O.C. Writers

// Excerpt from Deathbed Photos //

In my hand is a snapshot of Hiroko, my dead wife, which I took at the behest of our thirteen-year-old son Eugene, who is with her in the photograph. It is a morbid pose: she supine on the bed in the family room where she had succumbed an hour before, a soiled sheet covering her torso but not her shriveled limbs; he, eyes shut, his cheek against her gaunt, sallow face.

The figure in the photo little resembles the woman I knew for twenty-six of her forty-eight years. Blotchy skin is taut over nose, chin and brows – features formerly softened by cartilage and flesh. Years after the fact, I gaze at her image feeling the shock of meeting someone, long separated, who has changed almost beyond recognition.

I recall Eugene taking the camera and snapping photos himself – this after sobbing uninterrupted for an hour. I recall, too, the camera’s flash as he captured her corpse on film, each flash reigniting the agony we’d witnessed during the previous nine months, which is to say about the same amount of time it took her to gestate the child now recording her demise.

He hasn’t looked once at his work in the years since. I have only rarely eyed the photos taken during her illness and its aftermath, stored in one of several cardboard boxes containing get-well cards, sympathy cards, medical records, and literature gathered from clinics, hospitals, and the Internet (just entering the scene) on the disease that killed her. Looking at them now, I am assailed less by grief than by utter frustration at her dying so young.

Because that feeling is with me always, I remember Hiroko’s death, despite its certainty, as having taken me by surprise. This notion of surprise, I suppose, is a kind of fiction, not unlike the hour of death, which appears on the certificate as 8:50 p.m. – useful but not wholly accurate.

This deathbed portrait is a fiction, too. Eugene and I were not alone. Both sets of parents were in the room to bear witness. They had come from afar: mine from Northern California, a full day’s drive away; Hiroko’s from Japan, a transoceanic flight and a distant culture away. Mine had been in town for two days; hers, here at the house, for four long weeks. Yet I invariably recall Hiroko in death as being surrounded only by Eugene and me. That is the power of the snapshot in my hand; it excludes all others and binds us immediate family members together: deceased mother and grieving son on the far side of the lens, and I alone on this.

Twenty-six years: was that a long time, or short? I still don’t know. The one thing I’m sure of is that it is not a bygone time; for I continue to relive those years, and especially that last year, every day without fail.

*****

We were a threesome in this same room when first absorbing the shock of Hiroko’s illness. Returning home late one afternoon in March 1997 from my department office at UC Irvine, where I had been writing an exam, I found Hiroko on the floor, prostrate.

“Stupid doctor!” She spat out the words. “He says I have cancer.”

Eugene, home from middle school, was eyeing her fretfully as he stroked her back. He was accustomed to his mother’s theatrics, but he could tell that this was no ordinary outburst. The television news was on, but no one was watching.

Hiroko had been complaining earlier in the year of mild nausea, but we thought it due to the drug she was on for elevated cholesterol. By late February she had developed an intolerable itch that left her sleepless at night and scratching herself to a bleed. A nurse practitioner at the UC Irvine campus clinic suspected scabies and treated the condition with a body cream. It might be a case of atopic dermatitis, we were told. It would go away on its own, we assumed.

It did not. Our family doctor, when he later examined her and noted jaundice, succeeded in getting our health insurance company, an HMO, to approve an ultrasound the very next day at the UC Irvine Medical Center’s Department of Radiology. Not wanting to disrupt my teaching schedule, Hiroko traveled to the hospital by campus shuttle.

The hour-long examination was negative for gallstones, but the radiologist, reviewing images of Hiroko’s abdomen, discovered something far worse.

“We found tumors in your liver,” he announced, as if pleased at having turned a routine exam into an event of consequence. He left the exam room momentarily and reappeared with a throng of interns who proceeded to ogle the specimen that Hiroko had become: Hepatic Adenocarcinoma, Exhibit A. Having been declared cancer-ridden, then suddenly put on display, she left the hospital distraught. The shuttle bus driver on the return trip apparently took pity on his sole passenger and dropped her off right at the house.

Listening to Hiroko’s account, I felt my blood surge; no one should suffer such a pronouncement alone. This, I told myself, would not have happened in Japan, where tact takes precedence over candor and the patient’s family bears the brunt of bad tidings.

“What does he know?” Hiroko repeated, mantra-like. “What does *he* know?”

She cursed the radiologist and, in her own non-native English, mocked his accent, which revealed him to be among the hospital staff’s sizable international population.

The doctor’s brusque diagnosis, however, prior to any biopsies, told me that the disease was patently obvious to the trained eye. If he appeared unconcerned about timing his findings, wasn’t it because there was no time to lose?

Watching Hiroko’s deflated form, I recalled her habit of badgering family, friends, and colleagues in pursuit of her latest cause. If she pushed hard enough, she reasoned, people would bend to her will. This time, however, she was up against something mightier than any human foe. Her angry speech lapsed into incoherence, revealing blind terror behind the rage.

“You have cancer!” She mouthed the doctor’s words as if in a trance, reliving the horror of being treated as a textbook case.

Hiroko’s narrative fragments, which I’d labored to piece together, now congealed with terrible clarity. The doctor was regrettably unschooled in decorum. But was he intent on springing a joke on his patient? Such a conclusion made no sense.

Stunned by my train of thought, I retreated to the bathroom down the hall. I raised the toilet seat and stared at the gleaming bowl. The stream hitting water and the flush that followed muffled my sighs. I rinsed my hands and dried them on a towel, only to bury my face in it and weep. This was the beginning of the end: of that I was certain. Just what sort of end – or beginning, for that matter – I had no idea. But as surely as water flowing down the drain, the life I’d known until then was gone.

Not daring to linger, I hurriedly dabbed my eyes. No looking away, I told myself; be steady as a rock. I had burdened Hiroko in the past with my own serious illness. Too often, I had been the weak link in this household. I’d strained our marriage with periodic neglect. . . . Moments later, as if nothing were amiss yet wondering how I’d cope in the days ahead, I returned dry-eyed to my disconsolate wife and bewildered son, both still huddled on the family room floor.