Last Wish, Page 2

be right there."

  With another patient waiting, the old colleagues broke off their personal conversation and turned their attention to setting up the beginning schedule for Carl's palliative care. Since he did not intend to attempt any of the against-all-odds therapies, the only treatments available, he could lead an essentially normal life until his cancer progressed. So it only took a few minutes for them to get the preliminary details arranged. Then Ralph again shook his old friend's hand and left the office to attend to his other patient.

  Carl gathered his coat and hat and then also left Ralph's office. He paused briefly to greet and chat with the nurses who a few years earlier had been his assistants too. Then he bid them a pleasant day and walked down the hall toward the elevator. As he reached it Ralph came scurrying after him from the area of the examination rooms.

  "Wait a minute, Carl!"

  When Ralph caught up he motioned for Carl to step with him out of the traffic pattern leading to the elevator to a spot where they could talk with a bit of privacy.

  "Carl, I'm concerned about you facing this thing alone."

  It was an appropriate concern because Carl and Simone had never been able to have children, and Carl had been almost a social recluse since Simone's death. So Dr. Carl Frieder quite literally was facing his terminal illness completely alone, without family or intimate friends.

  "I'm not trying to convert you" Ralph continued "but would you be willing for me to ask the chaplain at the Lutheran Brotherhood's Hospice to visit you? She's a lady minister, Reverend Christine Heuber. You may have met her sometime when you were seeing patients at Lutheran."

  "No, I don't recall ever meeting any lady chaplain."

  "She's no Bible thumper!" Ralph emphasized. "So she won't try to convert you. She's a devout Christian, of course, but she's a compassionate Christian who believes she serves God best by serving His children rather than by indoctrinating them. I've been deeply impressed with the tolerant way she interacted with and helped my nonbeliever patients, and they have all been deeply grateful to her. Mary Jane and I know her personally through church activities. She's a gracious, intelligent and highly educated person, and I'm sure she could bring you the kind of psychological and, ... please excuse a believer's word, the spiritual comfort I never could."

  "I don't really know what to say" Carl answered. "Without work to distract me, it is lonely. But I don't want to put anyone out."

  "You wouldn't be. As Hospice chaplain it's her main duty to visit patients, all patients, regardless of their religion or lack thereof. Knowing her as well as Mary Jane and I do, I can assure you she would be eager to meet with you. And again, I know you have your own religious beliefs, and they are not a Christian's beliefs. But as I said, she is no Bible thumper. If you don't raise the topic, she'll probably never mention Christianity at all. This is no time for you to be sitting alone, staring out the window, Carl. May I ask her to call you."

  "Well, all right, Ralph. Your concerns are well founded, and if it's part of her job to visit Hospice patients, it looks like I'm an appropriate client."

  "As soon as I finish with this next patient I'll call her and ask her to contact you."

  Again Ralph shook Carl's hand. He would have liked to pray with his friend, but Carl's nonbeliever status precluded that, so a hand shake seemed the only way he could express his concern.

  II

  When Carl got back to the retirement community it was lunch time, so he went directly to the cafeteria where, as he always did, he ate alone. Then he went to his small but comfortable apartment, stopping at the mail station on the way. The latest editions of two different medical journals were the total of his mail, and when he got back to his rooms he sat down in a comfortable chair to read through them. But after scanning their contents he laid both on the end table beside his chair, unread. His whole life had been wrapped up in medicine, especially after Simone's death. However, somehow it all seemed irrelevant now. So he just sat and looked out the picture window overlooking the retirement community's gardens.

  After sitting for some time with his thoughts wandering unsystematically and nonproductively over dozens of topics and memories one highly pertinent thought occurred to him. "Good heavens" he thought. "I'm doing exactly what Ralph said he was afraid I'd do. I'm sitting alone staring out the window. At the very least I've got to find something to read."

  The retirement community has a residents' library. It is composed wholly of volumes which present and past members had contributed from the store of books they had had before moving to the community. It is kept in excellent order by three resident volunteers. So Carl got up and took the elevator down to the library in the recreation rooms in the building's basement.

  Most of the library's books are self-help works of various kinds. Among these is a large assortment of books Carl considered blatant baloney, the kinds of hurtful quackery that had been a thorn in his side throughout his career. Although much less frequently than many persons realize, cancer all too often is fatal. Understandably, therefore, patients reach out for anything that seems to offer hope. For patients whose disease, like his own, is virtually invariably fatal, Carl had raised no objections. Anything that can engender hope in a hopeless situation has value. But all too often the hope offered by self-help gurus was nonscientific nonsense that led patients to question or abandon treatments having a real possibility of help, and these cases put Carl, as the treating physician, on the horns of a dilemma. Hope was to be encouraged, of course, but not when it was bought at the cost of surrendering treatments of scientifically proven potential benefit.

  Adjacent to the self-help shelves are the books on religion. Carl didn't know whether this arrangement came from the three volunteers, the Dewey Decimal system or Library of Congress cataloguing, but it seemed appropriate. Most of these books differed from the self-help books only in the source of the help offered, faith and prayer as opposed to panaceas. As a physician Carl was convinced prayer and faith has no effect greater than placebo. But he had no objections to them so long as they were used in addition to rather than in place of appropriate medical treatment. A few times in his career he had had wavering Christian Scientist patients, persons who wanted the help medicine might offer but who also felt they were faithless backsliders for seeking it. Ralph Goodkin was his resource in these cases. As a devout Christian himself he could communicate with these people and help them reconcile their beliefs with medical treatment. So usually Carl passed these patients on to Ralph, to the patient's benefit and to the satisfaction of both himself and Ralph.

  Next to the religion section are books on philosophy. Most of these are old college textbooks, ones carted around but never read for almost a lifetime by their previous owners before finally being surrendered to the retirement community's library. These works caught Carl's attention. As he himself would admit, Dr. Carl Frieder is a man of very narrow interests. Simone, who had had a wide variety of different interests, used to tease him as "her one-dimensional doctor husband". Philosophy was one of the few topics outside of medicine that had ever attracted his attention, but he had never followed up on this attraction. Once when he was an undergraduate he had planned to take an introductory philosophy course, but when a conflict developed with a biochemistry class which he felt he had to take even thought it wasn't required by his premed major, the philosophy course lost out and Carl had never again made any effort to follow his vague interest in philosophy. "Now is the perfect time to do it!" he thought to himself.

  He went through the philosophy section books, selecting first this one then that to casually look over. He was immediately surprised by their copyright dates. Most of these books had been published not simply many years earlier, but many decades earlier. Indeed, he found a few copyright dates more than a century old. At first he thought this indicated uselessly obsolete books. In medicine a text which might cost well over a hundred dollars will usually be out-of-date in a couple years
or less. But when he considered the difference between philosophy and medicine he realized these old, even ancient copyrights didn't indicate hopelessly outmoded works. Rather, they indicated that philosophy did not deal with rapidly changing, empirically based technology, but rather with unchanging issues as old as mankind. Philosophy's concerns are enduring, not transient, and to his complete surprise Carl found this fact reassuring.

  He gathered three books which seemed most suitable for someone who knows nothing of the topic and returned to his rooms. At first he sat in the comfortable chair and started to read one, but a passing reference to one of the greatest works in philosophy, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, started him running through the indices of all the books he had brought from the library, trying to find a concise, exact explanation of just what this great philosopher had had against reason. Soon he was sitting on the floor with all three books, each open, spread out around him. But primarily he was using a fourth book, the dictionary, trying, unsuccessfully, to find comprehensible definitions of technical philosophical terms. "What the hell does 'synthetic a priori judgment' precisely mean?" he asked himself as he searched