A Death Observed, Part II | Spent Light in Marred Eyes
The story of my diminishment by the fangs of the psychosomatic plague gripping our age (Part II)
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains…
- Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses” (AD 1833)They also serve who only stand and wait.
- John Milton, Sonnet XIX (ca. AD 1652)
One cool December morning of late, around dawn, I awoke with a start, choking on blood and—well, it’s not exactly mucus, although it does seep down from my sinuses. (Dead giveaway as to its non-mucus nature: it coexists amidst nasal mucus, very conspicuously its own species of material.) It’s a milky silver, with a texture and gravity not unlike albumen. It does not dry or harden; instead, it nucleates into globules around 5mm in diameter, and given time, they form weak bonds between each other in thin, fibrillar structures faintly reminiscent of an incomplete polymerization reaction. However, they always remain a viscous liquid. Should I blow my nose, the structures may pull apart, each constituent lazily attempting to spring back into its globular form. Sometimes strands remain, though. The sludge, as I call it, has a bizarrely high tensile strength; one of those strands can be stretched several inches before finally falling away. All of this is to say that when the sludge finds its way down my throat, it can be rather tedious to cough up; and the (I assume obvious) implication is that the sludge only began to appear in my body after The End.
As pained, somewhat frantic coughing cleared my airway, and then as my heart rate equilibrated—as oxygenated blood bathed my again conscious mind—I blinked a couple times, not believing my eyes. Straight ahead of me, out the window, down the street: yes, there was no mistaking it.
Lights. These little hanging strings of lights, quietly shimmering and dancing, utterly unconcerned with the world around them.
They were back. It would seem that, while the darkness could not overcome the light, the doubling of electricity costs where I live had achieved what the darkness could not. The lights which were once left on 24/7 were now lit only in the darkest hours of the night.
And the following morning, as I languorously crawled out of bed hours before first light, the lights were again gone.
In Part I, I made a throwaway mention of “desiccated sinuses.” From the very first day of The End, my nose was peculiarly empty. No moisture, no mucus—dry as a bone. By the third or fourth day, the bleeding came. On whichever day it started, my nose bled for just over thirteen hours straight. Remember that I had to keep my head perfectly level or else risk blacking out; and so gravity was very much working against me in the blood control department. No matter what I did, the blood would not—seemingly, could not—clot. I do not remember how it finally stopped, nor do I remember just how much blood I lost. Over the next few days, the nose remained utterly devoid of mucus or moisture. Blood occasionally manifested, but even it eventually dried up. Where was the mucus? Well, I have a theory. But first, the quickest of summaries.
In all of the time I am about to cover, for it will be a good deal of time, no given symptom dissipated until when I record it doing so. The situation was additive in nature. The deafening tinnitus? Constant. Delirium-inducing pain in the inner ear? Constant. Searing pain around the eyes? Constant. Etc. When I speak of this or that being overwhelming, should you consider it grandiloquent or melodramatic, please generously consider that everything was additive. The human body (much less soul) can only take so much. Now to return to the mucus theory.
After about a week or so, a dark brown pus, or sludge, or pick your noun of choice, began to be secreted by my right ear. It dripped down out of my ear canal at a steady rate, not unlike a leaky faucet. There was never blood in it. It would dry, forming a crust on the skin similar to that which forms around the eyes from conjunctivitis. I have half a dozen shirts stained with it. I have sheets stained with it. It resists any and all attempts at washing. When I would sleep at night, sitting upright against the wall, the ear would pour out the pus all night, dripping down my head, neck, and shoulder.
Any cursory glance, much less deliberate thought, towards this sludge, would cause one to think that it was some bastardized hybridization of nasal mucus and earwax. Indeed, for about two or three months of The End, both of my ears more or less stopped producing any earwax at all. To this day, the earwax generation of my right ear remains mutated—somewhat off, both in composition and in amount, from what it used to be.
