Part 2: My Invisible Friend Update
Part 3: My Invisible Friend, Conflicted
The day I got back from Cannes, I went to see Petra at the hospice. It’s a multi-story building protected by tall walls and encircled by gardens with shade-giving trees, flower beds and winding paths.
Volunteers stopped by daily to chat and she was constantly being checked on by nurses, so the solitude of living in her chair in Maurice’s apartment was over. But her health had deteriorated rapidly during the two weeks I was away. She could no longer move her left leg, and asked me to move it for her, up and down and circling her foot around. She wasn’t hungry, and only ate because her stomach bothered her if she didn’t. She was quite literally wasting away.
Maurice came to visit with Burrow once a week, and I began to visit every three days, bringing Sirius with me whenever I could, at her request.
The first time I visited, I said, “What can I do?” and she had me perform a dozen little errands. After that, as soon as I arrived, she would say, “Are you ready for me to order you around?” and I would find things she needed, put other things away, change the flowers for new ones I had brought. If it was nice out, a nurse and I would wheel her bed into the garden, where we would sit and chat and listen to the blackbirds.
I would take her laundry home with me, and bring it back clean. I was surprised that the facility didn’t do it. “They will if you don’t have anyone,” she said. “Otherwise, they ask the family to.” She smiled and squeezed my hand.
I signed the form to be her personne de confiance. Which meant that I would be the one they called when she died. “But what do I do after that?” I asked.
“I’m not really sure,” she admitted.
So we asked a nurse to tell us what happened after death. I felt sorry for the poor lady, because she was trying to say things in the softest possible way, like, “After the moment of passing, we transfer the body to the mortuary area on the lower floor.” And I was translating in the very matter-of-fact way Petra and I have always communicated, “Okay, once you die, they take your body downstairs.”
The nurse looked a bit horrified, but Petra and I both smiled at her to show we were okay. “Ask her about what I wear,” Petra asked.
I translated, then relayed the response. “She says you’re supposed to choose the clothes you want them to dress you in.”
“What if I don’t want clothes?” Petra asked.
I translated and responded, “She says they can just wrap you in a sheet.”
“That’s what I want,” Petra replied. And the Q&A continued until she was satisfied. The nurse booked it out of the room as fast as she could, leaving Petra and I chuckling and agreeing we would make terrible diplomats.
Following the nurse’s recommendation, I chose one of two funeral homes across the street from the hospice, and made arrangements with them. I came back and asked Petra questions about the choices I wasn’t sure about, then returned, signed forms and let them photocopy her German ID card and my French one. Since Petra didn’t have her birth certificate, I gave them her parents’ names and birth places for the death certificate.
She wanted the cheapest options for everything and didn’t want anyone to see her after she was dead. I offered to scatter her ashes in Trouville. (“Scattering ashes or keeping them at home is against the law in France,” the funeral parlor people said. “But no one obeys it and we can sell you an urn that is biodegradable or seawater soluble.”) But Petra wanted the least trouble possible and liked the idea of being scattered in the Jardin de Souvenirs by the groundsperson at Père Lachaise cemetery, where the cremation would take place.
When I was about to leave that day, she made a speech that I suspected she’d been preparing for a while. I listened silently, feeling it was important for her to get it all out. To follow her script.
“I’m not angry about this,” she said. “And I don’t have regrets. Not anything. Except for the fact that we didn’t get to go on our Trouville trip. We really missed our window on that.” I agreed, then waited for her to continue.
“But I know that Burrow will be taken care of…well enough…and I know that Maurice won’t be left with the burden of clearing out my things. He said he didn’t mind. That I could leave everything where it was, but I don’t like the thought of my things being in his house for the next ten years. I wanted to strip it all away and leave the place like it was before I arrived.”
She said all of this while staring straight ahead, as if seeing it all play out in front of her. Then she looked at me. “There are a couple more bags for you to go through. You can keep what you want and take the rest to recycling. They’re on my bed.”
I smiled. “No problem. When should I go over?”
“Whenever. After, I’m gone,” she said. “I have no regrets,” she repeated.
“I’m glad,” I replied.
And then a nurse bustled in and that conversation was over.
After that, I visited twice. During that week, Petra lost the feeling in her other leg. The morphine made her mouth dry, so she was harder to understand. In the last few days, she lost control in her hands and couldn’t write texts. So I continued sending texts and photos and she would phone. On Tuesday morning she said she was having more pain. It was hard to understand her. I began to worry.
