Fear of Dying (2 page)

“What are you thinking about?” my mother asks.

“Nothing,” I say.

“You're thinking you never want to get as old as I am,” she says. “I know you.”

My father is sleeping through all this. His wasted body takes up remarkably little space under the blankets. With his hearing aid turned off, he cannot follow our conversation and he doesn't want to. He prefers to spend the day sleeping. Just six months ago, before his cancer surgery, he was a different man. My sisters and I used to start the day with threatening missives from him, often in verse.

What do you do when your days open with this messily penned screed from your ninety-three-year-old father?

I feel like King Lear.

I have three daughters

beautiful and dear,

clever and cute,

already in dispute.

Who gets more?

Who gets less?

What a terrible mess

For an aging Lear

In geriatric stress.

So much for poetry. At the bottom of the page he has scrawled in a shaky hand: “Read it again and again—no disputes!”

How did our father go from Brownsville to Shakespearean tragedy?

Here's his version: “All my father ever said to me was ‘Get a job.' I wanted to go to Juilliard. My father said: ‘You're already making money playing the drums—why do you need it?' He threw away my admission letter. That was why I was determined that the three of you should get degrees.”

My father said this in my mother's studio overlooking the Hudson. She was lying in bed like Queen Lear, nodding. (
Was
there a Queen Lear?)

The sisters Lear were sitting around their mother's bed. Their mother had just had stomach surgery and she was making the most of it. Occasionally she moaned.

“Your mother has Crohn's disease, coronary artery disease, a fractured vertebra at the base of the spine, two hip replacements, two knee replacements. I cannot continue my job as ‘U.S. male nurse'”—my father's pathetic phrase for his status in the family. “If you three don't come here every day, there will be some changes made in my will.”

“Don't you dare threaten me,” my older sister, Antonia, said. “When we were living in Belfast at the height of the Troubles”—of course Antonia had to marry a poetic Irishman—“pulling the piano in front of the door to keep the paramilitaries out, shopping for bread during the early-morning hours before the shooting started, covering the windows with furniture so that your grandchildren wouldn't get hit by shrapnel—where were you? We were going through a genuine holocaust and nobody came to rescue us. I'll never forgive any of you for that!”

Queen Lear suddenly revived: “What do you mean? We sent you money!”

“You sent us a measly twenty-five thousand dollars! What was I going to do with twenty-five thousand dollars with four children and a war going on?”

“Nobody ever sent
me
twenty-five thousand dollars,” my younger sister, Emilia, said.

“No, your husband got the
whole
business. That's why you didn't need twenty-five thousand dollars!” Toni shrieked.

“Your husband didn't
want
the business! Nobody wanted it! We got stuck with it! You were both away gallivanting around the world and we were here, taking care of everybody! And Bibliomania—the shop itself. When Grandmama died, I was alone with her! The parents took off for Europe. Where were you two? I never got to go
anywhere
.”

“That's not quite true,” I said.

“Girls, girls, girls,” my mother said.

“Nobody has any sympathy for me!” Emmy howled. “I felt I had to be the good daughter and stay home. I sacrificed my poor schnook of a husband on the altar of the family bookstore!”

“That poor schnook got everything! And so did you! We got nothing!” Toni wailed. “Some sacrifice!”

“I would have made that sacrifice.”

“No way! You never would have done it. Your husband never would have done it!” This is Emmy, who shouted just as loud.

“Can't you try to see each other's point of view?” I asked.

“Not as long as she's a dishonest liar!” Toni yelled.

“My blood pressure's going up—I have to get out of here!” Emmy ran to the door. I dashed to her and coaxed her not to leave.

“Why shouldn't I leave? This is going to kill me! My heart's pounding!”

By then my father, the old King Lear, had gone to the piano and was playing “Begin the Beguine” by Cole Porter and singing along to drown out the roar in the other room.

I was where I always was—the meat in the sandwich, the designated peacemaker, the diplomat, the clown, the middle sister.

My sisters went into the kitchen to continue their altercation without a mediator. I went into my mother's room, where I found her leaning back on her pillows and moaning: “
Why
are they fighting?”

“You know perfectly well why,” I said. “Daddy set it up that way.”

“Your father would
never
do a thing like that,” my mother said.

“Then make him undo it.”

“I can't make him do anything,” she said. And then she clutched her chest. “I feel faint,” she said, rolling her head to the side. She moaned loudly.

My sisters ran in.

“Call the ambulance!” Emmy ordered me.

“I don't need an ambulance,” my mother said, wailing.

My sisters looked at each other. Who would be the irresponsible one who neglected to call the ambulance on the ultimate day? Nobody wanted that onus.

“I really think it's unnecessary,” I said, but my sisters' panic was beginning to stir the old anxiety in me. What if it was not a false alarm this time?

Before long there was an ambulance downstairs and we were in it, bending over Queen Lear on a stretcher in the back. Our father was in the front seat with the driver, prepared to flash his big-donor card when we arrived at the hospital. We careened around corners, screeching our way to Mount Sinai. On one abrupt turn the mattress from the gurney went slithering into the attendant sitting behind the driver.

“Oops,” he said.

“Be careful! That's the only mother I've got!” I said.

“She's my mother too!” said Emmy—always pissed off no matter what the occasion.

Our father sat by our mother's side as long as she was hospitalized, and when she came home, he began threatening us with being disinherited unless we came to visit her every day.

Now, only months later, he is too exhausted to threaten us and I yearn for his old truculence. Ever since the surgery for the blockage in his colon, he has been a shade of his former self. I sit on the edge of the bed, watch him sleep, and remember the conversation we had in the hospital the night before the operation that saved yet also ended his life.

