Exit Laughing (2 page)

I can say with certitude that the longer you live, the more people you know will die, which is like saying that when people are out of work it’s because of unemployment. And, generally speaking, it seems to be quite in order for our parents to die before us, as obviously mine did, and here’s a bit of my mother’s dying saga. (A note here: the title of my brother’s book,
Angela’s Ashes
, arose from her heavy smoking and the fact that she ended up being cremated.)

As anybody knows, the whole thing begins with an assault on the body, usually when someone slaps us on the arse to get the breath going. The first one being an inhalation, and the last one being an elusive exhalation with corpse-to-be vainly trying to recapture it and funnel it back to the lungs.

The mother born Angela Sheehan on January 1, 1908, took her first breath in Limerick, Ireland, and from her descriptions of her life, all her breaths from then on were uneasy. She smoked cigarettes from the age of thirteen. She gave birth to seven children, three of whom died in childhood from various respiratory failures, perhaps because of the constant presence of cigarette smoke in their short lives. She panted, she wheezed, and she coughed for many years because she had severe and chronic bronchitis and, finally, emphysema. Angela was a walking advertisement for the stop-smoking brigade.
The day arrived when she could walk no more and had to have oxygen administered all the days of her life and, indeed, all the hours too.

Then it was off to Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, where she was hooked up to various life-sustaining devices. One of the questions asked her was, “What did your husband do?” She could not think of the phrase
jack-of-all-trades
, so she said he was an “all-round man.” “All-round what?” they asked. She said, “All round the bars.” Her reputation as a wit was established in the hospital, and thus she got very good treatment.

As death approached, her moods changed and depression set in. A psychiatrist was dispatched to her bedside, and after a few perfunctory questions he informed her that, in his opinion, she was depressed. She told him that that was a coincidence, as she was of the same opinion, but wouldn’t he be depressed if he were on the verge of death, and were sick, so miserable they wouldn’t let him die? They allow abortions, but insist on keeping people alive who don’t want to live. She told the psychiatrist to go and help someone who needed to live. A Catholic priest arrived, and she waved him off, as the church had not been of much help when she was trying to raise four children alone in Catholic Ireland.

I was having a fiftieth birthday party and, against all medical advice, she heaved herself out of the bed into a wheelchair and got herself to the party venue and distinguished herself by being the only dying person present. One of our friends at the party, Bernard Carabello, said to her, “I hope you don’t
die during the party.” “Why?” said she. “Because I couldn’t stand the excitement,” Bernard replied. She reassured him that she had to get back to the hospital and did not want to disappoint the nursing staff by dying off premises. She returned to the hospital and resumed her intake of pills, medication, and, most importantly, oxygen.

As the days passed, her medical condition worsened, and she kept wondering why they would not allow her to die. They shushed her and told her not to talk like that. The situation was not helped by her bingo friends, who kept telling her that she would be out and about for Christmas and back to bingo. They all knew she was dying, but people play games when death is looming.

I requested a meeting with the main physician to discuss how we could let her go. He hemmed and hawed about getting her to a nursing home, how it was against the ethics of medicine and against the law to assist in a person’s dying. I don’t know why I said it or what it means, but out of my mouth it came. “Don’t worry, Doctor. You see, we come from a long line of dead people.”

The doctor looked like a man who has just been cornered by a pack of rabid dogs. He gasped something about Code Red or Code Blue or some emergency, and he fled down the hall, away from this non sequitur–spouting lunatic. Later on that day, the nursing staff did remove the intravenous needles, leaving only the oxygen to facilitate comfortable breathing.

The family gathered about to make the final farewells, and so began the deathwatch as she sank into what is commonly called a coma. At about two in the morning, I was seated
in the chair at the foot of her bed, listening to her labored breathing. At one point, she opened one eye and observed me. “What are you doing here?” said she.

“I thought you might die this night!” said I.

“I might and I might not,” said she, “but that is my business, so why don’t you go home to your bed?”

