A Time to Die. Part 5: Love and loss

n the movie-of-the-week version of Nöel Earley's dying, he would spend his last months in warm embraces with his friends, reconcile with his brother and silently caress the hand of his sweetheart.
      In real life, dying did not soften his feelings toward his brother, nor did it smooth out his turbulent relationship with his girlfriend. Indeed, real life brought a fair amount of turmoil to his final days.
      Earley nursed a lifelong grudge against his brother, Walter, in part because of Walter's decision to put their grandmother in a nursing home. So deep and vengeful was Earley's antipathy for his older brother that he originally chose Dec. 4 for his suicide because that date is Walter's birthday. Nöel insisted that the two were "terminally estranged" -- although he kept a picture of Walter and his two sons taped to his refrigerator.
      Nonetheless, starting in March, Walter came to visit every Sunday night. Nöel acknowledged that Walter was seeking reconciliation, and that Nöel wanted nothing to do with it. They often spent their time bickering. Walter told Nöel he loved him; Nöel told Walter to get lost.
      "He's hurt me too much in my life," said Nöel.
      And Nöel can't forgive him?
      "Won't."
      Earley fought with his girlfriend, too. Time and again, they broke up, only to mend their relationship the next day. She resented the constant intrusion of reporters and friends she didn't know. She has children and a demanding professional life; what little time she had to spend with Nöel she wanted to be hers alone.
      But no attempt to accommodate her seemed to work. Earley posted signs advising visitors to stay away after 5 p.m., later revised to 4 p.m.; yet he said that more often than not, he'd end up sitting home alone.
      His girlfriend said that she did visit, and there'd be someone there anyway. Adding to her annoyance, it wasn't just the press: old girlfriends were showing up, flowers in hand, seeking tender good-byes. At least one bunch of flowers wound up in shreds in the hallway, victim of her rage.

      "They flock to this," she said. "I'm running the opposite way, to get away from it. I hate the sickness. I hate the publicity. I hate the way it cuts into our time. But this is what Nöel chooses."
      She had been the most important person in his life. Now, she sensed a peculiar chill, a distance. He surrounded himself with strangers, and made her feel like an intruder.
      Once she apologized for "flipping out" so much about his visitors. Earley fixed his eyes on her and said: "Whatever you want -- it's okay. You're not dealing with this very well. Yours is the greatest loss."

he losses, the losses -- they seemed endless, bottomless. When he gave away a bookcase, even that loss caused a pang.
      One afternoon in December she called Earley to say that she was coming over. An hour and a half later she called back in tears. She had stopped at the mall, and in each store she saw something reminding her of what they would lose. She had wandered, weeping, from store to store -- and never made it out to spend time with the man she was losing.
      "The friendship is gone," she lamented one afternoon shortly before Christmas. "You never get to see him alone."
      That very afternoon, Earley spent several hours alone. With the oxygen tube dangling from his mouth, he complained angrily that his girlfriend didn't come often enough or stay long enough -- that he hated being alone when he could feel his lungs failing.
      By evening, though, he had company: a photographer and a videographer were there watching TV with him.

ita Senna came into Earley's life in October. She was there to do a job, but she would do much more -- and gain much more than her hourly wage.
      As a nursing assistant, Senna at first came to give Earley a bath on the weekends. How he dreaded being naked with a stranger, how he hated this leap into dependency! But Senna, something about her -- she made Earley feel comfortable.
      She has a round, ageless face; long crinkly hair; an easy bow-shaped smile; gentle hands. Something about her -- she made the horrible seem manageable. Soon she was coming five days a week, and then seven days. No one spent more time with Earley in his last two months of life.
      Besides tending to his weakening body, she washed dishes and ran errands. When he could no longer sit up in the tub, she gave him sponge baths in his chair. She treated his bedsores. When he had a fierce itch, it was her rubber-gloved fingers that brought relief.
      After several weeks with him, she felt she had known him for years.
      Why?
      "I don't know," she says. "He's got that certain touch.
      "He's been nice, like a good friend. He's made me feel better about myself. When I make little mistakes, he'll correct me, but he'll say, 'Wait a minute -- you're not that bad.' He always uses the medical terms, just to help me remember them. . . . He's my teacher, but then again he's my patient."
      Senna was entrusted with a stack of small cards, each with an identical photograph of a pink rose on the front, each inscribed with a message in small, perfect script. The cards were the work of a missionary nun, one of the many religious people who sought to reach Earley and prevent his suicide.

ith a royal-blue wimple framing an angelic grandmotherly face, this nun got a little further with Earley than most. She visited three or four times, and Earley at first enjoyed her, because she was so smart; they could argue philosophy and theology. But as she pushed to convert him to the Catholic Church, he tired of her and told her to stop visiting.
      Sister was undeterred. She wrote those rose letters, and asked Rita Senna to read one each day.
      Said one: "If you surrender to God in a natural death, then you will hear those blessed words 'Well done, good and faithful servant, come into eternal life.' If your last human act is against God's will, you will surely be accountable for it. . . ."
      Said another: "I am counting on you to die a natural death so the Father will assign you as my helper in saving souls. . . ."
      And a third: "Change your plans, Nöel, surrender to God's plan."
      To the end, Earley said he did not believe in God. "The natural world defines its own kind of deific beauty," he said. He believed that his spirit would dissipate into "the general energies of the universe" and his personal identity would die with the neurons in his brain.
      Senna dutifully read the nun's letters, but she never told Earley how fervently she, too, wished that he would not kill himself. "It's not the right way," she said privately.
      Asked at the end of December what she thought Earley would do, Senna said: "There are times he seems so happy. On the days I can see that he's so very happy, I think maybe he's backing out of it. I say, 'Good, good, good -- let it continue this way.' But I know it's not what he wants; I know he wants to do it. But there's a side of him that says, 'I can't.'"
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