Summary: Section 11

For nine more years the everyman is healthy. Then in 1998, he suffers an obstruction of his renal artery, which is fixed with a stent. He is sixty-five, just retired, and goes on Medicare, begins to collect Social Security, and writes a will. After the September 11 attacks, he moves from Manhattan to the Starfish Beach retirement village at the Jersey Shore, close to where his family had once taken their vacations every summer. The everyman turns his living room in the complex into an art studio and slips into a comfortable, active daily routine. The only thing he misses about his life in New York is Nancy, who is recently divorced. He wants Nancy and her two four-year-old children to join him at the Jersey Shore. They will have a better quality of life there and be safe from possible terrorist attacks.

Summary: Section 12

A year after the renal stent, the everyman has another operation, this time for an obstruction in his left carotid artery. The operation is not as serious as the others the everyman has been through, though he does not have as much moral support at this time. Nancy is busy with work and looking after her children. The everyman does not want to disrupt Howie’s busy life either. The operation will allow him to be out of the hospital the next morning, and his surgeon assures him he will recover quickly. In the calm waiting room, a man starts up a strange conversation with the everyman, telling him about the terrible misfortunes of his life. The everyman chooses to have local anesthetic for the surgery, and because of this the operation is claustrophobic and alarming, but he endures it. When he checks out of the hospital the next day, he lies and says a friend is taking him home. He drives himself back to his condo and bursts into tears.

Summary: Section 13

The everyman’s health gives way, and every year he has to be hospitalized. A year after the carotid artery surgery, a doctor discovers that the everyman has had a silent heart attack. Nancy is with him, and provides comfort and reassurance. To keep calm during his angioplasties (a procedure used to widen blocked or narrowed coronary arteries), the everyman pictures his father’s store in great detail, listing the makes and design of watches his father had stocked. The year after the stents are inserted, he has to have a permanent defibrillator installed. Nancy comes with him for this procedure. When the everyman shows her the bulge created by the defibrillator, Nancy is horrified but the everyman remains calm. The everyman thinks back to Nancy’s time as a track star when she is thirteen. He gives up swimming so he and Nancy can run together. During a meet, Nancy is severely injured. While in recovery, she hits puberty and is no longer able to run as fast as she had before. Her championship dreams are over. Following this, Nancy’s parents go through a divorce. The impact of seeing the defibrillator on her father makes Nancy relive these painful experiences, and she tells the everyman how she had long hoped that he and her mother Phoebe would get back together. All the everyman can do is tell Nancy to take reality as it is.

Summary: Section 14

Lonely, the everyman begins to feel as if he is close to the end of his life. Instead of moving back to Manhattan, he decides to engage more with the world around him, and organizes painting classes for the retirement village residents. One of the everyman’s best students, Millicent Kramer, has a bad back and rests in his bedroom. One day he hears her crying, and goes in. Millicent’s recently deceased husband Gerald Kramer was an opinionated, outgoing former newspaper publisher. When he was stricken with brain cancer, the difference in his circumstances damaged his sense of self. Since her husband’s death and with the onset of recurrent back pain, Millicent’s quality of life has diminished. Millicent feels ashamed at her helplessness and tears, and is embarrassed by who she is as an ill person. The everyman understands this point of view and tries to comfort her. Ten days later, Millicent kills herself with an overdose of sleeping pills. The everyman announces that due to a change of plans he will not be able to run his popular painting courses until the next fall.

Analysis

One of the everyman’s strongest fears is succumbing too soon to death. While he is stoic about the suffering he undergoes through continual surgeries and the indignities of old age, he worries about dying in a hypothetical terrorist attack. His anxiety and choice to move away from New York is a direct response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. This worry is a reflection of the everyman’s averageness. It is likely that in the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, fear of another terrorist attack went through the heads of many people living in New York City. The everyman moves to the Jersey Shore, which he used to visit during childhood vacations. This move marks a retreat from the harsh unknowable realities of life towards a place of safety, that is, the known world of the past and of childhood. Once in his new retirement community, the everyman establishes a routine designed to maximize both his mental well-being and his health, in order to further secure himself in the world of the living. Despite his efforts, life continues to prove unpredictable, isolating, and marred by suffering and death.

We also learn that the everyman wishes to protect and provide for Nancy and her young family from both imagined future attacks and from the difficulties of life in a single-parent family. The everyman’s desire to protect Nancy from death and suffering comes from their close family connection, as he wishes to save his own link in the chain of life, and because he views Nancy as a pure and kind person who makes the world a better place by being in it. Nancy is perhaps the best gift he has given the world. We have a glimpse of Nancy’s husband who left her to return to his quiet hometown to escape the chaos of raising twins. In this selfishness, he resembles the everyman himself. The everyman, however, did not always leave his relationships to seek ease or comfort, but because his desires caused him to make impulsive and hurtful choices regarding the women in his life. He is in part trying to protect Nancy because he could not protect her from the fallout of his affairs or from painful accidents when she was younger and more vulnerable.

In these sections, the narrative touches on the consolations of having a patient and accepting attitude towards suffering. The everyman endures the indignities of his various operations, including waking to find that medical equipment is still attached to his body by mistake and having to lie completely still for hours immediately following an operation. When he is alone, his suffering is greater. We see this when the masked faces of the surgeons bring to mind the everyman’s greatest fear, terrorists, and later, when, exhausted after driving himself home after an operation, he bursts into tears. Still, he doesn’t complain. He focuses on concrete details to ease himself through operations, and sticks to his routines to maintain as best he can his quality of life. When Nancy is alarmed by his newly fitted defibrillator, the everyman is able to fall back on a stoic outlook that suggests taking each incident in life as it comes and reacting without undue paranoia.

The everyman’s attitude toward suffering contrasts with Millicent Kramer and her husband’s reaction to aging and loss. While lying on the everyman’s bed during a bout of severe pain, Millicent ineffectually tries to hide her back brace. The back brace is a reminder to the everyman of the undeniable and looming presence of death and illness. For Millicent, the back brace is something shameful. Both Millicent and her husband defined themselves by self-sufficiency and independence of thought and body, so much so that reliance on others is deeply embarrassing and leads to anger, depression, and a loss of sense of self. Millicent is so overwhelmed by her emotional response to pain that she is not helped by either the everyman’s concrete offers of help, such as water or a heating pad, or by sharing the burden of her suffering through speaking of it to the everyman. For her, daily life is hellish.

Millicent and her husband’s inability to cope is not something the everyman dismisses as weakness. He does not view his own accepting attitude as superior and he doesn’t view tears or complaints as anything out of the ordinary. His other painting students bond over their illnesses, and these become a form of identification by which the residents know each other and chart their own passage through their last years. This is not something the everyman himself does. Millicent actively appears to resist aligning herself with her pain, seeing it as an upsetting and remorseless force, changing her without her wishes into someone limited by their body rather than living through it. At the same time, she does not see herself as unusual or special, much as the everyman does not view his life or illnesses as in any way atypical. So when Millicent ends her life to escape her suffering and loneliness, the everyman is rocked to his core. Millicent is an example of the kind of person the everyman could quite easily have become if not for the stoic outlook passed on to him by his father which helps guide him through the indignity of pain.