Essays After Eighty (10 page)

 

My childhood hometown threw a bash to celebrate my last book of poems, shortly before my eighty-third birthday. Except for summers on the farm, I grew up in a Connecticut suburb in the house where my mother survived to be ninety. Jane and I drove to see her every month when she could no longer drive, and after she died I thought that Hamden was over. I didn't know anyone there—and so I was surprised to be asked to a tribute from the town, sponsored by the Hamden library. I was amazed and ecstatic that four hundred people came. There was an introduction, anecdotes, and poems from the Connecticut Poetry Society. It went on and on. Then I read some poems and took a few questions. Afterward, fifty people surrounded me, saying, “My mother taught you French!” “My grandfather worked for your grandfather!” “Your father gave me this book with his own hands!” and “Do you remember me?” I did not recognize my date for the prom.

At my birthday, back in New Hampshire, my children and grandchildren gathered for dinner at a restaurant's long table. I was so excited about the Hamden occasion that I described it to the left side of the table, then turned right and repeated everything. “I don't know why,” I said, “but it pleased me as much as the White House.” My beautiful and sharp granddaughter Allison said, “Maybe it was because you were the only one.”

 

Including the dropped cigarette that occasioned my first automobile accident, I have fumbled cigarettes ten thousand times, and long ago renounced the pleasure of smoking in bed. I sucked on most of my cigarettes as I sat reading in the overstuffed blue armchair, the same one from which I looked out the window at winter birds. One time when Kendel was visiting, she noticed that the carpet between my chair and a low bookshelf was burned away, as were the backs of some books. She was horrified when I told her that I had dropped a cigarette and couldn't find it. She begged me—no, she commanded me—to telephone her if I couldn't find a dropped cigarette. I didn't want to wake her up in the night, but she would not let me go until I promised, so I promised.

Often I go to bed at ten-thirty. I sleep for an hour or so, then wake feeling jumpy and sit up for a while, reading a magazine and smoking. Shortly after promising Kendel, I dropped a cigarette in my overstuffed chair. I could not find it! I felt horrible, because I had promised her and it was midnight. I pulled out the cushions of the chair. Nothing. Then I reached down below the cushion line and found it. I finished inhaling the ember and went back to bed. I slept soundly until about three A.M., when the blast of a siren awakened me. I looked at my alarm clock, groggy, as if it could make such a noise. I sat on the side of the bed, two-thirds asleep, aghast to listen to the blast—then woke enough to see smoke billowing through the bedroom door. The screech was the smoke alarm! I had the brains to push the button around my neck. The voice asked gently, “Are you all right?” “Smoke is filling my bedroom!” “Stay where you are!” In a short while, after alerting firemen and an ambulance, the voice came back, “Don't move. Is your front door unlocked?”

Firemen from Wilmot and nearby towns arrived with a twenty-four-hour ambulance from New London. Kendel joined us, alerted by the button people. The front door crashed open and the ambulance crew carried me outside on a stretcher through the smoke. I saw no flame—but my big blue chair was pouring out a thick column of smoke. Confused as I was, I had glimpsed the source of the conflagration. The cigarette I found in my chair at midnight, alight enough to smoke, had left behind in the chair's bowels a burning hunk of tobacco. In the ambulance the crew confirmed that I was intact. They took my blood pressure over and over, lower every time. It was a warm November night, but it was November. Kendel took shelter in the ambulance. At her request, they took her blood pressure also.

On my front lawn the blue chair stood soaked and looking lonely. In the house the firemen opened the windows and blew the smoke outdoors, downstairs and up. When the ambulance crew took me back inside I could not smell a whiff. I had been saved by the shriek of the alarm that my friend Carole Colburn had thought to install ten years ago. Two weeks ago Linda had checked it out when it made a noise like an insect. She replaced the dying battery. Women had saved me again. Cigarettes are not only a dishonor but lethal, and not only on account of lung cancer. Was my life in danger from smoke inhalation? I think so. In the morning the armchair on the lawn again billowed dense smoke. The firemen had put it out only temporarily, and it recovered its prodigious outpouring. Kendel arrived and dialed 911. “This is not an emergency.” Firemen returned with water and foam, but they needed to use axes to chop the blue armchair into smokeless shreds.

