Fear of Dying (12 page)

I know he loves me. Even his unconscious loves me. I never had that before. And that's what most people who meet Asher can't see. They buy his tough-guy act. I don't. I see the sweet boy underneath the bluster. I imagine him bluffing his way through his Bar Mitzvah. I see how vulnerable he is—saw it even before he got sick. I see the way he looks at me—as if his eyes could pierce my skin. I know he even loves me in his dreams. And I want to love him back that way. Can I?

*   *   *

“What do you think of this all-female house?” my mother asks. That is the only reference she makes to my father's hospitalization. She lies in bed, wearing diapers, waking and sleeping, attended by rotating nurses. When I look for a vase for the flowers I've brought her, I discover that every container is veiled by greasy dust—something she never would have allowed when she was awake and aware. All the women in my family are mad housewives, compulsive cleaners. Veils of grease are not our style. This is the way the world ends, I think, greasy dust covers all.

I give her a big smooch and sit by her side in her wheelchair while she fades in and out of consciousness.

She wakes up, sees the flowers by her bedside, and says, “I should paint them.” But the truth is she hasn't painted in years. She has forgotten how.

My mother tilts her head back and looks up at the ceiling with her mouth open as if she would swallow the sky. This is no life for the energetic person she once was. If she could see herself, she wouldn't be happy.

When babies spend their days waking and sleeping, we're not sad because we know their lives are going forward. But an old person's slipping in and out of sleep is only a warm-up for extinction. We know it. Do they know it? And if they know, do they care?

Yes!

What on earth are we going to do with our old, old, old, very old parents? If we have to choose between babies and old people, we know damn well what we ought to do. My mother always used to tell the story about the mother eagle that could save only one of her baby eaglets from a catastrophic storm that threatened to blow away their nest. So she asked each eaglet what he or she would do when she was old and utterly dependent on his or her care. The first eaglet answered: “Stay and take care of you, Mother, for the rest of your life.” The second said: “Sacrifice everything for your welfare, Mother.” The third said: “I will have eaglets of my own to care for, and they must come before you. If I can save them and save you, I will do it. But if I must choose, I will choose
them
when you are old.” Of course the third eaglet was the one she saved.

Survival of the tribe is always more important than survival of the dying. Triage was my mother's lesson to us. It was far less ambiguous than a so-called “living will.” Yet how to follow it? We'd better harden our hearts as the earth becomes overrun with the dying. The old are rigid. They don't want to give up their power. Unless we replace them with flexible new people, we have no chance of changing the world. I assume that's why the immortals invented death. They must have known that immortality was no bargain.

Remember Tithonus—the man who could not die?

Remember Tennyson?

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,

The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,

Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,

And after many a summer dies the swan.

Me only cruel immortality

Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,

Here at the quiet limit of the world,

A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream

Tithonus asked Eos, goddess of dawn, for immortality, but he forgot to ask for the eternal youth the gods enjoy (if they do). The gods are tricky. Probably out of boredom. It must be boring to live forever. You must be very specific in your wishes or they'll come back to haunt you. Eos went her merry way, rising always in her pink-and-red chiffon with streaks of gold and blue; Tithonus lived out his immortality as a decrepit, walking, talking corpse. But at least he talked poetry.

My father wished for more. Immortality and eternal youth. Of course he got neither.

Aldous Huxley, who was prophetic about so many things—from artificial insemination to artificial wombs to euthanasia—envisioned the dying wafting to the next world on a cloud of music and “soma.” Pain would be obsolete, drugs ubiquitous. We're almost there.

I like morphine as much as the next addict. I'd break my leg again to have it, I sometimes think. Byron and Shelley lived—and died—on laudanum, tincture of opium. Who could blame them?

You don't really become aware of the body until its beautiful balance breaks down. My father couldn't eat, couldn't swallow, couldn't pee, yet wouldn't die.

If only I could get inside his head and know what he was thinking. But I couldn't even do that when he was well. He was always running away—to the airport, to the baby grand, to the drums, to the Metropolitan Opera, to Carnegie Hall, to the office, to Japan or Italy or China. He was an escape artist. And so, of course, was I. It took me years to find a marriage I didn't want to escape from, and yet I kept having escape fantasies. Perhaps it was the escape fantasies that led me
not
to escape. Perhaps fantasy is the only way marriage endures, or life.

Now my dad could not escape except by dying. I wondered if he knew that. Of course I didn't have the courage to put the question to him. All I could do was hold his bony hand, then go to the other hospital and dream of his escape through the park.

*   *   *

Of course, when he finally died, our mother was in the other room. We'd brought him home to a hospital bed, our pockets full of morphine and syringes that were never used. We settled him in bed, made him comfortable, and my sisters left.

“Where is La Seconda?” he asked. (That was me.)

“Here,” I said.

Some sixth sense prevented me from leaving. For several hours he was very peaceful, watching. I was watching him watching. Then he seemed to drift off. At one in the morning he awakened in pain. He made a terrible grimace and with difficulty took in three enormous gulps of air. Were there three angels summoning him as kabbalistic tradition tells us? Was he resisting their pull? Or had he lost the strength to resist?

It seemed he had been waiting to come home. He had been looking at the snowy hills of the park, imagining his escape. And now he was gone. The transit from life to death rode on the breath.

“Is he in that box?” my mother asked at the funeral.

“No,” I said, without lying. He was already far away.

When identifying his body, I kissed him on the cheek, leaving my lipstick valentine, but his expression was no longer his. How quickly the spirit flees!

“I love you, Dad,” I said to the cold cheek.

