May 8, Kyle’s Memorial Day 2023, Two Years Gone

Oliver Jeffers is a Northern Irish painter known for his Dipped Paintings project. He spent months creating a painting, only to dip it in a vat of paint before a small crowd of witnesses. Only the top of the subject’s head remained out of the container. Whiskey was passed around, and a toast was made: ”What’s done is done, and what’s to come is to come.”

I can’t relate. I am a ruminater. Not to be confused with a ruminant. But maybe if I chew on the events of late March and early April 2021 long enough, they will become palatable?

No. Not today, on Kyle’s Memorial Day. Not ever.

Jeffers said, “The only evidence of this painting will be the people who witness it, like history.” He began the projects with interviews of subjects who had witnessed death. I thought, oh, how awful for those people.

Then I remembered. I am one.

Kyle died on April 6, 2021, 17 days after he began showing symptoms of COVID-19. He was 38. His wife Charlotte, dad Murray, step-dad Mike, and I were all in the room when he died. None of us was prepared for what would happen. Not even Murray, who had watched his wife Margaret die of cancer the previous week.

When we were told that Kyle’s death was inevitable, that he was in multiple organ system failure, we initially agreed to let him go. But later I thought I had been too hasty. I thought about what Kyle would do for me if the situation was reversed. I knew he would fight for me to live. I called and changed my mind. A meeting with the “care team” was scheduled.

The next day at 3pm, Charlotte, Mike, and I walked into a conference room to see a half dozen nurses and doctors of varying specialties and a chaplain waiting for us. A more detailed explanation was given of Kyle’s condition, but not nearly as detailed as I would have liked, though I wonder if I would have been able to absorb it all, had it been really thorough. Though they were trying to help, I felt ganged up on.

Fidgeting and half listening and trying to slow my racing thoughts, I needed the bottom line. “Have any of you EVER seen anyone in Kyle’s condition recover from this?” All heads moved slowly and sadly side to side. The young doctor who was a twin for Dr. Jimmy Palmer on NCIS looked like he would cry. I couldn’t fight them all. The decision was made.

We returned to the hospital that night around 7. None of us are medical people; we didn’t have any idea what this was going to look like. Now I wonder if the others, like me, thought it would be peaceful. It wasn’t. At least not for us.

Marilyn, the first of two tenderhearted nurses assigned to Kyle that night, whispered as she encouraged us down the hall toward the COVID ward. “Only two visitors are allowed in a room, so when we get there, I’m going to close the curtain so other families don’t get upset.”

Which of us would have been left behind if she hadn’t had the guts to break that rule? Mother? Wife? Father? Step-dad of 20 years? Thank you, Marilyn. Thank you forever.

We spent about an hour with Kyle, reconciling our lives before this night to our lives after. We didn’t say goodbye. How do you do that? We had no concept of what life without Kyle meant.

We held his hands, touched his face, spoke softly. His brother Austin was on the iPad on a table in front of the bed. Austin wasn’t speaking to Kyle at the time, and hadn’t been for quite a while. I often wonder what he felt that night. I’ll never know. He doesn’t speak to any of us anymore.

When we were told it was time to extubate Kyle and remove him from the other machines, only Charlotte was able to hear the nurse describe how Kyle’s body would react. She was told that he would sit bolt upright in bed, that his eyes would fly open, and that he would take a loud, gasping breath. He would look like he was conscious. This is exactly what happened.

I was so shocked that for a moment I couldn’t feel my body. I wanted to scream what the hell was that? Why weren’t we warned? It was the most traumatic thing I have ever experienced. I can only hope that Kyle was so heavily sedated that he was totally unaware of anything.

The respiratory therapist had tears in his eyes as he pulled the tube. The bottom of it was covered in what looked like green pea soup sludge. I knew in that moment that he never had a chance. No wonder his oxygen level had been 57% when he walked into his ICU room in the second of three hospitals where he received care. How could anyone breathe through that?

For the next 10 minutes he took about ten more ragged, gasping breaths. I leaned over and whispered in a soothing voice that he was OK, he could just relax, everything was fine. And then he was dead.

A doctor came in to pronounce him. She was a tiny Indian woman not much older than Kyle with very kind eyes. She stayed about ten minutes, repeatedly listening to his chest, and gently moving curly locks of his hair up and off his forehead. We just stood, unmoving, in our posts at his bedside.

They let us stay another hour. Finally, we had to leave. We looked at each other briefly as if to say, it can’t be time yet, can it? We shambled out of the room, each of us glancing back at him. I was the last out, and I stopped to take one last photo of this unbelievable scene. I knew that if I didn’t have evidence of this moment to revisit with my own eyes, with the heart monitor display dark and quiet, that I would find a way to deny it forever. His second nurse that night, Kevin, said to me as I crossed the silver metal strip of the door threshold, “Kyle was 38. I’M 38.” His face was a sad mix of confusion and compassion and maybe a little bit of misplaced guilt.

It has taken me two years to get really in touch with my outrage that Kyle, and we, had to go through this end of his life. Why couldn’t he have been given an injection of morphine, like the veterinarian uses when euthanizing our beloved animals? Why make us all suffer through this? It is inexcusable.

I was researching medical euthanasia drugs last week. I wanted to see what is used for terminally ill people in states where it is legal. It turns out that the drugs that vets use for our animals are not legal for human use anymore. The drugs that are used now are not uniform in their effectiveness, not in time until death or peacefulness. Who made them illegal? And how dare they?

My son had a right to a completely peaceful death since he was considered terminal. Shame on the people who made that unavailable to him. I curse their arrogance for deciding, for others, what is “right”.