Diamond Anderson is preparing to meet his maker
By LORETTA FULTON
Senior Staff Writer
There are days when Diamond Anderson wishes he could just go to sleep and never wake up.
His doctors tell him he will get his wish in short order. Anderson is dying, and he knows it.
"As far as I know I'm prepared to meet my maker," he said.
Anderson has been prepared at least since March when his doctor suggested hospice care, a service that provides home care, including nurses, aides, equipment and social services, for people whose prognosis is six months or less.
Before that the 80-year-old World War II veteran knew he was seriously ill with emphysema, but he didn't know how long doctors thought he would live. His doctor answered his question frankly -- six months or less -- but he added a disclaimer.
"I'm like the weatherman," the doctor said. "That's subject to change."
Anderson is staring his six-month lease on life in the face, and he earnestly wishes the doctor's prognosis would come true.
"I wouldn't care if I keeled over right here, right now -- in fact I wish I would," Anderson said, sitting on the edge of the hospital bed in the living room of his apartment, a cart holding medications serving as a prop.
Anderson admits, without shame or embarrassment, that he has asked God to take his life. He sometimes is depressed because that prayer has not been answered, but other times he realizes God acts in his own time.
"The Good Lord will take care of me, I guess. He always has," Anderson said.
It hasn't always been this way for Anderson or anyone else dying of a disease that has been chipping away at the body for 15 years. Once he was a daring tailgunner on a B-26, flying missions with the Army Air Corps over North Africa, Sicily, Italy, Sardinia, and southern France.
"We got shot up enough to where we had to crash land," he said, his eyes lighting up for a brief time as he recalled those glory days of World War II. Those were the days when a 20-year-old knew he might die the next minute in combat, but somehow it didn't seem real.
The death Anderson is facing now is real.
Everything around him attests to that. His thin arms, the suspenders that hold up pants on a failing body, the extra-long oxygen tube attached to his nose so that he can walk about the apartment, the tissue papers folded into padding underneath the tube to protect his tender skin, the bubbling noise from a breathing machine next to his bed, the cup to spit in, the ever-attentive wife sitting close by, helping him remember everything he wants to say.
"We have all our affairs together, haven't we?" he asks his wife, Pinkie, glancing at her with loving eyes and a fateful smile.
Then they laugh and explain how the two of them got names like "Diamond and Pinkie" and tell about the jokes they've endured since their marriage 24 years ago.
"Pinkie has a Diamond," was what people always joked about, Pinkie said. She got her nickname in third grade, but Diamond was the birth name given to her husband.
"He was a gem," Pinkie reckoned.
Diamond doesn't mind that first name. It's his middle name that always got him in trouble, the one he swears in his still-playful manner that he won't tell you.
"I had many a fight as a kid because of my middle name," he said. With some prodding he confesses: "Hoover." That was the name that caused him so much trouble.
"He wasn't no good back in my day," Anderson recalled of President Herbert Hoover.
Just as quickly as Anderson's sharp mind recalls missions from World War II and jabs from elementary school classmates, it jumps back to the reality of the present. He hasn't lost his humor, his manners, his respectfulness, or his tendency to praise others for their kindness.
"Those hospice people, I couldn't say enough for 'em," he said.
"They're all nice, friendly, and loving," Pinkie adds.
And don't forget the physical therapists who come by regularly, he says.
"They got me up off my back and got me walking."
Confined to walking about the apartment except for trips to the doctor, Anderson's last days are not pleasant, and he doesn't mind talking about it.
"It don't bother me to talk about death," he said. "It does some people, I guess."
For Anderson death is not a mystery. It is 28 pills a day, including 14 at breakfast. It is sleep, pills, treatments, sleep, pills, treatments. Sometimes it is eating, but not much.
"It's a chore for me to eat," Anderson said. "I run out of air eating."
Death for Anderson is three inhaler treatments a day and four neubilizer treatments. It is having an aide come to his home to shower him. He handles it all like the gentleman soldier he once was.
"That's another bunch I can't give enough praise," Anderson said of the aides. "I give 'em a hard time," his favorite form of flattery.
Anderson learned his manners at home. He grew up in Albany and after the war he worked in the oilfields until 24 years ago.
"I met an old girl in a storm cellar," he says, once again glancing at Pinkie.
He had been married before and has six children. Her first husband had died at age 48. Diamond and Pinkie lived in the same mobile home park in Abilene when the storm hit that drove them together. After that Diamond worked in maintenance for the Abilene Independent School District.
It was years of smoking -- "they gave us cigarettes in the Army" -- followed by years of sandblasting and chemicals in the oilfields and asbestos in other jobs that contributed to the disease that's killing Anderson, he believes.
He refuses to blame it on the cigarettes alone, a habit that brought him pleasure for many years. But it doesn't matter now. Diamond Anderson is dying, and he knows it.
"I'm ready," he said. "I've done everything I wanted to do."