Some reading this, however, did see me in brief flickers throughout this period, and they will wonder how they never saw this sludge. For instance, I sang the cantor part in an Advent Lessons and Carols service [while almost entirely deaf] during this time. But—please forgive me the digression—it was much stranger than mere deafness. Whatever faint sounds did make it through my tinnitus-perforated hearing, I would then hear a second time, about 0.3 seconds after the first time. And what’s more, the pitch of the sound would be shifted down by about 5/8 of a step. Truly, this made for quite a surreal singing experience. There is something haunting, if not outright terrifying, about singing when you cannot even particularly hear yourself, besides hearing a faint, ghostly double of your voice, lagging behind, that is also just a bit more than a half-step flat. I had to sing entirely off of the muscle memory of what certain pitches felt like in my throat, striving to block out all that I heard. The entire service is a ghastly smear of memory. I was more or less in shock from all of the cacophony, despite how little I could hear. But enough of the digression. How, the reader asks, did I go out in public with sludge pouring out of my ear? The answer is very simple, and it is very American: the answer is drugs.
By taking ~100% of the daily dose limit of the previously mentioned Excedrin, which for my intents and purposes I was utilizing for its aspirin and caffeine, whatever inflammation (or whatever else) which was causing the pus to pour out could be controlled for a couple hours. It also brought the pain in my head down to about an 8/10 on the pain scale. Now, there was a problem with this scheme: the problem is that I said “for a couple hours.” The pain could be ever so slightly diminished for about three hours; the pus, for about two. And so, the routine was thus: 1) Wake up in extreme agony every morning, take four tabs; 2) By noon at the very latest, agony was again very much encroaching. Take four more tabs or not? Do I care about having a healthy GI tract ever again? 3) Suffer through afternoon either drugged or no, trying to get to evening; 4) At evening, the trilemma: take four more tabs, but then wake up in the night in agony, or take four more tabs, and then take another four tabs just before bed (can’t be good for me), or suffer through the evening and then take four tabs just before attempting to sleep, knowing that in the morning I’ll be in agony anyway?
For those disinclined towards doing the math, for several weeks, I was taking 400%+ of the daily dose limit, every day. How I still have a stomach lining will be addressed shortly. During this time, as the pain in my face gradually worsened, with swelling radiating throughout the whole right side of my face, my ability to open my mouth to eat was rather rapidly declining, so inflamed was the hinge of my jaw. After about ten days, I think it was, I could no longer eat. And so I was subsisting entirely off of eggnog that I would make every morning and drink over the course of the day. Here is the recipe, which I doubt I’ll ever forget.
Raw milk - 3 cups
Raw eggs - 2 count
Raw honey - 3 tbsp
Ground nutmeg - 1/4 tsp
Ceylon cinnamon - 1/4 tsp
Vanilla extract - 1/4 tsp
Had I ever ingested anything particularly acidic during this period, I have to imagine that my stomach would have instantaneously transformed into a single gigantic ulcer, given the disgusting volume of aspirin that was going through my system (with little in the way of anything else to dilute it). But despite all of the delirium, dizziness, and sleep deprivation, I stuck to my eggnog, because I was generally thinking clearly. Or rather, I had thought clearly in the past. In the midst of this all, I was merely drawing checks on a previous cognitive balance. I was hardly thinking at all: instead, I was operating off of mental muscle memory.
Over the course of these ~50 days, the worst of The End, I lost around thirty pounds. When I ran a hand through my hair, the hair came off in great clumps. Washing my hair in the shower caused a cascade of hair not out of place in a barbershop. My eyesight degenerated, with its double astigmatism becoming much severer. Paralysis and numbness began to radiate from my inner ear, overshadowing my right cheek, creeping down my neck. Just as I am beginning to dilate my descriptive focus, though, let us contract our focus yet again. Yes, the time of acute suffering is bounded by a rough fifty day mark; but that acute suffering came in two discrete episodes. And of the first episode was born, by far, the greatest suffering. And the greatest suffering has gone unmentioned until now.
