For Paul Schaefer
Two weeks until Christmas. The Christ you believe in coming, you leaving. Perhaps your paths will cross. Neighbors ask what they can do. Friends from your church and the Amvets drop by, grandchildren are in and out, the priest come and gone. The kitchen table fills with food. Someone unearths a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue that won’t outlive the day.
In the room where death is late arriving, I examine photos dim on the walls. The television, barely audible, is tuned to a channel featuring the Great American Songbook. Louis Armstrong rasps his way through something. Flowers, a ring of chairs. As for the hospital bed: what fits into such a thing?
Outside, I breathe the cold, watch cars pass on their way to or from wherever the unburdened go. A light snow falls. The flakes landing on my sleeve all look alike.
Annie Dillard says that anyone who rights a turtle overturned in the road has shown more compassion than God ever has. “Everyone,” says Susan Sontag, “holds dual citizenship—in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” Or try Robert Creeley on for size: “No one is one / No one’s alone.” Has anyone the Bardo Thödol handy?
Sleet now where the sun should be. The sleet that never falls upward.
Now it’s maybe Mel Tormé, now perhaps Ella. As each song begins, I turn to confirm who is singing what, turn back, and forget what I just read. Distractions: how, I guess, we manage in the midst of the dying, will manage after the death.
Ashes to ashes, we say; dust to dust. But there is no dust, no ashes. If only that were all this were.
Like dying itself, to watch someone die can be, among other things, tedious. Yet it is what we are already and always all about. Stiffening, drying out, running down. Misfiring, graying, shrinking, wrinkling. Cells misdividing, delusions of vigor. “Necrobiosis” is the word, programmed cell death. You name it, we’ve got it.
The phone rings and rings, calls coming in from the uninformed, the just informed. I watch grown men cry, lean down to kiss their father, make pointless adjustments to the blankets, open or shut the window a crack. Is it warm in here or isn’t it? Do we want December in the room or not?
I wonder what sort of death I’m busy making down payments on. It is myself I grieve for.
I have been ignoring you, ignoring everyone save Johnny, overstaying my break in the kitchen. Back, I listen to your nurse daughter explain what the change in your breathing means, take your vitals, fiddle the morphine. I look at my wife watching her sister and see by her expression that she is suddenly ten years old again, and scared.
In Heart of Glass, the seer Hias remarks, “people make themselves at home as if they didn’t want to leave this world, ever.” Yet your son tells me that, since your wife died, you have been waiting eight years for this day. Is that why only you seem to be smiling?
Still, each breath is labored, a gurgling, a slow drowning. Eyes shut, mouth open, heartbeat fierce. We are assured that you are unaware, but this is small comfort. A test of faith for the Catholics present, those holding each other’s hand. Making infrequent, irrelevant small talk. Leaving the room, returning—like Mel Tormé, whose turn has come round again, crooning, if you can believe it, “Body and Soul.”
Someone asks if I would like a cup of coffee and, although vaguely ashamed to admit it, I say I would. The paper, also late arriving, tells of a couple who, drunk, crashed their car into a utility pole. Both died on the spot. I envy them. I envy the birds at the feeder.
I cannot stay focused, study again the pictures on the wall, sing silently along with Dean or Anita for a rhyme or two, move my undrunk coffee from floor to dresser, dresser to floor, offer my wife a sip, watch your children come and go, look out the window into the drizzle, the drear. I want all of us outside—the four brothers, three sisters, their wives, husbands, partners—where the ground is wet and cold, leaf-swept, muddy. I want everyone rolling in the mud, running and slipping and shouting in some game of freeze tag, breaking things, throwing something hard against the walls, through the windows, far away.
Or: I want to be alone in some elegant, dimly lit bar with a large glass of something expensive, reading things of interest only to those who can forget about death: budget deficits, Guggenheim retrospectives, shameless congressmen, pre-Christmas sales. Instead I toast a bagel and think hard about my choices: butter, jam, cream cheese.
Some version of each of us is disappearing before our eyes, some version of each other changing in each of us. Some version of ourselves. Your breathing too has altered again, grown shallower, each breath perhaps the last . . . but then another. The rest of us hold ours. “Breath,” says Creeley, “breaks the heart when it stops.”
I look at my wife, say “give me your hand. Take my hand.” Now. I won’t let go, and don’t you. Despite this letting go, we won’t.
Here in some third kingdom, we are all overturned turtles impossibly far from home. A home we will never return to all the way. As for the birds, they are nothing but a nuisance.