IT IS SENSIBLE
of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not
pass away
. Every day millions of people
pass away
—in obituaries, death notices, cards of consolation, e-mails to the corpse's friends—but people don't
die
. Sometimes they rest in peace, quit this world, go the way of all flesh, depart, give up the ghost, breathe a last breath, join their dear ones in heaven, meet their Maker, ascend to a better place, succumb surrounded by family, return to the Lord, go home, cross over, or leave this world. Whatever the fatuous phrase, death usually happens peacefully (asleep) or after a courageous struggle (cancer). Sometimes women lose their husbands. (Where the hell did I put him?) Some expressions are less common in print: push up the daisies, kick the bucket, croak, buy the farm, cash out. All euphemisms conceal how we gasp and choke turning blue.

Cremation hides the cadaver; ashes preclude rot. Neanderthals and
Homo sapiens
stuck their dead underground or in mounds. Pyramids sealed up pharaohs. Romans shifted by the century between incineration and burial. Commonly Hindus burnt dead bodies by the Ganges, in the old days performing
sati
by adding a live widow to the pyre. Cinders clogged the river, along with dead babies of families too poor to buy wood. Zoroastrians and Tibetans tended to raise corpses onto platforms for vultures to eat. My favorite anecdote of ash disposal is recent. After I finished a poetry reading, a generous admirer presented me a jar of her late husband's remains.

Myself, I'll be a molderer, like my wife Jane.

 

At some point in my seventies, death stopped being interesting. I no longer checked out ages in obituaries. Earlier, if I was fifty-one and the cadaver was fifty-three, for a moment I felt anxious. If the dead man was fifty-one and I was fifty-three, I felt relief. If a person lives into old age, there's a moment when he or she becomes eldest in the family, perched on top of a hill as night rises. My mother at ninety left me the survivor. Soon I will provide that honor to my son. When he was born, I was twenty-five and wrote a poem called “My Son My Executioner.” A decade ago I went to the emergency room when I fell and hurt myself. It was no big deal. The resident doctor dropped by and we chatted. When I asked about blood pressure numbers, he said I had nothing to worry about. “How many years do you want to live anyway?” Without thinking I grabbed a number out of the air. “Oh, until eighty-three,” I told him. On my eighty-fourth birthday I was quietly relieved.

In my eighties, the days have narrowed as they must. I live on one floor eating frozen dinners. Louise the postwoman brings letters to my porch, opens the door, and tosses the mail on a chair. I get around—bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, new chair by the window, electrical reclining (or lifting) chair for Chris Matthews and baseball—by spasming from one place to another pushing a four-wheeled roller. I try not to break my neck. I write letters, I take naps, I write essays.

 

The people I love will mourn me, but I won't be around to commiserate. I become gloomy thinking of insensate things I will leave behind. My survivors will cram into plastic bags the tchotchkes I have lived with, expanding a landfill. I needn't worry about my Andy Warhols. I fret over the striped stone that my daughter picked up at the pond, or my father's desk lamp from college, or a miniature wooden milk wagon from the family dairy. My mother approaching ninety feared that we would junk the Hummel figurines that decorated her mantelpiece, kitsch porcelain dolls popular from the forties to the sixties. Thus, a box of them rests in my daughter's attic. More important to me is this house, which my great-grandfather moved to in 1865—the family place for almost a century and a half. In the back chamber the generations stored everything broken or useless, because no one knew when they might come in handy. My kids and grandkids don't want to live in rural isolation—why should they?—but it's melancholy to think of the house emptied out. Better it should burn down. Remaining in the old place, I let things go. I shingle the roof, I empty the cesspool, but if a light fixture fails, I do without it. Maybe the next tenant will not want it. I let the old wallpaper flap loose. Somebody will remove four hundred feet of bookshelves.

There are also bits of land I cherish. When Jane and I moved here, we found my great-grandfather's stationery, labeled “Eagle Pond Farm,” and borrowed the name for our address. Last November a friend took me driving past Eagle Pond. It's obscured from my windows by the growth of tall trees, although the pond is only a hundred yards west, twenty-four acres of water. My land includes half the pond's shore. I titled books of essays
Seasons at Eagle Pond
and
Here at Eagle Pond
. Then I collected them as
Eagle Pond
. Then I wrote
Christmas at Eagle Pond
. Back in the day, Jane and I used a tiny, hidden beach, among oak and birch, to lie in the sun on summer afternoons and grill supper on a hibachi. We watched for mink and beaver, we saw the first acorns fall. In the years after she died I visited the pond rarely, and by this time it's long since I've even passed it by. When my friend drove me on its dirt road—an afternoon of bright autumn sunlight, the pond intensely blue with its waters choppy—I glimpsed the birches of our old beach and wept a tear of self-pity.