After no more than a week at most of The End—after passing every waking minute sitting upright on my bed, spine straight as an arrow, head held upright by a neck that became increasingly pained (if this sounds silly, and I am sure it does, imagine never lying down, or holding your head, or leaning back—imagine your neck holding up the weight of your head perfectly rigidly, motionlessly, for weeks on end—because that is what this was), eyes shut due to pain (so no reading), hearing largely drowned in the oblivion of tinnitus (so no listening to anything), mouth increasingly incapable of opening (negligible eating), nose bleeding, ear extruding sludge, dizziness so severe I could not walk remotely straight, much less without bracing against walls, conscious mind almost irretrievably devoured by unspeakable pain, etc.—I began to be visited. It was at night, of course; that’s generally the way of such things. And my visitors would say things. By God’s Grace, I do not remember any of it, save one thing, which elicits shivers to even recall: Physician, heal thyself. It was not an invitation or an imperative.
It was a taunt.
There were two visitors. Like footprints in wet sand, there is an impression of their presences seared upon the surface of my memory. I could point to where they would loiter in my bedroom.
Regarding their taunt: I am not a physician, of course; or rather, not by any credential (although I received much of the education of one). I might humbly submit that per the Hippocratic Oath, I am more of a physician than most who now bear the title, but that is an argument for another time. But I have poured an immense amount of time in my life into helping others, or others’ children, amidst disease and injury. For a few people, I am the first whom they call if something “goes wrong.” I am whom they go to. And it was that avenue by which the visitors needled me: See how you’ve no one? Others come to you, but who can you go to? See how you heal others, and not yourself? You are alone, and you have failed. You cannot even heal yourself.
After a night or two of such visitation, I stopped turning lights off. Night or day, it mattered not: every light in every room was on. This did not particularly discourage the visitors, mind, but it made them, somehow, a little less awful. And I would murmur half-remembered hymns and psalms under my breath, for I could barely speak. And they blathered on about whatever it is they blathered on about, and the tauntings continued.
The visitors were only auxiliary to—only accessories of—the greatest suffering that I mentioned before, and which sprang into being fully formed and actualized on the morning of the First Day. That suffering is something for which I lack the descriptive language. “Dark night of the soul” is a start. “Severe depression” is as well. But they are too myopic, too restricted. What I experienced was the complete annihilation of the self. If I may use an otherwise previously-defined term for my own purposes, it was “ego death,” which is to say, “the death of my ego” (n.b. “ego” is Latin for “I”). My personality was pulverized. I lost no faith in God, and my Christianity did not waver for even a moment—but I was ripped out of all of it. It was as though I were watching “some one”—not I, but another—and believing in and witnessing his faith in God, his Christianity—but they were no longer my own. I felt no emotions of any kind: no sentiment; no hope; no anything. Just as the skin of the right side of my face felt nothing, so my soul felt nothing. It was as if all residue of my soul had been scraped out of my skull and heart and deposited into the fire. It was not that there were a cold, inky blackness and that it was particularly unpleasant. It was not that there were an unnerving absence (of anything in particular) that was an unpleasant sensation.
There was no sensation. There was nothing.
The world, which I earlier wrote had become irretrievably distant, had dwindled unto nothingness. What was there to retrieve? I was, utterly and indomitably, alone. There was nothing else but the pounding, pulsatile pain, the deafening static, the blurred vision, the pain, the pain, the pain. To say that there was no hope is not enough: the entire Concept of Hope had not only been obliterated or demolished, but rendered impossible. It was not that I mourned losing hope. Any memory of hope was eclipsed; the very reality of Hope being something which existed was expunged.
A brief aside: my incessant use of the passive voice here is not an accident. Integral to the greatest suffering’s nature was the ineluctable sensation that something, or someone, was doing this to me. That there was an agent, a cause; a moral, conscious actor, if you will, impressing this hell upon me. There was a personal quality, a vindictive quality—a virulently aggressive, gleefully murderous quality—to it all.
There was not one emotion, positive or negative, which I could feel. Anything resembling tender humanity—a soul—was gone. Any memory of such sensations was gone. I was left a spent husk. I felt nothing and did not know what feeling even was. I worry that in writing this, I may sound like a sociopath. Perhaps I do. I shall have to trust that those reading this have sufficient context as to realize that this condition clearly did not wholly endure. However, to say that it did not wholly endure is not to say that it did not change me. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not unlike my namesake, I can grimly lay claim to a jagged, obtrusive thorn plunged deep through my flesh—through my mind, and body, and soul.
