A Death Observed, Part I | The End of the Beginning

The story of my diminishment by the fangs of the psychosomatic plague gripping our age (Part I)

After a great blow, or crisis, after the first shock and then after the nerves have stopped screaming and twitching, you settle down to the new condition of things and feel that all possibility of change has been used up. You adjust yourself, and are sure that the new equilibrium is for eternity. … But if anything is certain it is that no story is ever over, for the story which we think is over is only a chapter in a story which will not be over, and it isn't the game that is over, it is just an inning, and that game has a lot more than nine innings. When the game stops it will be called on account of darkness. But it is a long day.

Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men, Chapter Nine

Several weeks ago, I absentmindedly bought some fresh garlic bulbs. A few days later, I discovered the garlic reposing on the kitchen counter and thought, “Ah, garlic! How delightful. I’ll sauté some and toss it in with what I’m making.” Out came the chef’s knife—the sloppy mix of butter, tallow, and lard in the pan was contentedly sizzling—and in went the garlic. All was delight.

And then, that blessed, sacramental smell arose, and a nightmare which I had interred in the deepest recesses of memory sprang out from the catacombs of my mind.

November 20, AD 2021, was a Saturday. The day prior, I had visited the grocery store to pick up a few sundries, including three bulbs of garlic. On Saturday afternoon, they were reposing on the kitchen counter while I baked something or other for the party. For, that night, I was going to a birthday party for the daughter of very dear friends. (The daughter is a very dear friend as well, insofar a seven year old may be called an adult’s friend.) I left home around 4pm or so.

I remember almost nothing of the party, which is uncharacteristic of me. I remember singing Happy Birthday in parts, and I remember taking the high tenor part. But all the rest is but a smear in my mind’s eye. Around 8pm, I noticed a severe headache was rapidly forming. Now, I have been all too well acquainted with headaches all my life: headaches from stress, blood sugar, dehydration; a variety of migraines from medication side effects, stress, and diet; a concussion is probably somewhere in there, etc. However, in recent years, I have all but conquered headaches of all kinds via a battery of dietary and lifestyle amendments. And this is important to note for two reasons: one, because headaches are thus, nowadays, very uncommon; two, because this headache was unlike any I had ever had before, which is truly saying something given the menagerie thereof with which I am so familiar.

I remember realizing that the pain was so severe, so neurologically debilitating, that I couldn’t keep track of the conversation anymore. The words were floating by, the laughter and the faces, and I realized I couldn’t understand anything happening around me. It was just disparate sounds, just sonic clutter, just flotsam in the ocean of my disintegrating consciousness.

Then I realized that I could barely hear anything at all.

Over the course of about thirty minutes, my right ear had become the nucleus of a continuous, exploding pain. Simultaneous with such pain was the explosion of tinnitus. As the tinnitus effected its ascendency, all hearing on my right side precipitously declined, unto total disappearance. My brain, unable to rectify the complete nonsense which my senses were now reporting, was allowing the tinnitus to begin to overwrite aural signals from my left ear as well; the brain, unable to decipher the spatial orientation of the tinnitus, decided that perhaps it was everywhere, and rendered it as such.

Forgive the violence of the metaphor, but imagine a Ka-Bar, or a slender, 10" chef’s knife; and now imagine the sensation of it being plunged into the ear canal, perpendicular to the skull, all the way to the skull’s center, over and over again—in perfect rhythm, in fact, with your heartbeat. That is what sprang into my mind as I sat at the dining room table that night, and that image is one which grew to be burned into my soul.

As my nervous system began to burn out from the incessant electrical firings, my limbs grew lax and weak; a vague numbness began to set in. My right eye began to feel an unflappable compulsion to close, arising from an amorphous searing pain around its borders. (I soon enough realized that that was because that whole side of my head was now under the reign of death.) My left eye, which is not my dominant eye, accordingly resented being asked to manage things by itself.

There is a faint memory of excusing myself from the table and stumbling into the bathroom. I think it was around 10pm at that point. There is a vivid snapshot in my memory of my face looking back at me in the mirror. My head was spinning. Anyone who looked at me would say that I looked like I was in perfect health, of course. Nothing was superficially wrong. No discoloration of my face, no swelling, no nothing; yet below the surface, death’s tentacles were doing their work speedily. I remember pressing my hand against my ear, against the side of my jaw, marveling at what was happening. Dumbstruck. Imagining my memory was failing me; that this was accountable for via some scrap of medical knowledge my brain had misplaced.

I did not wish to interrupt the festivities, and so I soldiered on, praying that people would start to leave so that I could ask my hosts for help. For they know all about home medicine and the like, and I thought that surely they could fill in the gap of medical knowledge under which I was suffering. By around 11:40pm, things were wrapping up. I finally asked them for help, rendering my deaf (and somewhat dumb) supposition: maybe an ear infection? Well, they lacked a fitting remedy for that. “But what about garlic oil, Paul?” At least it was what I had already thought of; three people couldn’t all be wrong, right?

Here we have returned to the disinterred nightmare with which I began: standing over my stove, watching the olive oil and crushed garlic cloves pour out their aroma unto my desiccated sinuses, thinking that this peculiar episode was about to meet its end. For what infection could withstand the might of garlic? And I remember thinking, “This is an ear infection? Those are a common thing. How could anyone, much less a child, bear this? How are these routine?” I was already slipping towards delirium.

