by Michael Bettencourt

Created on: April 15, 2008

"RAGE, RAGE..."

My friend's letters had mentioned the possibility as far back as the fall of last year, but now what had stood merely possible had become painfully probable now: the death of his father. He had come back to Brooklyn from San Francisco each time the alarum had rung: the complaints about vague pains and exhaustions, the initial physical exams, the test bore of a biopsy, the sentence of liver cancer, the metastasizing of the cancer to the brain, the long vigil at home, the final breaths. Because of the way nature had built my friend, I knew this whole event was wrenching for him, so I called as often as I could to see how he fared and offer what ear I could for his thoughts and feelings.

As we talked, however, it became quite clear that his father, enfeebled as he was, did not intend to follow the tragic script laid out for him by the expectations of those gathered around him: a graceful acceptance of the inevitable, a slow but metered decline into death, with his family encircling him. Even though he knew that the disease had no intention of breaking camp and going home, he refused to let the siege have its say. He lingered, tenaciously, not with a grim countenance, beads of sweat on the forehead, but with good spirits, a little scorn, and his trademark stubbornness. (It also helped that he didn't have to take pain killers: the tumor in the brain seemed to clamp off the pain, and so he could, unmorphined, keep his full wits about him.) Why should he follow out the tragedy to its appointed curtain-fall? What did he have to lose?

The phone calls got funnier and funnier as both he and his sister, in alternating conversations, would mock-groan about how the long the man hung on to life while the rest of them, lives on hold, waited for him to let go. His sister said she'd forgotten what her husband and children looked like, she'd vigiled at the bedside for so long. And my friend, a clinical psychologist, phoned, e-mailed, faxed, and phoned again to keep his practice going and the grant proposals on schedule. He said that they'd even started to joke with him about it, sitting in the bedroom, drinks in hand, asking him if he could please tell them, with a little more precision, when he intended to let them all get back to their land of the living. And he took it good-naturedly because, as my friend said, he was doing precisely what Dylan Thomas had told him to do: "Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage..." Well, perhaps not rage, but instead

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