“Do you know Spanish?” my father asked me that night.

I nodded. “A little.”

“La vida es un sueño,”
he said. “Life is a dream. I look forward to that deep sleep.” And then he went under and never quite came back. Three days after the surgery he was babbling gibberish and clawing the air. Six days after the surgery he was in the ICU with a tube down his throat. When he was diagnosed with pneumonia, I stood at his side in the ICU and sang “I gave my love a cherry” while his eyelids fluttered. We never thought that he would emerge from that hospitalization. But he did. And now he and my mother spend their days sleeping side by side in their apartment but never touching or speaking. Round-the-clock shifts of aides and daughters attend them. Every day they sleep more and wake less.

*   *   *

The ancient Greeks believed that dreams could cure you. If you slept in the shrine of Aescalepius, you could dream yourself well. But my parents are not getting well. They are deep into the process of dying. Watching them die, I realize how unprepared for death I am myself.

It doesn't matter how old they are. You are never prepared to lose your parents.

Even my sisters have tried vainly to make peace with each other now that we have entered this final stage. We seldom go to an event where some aged acquaintance doesn't get carried out on a stretcher.

No wonder I was advertising for Eros. I was advertising for life.

 

 

 

There is no substitute for touch. To be alive is to crave it. The next day, when I go to visit my parents I decide I will not even try to talk to my father, I will only stroke him, rub his back, and try to communicate with him this way.

I ring the doorbell and am greeted by Veronica, the main day person. She's a Jamaican woman in her sixties with a lilting voice and a family history that could break your heart. Her son has died. Her daughter has MS. Yet she soldiers on, tending the dying.

“How's my father?”

“He's okay today,” she says.

“Is he sleeping?”

“Not sleeping, not waking,” she says. “But on his way somewhere…”

I go to his bedside and begin to massage the back of his neck.

“Who's there?” my mother says. “Antonia? Emilia?”

“It's me, Vanessa,” I say. And I rub my father's neck until he stirs.

He mumbles: “I feel the love in your touch.” This encourages me to go on until my arms are tired. As I massage him I am taken back to the time he sat on my bed when I was six and told me he would never leave my mother because of me. My parents had had a huge fight and I was terrified they'd divorce. My father quieted my fears.

“I would never leave you,” he said.

My sisters have always accused me of being his favorite. But what good did that do me? A marital history of searching fruitlessly for him in the wrong partners until I married someone I thought could be his stand-in. And now we are all old and so is our story.

About a year ago, when my father was still robust enough to threaten us with being disinherited, I had come over to find him in an ebullient mood.

“Did I ever tell you about my first job?” he asked.

“No.”

“Well, I walked around the neighborhood looking for signs in the windows that said ‘Boy Wanted.' When I found one, I walked right in and said: ‘I'm the boy you want.' I knew even then that your own enthusiasm had to carry the day. It was the same with show business. The reason I got the job in
Jubilee
when I auditioned for Cole Porter was because I had so much enthusiasm. I wasn't the best musician. I was only the most enthusiastic.”

“Maybe he thought you were cute,” my mother said. “He also had a sign out that said ‘Boy Wanted.' Everyone knew that.”

“You don't know what you're talking about,” he said to my mother. And then, in a burst of sheer bumptiousness, he began to do jumping jacks there on the bedroom floor. He did about thirty in a row.

“Look at your father,” my mother said. “He thinks if he keeps exercising he'll never die.” And it was true. My father worked out as if his life depended on it. All through his eighties, he walked to the bookstore every day, then came home to walk another five miles on the treadmill. He was full of contempt for our mother because of her sedentary life. He starved himself down to a skeletal weight.

“Learn to go to bed hungry,” he told me. “The thinner you are, the longer you live. It's been proven.” He ate sparingly but gorged on vitamins. The dining room table was full of seaweed extract and HGH and all manner of trendy supplements. But there came a day when he could barely eat at all because of the pain.

My sisters and I went with him for the CAT scan, the sonograms, the X-rays. He sat in a little dressing room in the radiologist's office shivering in his shorts and T-shirt. He looked so small, so scared, so reduced. Nothing showed up on the films. Finally they put him in the hospital and gave him a colonoscopy, which found the blockage.

He was avid for the operation. “Cut it out. Get the bastard,” he said. He believed that if they got the cancer, he'd be good as new.

How many times have I seen that avidity for the knife? “Cut it out,” they say, as if mortality were no more than a tumor. But if death can't march in the front door, it'll sneak in the back. They excised the cancer from his gut, but the anesthesia invaded his brain.

The first day after the surgery he was fuzzy but fine. As in the old days on our family car trips, we sang our way through the alphabet from “All Through the Night” to “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” But the following morning he was holding
The New York Times
upside down in one hand and making up bizarre stories to explain the headlines. After that, two burly guards appeared in his room because he had bitten the nurse. I talked him down and stroked his hand and he went to sleep. But the day after he became even more agitated. First they thought it was the meds, Klonopin or Haldol or the anesthesia, but then a convocation of doctors decided it was “something physical” making him tremble, rant, shake, and grasp the air. They intubated him, catheterized him, and took him to a step-down, then to the ICU. There I prayed for him to come back, and in a way he did. Now I wonder about the wisdom of such prayers. Life, I now know, is the step-down unit of all step-down units. The only cure for the agitation of life is death. And the cure, as they say, is worse than the disease.

“Stop,” he says now, “you're hurting me.” Can he hear my thoughts? I think so.

“Veronica!” he calls. “I want to go to the toilet.” And Veronica comes to take him. When he emerges, he seems exhausted and curls into the fetal position again.

“Is he sleeping all day?” I ask Veronica later. She takes this as a slur on her professionalism.