Fear of Dying (10 page)

“When will he wake up?”

“In a few hours.”

“Why is he so cold?”

“We have to drop the body temperature for open heart surgery. We should have warned you.”

You should have, I think. And yet I am immensely grateful Asher is still here—whatever his temperature. Probably it's a blessing I knew so little about aneurysms yesterday. If I had known the mortality rates, the narrow window of time in which to get help—I would have done exactly what I did. Instinct had proved as good a guide as knowledge.

“Mommo—he's freezing,” my daughter says, having tuned out the doctor's explanation. She begins to tremble. She grabs my hand and squeezes it.

“Will you hate me if I wait in the hall?” Glinda asks.

“Of course not—you can wait wherever,” I say.

Isadora hugs me. Glinda flees.

*   *   *

From then on I spend the days and the nights in the hospital. In between, I'm forever on the telephone listening to useless advice from friends or reciting chapter and verse of Asher's condition to his relatives. People pretend to care when you are about to become a widow. In New York they proffer massage therapists, shrinks, acupuncturists, plastic surgeons. As if you could jump up and reconstruct your life in an instant. As if you'd
want
to.

I am clear enough to know that if Ash doesn't pull through, it will take me years to get used to the idea. I won't be out looking for love in all the wrong places. Nor will I be placing ads on the Internet. How do I know this? I just know. I know because I have a best friend who lost her husband to an avalanche at fifty and took nearly a decade to open her arms and mind to love again. You can't just replace people like T-shirts or sneakers. I've begun to understand that if I lose Asher, my whole life will be stunted. I never realized how much I need him, how much I love him.

Am I crazy, or do I hear an undercurrent of exultation in the voices of acquaintances? The phone seems to whisper:
Glad it's not me, glad it's not me, glad it's not me.

Every night at midnight, Asher's brother calls me from L.A.

“What did the doctor say?”

“Nothing much.”

“He can't have said nothing much.”

“They never commit themselves—you know that.”

“How is Ash?”

“He has no idea what we've been through. He was out of it the whole time. He tells me the aneurysm was mine, not his. He wants me to get him Chinese food.”

“And what do you do?”

“Get him Chinese food.”

“How can you do that?” my aged brother-in-law yells. “He should be on a low-fat diet.”

“Then come here and put him on it. He won't eat anything but Chinese food for me.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Absolutely not. You know how stubborn he is.”

“But make him eat healthy food. His life depends on it.”

“I'm trying.”

And it's true. Isadora and I go to Whole Foods and buy everything low fat—beans, rice, fish. Asher will have none of it—nor hospital food.

“If I don't know how long I've got to live, I'm going to eat what I like,” he says. And with that he drowns his Lobster Cantonese with several packets of soy sauce.

“Not salty enough?”

“Damn right.”

I try to talk to him about what he remembers from his surgery.

“I remember nothing. I was flying.”

“Do you know you were out for three days?”

“How would I remember that? But I do know you saved my life. And I know how much I love you.”

“Me you too.” I reach out to put my hand over his heart but the bandages stop me. He grabs and gently squeezes my hand.

*   *   *

We had both been in the same physical space but we each had inhabited a different mental space. There seemed to be no way to share what we'd been through. The paradox of illness. Whose reality is real? The sick inhabit one universe, the well another. They may not even be parallel. The branes between them are thicker than forged steel.

Asher is fearless. I sit by his bedside, watching him read the paper as if nothing has happened.

“I can't believe how calm you are.”

“Because I slept through the whole crisis. You were awake.”

“Were you ever afraid you were going to die?”

“No. I knew it was going to be okay.”

This was the reason I had married Ash. He was brave where I was fearful, calm where I was crazed. Natural Prozac ran in his veins. He was an optimist. Optimism was the source of his success. He would have been an optimist in Auschwitz. And he would have survived. I don't know about me.

When (after 9/11) I sat at my computer surfing for bomb shelters to install under the country house (despite the fact it has no basement and perches on solid rock), he reassured me that it was
not
the end of the world.

“It's not even the
beginning
of the end of the world,” he said.

You had to love a man like that. I did.

*   *   *

It was a winter when it snowed and snowed. The city was repeatedly blanketed in snow. Trees came down. Power went out. There was more salt in New York City than in the Dead Sea. Climate change was upon us—or El Niño or both. The snow fell endlessly as if to bury its own ghosts. I kept thinking of the Joyce story “The Dead” to remember how he described “the snow falling faintly … like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” There was an end-of-the-world feeling to this weather.

One day, after a powerful snowstorm that buried cars and reminded me of the great snow of 1947 when I was a tiny child. (My parents had come back to New York for meetings, brought all three of us, and we got trapped by the blizzard.) I put on my warmest clothes and boots and go walking in Central Park with my beloved poodle, Belinda.

The trees are weighted down with snow. From time to time a great glob of snow falls from a snowy branch. The city is silenced. Kids are running around wearing bright-colored parkas and pulling sleds. I keep seeing men who look like my father—until they turn around and I realize their faces are different.

The descent of our last end—how much nearer we are to it than Joyce was. He lived in a world without nukes, without climate change—and still he suffered over his daughter. No human life passes without disappointment and suffering. No children without trouble. He invented a new language to tell his troubles. Don't we all wish we could?

*   *   *

I once had an acting teacher who used to quote Stanislavsky at the crinkle of a script. “Never lose yourself while acting,” he used to say. “It all comes out of your own being.” At first I had no idea what he meant. I had thought acting was becoming another person—but in truth it was becoming more actively yourself—more human. This took forever to understand.

