Unfinished Work

I always thought of death as something that happens to you. Until I met Daniel. He set about dying with a keen sense of responsibility, as if elected to an important office—hoping to set a good example. And he did.

***

Birds flying nearly vertical, landing lightly on bare limbs. Needles high above us, deep green clusters. The dry ones fell. They clicked on the tent roof at night when the wind blew and sounded like rain. “… such small hands.”“Go ahead,” I told him. “Die. See if I care.”He laughed. It had gotten to that. The choking feeling had subsided months ago, but there was a time when we had tugged at each other, had pressed our bodies close like two boards and I had said things like: “I can’t stand the pain you’re in. What can I possibly do to help?” And he had asked questions of me as if I were a sage and not just a fairly recent girlfriend, fifteen years his junior. Questions like: “Am I still here?”“You’re right here,” I had told him. I pulled at his torso, trying to induce a strong enough sensation to assure him of the physical world.By now, though, that early panic had eased, mostly. We lay in the tent on the land where Daniel lived. The night was thin around us, the racket of frogs in the estuary crazy with mating. An owl shrieked. Further up the path a porchlight shined, its bare bulb illuminating the unfinished house Daniel lived in.Unfinished, I thought, like his body, like mine, like all of our lives. Volunteer carpenters from the community came in to finish the house enough so he could be comfortable in it before he died. They worked into the night. From the tent, we heard the rat, rat, rat of hammers, the chug-chug of a nail gun, and the occasional scream of the circular saw.“Those are all my tools,” Daniel said. His head rested in the hollow between my ribs and my pelvis. When I breathed in, his face rose like the sun, then set again. When he made me laugh, he bounced crazily, giving me an exaggerated clownish grimace.“I have collected all of the right tools to finish a house,” Daniel said. “It’s strange that I’m not the one using them.” He had amassed a storage locker full of equipment of all sorts: not just construction tools, but the trappings for five or six complete lives. “I didn’t know which one I wanted to live,” he said. He had scuba gear—tanks, fins, and tools for scraping barnacles from the submerged hull of a yacht. He had colored pencils, sketchpads, pen nibs, easels. In another box: shoe leather, oversized needles—instruments with names I didn’t know but they looked vaguely surgical.“Did I tell you I was a cobbler?” he said, referring now to that box. He hadn’t told me. “I handmade shoes to order. I wanted each to be perfect—cut and sewed to fit the unique foot. I couldn’t keep up though. The more I tried, the more behind I got. Toward the end, I worked straight through the night. The chemicals made my head spin.”He didn’t laugh about this. It still hurt. He explained how women in batik tops and men with long braids had come to stand at the shop door. I could imagine the disappointment growing on their faces with each visit, their estimation of Daniel sinking. Like a bad dream, he kept digging through the piles of leather thongs, soles, laces; he kept stitching, cutting, molding, but never got finished. The faces grew in number. They hovered around the tent now as Daniel told me about it, as his head rose and fell on my belly. A blonde woman with ringlets peered in through the mosquito netting. You said they would be ready a month ago, she pleaded, softly. I was going to wear them to my sister’s wedding.“Do you mind if we change the subject?” Daniel asked me, his voice brittle.“No,” I said, and the milling people dispersed, their bare feet soundless on the gravel drive, across the unmowed grass. Daniel breathed out heavily.

***

“We’ll climb to the overlook,” Daniel said. He got out of the tangle of blankets and stood. Naked, he was the color of a pencil eraser. His hair hung down to his nipples. It had gone white at the roots but was still silky and the color of dry grass at the tips.Hammering, hammering, sawing in the background. Our friend Francis, who had organized Daniel’s hospice team, was overseeing the construction. I could see him from where I lay, fine-boned and balding, hands on his hips as he watched a man on the roof. Francis was an unconventional minister of sorts, who ran a weekly ecumenical spiritual gathering. He maintained a ministerial air—quiet, concerned, humbly endowed with a wisdom beyond the rest of us—but lacked other trappings of the office. Part traveling wise man, part court fool, he smoked pot and drank red wine with exuberance. Today he wore a dhoti, a white wrap-around Gandhi skirt, with a carpenter’s belt strapped over the top.“Come on,” Daniel said, ignoring the noisy work behind him. He didn’t say, Hurry, but meant it. We had been in bed all morning. My day off. We pretended to be just lovers with nothing better to do. We even had made love, a little—carefully—until his nose started to bleed and we both lay very still, breathing, while the fear ebbed.“Are you sure you can?” I asked. I pulled my limbs free of the blankets one-by-one. I felt muscular, almost chunky, beside him. My muscles seemed to get fuller as his thinned and disappeared.“Give it a shot,” he said. He didn’t say, one last time. There were always these two parallel threads of conversation now—the spoken and the understood. At first, I had doubted that he sensed the unspoken, but when I asked him, he had confirmed it, gruffly. Now I didn’t need to ask. I saw it in his eyes—a sadness and a pleading along with relief that I was there and understood. But still the sadness.I pulled on wadded-up socks, damp from the night on the tent floor. He wore a tennis shirt. It looked empty on him, as if still on the hanger. He stepped into white shorts. Even thin as he was, he moved jauntily; his great athletic vigor converted now into jerky motions. He tried to convey good humor—and did. He made me laugh. He didn’t mean to, but also didn’t mind the result. One of the things I liked best about Daniel was his desire to make me happy.“Hup, hup,” he said in a mock English accent. “No time to waste.” He bounced on the balls of his white tennis shoes.“Are we taking a walk,” I asked, “or going to play doubles?”“Which would you prefer?” He paused, waiting for my reply as if it were truly a choice.Daniel and I had walked up to the same overlook on our first date six months ago, before his diagnosis. We’d sat on a weathered maple snag that the sun made hot to the touch. Daniel told me about evading the draft in the ‘60s and I watched ants stream across the snag on their invisible paths.Back then it had been a quick hike, just ten minutes. Getting there wasn’t the point, being there was. We would sit for an hour, taking in the precise way blue inland waters shone and black islands made a collage up the horizon. Now the fluid had risen in Daniel’s lungs, converting him from bass to baritone to tenor. He spoke high and womanly as we began the trek.“I’m not as fast as I was,” he said. He sounded puzzled as if he didn’t know why.“I’m in no hurry,” I told him.“I’m in a hurry,” he grumbled. “It just doesn’t do any good.”We walked, step by step, under the cover of firs with trunks the size of broomsticks. Twenty steps, then we stopped. Daniel bowed his head, laid one palm on his chest, breathed carefully. After a few minutes, he nodded curtly and we moved ahead. One, two, three, four. Thirty steps this time, then the pause, doubled over. He gripped my shoulder. His hand made a wet spot there.“Do you see the orchid?” I asked.No reply.When he seemed steady enough to forego my support, I crouched. A shoot twelve inches high grew between rocks. Its skin reddish brown, it had ten little bells hanging from it. I lifted one bell with a fingertip, careful not to snap it off. I could feel Daniel see it—its speckled interior like a fairy cave, like a sex organ, like the imaginary creation of a child.The overlook came to us, a surprise by the time we reached it. The trip had grown so slow, I had forgotten the goal. Once there, Daniel crouched in the dry grass, his elbows on his knees. He didn’t look up for a long time. Far below, the Puget Sound spread out. Shining ripples of tide lines marked a script across it. One, two, three sailboats appeared frozen with their sails arched full of wind—tiny and white and perfect.At last Daniel raised his head. He looked out, lips parted not with joy or gratitude but as if the sea, the sun, the pale sky were telling him something he must remember and he needed to concentrate to get each word right.

