In the Slender Margin (12 page)

In her book
A Natural History of the Senses
, Diane Ackerman writes about how animals communicate outside
the five senses. Bats and dolphins use ultrasonic or high-pitched sounds, beyond the range of our hearing; elephants and alligators use infrasonic sounds, too low for us to catch. Wind, fire, thunder, floods and earthquakes all emit sounds inaudible to human ears. The language of destruction flies around our heads as we carry on, oblivious. Animals often act in strange ways before an earthquake strikes. There have been reports of catfish leaping out of the water, goats running in circles, dogs howling and elephants screaming. Snakes have been known to leave their underground places of hibernation in the middle of the winter prior to quakes, only to be found frozen on the surface of the snow.

Over the years, I saw numerous animals act in strange, uncharacteristic ways around impending death. In the home of a man dying of lymphoma, a strange cat appeared one day at the far edge of the garden. Nobody recognized it. Every day it came a little closer. The first day it lay on the lawn; the second, it sat on the back porch; the third, it rubbed against the screen door to be let into the sunroom; on the fourth, fifth and sixth days it curled up in a chair at the foot of the patient’s bed. From there it climbed onto the bed and made its way slowly up into the man’s arms, where it nestled until he died. The man’s daughter believed the cat had come to comfort her father. When it disappeared after he died, she put up posters and went door to door trying to find the cat’s owner. Nobody recognized it; it was as if it had never existed.

Who knows what an animal knows? According to the
New England Journal of Medicine
, Oscar, the resident cat in a geriatric hospital in Rhode Island, is drawn to the rooms of dying patients and has “presided” over the
deaths of twenty-five residents. Completely uninterested in the chronically ill, he scratches to be let in at the doors of imminently dying patients and stays with them until they die. When the undertakers appear, Oscar, who has remained with the body, walks down the corridor with them to the locked door and looks out the window while the hearse drives away.

In ancient Japan, it was thought that somewhere on the tail of a cat there was a single hair that would restore a dying person.

MY BROTHER CHRISTENED MY FIRST DOG WITH CHAMPAGNE. WE’D
had dogs before, as a family, but this one was to be mine. The pet, a present from my sister when I was five, was smuggled into the house on Christmas Eve while I was asleep. The dog went out a few times in the night but came back right away—until the last time, when she was let out near dawn.

It’s hard to separate memory from imagination. Truth from lies. It was 1958, the year Elvis was inducted into the army and General Charles de Gaulle became prime minister of France; the year Truman Capote wrote
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
and, according to my mother, the year my father left. He was building a boat in the basement and when it was finished he sailed away. At least that was her story.

I woke up at seven o’clock and walked sleepily out of my bedroom towards the living room, where I heard my sister crying and my mother consoling her. At the same time, there was a scratch on the door and my brother leapt up and escorted the dog in with a wide sweep of his arm, announcing, in a triumphant voice, as he poured the sparkling wine over her head, “I name you Ruthless!”

There is a larger-than-life quality to big brothers. A mythology. They are the ones who can do no wrong, who are invincible. They are faster than we are, can climb trees in a flash, they tease us and mock us and carry us high on their shoulders, and they belong to no one. They are hungry for everything. Before he left, my father, believing that Ian was on the road to becoming a juvenile delinquent, got him a job at one of the radar stations on the DEW Line. When he came home, he brought my mother steak knives with antler handles and a white fox stole that she wore loosely draped over her shoulders.

“He burned like a wick,” wrote his friend George Bowering.
Eyes glazed in utter joy & defiant empty bottle a scepter in his drunken white kingly hand.

In my imagination, when he wasn’t with me, my brother lived in a house built of snow and ice and walked on a frozen sea.

El Duende

It was not unusual, when I worked with a nurse on the palliative response crisis team, to be called to see a patient at home in the middle of the night. We would spot the house a block away by the light glowing from one of the bedrooms; most often there was an
oxygen
sign on the door with a red line through it to indicate “no smoking.”
Blood of the lamb
, only this time signifying the house had not been passed over. Because we arrived at a time of crisis, all formalities dropped away; we were, in those hours, the closest people on earth to the family. Time slowed, the way it does in a crisis, the neighbourhood slept on. Death was a presence that shared the night with us; not the Grim Reaper or the black angel, not the rider on his pale horse or Allah’s Azrael. It was something quieter than that. It was in the rocking branches and in the voice serenading; it entered us from the soles of our feet.

In some strange way we needed death’s presence on our visits to the dying. There are no words in English to explain this; the closest, in Spanish, is
el duende.
“There are,” wrote Lorca, “neither maps nor exercises to help us find the
duende
.” It is the closest we come to raw emotion—the difference between the trained singer and the one who sings with a scorched throat. “The
duende
loves the rim of the wound,” wrote the poet. It is, he said, “a power, not a work. A struggle, not a thought.” To be with the dying is not a question of ability or training; it is a work made up of “dark notes.”

We visited homes all over the city. People were dying in apartments with intricate intercom systems we had to buzz
to gain access to and in leaking condos covered with massive sheets of blue tarp that quivered like sails and filled with wind as if the whole building were setting out to sea. In a one-bedroom apartment on Dallas Road, overlooking the ocean, we met a Japanese woman who told us that souls come in with the high tide and leave on the low tide. The greatest high and low tides are the spring tides, when the earth, moon and sun are in line. The moon tries to pull at anything on earth to bring it closer. The earth holds on to everything but water and the rising souls. The woman we met was dying in the fall; she would not be going out on the great low tide, she would have to settle instead for the neap tide at the third quarter of the moon.