 

Of course we start dying when the sperm fucks the egg. (Pro-lifers dwell on this insight.) At my age I feel complacent about death, if sometimes somber, but we all agree that
dying
sucks. I've never been around when somebody, in the middle of a sentence or a sandwich, has the luck to pitch over dead. I've only sat beside two deaths, my grandmother Kate's and my wife Jane's. In both cases the corpse-in-waiting was out of it. Hours earlier each had slipped into Cheyne-Stokes breathing, when the brain stem is stubborn about retaining oxygen though the big brain has departed. Cheyne-Stokes is one long breath followed by three quick ones, then a pause. The brain stem holds on, in my experience, for as long as twelve hours. Because my grandmother's mouth drooped open and looked sore, a nurse spooned water on her red tongue. She choked as if she had swallowed the wrong way. I held her hand. I rubbed Jane's head until the long breath ceased. Least enviable are folks who die while alive, panicked as they rush, still conscious, from pink to blue. My father and my mother both died alive.

 

Beginning as a schoolboy, death turned me on, and for decades I practiced an enthusiastic morbidity. At home a whole bunch of great-aunts and -uncles took their turns at dying. At ten I enjoyed banquets of precocious lamentation, telling myself that Death had become a reality. In seventh grade I wrote my first poem, which explained that Death hunted you down, screeching through the night, until Death called your name. When I was fifteen, more and more practicing the poet, I decided that if I announced that I would die young, it would appeal to cheerleaders. I let it be known that I would die between pages seventeen and eighteen, not noticing that seventeen and eighteen are two sides of the same page. When I started writing real poems I kept to the subject, though death dropped its capital letter. I wrote cheerful poems—about farm horses or a family dog—and pointed out that eventually they all died. Who would have guessed? I wrote a poem, “In Praise of Death,” that tried to get rid of death by flattery.

Except in print, I no longer dwell on it. It's almost relaxing to know I'll die fairly soon, as it's a comfort not to obsess about my next orgasm. I've been ambitious, and ambition no longer has plans for the future—except these essays. My goal in life is making it to the bathroom. In the past I was often advised to live in the moment. Now what else can I do? Days are the same, generic and speedy—I seem to remove my teeth shortly after I glue them in—and weeks are no more tedious than lunch. They elapse and I scarcely notice. The only boring measure is the seasons. Year after year they follow the same order. Why don't they shake things up a bit? Start with summer, followed by spring, winter, then maybe Thanksgiving?

I've wanted to kill myself only three times, each on account of a woman. Two of them dumped me and the other died. Each time, daydreams of suicide gave me comfort. My father presented me with a .22 Mossberg when I was twelve, but self-assassination by .22 is chancy. If I didn't aim it like a surgeon, I could spend the rest of my life on a breathing machine. My friend Bruno suggested an infallible method—to carry my gun into Eagle Pond, wading up to my knees, then plonk a long-rifle bullet into my head. I would drown if the shot didn't finish me off. Bruno gave suicide a lot of thought, and he took no chance with himself. In his Beverly Hills condo he pulled the pin on a hand grenade clutched to his chest.

By this time, even if I wanted to, I'm too frail and wobbly to walk into Eagle Pond.

 

In middle life I came close to dying of natural causes. When I was sixty-one I had colon cancer, deftly removed, but two years later it metastasized to my liver. A surgeon removed half of that organ and told me I might live five years. Both Jane and I assumed I would die soon, and she massaged me every day, trying to rub the cancer out. I went through the motions of chemo and finished writing what I was able to finish. Aware of my own approaching death, I was astonished and appalled when Jane came down with leukemia. Her death at forty-seven—I was sixty-six—was not trivial. Six years later I had a small stroke and my potential death felt matter-of-fact. A carotid artery was eighty-five percent occluded. Dr. Harbaugh removed a pencil-wide, inch-long piece of plaque during a two-hour operation under local anesthetic. I enjoyed hearing the chitchat of the white-coated gang. Now and then somebody asked me to squeeze a dog's ball, which tinkled to affirm my consciousness. I was disappointed when Dr. Harbaugh wouldn't let me take the obstruction back home.