She had told me a few weeks ago to buy myself flowers because I kept bringing them for her and thought I should have some too. She checked up afterward, and I admitted that I hadn’t had time. So Tuesday night, I sent her this photo:
and she sent me a smiley face.
I wrote her my regular evening text, “How are you, friend?” and then went to bed. By Wednesday morning she hadn’t responded, but I knew she couldn’t type, so I wrote her, “Good morning, Petra! Are you feeling better today?” A half hour later, while I was having breakfast with Tibor, she phoned.
“Hi Petra. How are you?” I asked.
“Dead,” she said. “I’m not good. Much pain.” She sounded breathless.
“Oh no,” I replied.
“What are you doing today?” she asked.
“Well, I have plans this afternoon, but I’m free this morning. Would you like me to come?”
“Yes,” she said. “I need you to translate. They don’t understand.” There was a note of panic in her voice.
“I’ll be right there,” I said, and hurried to get dressed and brush my hair. I didn’t bother with makeup and brought my makeup bag thinking I could do it later. I had a business lunch, then an appointment at 15h30 to have my hair colored, then jazz night with friends at the Circle Suedoise.
I sent Petra a text as I walked out the door. “I’m on my way.” Then, in case she wasn’t looking at her phone, I phoned.
“Hello?” Her voice was weak.
“I’ll be there in 40 minutes. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said, and we hung up.
Exactly 40 minutes later, around 9:10, I walked into her room. “Oh good, you’re here,” she said as I took off my jacket and scarf and draped them over a chair. “I’m going to start ordering you around right away,” she said.
“Good. I’m ready.”
“It doesn’t smell bad in here, does it?”
“I can’t smell a thing. Remember, Covid-nose?”
She looked relieved. And then she began asking me to do things. Move her leg. Put the bed rail up so she could reach the controls. She held her arms out like a child so she could wrap them around my neck and I could shift her upper body to the right. Then to the left. “It really hurts. Since 6:30 this morning, it hurts so much,” she said. “And I have so much nausea.”
“Where does it hurt?”
She indicated her mid-section and pulled back her shirt. Her stomach was swollen.
“Call the nurse. I need more morphine and she said she would be bringing it but she hasn’t.” Each word was labored.
Although I tried to have them hurry, we had to wait a while for the morphine. During that time, Petra swung between gasping in pain and scrambling for the vomit tray, but she never got sick. Finally they came and gave her morphine, Haldol and an anti-nausea drug. After that another hour went by with me massaging her back or opening the window, or massaging her hand or foot, and then stopping because during the waves of nausea she didn’t want to be touched. Her speech was getting less understandable. Sometimes she would open her eyes very wide and look right through me. Once she asked if I was cold. I said no, and realized I was hugging myself.
She pressed the button for the nurse and asked for more morphine. The doctor came in, and I translated that the pain was intense. She wanted to know why her stomach was so swollen. The doctor asked me to leave them alone for 5 minutes. When I came back, I looked through the window in the door, and saw them talking intently, so I sat and waited.
In hindsight, this is the conversation I think they had.
Doctor: We can’t do anything else.
Petra: I’m ready to go. Can you do that?
Doctor: Euthanasia is illegal in France. So I will, but we can’t say anything to your friend. We’ll tell her we’re putting you to sleep for a few hours to give you a rest from the pain.
Petra: Agreed.
When I walked back in, Petra said, “They’re going to make me sleep a while. Can you sit just there? I would love you to accompany me. You can do some writing.”
“Okay,” I said, knowing there was no way I could write while she was like this. (On previous visits, I had written while she rested.)
After what seemed like an interminable wait (more pain, gasping, nausea) a nurse came in and gave her morphine. I won’t tell you how much, in case it’s incriminating in any way, but it seemed like a lot.
Petra asked me to move her torso again and held her arms out. I pulled her toward me and shifted her to the right. “That’s good,” she said, and within minutes her head leaned back and she started snoring. But her eyes were still open.
I held her hand for a minute. “Can you hear me?” I asked. She didn’t respond. I sat like that for a while, but the snoring started sounding more like moaning. I knew she couldn’t feel anything, but it was upsetting to hear. I told her I was going to leave to make myself some tea.
In the hallway, I began crying. A volunteer got the doctor, who brought me into his office. I told him that Petra was sleeping with her eyes open and snoring. I asked if he could tell me what was going on.
He told me that her bowels were twisted and that’s where the pain was coming from. It’s probably the thing that would kill her. His goal now was to keep her from suffering.
