David Gans and I went up to see Dick Latvala yesterday in the hospital. I didn't know what to expect -- the word "coma" implied a lack of activity to me; I feared I'd walk in and see an inanimate shell in the bed, a vacated meat house wherein once dwelled a spirit I loved. This has all been sudden and terrible. I spoke to Dick last Tuesday to wish him a happy 56th birthday. He told me he'd had the kind of birthday he really wanted to have: slept all day, getting up to watch Imus from the night before. He loves Imus -- for a sweet guy who often lets others call shots, I can see why he gets a kick out of an unapologetic asshole who dominates everyone. Imus is Dick's id unchained.
Dick was in a great mood on Tuesday. He asked me what era he should aim for with the next Dick's Picks (not a special honor, he asks everyone), and I told him either the mid '80s, the late '80s, or the very early '90s. One of his candidates fell within one of those time-zones, so we talked about that show. It sounded great. Dick's greatest pleasure is to blow the minds of Deadheads out there who he imagines are as into having their minds blown as he is. He can listen to tapes for six hours straight and still get beside himself when an especially asskicking version of some tune, *any* tune, gets laid down. "This is the best version of [insert title] there's ever been!" he'll rave with absolute seriousness, like a kid discovering not a bike under his Christmas tree, but a jetpowered Harley with a space helmet. It doesn't matter whether it actually is the best version technically speaking -- for that moment in Dick's life, there is nothing else. It's a kind of clear-creek Zen at the core of his ragged life, not dwelling in frets or future aspirations. The shape of wow, over and over again. And being a scholar, Dick writes it all down, on hundreds of notebook pages -- a handwritten high-resolution map of the topography of the Grateful Dead continent.
"The Great Way is simple," Dogen-zenji advised. "Avoid picking and choosing." As head picker and chooser, Dick manages to juggle both minds at once -- wonder and overview -- without ever losing the ability to just soak it in, when the words don't matter anymore.
The right of visitation is parcelled out in the ICU: if two people come to see a loved one in this difficult place, one must wait outside the swinging door. David let me go first.
Whatever I was ready for, however much I'd tried to prepare myself or not think about it, I was still shocked when I walked in. I didn't even see Dick at first -- his son Richie and his first wife Carol were there, and an old friend from Dick's commune days named Charlotte, clustered in a circle of love around the bed. Dick was the small presence at the center of the circle, with tubes running out of his nose and mouth. He looked exposed, vulnerable, like a kid laying on his back, barefoot, under a green hospital gown. Mechanical sounds: pingings, the apparatus that has completely taken over Dick's respiration after his wn nervous system stopped adding breaths to the 12-per-minute cycle of the machine after the first day.
What I wasn't ready for was how active Dick's face was. He knit his brow, he grimaced, his mouth -- his poor old-man's teeth removed -- fought to spit out the tube jammed down his throat. Richie held Dick's left hand while Carol cradled his left foot and stroked his leg, while Charlotte gently touched his furrowing forehead. He appeared not to be at rest, but engaged in battle in one of those perilous in-between places the Tibetans call the bardo. (According to their Book of the Dead, what happens there, what you do after you're dead, is very important: it's where you slot yourself into your next incarnation, or where the White Light appears, if you've brought good karma, or a sharp practice of mindfulness, into that no-Place.)
Dick's hands were warm, and he had good color in his face. Distressingly, his closed eyes were tearing, I was afraid to ask what that meant. There *did* seem to be a presence in him. He was no empty shell. When Richie spoke to Dick, he reacted with a little flicker of activity to his son's voice. I thought of the kitties that Dick puts food out for at the Dead's studio early every morning, making a special trip to feed them; I didn't mention them, fearful of triggering some nightmare of guilt in his mind, where ever he was now. Richie looks like his father when he was young and beautiful, and the emotion radiating toward the man Richie calls Dad was pure and life-sustaining. It sounds sentimental, but the love from Carol and Richie and Charlotte shone like a golden light around the bed, their voices soothing him. (In Hell there are angels, and they're us.)
Carol grinned as she told me that when the hospital chaplain had come in, asking if there was anything he could do, Dick had let loose with a thundering explosive fart. We agreed that that indicated that Dick was still Dick, using any means of communication at his disposal. I looked down at Dick and didn't know what to say, not wanting to talk about him in the third person, not sure how to speak to him directly. Finally, I figured I should talk to him as I normally do: "Dickie, sweetie, get up, it's me, Diga Baby!" I said, and took his hand. That's how I always talk to him: there's little standard refrigerated male distance between us: we babble happily to each other in babytalk and nicknames for hours on the phone, one young middle-aged guy and an older middle-aged guy who agreed years ago simply to like each other without a lot of dire preliminary tests or barbed wire. I know just why he gets up at dawn to feed those cats, and he knows I know, and we don't even spend all of our time talking about the music, because I figured out a while ago that the only way Dick was ever going to be iron-clad sure that I wasn't loving him for his tapes was to never ask for any. I love him, and that love outlasted even my craving to get more tapes; and knowing that together has nourished me more in the last 6 years than all the Scarlet > Fires I could have wheedled out of him.
I held Dick's hand for as long as I could, but left to give David a chance to have time with him, and then the big EEG cart was wheeled in, calling off all visits until the tests were done.
In the backyard of the hospital, David and John and Annie Cutler and Dick's roommates and Richie sat at a table in the sun, not saying a lot, feeling everything.
Later that day, David and I went to Club Front to continue work on the "So Many Roads" project that has become, without anyone saying it yet, a tribute to Dick. We ran into Nancy Mallonee, the Dead's chief financial officer, who told us the Dead-office family had joined in the focusing of healing beams toward Dick at noon that was organized by somebody on the Internet. She explained how they'd given their prayers an extra burst of Dick energy: "We touched the vault!"
With angels like that rooting for him, Dick has a lot of help finding his way in the bardo. May he choose wisely, and if it's right for him, may our old friend come back to us soon.
Steve Silberman
co-author, "Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads"
http://www.levity.com/digaland/index.html