Which is what I did, and at about 5
AM
the telephone rang, and the voice at the other end informed me that the mother had just died. She had an innate courtesy, which would not allow her to die while someone was visiting her, and that’s why she waited till I was gone.

Brothers Frank, Alphie, and Mike and myself met with a funeral undertaker who was festooned with things gold: gold watch, gold spectacles, gold tie clip, gold rings, gold tie pin, gold teeth, and highly polished fingernails. His golden tanned face was set in practiced commercial condolence. He sat behind a desk, elbows propped, fingertips together cathedral-style, saying things like, “You will want the redwood casket with the blue satin lining and the brass handles.” Our reply was, “No, we will not want that one, as we are cremating her, and could we possibly have a body bag for the purpose? And while we are at it, is it possible to have her collected by the sanitation department?”

The gold-bedecked undertaker did not appreciate the levity and left the room to recover from the inappropriate witticisms of a bunch of Irish sons who had no respect for undertakers or for death itself. My brother Alphie, usually the quiet one—thus dubbed
chatterbox
by the ironic mother—remarked,
“There goes a man well experienced in extreme unctuousness,” a pun that sent us into the heights of hilarity, the state that happens only at times of sorrow.

Angela was cremated without ceremony and her ashes returned to us in what appeared to be the kind of can that is used to contain peas. Whilst bringing her ashes to Ireland, the aeroplane sprung a leak in one of the doors. The high-pitched piercing whistle from that leak was deafening, and to calm the frightened passengers I asked if anyone would like to meet my mother. Some said yes and I produced the can, holding up her ashes and announcing, “Here she is!” For some reason, people on planes that have to return to aeroports because of trouble do not want to meet dead people in flight, so introducing them to my mother was a social failure.

We did eventually get to Ireland and put Angela’s ashes in her old family graveyard. We had to sneak them in, due to the graveyard being part of a tenth-century abbey, which is now a preserved national monument; no more burials are allowed. As we stood there, this family of McCourts, we did laugh a lot, and we did sing first of all the songs that Angela disliked, as we felt she might pull a phoenix act and arise from the ashes and tell us to shut up, and then we sang the songs she liked, including “Will Ye Go, Lassie, Go,” and she went.

And that was end of Angela McCourt on this planet.

In the middle of spring, in what should have been the middle of his life, my husband died, leaving me and three young sons, as well as a teen daughter from a previous marriage. Nothing about this was good.

Although all the morphine that hospice could give finally was unable to quell the pain so that Dan could sleep or even talk with his siblings or the children, he did not long for “peace.” The end was preferable only in that there is no fighting colon cancer once it digs in its talons. We lived then in Madison, Wisconsin, and at his memorial, when people told six-year-old Danny that his father was in “a better place,” Danny explained that Dan really preferred Dane County to heaven.

As memorial services go, it was a good one. Although his sister was enraged that we didn’t opt for a Catholic mass (for Dan hated standard-issue Catholicism with all the passion of a former altar boy), one of the privileges of widowhood (along with no longer having to send Christmas cards) is not giving a big damn what other people think. All Dan’s friends came, and all his enemies came, too. As a crusading political reporter, Dan took the journalistic adjuration about afflicting
the comfortable utterly seriously; but even the immensely popular Republican governor paid a visit, later telling me that he and Dan had their differences but that Dan always fought fair, and cherishing family was something on which they agreed. The big Frank Lloyd Wright meetinghouse was filled with the music Dan had loved—and music was his passion—from “God Only Knows” to “Ashokan Farewell.”

And then, because Dan never did anything according to standard procedure, after the funeral, his best friends—among them Michael and Mad Dog (I didn’t know Mad Dog’s real name until twenty years later)—hosted his wake. There were fireworks. There were lots of fireworks, and staid neighbors who might have been apt to complain came instead to join the fun. I had my first two or six shots of whiskey (and I was nearly forty years old!) and promptly got outrageously sick. I can remember my brother telling me that if anyone could see me, they would be appalled by my throwing up like a dog eating grass. However, not then or now have I had a stomach for liquor. I went home early with my brother, my father, and the boys, who were only four, six, and ten, to put off for one more day facing the Big Question: how I was going to support the kids. All the life insurance Dan had amounted to a 1993 year’s salary for a small-town newspaper editor.