“So is this it, or will she wake back up?” I asked. “If she’s going to wake up, I don’t want to be crying this hard.”
“She’ll probably wake up in a few hours,” he said. “You’ll need to let us know if she needs more morphine then. It could be a few more days before she passes.” He was looking at me weird. I’m terrible at reading body language, so I just kept asking.
“A few more days? Isn’t there any way you can…” I gave him what I hoped was a significant look. “I mean, she’s really in pain. And she told me she was ready to go a few days ago.” I didn’t want to spell it out.
“My aim is to make her as comfortable as possible for as long as she needs,” he repeated, staring at me.
Is this code? I thought. But by then, I felt I didn’t understand anything. And no one was saying.
When I returned, the nurse who was going room-to-room had gone in to give Petra her “toilette” or wash-up. It took around 10 minutes before they let me back in. Once I was back by her side, her hand in mine, she groaned/snored a few more times, and then shifted and began breathing more softly. It turned into a kind of gasp, and then a few seconds of silence before the next gasp. The doctor came in and listened to it, looked surprised (or did he?) and then left. A nurse came in, and I asked her if that kind of breathing was normal. She said that it was an effect of the morphine. I had already texted to cancel my lunch, but now canceled my late afternoon hair appointment and my plans for the evening.
I wrote a friend and said I thought Petra was dying. I heard the ding of her return text, but put the phone down and took Petra’s hand in mine because her breathing had gotten even slower. She took one gasp and then didn’t breathe again.
I began talking to her. “I’m right here. Are you going now? I hope you aren’t feeling any pain. I’m glad to be here with you. I’m so happy to have been your friend.” I thought, Can she hear any of this? Is she already dead?
And then she let out one more shallow breath. I waited. That was her last. I talked to her a little bit more as I held her hand, just in case she was still hanging around in the room watching. I told her I hoped she would be happy wherever she was going next. I said I was glad she wasn’t in pain any more.
Then I went out into the hallway and found a nurse. “I think my friend has stopped breathing,” I said.
“Were you with her?” she asked.
“Yes, holding her hand.”
She nodded. “Good.” She sent in the doctor.
“She stopped breathing at 12:37,” I told him. “But there was a long gap between the last two breaths. Will she breathe again, or is she dead?”
He looked at her and said, “Je suis sûr et certain.” He said he would leave me alone with her.
I sat there, rubbing her hand, rubbing her foot, waiting to see if she was going to breathe again. But she didn’t. Her shirt was kind of open and you could see the red stains on her skin above the breast that had the tumor. So I got a scarf and wrapped it around her neck to hide her skin, tying it in a loose knot. She looked more dignified. I knew she would approve.
I called Maurice and told him she had died five minutes previously. I called the funeral parlor and notified them. They set things in motion with the hospital and the cemetery. I began throwing things away and packing other things up, as she had instructed me weeks before. I kept looking back at her, half-thinking something would happen and she’d wake back up. Once in a while I’d sit down and hold her hand again, or touch her face or her hair. Finally, I said goodbye to my friend. It felt unfinished. Like I shouldn’t be leaving so soon. But there was nothing else to do.
So I left with three bags and her chair. Got an Uber van, and dropped the chair off at Maurice’s, where he insisted on paying me back and then tipped the Uber driver 50 euros. Then I walked home with the three bags, set them down, and looked at the clock. It was only 3 in the afternoon, but it felt like days since I had rushed off to the hospice. I had a splitting headache from crying, so I took an aspirin and went to bed, watched the latest installment of Ted Lasso, then wrote all of this down (and a bit more…this is abbreviated) so I wouldn’t forget anything. (I lose details very quickly when something is upsetting.)
When I was done, I picked up Petra’s identity card and typed her name into Google for the first time. And I learned something about my friend that I had never expected.
I was right to have thought of her as My Invisible Friend. Petra had been registered in Germany as a missing person.
I wanted to follow this post with an obituary. I planned on using Petra’s real name. Now that I know she wanted to disappear, I will respect her wishes and stick with my made-up name for her. But I want you to see her as I saw her (not just these unflattering hospital photos). And I want to tell you the things she told me about herself and the things that I discovered after her death. That leaves wide gaps of time and lots of questions. There is much none of us will ever know about Petra.
I will just say here that I feel honored she not only let me in but in a way adopted me. She cared for me as much as she could until our roles had to reverse. She walked her own path and braved life as best she could. Until it ended…long before it should have. Long before I wish it had.
Very moving indeed- thank you
Your writing really touched me. I'm sorry for your loss.