But I have come up terribly short in my description. The utter spiritual oblivion is, after all, indescribable. “Existentially evacuated” is another term that I have used. Later, when things further worsened, I prayed for death. I prayed to be taken Home. The yearning for Home didn’t die. Not everything died when the ego died. Just most everything. Contained within that most everything, and concurrent with the occlusion of the soul, was a shattering of the mind. Those who know me at all have tended to call me smart; some who know me best have proffered such unmerited lauds as, “one of the wisest I’ve ever known.” Whether such monikers are valid is irrelevant; what is relevant is that the means by which people reach such judgments are of measuring my words, almost entirely those spoken in conversation. (Few have read more than little of my writings.) And what The End wrought was a profound disintegration of my cogitation, most visible in my faltering grip on language (remember that thinking itself is only possible via the medium of language).
Unlike occlusion, disintegration leaves bits behind. Wreckage. The soaring towers and stained glass may be bombed out, but the fractured buttresses yet litter the ground. And so while emotional sensation had been entirely muted, my flailing, wounded thoughts yet retained perfect, splendid memory of what they once were. I never forgot what I lost. I still have not. But mid-sentence, I would forget everything that I was about to say, much less what I had just said; because my thoughts had simply evaporated, vapor-like, from my mind. Vast segments of my vocabulary spontaneously dropped out of my conscious mind for months on end, only to lazily reappear long after they were needed. A mind which once delightedly, contentedly digested organic chemistry, literary criticism, Virgil (in the Latin), higher mathematics, Beethoven piano sonatas, and even the vulgar idiosyncrasies of computer programming, was now reduced to sputtering “um”s and “ah”s amidst conversations on such simple matters as the weather. As my body weight precipitously declined, so too did my physical powers; and married to that decline was the near total decline of my mental powers. The sensation of both together was one of being existentially lobotomized. When the life of the mind is paramount, for said life to then be snuffed out is a grievous wound. Even months after The End, I would find old letters and essays I had written, and I would stare in awe, in utter disbelief that I had once been able to so string words together. And all of this continues even to this day, although the disintegration dissipates ever so invisibly, marginally, slightly, with each passing day. And I have good days and bad, and some days I can only produce a sentence of conversation, or read a music score, by the extremest of efforts, so disoriented and fractionated is my mind. (Tinnitus’ incessant song of Damocles, if you will, does not well aid me in having a clear mind.) But: Der Geist Hilft, to say nothing of mundane helpers—the ensemble of which shall be discussed in Part III.
And I must reemphasize here that things were not as dire as they might have been, because I could not remember the most vital of what I had now lost. It was not that I remembered once knowing Hope, or delighting in Beauty, and then was left to endure the loss thereof. No, all of it was simply gone, and while I sensed that I had lost a great deal (just about everything, in fact), I did not know the scope of what I had lost. Yes, I knew what I had lost cognitively—but that was a known loss. The unknown loss, or rather, the unknownness of it, was an unspeakably kind blessing. Remember too that so many of these days passed by in delirium. A delirium colored by intense introspection, yes, but what else can one do, sitting against a wall with shut eyes and closed ears and screaming nerves for days on end? The introspection was of a very dispassionate sort, though. Almost auto-clinical—but it is not important to this tale. All told, the greatest suffering was not unlike the feeling when you walk into a room only to promptly realize that you forgot why you did. It was like that, except with the entirety of my existence.
I am subtitling this tale, The story of my diminishment by the fangs of the psychosomatic plague gripping our age. As you shall soon see, by any reasonable clinical diagnosis, I first contracted SARS2 in mid-December, almost a month after The End. However, by any reasonable clinical consideration, that which came before the SARS2 infection—namely, The End—was of the same plague. Both are parts of a whole, and the whole is the psychosomatic plague of our age. Before I speak about my combat with SARS2, however, there are two things far more important to recount: both True, but only one, Beautiful.
