Passport
By Carolyn M. Crane
Do not go gentle into that good night…
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
–Dylan Thomas
In mid-October, the steroids stopped helping Jack’s clarity, so it was time to wean him off them. I knew this was the beginning of the end, and I had to fight the urge to keep giving them to him just to keep his body around. I soaked him in during those few days. His smell. His hugs. He had been so weak when he went on hospice, but by then he was as strong as a tree. A big, beautiful, bad-ass, psychotic tree.
We had a routine those days. I’d give him pills at 6 a.m. These consisted of 2 milligrams haloperidol, 1000 milligrams acetaminophen, 300 milligrams gabapentin, and 25 milligrams methadone. He’d go back to sleep then for a few hours, and I’d get some school work done at my desk.
The morning of October 27 was different. I settled down at my desk at 6:15, coffee in hand, and I heard him stirring. I went around the corner to the living room at the same time he rounded the corner from the bedroom. He was fully dressed, from his favorite army-green knit hat to his Carhartt pants to his white Nikes. These were his “going out” clothes. He looked at me with desperation.
“We’ve got to get out of here now!” he said. “We don’t want to go to prison. We have to get out of Mexico NOW. The Mexican police are no one to fuck with.”
In the preceding weeks, I’d traveled the learning curve of dealing with a psychotic person with brain cancer. There is no point in arguing. (Believe me, I tried.) It is all about joining and negotiating with the person.