You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (28 page)

“I’ll see you next week,” I said, hoping I was right.

And in my head, I prayed:
Don’t go. Don’t go. Don’t go
.

I was pretty excited about your birthday even if you weren’t. I’d reminded you of it on my previous visit.

“I’ll see you Wednesday,” I said, “for your birthday.”

“Ah, birt’day,” you said, perking up for the first time since I’d arrived. You’d been slouched and mumbling for about an hour.
Chest pain. The feet don’t go. Half past three
. Then the nurse brought you water, applesauce, Tylenol, and a constipation-syrup cocktail. You could focus again.

“Ninety-one,” I said. “It’s a big one.”

“Twenty-one,” you said.

You looked across the table at your dining companion, a tall man with brilliant blue eyes, and pointed your chin at me.

“If this is my friend, you should see mine enemies!”

You weren’t as cheery on the big day.

“All my friends from my town died, and my brother is sicker than me,” you said.

I worry that you’re about to die when you’re sick and weak, but also when you’re coherent and uncharacteristically affectionate, like when you touch the tip of my nose or call me darling. I think your relaxed state means you’ve stopped fighting, a sign that Death is in the waiting room. I guess what I’m saying is that I worry about you dying all the time.

But on your birthday, I started to believe that you might be the last one standing—that if you’d survived this long, maybe you’d be with me for a long time: until Maxeleh’s wedding, until Carrie is standing in a lobby, cradling a baby. I told myself to stop worrying about when you were going to die.

That’s always when they get you, isn’t it? When your guard is finally down.

Your eyes were scary holes, barely opened.

“Where’s Bibi?”

“She died,” I said, as gently as I could. “You lost her in 1992.”

You were still confused.

“She’s sleeping,” I amended.

“Where’s Vera?”

“Downstairs.”

“I have no one left to love.”

Later, when you came back to me, I tried to get you out of bed and down to the dining room. It was almost dinnertime, not too crazy early to claim your seat. You sat on the edge of the bed and tried to stand. You couldn’t push yourself up with your big hands, and I couldn’t pull you with my weak ones. Nothing worked.

“You put a dog to sleep in this condition,” you said.

I hunted down your aide and brought her to your room. She scolded you, as if you were lazy.

“Aron, get up! You can stand.”

Jeez, lady, ease up a little.

But her harsh tone worked. You stood.

She left and you said you needed to pee before heading down the hall. I helped you toddle into the bathroom and stood behind you to make sure you didn’t fall. Your stream was still strong, but your aim, not so good. You left a puddle on the floor. Like a dog.

I grabbed towels from the cart outside your room and mopped the floor. We stood outside your door, ready to walk the hall you’d walked a thousand times before to the meal you never missed.

“Please,” you pleaded. “Let me go back to the bed. Please.”

“Of course,” I said and led you back.

I should have known that this was the final crumbling of the mortar that was holding the final brick in place.

You asked me to cover you. The puffy green comforter I’d brought from your apartment was folded in a corner. I pulled it up to your chin, kissed your forehead, and told you I was going to visit Vera. You asked when she’d be up.

“Later,” I said.

And the last time I saw your eyes fully opened, you looked at me like a little boy watches his mother, with a mixture of fear and trust, as she closes the bedroom door after the final lullaby.

Six weeks ago, we were sitting in the hallway talking about the usual nothing. You wanted batteries for your electric razor. You asked me to buy a necklace for Gloria for Christmas. Then we sat in silence for a while, as we often did, just being together.

“That’s the whole story,” you finally said, referring to nothing.

But it wasn’t. A chunky young woman wearing tight corduroy pants walked past us and out of hearing range.

“The thing is,” you said, as if winding up for a profound soliloquy, “women today have such big behinds.”

This is how I want to remember you.

Your room is getting busier. Nurses’ aides keep coming in to comfort Gloria and to stand at the end of your bed and gawk. They’re reverent, almost shocked, that after all your preamble—all your
I-think-this-is-the-days
and
it-was-good-to-know-yous—
this really could be it. You open your eyes for a moment, encouraging Gloria.

“He is waking up!” she says, popping out of her seat. “Look …”

But you close them before she can finish.

One of the nurses gives you a shot of morphine. She tells me that it’s not a big dose, just enough to make you comfortable, and that later they can increase the amount if you need it.

Your panting slows. Now there are long pauses between each breath. It’s natural for bedside vigil sitters to hold their own breath during such pauses, thinking
He’s gone
with each period of silence. I’m not falling for it. I’ve been at deathbeds before, and I know this game can go on for days. Besides, I see your pulse tapping like a nervous finger in your neck, so I know you’re still with me.

I let go of your hand and look away to find Bill’s number in your address book. I’m standing a foot away from you, listening to Bill complain about how sick he feels, too, when it happens.

The nurse walked in, stood at the foot of the bed, and looked at your face.

“He’s gone,” she said.

Nice touch, waiting until your blood family and your heart family are around you before exiting.

I kissed your head, the soft little hairs so like the fuzz your mother’s lips must have felt at the beginning. Warm. I touched your hand. Cold. Your skin had already turned yellow. You were wax.

I’d said good-bye to Bill abruptly without telling him you had died, but I called him back a few minutes later.

“He always had life in him,” he said. “Always laughing.”

Then, his voice breaking, he added, “I’m the only one left.”