At some point near the beginning of December, in one of the only texting conversations that I had amidst The End, I wrote to Penelope (previously mentioned here) to tell her about the poem “The Pulley” by George Herbert, remarking that it was encouraging to me in that time of crisis. She delightedly texted back with another of Herbert’s poems. I opened the link she sent and began, such as I was able, to read it aloud. Two lines into the second stanza, my eyes were glistening; by the middle of the third stanza, I was sobbing. I dropped to my knees, my voice spent and gone, and bowed my head—the first since The End. And the blackness came, and my tear-stained vision swirled, and the tinnitus swelled to triple forte, and the throbbing pain overshadowed all, and for a moment, Time dilated into an unyielding expanse, and my head lay bowed, my neck screaming out in stiffness, my senses melting down from duress, and for the first time, I began to remember all which I had lost. The poem, “Love (III)”; the memory, the love of God.
Such was the Beauty; now for the second Truth. Over the course of The End, simultaneous with the deepening ego death was a physical phenomenon. On the right side of my head, as numbness and paralysis plunged downward from my inner ear, a discoloration on and under the skin followed. Owing to my beard, it was not visible until my neck. But on my neck, it could be better seen for what it, evidently, was: a blackness of, and in, the blood. My anatomy is rusty, and I never took any photographs of this, but I believe it was my right jugular vein that was, as days turned to weeks, gradually turning black (or perhaps a very dark grey) from its usual vibrant blue. Indeed, the discoloration moved with the paralysis and sensory decline; or rather, perhaps the paralysis was following the discoloration. Before the paralysis would manifest, a dull pain of inflammation would emanate in the given region. And in early December, the aching was breaching the span of my collarbone. The blackness had almost made its way off my neck, to my lungs and heart. With it came epithelial tenderness and a generally poisoned appearance. The skin did not turn green, per se, but it was not a healthy shade, either. It had the hint of a chartreuse air, if you will.
In tandem with this encroachment of death was a redoubling of the visitors’ efforts. To say that my spirits were crumbling is overly generous, as at this point, for all intents and purposes, I had no spirits at all. I was a blank, vacant, null, adrift in a waking hell. Whatever light I had once had was now spent; and so that is all that was left in my marred eyes: nothing. Not even fear. Just, as before, infinite awe at what was happening. Quintessential befuddlement. I slept very little these days, surrounded by light, yet leered at by the visitors. I was trying to wean myself from my diet of Excedrin overdoses, and so the ear was flowing all the more, the head pounding all the more: in short, delirium ruled all. And I absentmindedly mentioned to Penelope over the phone this bizarre creeping blackness in my blood, how wherever that darkness went, it left behind something resembling nerve damage, and how wherever it was moving towards, it projected dull pain and inflammation. And I remember asking, not unlike a child, something wildly dispassionate and detached, “It’s as if it is moving towards my heart. I wonder what will happen when it gets there?” I don’t remember everything she said in response; but I remember the sound of her strained, desperate voice as she uttered a first word of exclamation: “Paul!—”
Two or three days later, the visitors had a Visitor. This memory is as a brushstroke across my heart; the pigments dragged across time and space, across the Tapestry of Providence. It is a flood of faint imagery, spilled across the canvas of my consciousness. This memory did not happen only once. I do not know if all of it ever happened at once. The days and nights of this time were continuous; such demarcations of chronology meant nothing. But the Visitor came—but He was no Visitor at all, for no King can be a Visitor in His own Kingdom. And the visitors were prattling on as they were wont to, Physician, physician, heal thyself, leering with lidless eyes, those wretched unblinking, lidless eyes, born of the abyss, and the numbness was beginning to discolor my chest, and death, by any estimation I might render, was very near in these days and nights vacant of life and Love, and—
And the Lamb of God rejoined: Not yet.
That was all. The prattling continued. In fact, in any superficial sense, nothing changed at all. Which is to say, everything changed. All things, visible and invisible, surround us always; and it is the latter category which most affect us, for its members are not dim mirrors, but bright Realities. The pillars of the Earth may be shifted by a word. Or—two words. Two simple words. Not yet.