But here in the snow, it makes sense. Who am I really? A stumbling human being, age unknown, who knows she's going to die. I never really believed it before.

I walk up Pilgrim Hill and lie on my back below the snow-laden statue of the pilgrim with Belinda—who loves snow. I raise my arms and press them into the snow as I did with my father when I was little. When I stand up, I see my angelic imprint, a bit puffy from my parka, arrayed around me. My dog's angelic imprint is also blurred.

“Always go to sleep hungry,” I can hear my father saying. “That's the secret to staying slim—no night eating.” What he didn't say was that he believed slimness guaranteed immortality. Boy, was he wrong.

*   *   *

When you're young your energy is so abundant that you think you can do anything, but it's also unchanneled. As you get older you have to channel your energy because it's limited.

Wet snow keeps cascading from branches in explosions of white. As I walk with Ms. B., I grow frightened that a branch will fall on my head and kill me. Danger brings excitement, Stanislavsky also said.

I keep thinking I see my father darting behind trees. He looks just like he did when he and I were young. Do I believe that if I grow young again I will have my handsome father again? What is magic after all—but the deep intention to change? What is magic but turning back time?

*   *   *

As I walk home in the snow with Belinda, I think about how impossible it is to explain to the young what happens when you know you're not immune from death. Everything changes. You look at the world differently. When you're young, you have no perspective. You think life lasts forever—days and months and years stretching out to infinity. You think you don't have to choose. You think you can waste time doing drugs and alcohol. You think time will always be on your side.

But time, once your friend, becomes your enemy. It gallops by as you get older. Holidays come faster and faster. Years fly off the calendar as in old movies. All you long for is to go back and do it all over, correct the mistakes, make everything right. My father must feel that way. I understand when it is too late to tell him.

Does everyone die with unfinished business? What about those gurus who choose the hour of their deaths, call in their students, and say good-bye? Or is that just a pleasant myth?

Being young is not just about looks or sex. It's about energy. I amaze myself by having such sudden abundant energy that Belinda and I jog all the way home in the slush.

 

 

 

Have you ever spent your days shuttling between one hospital and another? That was what my life became. My father was in the hospital again. He bounced in and out of the hospital as people do at the end of their lives. He was at Mount Sinai, my husband at New York Hospital—and I the flying shuttlecock between them, propelled by love and fear.

When I wasn't running between patients, I roamed cyberspace lonely as a cloud. I was searching for love online, where the Internet shimmered with possibility. Here, for example, was a chap who wanted to fly his lover around the world in a private plane. He had read
Emmanuelle
and thought that plane sex was the height of eroticism. I played the game for a while, sexting my plane fantasies in response to his. I was sure there was a place of ecstasy and transcendence I could find if only I knew the code, if I only knew the key word. It was a place of sacred streams, healing waters, plants I could eat to gain immortality, and endless perfect lovers. I had to traverse a magic wood, full of whispering leaves and swaying shadowy trees. I knew it existed, but just as I discovered the entrance, it would vanish behind the trembling foliage. If only I could enter it, I'd be free of despair, of aging, erasing my history and starting all over again. The Internet was a sort of fountain of youth, a potion I could drink to let me rejuvenate and reinvent myself. I had registered at Zipless.com as if I could change my life by rewriting my story for prospective online lovers. I was supremely in control—as long as I never met any of these imaginary swains and was never disappointed.

Currently, I was also corresponding with a “Byron” who claimed that he had lived his life in accord with poetic principles—whatever that meant. “Rite on my loverz bods,” he texted. That didn't seem promising. Was the Internet a vast sea of lunacy? Sometimes it seemed that way. And sea levels were rising!

*   *   *

“Do you still think Zipless is a fraud?” I ask Isadora the next time we have lunch.

“Aside from the fact that they stole my title?”

“Yes. You should sue.”

“I don't want to spend the rest of my life in a lawsuit. When Zipless first appeared, I was incredibly pissed off about the theft of the title, but I thought the site might be great. Now, like most of the Internet, I find it gross and misleading. I don't believe you'd ever find the perfect lover there.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because if people can be anonymous they tend to lie and cheat. As a writer, I take responsibility for what I say. I sign my real name. On the Internet people hide and usually when people can hide the truth eludes them.”

“So you've stopped believing in Ziplessness.”

“Absolutely,” Isadora says. “It works in fantasy, not in reality. In reality you have to trust someone to have great sex, and how can you trust what you read on the Internet? The Internet has fractured our attention span, made headlines more important than explanation. How often have I followed a headline only to discover it told me nothing? It stimulates our eyeballs, not our brains. So often, I click on a story only to be disappointed. I don't even like tweets if people don't use their real names. Isn't it ironic that people think of me only in that context?”

“Just as people think of me as Blair,” I say. “We are all stuck in old news.”

*   *   *

At the hospital, my father was hanging on in the ICU. He seemed happy to see me, but he was intubated again, so he couldn't speak.

The nurse reported that he had pulled out all his tubes the night before and had to be reconnected by the morning shift. He even pulled out the feeding peg.

I sat by his bedside watching him doze and wake and cursed myself for what we were doing to him. We were not observing his living will. It was too hard to interpret. Nobody dared to play God. Nobody dared to make a decision. Perhaps my hysterical older sister was right. We should let him go. But how? Who could make that grave a decision?

*   *   *

Asher and I were both incredible news junkies. We watched it all with fascination and horror. Little kids left legless after stumbling on cluster bombs, hospitals overflowing with people killed in marketplaces, in schools, in cars (just for turning the ignition key). This was the world we'd made. Yet letting go of a ninety-three-year-old father had not gotten any easier.