In less than a month, you would be laughing together again.

The doctor came in and made it official. The nurse took the mask off your face, but the indentations the elastic straps had made remained. There was no blood flow to plump your skin back.

Gloria started to cry. A social worker appeared.

“Would you like him to have an autopsy?” she asked gently.

Why?
I wanted to ask her.
So I can see what a shredded human heart looks like?

You squinted your eyes so only a disk of color, slate-blue like an infant’s, showed. Your focus at that moment may have been as limited as a newborn’s, too, or you may have seen everything: her, me, the people you’d loved in that apartment by the sugar factory. Then, after you’d recognized that this was your last living moment, you dove. And we marveled: at the grace, the speed, the soundless break of the water—all in such contrast to every practice session that came before. For you had rehearsed this move, stepped right to edge of the board, so many times, in your mind and in truth. You thought it would be loud, painful, clumsy. You were wrong. It was
beautiful. Because of all that practice? Or because you finally, finally caught a break? Absolutely unknowable. Well done, my friend. Well done.

The part of my favorite movie,
Same Time, Next Year
, that makes me cry the most is something that doesn’t happen: The characters don’t stop seeing each other. But because it ends when they’re old, you know that one day the affair will stop because one of them dies. And I imagine how horrible that would feel—to have found that one person in the world who gets you, and to lose them.

Now I won’t have to imagine.

We didn’t have an affair, and we were never apart for long periods of time, but the rest fits. You were my special person. You understood me like nobody ever has, and you loved me still.

“You could always see through me,” the man said.

“And I’ve always liked what I’ve seen,” the woman replied.

I don’t think anyone gets more than one of those per lifetime, do you?

“Take your time,” the blue-eyed nurse said, leaving Gloria and me with your body.

So, of course, we started to clean.

The social worker said someone could pack up your stuff and store it so I could go through it later, but I wanted to get it over with. Plus, I worried that they’d lose something sentimental.

“You’ll have a big job after I’m gone,” you’d predicted. “It will take you a week.”

Yet the bulk of the job took less than an hour. We probably sorted quickly so we didn’t have to look too closely at your body in the bed. Not that we wanted you gone—not yet.

We started with the pictures on your shelves. They paint a portrait of your life in America and of your fashion savvy: you and The Little Doctor posing for a nursing-school recruitment brochure (green hat, navy sport coat); you and Vera dolled up (paisley tie and matching pocket square); you grinning behind bottles of Smirnoff and seltzer at a party to celebrate the anniversary of the European end of the war (tweed blazer, yellow sweater vest); you with Max in your lap, both smiling brilliantly (white short-sleeved business shirt); you with Bibi on her graduation day (leisure suit); your wedding portrait (double-breasted gray); you with Bibi’s entire family, posed on and around a sofa (spotted bow tie).

I took the print of an apple orchard painting that I thought would remind you of your childhood off the wall, and threw away the sports-car calendar that I’d bought you two years earlier.

Gloria found three gold utensils wrapped in a handkerchief in your top drawer. We didn’t know they’d been a gift from Vera. Did you keep them for sentimental reasons, or for protection?

We found pairs of glasses everywhere. We found bags of candy bars and rolls of Life Savers.

I went through your closet. You’d told me that everything was junk except for the leather jacket, which will now keep Gloria’s husband warm. I dug through all your pockets. Oh look, a napkin. A packet of sugar. A napkin
and
a packet of sugar. I took three shirts: one of the quilted flannel ones for Max, the green L.L. Bean for David, and a short-sleeved with stripes for me. The rest we donated. Someday I’ll do the same with the overcoats and Bermuda shorts in my attic.

I found the green hat. It was on the top of your closet the whole time. Dammit. Thinking you’d lost it had made you so upset. But maybe this fact will help: Fein-Kaller, the 116-year-old Swiss store that had made and sold the hat, also went out of business in 2011.

The nurse came back. She said we had to leave so she could get you out of the room before her shift ended. I guess it’s bad form to leave a dead body for the next nurse. I hadn’t realized that she’d been waiting for us. I thought we were waiting for her. I guess
we should have been keeping a bedside postmortem vigil instead of tidying.

She brought another nurse, two aides, and a gurney with her. A male aide offered to help, too, but they threw him out. It reminded me of a song lyric,“this woman’s work, this woman’s work,” which I started singing along with Kate Bush in my head. They closed the door to do whatever one does to a body—tie up your jaw, slide you into a body bag, use the lift to transfer you to the gurney. I stood right outside. You know, side-of-the-road duty and all.

A lady who worked somewhere in the building came up and gave me a hug.

“We all loved him,” she said. “May he rest in peace.”

I had no clue who she was, but I was grateful. No one had touched me all day.

The door opened and they rolled you out, a blue velvet cloth over the shape of you.

The guy from the funeral home took it from there. All I had to do, he said, was get him an obituary in an hour if I wanted it in the next day’s paper. Of course I did. What if your old friends or relatives wanted to come? I sat outside the dining room and started to write. Even though I was distracted by a lady reporting her previous night’s incontinence to a nurse, I didn’t want to leave. But I had no Internet connection, and I needed to find one so I could send the obit. I drove to a Starbucks, sat in the back, and got attacked by a song.

Keep me in your heart for a while, a weak voice warbled.

Fucking Warren Zevon. Leave me alone.