So I wasn’t there for the gigantic thunderstorm that rolled in late. I didn’t hear the story of what happened to four of Dan’s closest friends until much later. When I heard, I could not stop laughing—and again, I didn’t care who knew it. At first, I felt pretty invulnerable, as fools will.

The earliest five or six months for a widow (not a widower) are pretty great. Families offer to make room at picnics and fishing excursions for your kids. And then, although men raising kids as an only parent continue to receive the sweetest strokes and comeliest casseroles, an odd-woman-out becomes something of a burden and even something of a threat. Friends drifted away, some with no explanation, some just confessing that they didn’t know what to do for me.

One Friday night, when I called my friend Laurie to ask if she and her three kids could get together with us, she gave me what obviously had been the piece of her mind she’d been holding back. “We have husbands and families, Jackie,” she said. “We can’t drop everything and do something with you anymore.” I was heartbroken, and my relationship with Laurie never was the same, but I got it. The circus of Dan’s early, fast, and horrific death had moved on. My friendships now would be fewer, much fewer, because not only the couple friends but the single friends would fade away, one sort of afraid of the contagion, one a little miffed that my posse had to go wherever I went.

But this recognition was far in the future, and I still believed that people loved me not only for myself but for my sufferings.

After Dan’s wake, the house party was rained indoors, but three of Dan’s closest friends from town, along with another from out of town, decided to go up to the roof of the Mendota Mental Health Institute—the place in the State of Wisconsin where the severely mentally ill live, sometimes all their lives. Ed Gein, whose affection for his mother inspired
Robert Bloch’s novel
Psycho
, had died not long before at Mendota. Ed’s favorite part of his week were the Thursday night mixers, because Ed, murderer of at least two women besides his mother, did like the ladies. Dan’s good friend, Ken, was a psychiatrist and the administrator of Mendota.

There was a covered area on the roof, and Ken led three other friends up there to watch the lightning over one of Madison’s three city lakes. They talked about old times and how much Dan would have loved the thunderstorm. As news channels screamed for families to take cover in tornadoes, he was always outside with his old camera, hoping to capture a real twister on film. That night, the storm was more sound than real fury, and after an hour or so, the friends made their way down. Dan’s best friend, Rob, had to go back to New York the following morning, and the others had pressing business as well.

When they strolled up to the gate, flanked by ten-foot fences with electrified razor wire on top, the night watchman asked pleasantly, “And where are you gentlemen headed?”

Later, Ken would wonder if the storm had interrupted the electrical current, but the man’s manner was polite and calm. Similarly politely and calmly, Ken reached into his jeans pocket for his ID. But he’d left it in the car. Reasonably, Ken explained that he’d just been to a great friend’s funeral and now he needed to go home. He added that he was the medical director of Mendota. Why the man on duty at midnight should have believed this was anyone’s guess, but Ken was still surprised when the gatekeeper said, “You are, huh?”

“He is!” spoke up Dan’s closest friend from work. “And I’m the editor of the newspaper!”

Rick added, “I’m the Dane County executive!”

And not to be outdone, Rob said, “I’m a columnist for the
New York Times
!”

“You are, huh?” repeated the watchman, who had by then summoned several others.

No one could stop laughing—they realized how absurd they sounded—until the guard offered to escort them back inside, nice and friendly-like. Ken protested, spluttering. But spluttering is what a delusional person does best, and it was a good two hours before Ken could give his keys to someone who fetched his wallet with its ID, and until all the others’ IDs were verified, and double-verified, with calls to the police, the executive editor of the local paper, and the
New York Times
, where the guy on the desk at first had no idea who Rob was.