I think He was smiling when He said those words. You can hear when someone is smiling while speaking, after all. I think He was smiling.
And so it was that the jeering lidless eyes turned to dismay, and death was sent empty away. And about ten days later, by all germane clinical diagnostic criteria, I was infected by WT SARS2—my suspicion is that it was the delta variant, but my suspicion is also that I don’t really care. A leaden sensation, a lugubrious magma of inflammation, burned in every major muscle of my body. A heavy cough presented, and it would come in fits and bursts that would last upwards of forty seconds or so. Breathing became difficult; sleeping, almost impossible. The paroxysms of coughing would necessarily elicit muscle contractions all over the body, which would only redouble the inflammation therein. They would also crescendo the tinnitus and pain. Smell and taste, contrary to common experience with SARS2, did not fully disappear. They were severely attenuated, yes, but not entirely eradicated. The aching across the body was reminiscent of swine flu, but much worse. And the greatest suffering—that was the dead giveaway. It returned in full force, eclipsing that sweet, kind scintilla of relief which first emanated from the brace of words, Not yet. The perverse, unnatural, unprecedented, and wholly alien evisceration and mangling of the spirit; this cold, mechanical sensation of abject despair swelling upon and against the heart from, seemingly, very immateriality itself. That was when I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt—for I had nursed a variety of halfhearted ruminative suspicions prior to this—that The End, and now SARS2, were not disconnected coincidences. And so, on account of this blood-bought apocalypse, I wrote to Penelope, and acquiesced to the standing offer of assistance from earlier that week. And for the second time, I faced my failure—that I could not “heal [my]self”: that the visitors were not wrong. But, for the second time, I was taught that that did not necessarily mean that they were right.
The distended, swerving nature of this narrative is not an accident. While I intend it as something of an artistic device to illustrate my shattered mind, it is also intended, dare I say, for didactic purposes. Our lives, our threads within the Tapestry of Providence, are perceived by ourselves as these linear things, these lines stretched taut between two poles, with we as travelers making some grand peregrination. This may not be inaccurate, but it is comprehensive? I do not think so. For ours is a universe drenched in the condescensions of a God to Whom such a finery as Time is yet another plaything, another pigment for His Canvas. Our lives are shot through with the Glories of God, and those radiant beams of Light pierce us and our lives through at times and places quite beyond our comprehension, and we may not quite glimpse the beams until years later, if ever, and when we are honest with ourselves—as we find to be so very difficult—our own memories are tenuous at best, treacherous at worst, and the stories of our lives are better represented as grand, dense matrices, shimmering crystalline lattices, interlinked with others’ lattices—others’ lives—than anything so nearly pedestrian as bald, boring timelines. And so, accordingly, my storytelling eschews linearity. My aim in total is less to give a strictly systematic account, and nothing less than to paint pictures. To forge images. To affect people, not to effect medical charts. To spark imagination, that there has been more death—and more life—more supernature, in the latter years, than I have yet seen testified to. And so, one final note on the visitors.
They continued to come for quite some time after the Visitation of the Lamb, but their spells’ veil had been rent asunder by His Word in a fashion not unlike a certain curtain of old. Physician, heal thyself; and they had proven that I could not. But that did not necessarily prove that I could not be healed. And by mid-January, the visitors stopped visiting. That to which they were accessories—the greatest suffering—did not dissipate in nearly so tidy a fashion. Indeed, tendrils thereof still linger in my psyche even now. But what you must remember is that in the domain of suffering, everything is relative. A little hope can go a very long way indeed, and a little hope can arise from even the slightest improvement of one’s estate. As is the way of things in this world, what lifted the greatest fraction of the greatest suffering was the unnecessary taking on of another’s pain. But that is a tale for Part III—as is just what exactly occurred in the two or three days between my musings of a blackened heart and the Visitation of the Lamb. For now, I am content to remark that said Visitation was the first lift, the first relief, I had yet experienced. The first recapitulation of the misplaced Concept of Hope.
You did it, Paul, you completed and published Part II. A pain-filled endeavor, but a task fulfilled!