Hardest times never really disappear

My pub pal leaned back in his chair, the way boxers do when they see a punch to the face coming.

Except this punch -- veiled in the form of a probing question -- had hit him squarely in the gut.

"What is the toughest time you've experienced?" I had asked. "And how did you get through it?"

I don't know where that came from, any more than I can tell what prompts any of those type of questions.

The ones I tend to ask friends and acquaintances over dinner, or a drink, just to stimulate conversation.

As for these two, I wasn't anticipating my pal's reaction -- I'll call him Chris to protect his privacy -- because normally he's not the kind of guy who shares his interior thoughts, especially the emotional ones.

But he answered the first question almost reflexively.

The one about the toughest time in his life.

"Being with my brother for six days while he died," he said.

Then he went on to share the rest of the story.

Chris said several years ago, his brother -- his younger, adult brother -- had overdosed on medication he took for epilepsy.

"He literally fried his hypothalamus," Chris explained.

The hypothalamus is the part of the brain the size of a pearl that links the nervous and endocrine systems and plays a part in controlling several basic body functions,

Including, as it happens, hunger and thirst. What it doesn't control, though, is breathing.

So for a month, Chris's younger brother lingered in a hospital ICU, like a dead man breathing.

After a month, a neurologist finally gave the family the facts of life and death in regard to their son and brother.

In telling me over a drink, Chris reduced the message about his brother's prognosis to four words.

"He wasn't coming back."

But there was more.

Because he could still breathe on his own, the family was left with only one alternative to end the life he no longer really had.

Permit hospital staff to stop feeding and giving him liquids.

Chris was living in another part of Canada when he got that news.

He drove several hundred kilometres to get home.

He still remembers the day of the week he arrived.

It was a Friday.

By that time, because there was no room in palliative care, or perhaps because the hospital knew he would only live a matter of days, his brother had been transferred to a private room in a medical ward.

Chris recalled his father being in the hospital room when he got there, but not his mother.

She couldn't face what was happening.

Chris had to, though, and he had to know the brother he knew and loved was really already gone.

"I tried to talk to him," he recalled.

It was also Chris's way of testing to see if they were doing the right thing by not giving him food and water.

Chris returned to his brother's hospital room again the next day to find his brother by himself.

His eyes wide open.

Chris was angry, and he right then and there made a promise to himself.

"That's not going to happen again. I'm never going to leave him alone again. I moved in."

And Chris stayed there, for the rest of his brother's life. Reading passages from Louis L'Amour's style of western fiction out loud to his brother. Talking to him. Telling him other people were thinking about him. Swabbing his chapped lips and nostrils.

Until, just before the seventh day, his brother died.

In the end, the end wasn't the toughest part for Chris.

His brother's death was a relief.

What he struggled most with was trying to share his feelings with a lay chaplin who came by the room to help him.

"That was the toughest part for me. Talking to strangers, expressing myself."

Those feelings, as he expressed it, included the irrational, but understandable.

That he had killed his brother.

Even though he knew he had done the right thing, and that he had been there for him, despite his own pain.

"So," I finally asked again, "how did you get through it?"

Chris leaned back again, ever so slightly, as if I'd hit him again.

"I'm still getting through it," he said.

Aren't we all still getting through it?

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 4, 2012 B1