Top of the Mountain

Friday 8 June noon

"How's the coffee?".

I ask her the question sitting across from her at the breakfast table. She is wearing her daytime attire. "Like only you can make it!", she says smugly, taking the last sip of her Lavazza. Then her head slumps back into the palms of her hands, her elbows on the table's edge; she no longer has the energy to keep herself properly sitting up straight, as she knows she should.

Her HB level (hemoglobin) has probably sunk below 5.0 by now. The effect of it is the same as mountain climbers experience on the top of Mount Everest, says Doctor Isabelle Willemot, our GP. Her pulse is around 100. (She picks something up from her little table and it shoots up to 114.). We have upped the oxygen supply to 7 liters a minute. Her saturation admirably sits at 98% still. Her pressure stable at 9 over 5. The lower the HB level dips, the more Lara will feel prone to sleep, devoid of energy. Once the pressure would go down from there, organs could begin to shut down.

Lara tells her doctor she is feeling spent; she has nothing more to give. That's allright, says Isabelle, don't hold back. If you want to go, just go. I told her the same. That was clearly reassuring, like a constraint had been lifted. She said as much. Now it was down to her. She could decide to let go or not, without anyone pulling her back. Master of her fate, captain of her soul.

There is no room anymore for optimism. Certainly, everyone is free to hope for a miracle; fair enough. After all, she pulled through last year when every doctor said she should have been gone already. This time around, what people seem to miss, is that the miracle has already happened but we failed to perceive it as such: Lara should have been dead six weeks ago. But she clung to life and stayed with us for all that time, receiving scores of visitors, writing and dictating messages, taking video and phone calls. She got her stuff in order, wrote a poem to appear on her death announcement, signed a last will and testament, divided her jewellery and accessories, gave specific instructions about 'afterwards', and said her goodbyes. We spent a lot of quality time together. What more can you wish for when struck by a deadly disease, spun out of control? Most patients by far never receive such leeway.

Janis, Lara's friend, quotes a man named Bill, who wrote an open letter shortly before he died,

 “…as my physical health reached a point where optimism about my health would have had to become self-denial, I realized the need to accept my own impending death.  I also realized that self compassion meant feeling in my heart that even physical death was not a sign of weakness and failure. This seems to be the ultimate act of self acceptance.”

Lara has reached the top of the mountain - and what a climb it has been! Time to catch her breath and look out over creation.