I might as well have been speaking to a hollow doll. Without animation and warmth, without movement, the flesh is almost unrecognizable. What remains is in the survivors' memories: mirroring, imitated gestures, words, music.

I was wearing a black dress with silver jewelry, and one of my earrings must have fallen into his coffin. I didn't even feel it drop—or see it glimmer. Only when I got home that night did I realize it was gone. I was glad it was spirited away by what was left of him—along with that print of my lipstick on his dead flesh.

Inevitably, as with all my nonobservant dead relatives, we had to rely on rent-a-rabbi. My father never belonged to a synagogue. He refused to belong to any club that would have him as a member (à la Groucho Marx). His mixture of insecurity and arrogance prevented him from being a joiner.

His will dictated that each of us should speak about him at his funeral. And we did. We would have done it without the will. It was his anxiety that made him put it in the will. Remarkably, for three such different daughters, we all stressed the same things. Music was in all our memories. He played the piano through our dreams (his baby grand was good to him, as Billy Joel sings. She may have been the only woman he ever completely loved). He dragged us to concerts and operas until we understood. He would not let us close our ears.

When we buried him, we sang. I will always see us there in the snow, singing in quavering voices, “I gave my love a cherry that had no stone, I gave my love a chicken that had no bone, I gave my love a baby with no cryin…” It was as if we were standing around the piano in the old West Side apartment. We sang as we shoveled the snowy earth over his casket.

The bones clatter, but music covers all. His whole life was music to our ears—if not his own.

And the strangest thing is this: When he was alive, I thought all our conversations were partial, frustrating—unintelligible. But once he was dead, we really began to talk. We talked through all my dreams. We talked every night till the small hours of the morning. Alive, he was closed and careful. Dead, he told me everything. I think he may be dictating to me now.

 

 

 

You can go from the country of the well to the country of the sick in a split second. I have become a sleepwatcher. Asher has been kidnapped by the god with the wings in his hair.

“Did I fall asleep?” he asks.

“I guess so.”

“I hate this,” he says. “I don't want to make you a slave to my illness the way my father made my mother.”

“It's a little soon to worry about that. You've scarcely been here a week.”

“My feet feel all pins and needles. Will you walk me around to see if they'll support me?”

And we slowly set out down the hall of the cardiac unit, pushing his drips and tubes on a wheeling stand. He is at least a foot taller and sixty pounds heavier than me, but he leans on my shoulder as if I were twice his size. Step by step we go, stopping only to close the back of his hospital gown so he won't moon the staff.

“How are the pins and needles?”

“Not as bad as last time. But now I want to go back.” He is huffing and puffing and glad to sit on the edge of the bed when we get back to his room.

“God, I hate this,” he says. “How can you stand it?”

“Don't worry about me. This is nothing. You're the one who returned from the dead. Lucky you—my dad did not.”

“But he was ninety-three,” Asher said, not adding anything about his own age.

We both came back from death in different ways. We are putting one foot in front of the other, learning how to walk again.

*   *   *

The parade of ex-wives begins.

Asher's ex-wives are a tribute to his lifelong love affair with his mother. His mother was a six-foot beauty married to a five-foot mogul; all of Ash's wives were tall but me.

First comes Diane, a redheaded television producer who married a goyish trillionaire after leaving Asher. She won her original fame from her documentary on dominatrices in Vegas, but now she does crime shows, sci-fi shows, and reality shows. Diane struts in on four-inch platform spikes, wearing a skintight black leather pantsuit, her red ringlets curling around her face, her eyelashes beaded with black. She has a ski-jump nose, courtesy of Dr. Nasebery (I swear that is his real name), and implanted D-cup breasts.

“I couldn't believe it, Ash, when I heard. You were always so strong—didja have it
forever
, darlin'? What did they say? Why didn't they catch it sooner?”

She totally ignores me. She perches on Asher's hospital bed and begins running her fingers through his hair, holding his hand, displacing his tubes; she seems entirely ready to jump under the covers, even in her lethal-looking spikes.

I know that Diane left Asher before his big success to marry someone “really rich rich,” as she puts it, so I decide to take a walk down the hall and leave them to their reminiscences. If she needs to act as if she never left him, so be it. Her self-delusion has nothing to do with me. But no sooner have I circled the unit twice than I feel compelled to return. Now Diane is regaling Ash with tales of her difficulties raising money for her next show—a reality show about psychiatrists—and I see the ulterior motive in all her cuddling.

Can there be anything ruder than a rant about television financing at somebody's sickbed?

“Can't we talk about this when he's better?” I ask Diane.

“Oh—I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be inconsiderate, but you know how obsessive I am about my work—please forgive. What an idiot I am!”

I nod but she isn't looking.

“I'm gonna besiege you with healing energy!” she exclaims to Asher, extracting a little brown bottle of lavender and sage oil from her huge alligator handbag and handing it to him. “I'm gonna be here every day, I promise.” I know it's probably the last time we'll see her.

“How did you ever marry anyone so dumb?” I ask when she's left.

“I was young,” Ash says. “I knew it was a mistake from the beginning. When we were on our honeymoon in London, I wandered out one night and picked up a hooker—just to prove that I was still free.”

“Did she ever know?”

“God, no. She would have been furious.”

“How did you
feel
?”

“As if I wasn't hers hook, line, and sinker. Forgive the pun. I needed to know that then. She was so controlling. I stopped fucking her almost from the first month we were married. What did I know about myself then? Nothing. I hadn't been analyzed. I was very primitive. I fought control with control. I stopped even
liking
her.” He fingers the bottle of aromatic oil. “Healing energy! What a crock! Go sprinkle it on someone else!”