We drove our silver palliative-team car down dark streets in sleeping neighbourhoods looking for a certain address; sometimes we’d haul out the spotlight we kept in the back seat and shine it on the houses we drove slowly past like the secret police must have done in some of the villages some of these people came from. We never knew what a shift would bring. One night a doctor called us and asked if we could see a man, with limited English, who was in pain. When we called the home, identifying ourselves as the PRT team, the voice on the other end yelled, “No pizza,” and slammed down the phone. Puzzled, we tried calling three times, with the same result, before deciding to just head out. A block away from the house we passed the PT Pizza House and had to stop the car to compose ourselves before knocking on the door.

On Bear Mountain, we met a man, whose wife was dying of Alzheimer’s, in a cabin he had built sixty years before.
When she went out for a walk, ten years before we met them, and couldn’t find her way home, he built a fence and put in a gate with a lock and lived with her as the world disappeared one word at a time. The name of the mountain disappeared, followed by the name of the nearby town; the way back home was gone around the same time she lost every name for the plants in her garden; she forgot who she was before she forgot who he was. When she began to wander through the rooms at night, and the danger of her burning the place down was real, he put a child’s gate up in their bedroom doorway and tucked her into bed. We arrived when she was taking her last breaths; her hair was freshly washed and she was lying under a floral quilt in a clean cotton nightgown. There wasn’t much for us to do other than sit with him, after she died, in the small kitchen he had built for her, overlooking the mountain named after a great lumbering beast.

Each shift was different; I never knew, when I showed up for work, where we would go that day. We climbed down ladders into the galleys of sailboats and hiked into the bush to meet people in aluminum trailers. In the home of a compulsive hoarder, we had to walk sideways through stacks of newspapers, old bills, yogurt containers, tins, egg cartons and magazines that formed a kind of maze from the kitchen to the bathroom. The icy blue eyes of hundreds of porcelain dolls, some with flowing curls made out of human hair, followed our every move. When we called the ambulance to take the patient to hospice, they couldn’t get the stretcher past the front door. It took two hours to clear a path to get her out.

Years ago, when I read Jane Kenyon’s poem “What Came
to Me,” the image of a hardened drop of gravy on a porcelain gravy boat stayed with me:

I took the last

dusty piece of china

out of the barrel.

It was your gravy boat,

with a hard, brown

drop of gravy still

on the porcelain lip.

I grieved for you then

as I never had before.

We went into homes with china cabinets full of Royal Albert bone china plates, soup tureens and teacups with old country roses on the edges and cut crystal wineglasses that had been handed down for generations. In every one of those cabinets I scanned the shelves looking for a white porcelain gravy boat with a drop of hard brown gravy on the lip. In a house where death had taken up residence, I wanted to see evidence of a life lived. On the kitchen table that was covered with our syringes and vials of morphine, Dilaudid, Haldol, Stemetil, dexamethasone and atropine, I wanted to see wine sloshing in those heavy lead crystal glasses.

Above a Chinese grocery store we met an old man dying of lung cancer in a smoky room with yellowed walls. On the walls were four scrolls with the works of the seventh- and eighth-century poets Li Po, Wang Wei, Jia Dao and Tu Fu. The old man recited,
Drunk, I rise and approach the moon in the stream, birds are far off, people too few.
I wrote the
lines down on a piece of scrap paper and stuffed them in my pocket. In that moment it was the poet standing in front of us, not the dying man. I turned to go, completely forgetting that we had come to help because he was short of breath and that his days were very few.

In homes where people could no longer eat, there were cans of strawberry and vanilla Boost on the counter, bowls of ice chips beside the bed and a nearby basin to throw up in. We arrived when things were going wrong—from the Dutch
wrang
, meaning “sour, bitter,” literally “that which distorts the mouth.” Of all the calls we received, hemorrhages distressed me the most. We were sometimes called to the home of someone who was bleeding out, or “exsanguinating,” from the Latin
ex
“out of” and
sanguis
“blood.” I dreaded these calls. In one home a dog was licking the blood out of a bucket in front of his owner who was slumped over dead on the couch while
Days of Our Lives
played out on the TV. When she was cleaning the bucket, the nurse beckoned me over to tell me that she had found a lung that he had thrown up. I don’t know where to draw the line: what to tell, what not to. Secrecy still surrounds the ways in which we die. There is only so much people want to know. Only so much I can say.

When getting out of bed was no longer an option, we brought commodes and put in catheters. We carried boxes of Depends in the trunk of our car along with six fishing-tackle boxes full of narcotics, stool softeners, sedatives, anti-psychotics, antihistamines, Ativan, T3s, and atropine to dry up the rattle that often developed in the chest shortly before death. In the 1800s we would have been known as a two-woman travelling medicine show.

Amongst the white towels we carried in the trunk were two dark green ones we saved for hemorrhages. Red doesn’t show up as easily against green.

I know, if I’m ever in a tight spot, I can always get work as a cabbie. The city is laid out in my head like a grid; I recognize streets by the houses people died in. It is a rare day that I drive through town without seeing myself standing on one of the doorsteps, hand raised, about to knock.

In Tony Kushner’s
Angels in America
there is a scene in which Harper Pitt has a vision while looking out the plane window on a night flight to San Francisco:

There were nights when it felt as if we were rising along with the dead, clasping each other’s ankles, holding on for dear life.

Here and There

In the West we are largely uninstructed about interludes. From
inter
“between” and
ludus
“a play,”
interlude
historically referred to the farcical episodes introduced between the acts of long mystery plays. Take it a step further, and is not the interval, the transition between life and death, one of life’s ludicrously improbable situations? An interval between the acts of two long mysteries.

With death, wrote P. K. Page, there is a divide between
here
and
there.
Were it not, she noted, for the inconsequential
t
, the words would be identical.