No Greater Love
Ony Iheanacho
Ony Iheanacho shared her story, “No Greater Love,” at an Off Script performance in October 2022 at the Blaffer Art Museum on the University of Houston campus. In the video above, Iheanacho’s story begins at 15:42 and ends at 26:16.
It was July 11, and we were called into the conference room in the ICU, which is exactly as foreboding as it seems on the medical dramas. You really do sit across a long table from a bunch of white coats as they give you, quite matter-of-factly, news that rips your life apart. My visual memory of that day is foggy. I do recall the sounds, though.
The words said.
“The brain damage is nearly global. Her neuron-specific enolase is three times the limit of what we use to determine recovery. We’re sorry. It’s extremely unlikely she will come back from this.” Each word felt like a jagged knife in my chest. It was as if they were reciting a grocery list, not telling us she was never waking up. At least in Grey’s Anatomy I could expect some sort of twist. But this was real life, and miracles are scarce here.
“That’s impossible.”
My mother’s flat voice.
“You all should consider her wishes.” And with that the white coats were gone, leaving the room filled with wailing, and me with that statement that will loom over me forever.
A week later, I was still camping at the hospital beside her bed in the ICU. I had become a near-permanent fixture there. I sat listening to the rhythmic sound of her heart monitor when one of her neurologists came for her daily assessment. After taking a moment to find the courage, I asked him bluntly what he would do in my position.
“Well,” he hesitated. “I know my sister would hate me if I kept her in this state.”
I felt the knife in my chest bore deeper because I knew so would she. Was our desire to keep her with us subjecting her to a miserable existence that only robbed her of dignity? Perhaps the best care we could give her was the intervention that would devastate us all.
My despair must have been visible because the neurologist’s tense expression softened and his shoulders lowered. He walked across the room and sat beside me.
“Who was she before all of this?”
So I told him the story of a bright, beautiful girl who carried light with her wherever she went. She was fiercely competitive, but also a bit of a sore loser. No loss was ever taken without demanding a rematch. “Just one more time,” she would say for the third time, and I would happily oblige, as any good big sister would. She was boisterous, passionate, and had a loud, annoying laugh that I would give anything to hear again. She was a fire, and she lived her life with the reckless abandon of most 20-somethings until a blood clot smothered the flames of her life and thrust her into the cruel darkness of a vegetative state. With her thick hair sitting in a neat bun on the top of her head, she looked almost like herself—alive. But this was not life. This was torture and I was complicit. She would never want to live like that, even if it meant leaving us.
Leaving me.
It was only a week and a half after that conference-room meeting that her body started to shake, thrashing so hard that each time a nurse would run in to push increasing doses of medications. Her machines were no longer a rhythmic melody but a cacophony of distressing alarms and bells. As the nurse worked to calm her, I wondered for the first time if she was suffering. She certainly looked pained, her face marred by a stiff grimace. How could she not be pained? Her body was not her own. It had been overrun by tubes and cords that she did not consent to. I took her hand and squeezed it tight, willing with my every atom for a reaction. But her hand was cold and limp in mine and I knew that I was effectively holding a corpse, kept from its place in the ground by the desperate hopes of those who could not let it go.
Since the day she arrived in the ICU, I had convinced myself this is for the best. All the consents signed and procedures approved are how we loved and cared for her. Of course, we wanted her team to exhaust every tool in their arsenal to bring her back to us. But admittedly we never stopped to think about what she would want to happen to her. To do so would mean accepting a devastating truth—that the greatest act of love is knowing when enough is enough. There was one thing I did not share with the doctor about my sister, perhaps out of fear of judgment. She was fiercely independent. She was the child who never wanted mommy’s help, never wanted her hand held. Even while on crutches in the months leading up to her collapse, she would rather call Ubers or spend all day inside than ask anyone for a ride to any place. She would resent us for being kept in this state where at the absolute best she would hardly recover to be able to speak, let alone feed, bathe, or clothe herself. Frankly, she would rather die.
Three days later, I gathered my loved ones to discuss removing her ventilator. Standing before my parents and several aunts and uncles I made my case, stuttering and struggling to find the words as I wilted under the piercing gaze of those who just saw me as a defeatist. I urged them to remember who she was, and to reconcile that understanding with the choices we were making on her behalf. As it happens, there was not much of a discussion.
“How could you give up like this?”
“Why would you even suggest that?”
“You should be fighting for her.”
“Do you not love her?”
……………
But is it not love that would lead someone to willingly accept the lifelong agony of grief to free someone else of pain? We have gone too far. We have harmed her. We have prolonged her suffering.
Today, February 17, 2023, makes 133 days since my sister last opened her eyes. I frequent her bedside as often as life allows. How unfair that the world did not stop along with mine. The effects of time and stasis have begun to set in. Every week, she fights a new infection. Every day she shakes. She does not react when I call to her. She cannot grasp my hand. She lies there unresponsive and stripped of dignity, forced to endure this condition for as long as her body allows. I am both unable to mourn her yet and unable to have hope that she will heal. If she is somewhere in there aware at all, I hope that she can forgive us. After all, it’s love that is guiding all our choices, as different as they are.
“Just one more time,” I often whisper to her. And when I close my eyes I can hear her laughter faintly echo from the recesses of my heart—a sound I play on a loop in my mind to keep it fresh. So I never forget it.