Washing out my ear, whether with garlic or not, of course did nothing, or I would not be writing this. Somehow—and I mean somehow, for as you shall see, it was the last time for a long time—I wound up laid down in bed, sleeping, thinking that in the morning, the bizarre antics of my ear would be wrapped up, and I would be trotting off to sing in choir.

I awoke long before I intended, much less long before sunrise, around 5am, in what may be the most pain I have ever known. Befuddlement and confusion dominated; any curiosity as to what was happening was far from me. I remember very little of this day, and much of what I do remember is immaterial to the account at hand.

I remember texting some (likely nonsensical) vapid apology to my choir director, remarking that I could not come to church. I remember soliciting my neighbor to drive me to a friend’s house to get help; and I remember that my friends were at a loss as to what was happening to me. I remember thinking that ear infections could not possibly be this bad.

I remember that to speak, to move the muscles of my face, was so painful that my body would begin almost to convulse, and I would start weeping not even as a pain reaction, but as a reaction to the immense pressure in my head: the sensation was one of the tears being squeezed out of their ducts by some deep, unloosed wall of hydraulic force.

I remember, in a final Hail Mary attempt that evening, gobbling something like 200% of the daily dose limit of Excedrin (an OTC painkiller cocktail containing aspirin, acetaminophen, and caffeine—my selection of this will be discussed more throughout, but it was quite purposeful), asking a friend to come by in about twenty minutes [after the drug kicked in], and having him massage acupressure points in my neck and shoulders to loosen the still-building pressure in my ear, sinuses, and entire right side of my face and head. At this point, my neck and shoulders were stiff as iron and knotted as pine. The hope behind the Excedrin was that the aspirin, an NSAID (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug), would reduce inflammation enough that the acupressure effects may, well, have an effect.

I remember that the inflammation did lessen a bit—enough to ease the delirium a bit—but that the acupressure did nothing to ease the hydraulic agony in my skull. I remember finally eating something for the first time that day. And I remember deciding to go to bed, because sleeping usually solves any medical problem that I encounter.

But first, let us return to when I awoke that morning. I do not remember waking up, nor getting out of bed; but I remember a minute or two after getting up, the first time I bent my head over, chin touching my collarbone, attempting to stretch, thinking that that might somehow help matters. Instead, the pain and pressure so wildly, incomprehensibly, and impossibly intensified that I almost passed out. In a matter of a second (if that), my vision was blacking out, my head spinning, and everything going numb; and so I centered my head. And I came to realize, with very little experimentation required, that I could only incline or decline my head by about 5° before the blackness would come. And so, with that out of the way, let us return to where we were.

I remember attempting to go to bed. Even changing clothes proved quite difficult to do while keeping my head perfectly level (relatively speaking), and so I gave up on that front. Then I realized [during all of this, you may think it took me far too long to realize anything at any given time—be generous in such estimations, please, dear reader] that going to bed itself would be impossible. If I could not leave my head in any physical orientation other than perfectly vertical, how could I lie down—become horizontal—and sleep?

I remember trying to find some pillows or fitting proxies for pillows (I do not sleep with a pillow), making a little pile at the head of my bed, and climbing up onto the bed, stretching out my legs, but keeping my torso and head perfectly vertical, propped up against the wall. My head was leaning back at the outer limit of its newfound range of motion, just enough to rest against the wall (with an interceding pillow near my neck). My neck was already starting to get sore from holding my head level.

I remember turning off the light, watching my humidifier gurgle, and only watching, because I could no longer hear it. I could no longer hear much of anything. All had been blotted out by the supremacy of tinnitus’ static, its madness of the null, of pure blank.

I remember looking straight ahead, out the window, at a scene which I could have never imagined would become so entrenched in my heart. A street corner, animated by the motion of trees in the lazy wind, the blazing LED street light just outside the framed bounds of my window casting inky shadows upon the street by means of the trees.

But I remember seeing one more thing, looking out the window at that outside world which, in the course of a day, had grown so impossibly, irretrievably distant from me.

Lights. These little hanging strings of lights, quietly shimmering and dancing, utterly unconcerned with the world around them. Quivering in bouts of wind here and there. They illumined some of the patio they were adorning, and they were about half a block away. [I cannot include a photograph of them here, as they are not yet up this year, and I never took a single photo during the period A Death Observed describes—this shall not be the only time I regret the absence of photography.]

And it was evening, and it was morning, the first day.

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Remember, if you may be so kind, the epigraph—particularly its closing lines:

When the game stops it will be called on account of darkness. But it is a long day.

As I continue, you may very well wonder why I did not title this, the first part, The Beginning of the End.

Why instead The End of the Beginning?

Permit me to spoil something of the structure I have settled upon. The story shall be told in three parts. This first part, of dying; the second part, of being dead; the third part? Well, that much, I shall not spoil.

But this could never have been The Beginning of the End. This is not the beginning of anything. It is a death—nothing more. Death can only be the end, just as death is the end to which all other ends bow, and towards which all means flow. Death closes all, as the poet writes.

But what if the poet were wrong? What if there were something, or someone, that could make death into a beginning? If that were possible, of course, it could not fully purify the outrage and ugliness of death; death could still not only be a beginning. Death is always an end.

And so it is, even here: The End. But not of me, not of it all, as if all the constellations in my life could be squeezed into the head of a pin and called it all; no, while death may yet retain its terminal nature, this was no terminus.

This was only The End of the Beginning. Before November 20, AD 2021, I was some one. I was, in a world of ones, one in particular: some [specific] one.

Here, at The End [of the Beginning], that one comes to an end.