriving there entailed a certain kind of difficult struggle and sweat. Eventually, we breathed a shared air before having to be torn loose from one another.

Her finger operation done in 2000 by Lee Mann failed to achieve the hoped-for result. Did Mann screw up? Could I say that? If I could, was it necessary to say, to sing from the rooftops? When one doctor, Smith, was critical of another, Mann, then the patient, Ruth, was stuck in the middle, and this middle would take ten years to run its full course. The medical community lives in a land the lay-world hardly ever touches. As a member of this lay-world, I felt myself maddened, obscured, powerless. A sharp edge of doubt stabbed through fog. How I doubted and raged, imprisoned under suspicion. It was one thing to say a doctor could do no wrong, quite another to say no doctor could ever do right. But I was infantile, I said both. Then it was natural for me to think, over and over again, if Mann was thinking much harder about his own life (his coming vacation or coming divorce, his children with or without him, his new house or troubled marriage or looming emotional foreclosure) than about the finger in his operating room theater, in that hour belonging to Ruth.

Like a signal from a star, this all reaches my human eye years after that star has died. This pulse comes through the uncommon, bleeding into the unknown.

I want to run a race, pass a torch, plant a seed. No two reports of any two deaths will sound the same in any beings left alive behind on earth. The death to be examined is also examined in orbits of other lives affected, not mine alone. The race is finished. The torch goes out. The tree bears fruit and dies. I could finally retrieve some thoughts stranded in a space where no time touches. These are thoughts that breathe and live. They call without voice. They are silent before the most fervent begging.

And beg I did.

(Aug 13, Fri, 2010)

I hunt through old medical files and find these reports from Lee Mann, Henry Smith, the emergency room, yellow stickies with penciled shorthand notes from Ruth to herself, other reports from other places, other years, other doctors, from 2000 on up, from times before, various pieces of loosely organized data. Pieces and parts. Little boats of clarity in oceans of confusion. I try to order and decipher these. Mostly a losing battle, staring at all this data, and maybe only by way of long looking at the same things, a long-held confusion starts to clear up. These excerpted bits following stick in my throat because they show how much of the iceberg I never saw.

"Consultation Request To: Henry G. Smith MD

Dear Doctor Smith: Please see Ruth Carroll. We discussed her case earlier today — cellulitis following full-thickness skin graft one week ago for a squamous cell carcinoma of the right middle finger. I appreciate any advice on antibiotics and treatment.

Lee Mann MD

07/25/2000"

"Discharge Diagnosis: Staphylococcus aureus post-operative infection of right hand. Procedures: Incision and drainage of right hand on 07/26/2000.

Consultations: Henry G. Smith MD

This lady is a 53-year-old lady who had two recent procedures for squamous cell carcinoma. She developed a Staph aureus skin infection, was admitted, and underwent I.V. Antibiotics, whirlpool and infectious disease consultation. She was placed on Ancef to be taken twice a day either outpatient or home therapy. Daily outpatient whirlpools. She was discharged on Lorcet Plus and Phenergan to be seen in my office on Monday.

Condition On Discharge: Satisfactory.

Laboratory: Revealed 15,000 white count. Cultures and sensitivity showed heavy growth of Staph aureus.

Lee Mann MD"

"Consulting Physician: Henry G. Smith MD

Date Of Consultation: 07/25/2000

Ms. Carroll is admitted for a postoperative infection involving the right hand. She had a nine-year history of a prolonged nail bed abnormality on her right mid finger. This had evidently been diagnosed as a fungal infection multiple times in the past, and in fact, it had been cultured out the same.

However, this had progressed, and she had never really gotten better, and she evidently underwent biopsy and cultures by Dr. Mann.

The pathology was consistent with squamous cell carcinoma and she underwent a resection of the same by Dr. Mann with a skin graft over the area of the nail bed approximately one week ago. She was doing well up until 2-3 days ago when she began developing increasing pain in the finger. She was admitted to the Emergency Room today with a fever of 102 and significant pain. Dr. Mann requested consultation for the same.

She has been on Vicodin for pain only, and otherwise has been fairly stable.

Past Medical History: Otherwise unremarkable. She is a smoker at 1/2 pack per day. She has a history of squamous cell carcinoma as described above. Otherwise, there is no history of chest abnormalities, lung abnormalities, recent steroid usage, and liver problems.

Physical Examination: She is alert and oriented. Temperature 98.8, respiration 16, blood pressure 104/60. She seems to be in a modest amount of distress related to her right hand.

Consultation. Reply

Henry G.Smith MD"

"Adm Date: 07/06/2000 Attn Phys: Lee Mann MD

Present Illness: This is a 52-year-old right hand dominant lady with a chronic infection of the right middle finger. She has had numerous treatments. She is admitted for biopsy and excision.

Impression: Chronic lesion of the right middle finger. I am worried that this may have become malignant or that it represents chronic fungal infection. We will biopsy and excise it and hope that we can resolve the problem eventually. The patient is well aware of recurrence and the possibility of a malignancy.

Lee Mann MD"

"Date: 07/25/2000

Mode Of Arrival: Private vehicle.

Chief Complaint: Severe right hand pain.

History Of Present Illness: This 53-year-old white female had recently undergone a wide excision of a squamous cell carcinoma to the right middle finger nail bed and with this procedure she had a graft taken from the palm of her right hand. This surgery was on 07/18/2000 by Dr. Mann. The patient had an uneventful early convalescent course. However, yesterday she started having some pain at the hand and had been in touch with Dr. Mann and an early morning office appointment had also been set up for today. Evidently, the patient was at the office, but then decided to come to the Emergency Department where she complains of severe pain at the hand and now systemic fevers.

Emergency Room Record"

I don’t see how her finger trouble from twenty years ago could be her cause of death twenty years later. The medical reports with their strict formats appear comprehensive, detailed, precise. But going behind veils of scientific precision, I’m cast again inside spheres fogged up with vagueness and conjecture. The guessing game is a side of the medical world that affects only patients and their near ones forced to enter that world. Was Ruth only guessing, or was she quite certain Mann turned one surgery into two, in effect doubling