***

When the carpenters finished one room in Daniel’s house, Francis and I, along with the rest of the hospice team, moved a bed in, a dresser with Daniel’s clothes, and a small stack of books and cassette tapes. By this time Daniel didn’t try to get out of bed to do more than go to the bathroom, and he did that—just as jaunty as ever—with an escort. He bounced on the balls of his bare feet and suggested we take a jog.Years before, Daniel had left his cobbler’s work unfinished. He returned customers’ payments, left orders unfilled. He had carried the boxes brimming with his failure here to his new home, unwilling to let go, and stored them in a shed. The percentage survival of stage four lung cancer was basically zero. So the diagnosis challenged Daniel, not with getting better, but with dying well.“I’m not sure I can do it,” he told Francis the afternoon Daniel settled into his room.Francis tilted his head to one side and raised a gray eyebrow. “What do you mean, Daniel?” he asked. He stood by the bed and took the hand Daniel reached out to him."I’ve fallen short at everything else,” Daniel said. “Nothing has worked. Why should this?”Francis made a quiet hum. With a sparkle to his eye, he said, “On the contrary, my friend, this time I believe you’ve finally found your forte.”Daniel heaved a sigh. He nearly choked. Coughed until his face was purple and the veins stood out on his neck. When he could speak again, he said, “I hope you’re right.”

***

When the pain got bad, Daniel accepted morphine. I sat beside him in bed a lot in those last days. August sun made the grass, the wild rose bushes, and the madrone bark all crisp. With the window open, I smelled the pond mud drying at the edges and the sweetness of the grass Francis had mowed. Daniel sat propped up on a pillow, apparently asleep. His skin had gone gray with a waxy yellow sheen to it. His breath smelled now of decay—a powerful scent that made me gag when I got too close.“The smell of death,” Francis called it. He knew the road marks. When he said this, Daniel’s eyes fluttered open and he smiled a beatific smile, happy to have Francis confirm that he was doing his job.After Francis left, Daniel shut his eyes again. He looked awake in every way, but his eyelids stayed closed. He lifted his right hand and carefully closed finger to thumb. He began to stitch. It must have been leather he stitched because the needle was large and only went in with firm pressure and came out with a tug. Daniel’s hand arched through the air as he pulled the long thread free. He worked with the grace of expertise.I leaned in close and spoke softly. “What are you doing?”“Sewing,” he said. His eyes opened. Blue eyes. He beamed at me.“Are you finishing a pair of shoes?”He nodded. Then he looked down to where the blanket stretched smooth across his lap, his fingers holding nothing.“They’re just,” he waved vaguely, “on the other side…”He lifted his gaze back to mine. “I wish you could see them,” he said. “They’re beautiful. I’m almost done.”Then he shut his eyes and slowly, with great care, began again. All through the hot afternoon, he stitched.Monica Woelfel met Daniel on Orcas Island, off the coast of Washington state, where she lived for over 15 years. Daniel had been discussing with Francis Racey the idea of starting a hospice, the first on the island. In essence Daniel started the hospice by becoming its first client. His terminal illness rallied a volunteer care-giving team that went on to found the nonprofit hospice named Lahari. After he died, Daniel left a small bequest to the budding hospice. Francis hosted Lahari in his home for several years. The organization began in 1994 and continues to this day, serving the dying and chronically ill, their families, and caregivers in the community.[author] [author_image timthumb='on']http://www.turningwheelmedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/monica1_lowres.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]A longtime resident of the Pacific Northwest, Monica Woelfel now lives in Soquel, CA, with her husband. Her nonfiction, poetry and fiction have appeared in a variety of publications, including SIERRA Magazine, North American Review and The Sun. Woelfel has worked as a journalist and a caregiver. She has recently returned to school to become a nurse.[/author_info] [/author]