Whatever you do, don’t let Millie stay in the room when they take the body out,” Peggy, the hospice nurse, whispered. She held a piece of paper to her cheek, to shield the family from hearing what she was saying. “She does not need to see that.” We were sitting on the overstuffed sectional sofa that ringed the living room amid a dozen of Anthony and Millie’s relatives. Anthony’s hospital bed, and his body, sat in the middle, where I imagined a coffee table once sat.
Anthony and Millie lived on the top floor of that peculiarly New England style of building called a triple-decker. Built a hundred years ago for the working class and the poor, triple-deckers consist of three identical apartments stacked atop one another, with a narrow winding staircase leading to each. The landing outside the apartment door was a cramped area less than three feet wide.
I had just pulled into Friendly’s for dinner and ice cream with my children and husband when Peggy called. It was my birthday, but I was also the chaplain on call that week. I hadn’t met Anthony yet, but now he was actively dying, and the family wanted a prayer.
I drove straight over from the restaurant, but by the time I got there Anthony had already died. It must have just happened, because Peggy was still listening for his breath and heartbeat, still feeling for a pulse, when I walked into the dark and low-ceilinged apartment.
Once Peggy went through all the steps of the examination and quietly pronounced his death, the family started telling stories about Anthony’s life. He and Millie had met when they were teenagers. They’d been married more than sixty years. They’d lived in that apartment for their entire married life and raised five children there. When Peggy finished with Anthony’s body and pulled the sheet up and over him, neatly folding it down over his chest and tucking in the sides, as though tucking a young child into bed, she sat with us, too, and we waited for the undertaker to come.
It was when those somber men in baggy black suits knocked on the door that Peggy whispered her plea.
The family, Peggy, the men from the funeral home, and I gathered around Anthony’s body in the living room and said a prayer. Then Peggy hugged Millie, said good-bye, and left. The female relatives headed to the kitchen to clean the pots and put away the uneaten dinner they had brought a few hours ago. The men went outside. The funeral home men went downstairs to get a gurney and a body bag from the hearse.
That left Millie and me, and Anthony, in the living room.
“Why don’t we go in the kitchen?” I said to Millie.
“No,” she said. “I don’t want to leave Anthony.”
The funeral home men came back upstairs.
Many people are very skinny when they die; Anthony was naturally heavyset and now hugely swollen with fluid. The men set up the gurney next to his bed, unfolded the body bag, and opened it. They slid a board under his body. On the count of three, they heaved the board on top of the body bag on the stretcher. It landed with a thud.
“Why don’t we go downstairs and get some fresh air?” I said to Millie.
“No,” she replied, continuing to stare at her husband.
The men carefully tucked Anthony’s limbs into the bag and zipped it closed. Then they tightened four straps around his body to fasten him to the stretcher.
“Why don’t we sit in the bedroom while the men finish getting Anthony ready to go to the funeral home?”
“No.”
The two men looked at me and furrowed their brows. One gave me a barely perceptible shake of his head. The other darted his eyes from Millie to the kitchen door, back to her, and to the door again.
“Millie, I really think we should leave the room now. These men are going to take very good care of Anthony, and I think it would be upsetting to watch him leave the house,” I said.
“I want to stay here.”
A look of panic flashed across the younger man’s face. “We’ll take good care of him, ma’am,” his older partner said.
“That’s fine. But I’m going to see him out.”
“It’s not going to be easy, Millie,” I said.
“I understand,” she said.
The two men grimaced ever so slightly at each other and set their lips in a firm line. Then they wheeled the stretcher to the door.
Anthony’s body had not been strapped to the stretcher, as it first appeared to be. Instead, the straps simply encircled the body bag. They cinched Anthony to the board inside the bag. At the landing, the men lifted the board up and off the gurney, one of them at each end. Then they slowly tipped the board until it was completely upright, as though Anthony were standing up in his body bag. His head flopped forward, making a protrusion in the vinyl fabric. With one man in front, facing the body as though they were dancing, and the other behind, they shook and shimmied Anthony’s body to get it out the door and onto the landing.
Any dead body is heavy—dead weight—and Anthony’s was heavier than most. The two men from the funeral home struggled, though they tried to hide it. They grew breathless and called directions to each other in barely controlled grunts as they tilted and turned the upright board to try to maneuver it and themselves through the low doorway and onto the staircase.
I stood next to Millie as she watched them. As they started to walk down the stairs, they managed to get her husband’s body back into a horizontal position. But before the man at the top was even out of view, the man at the bottom called out to him to tip the board up again and to the right, to try to get around the first of the many turns in the stairs.
We heard bangs and scrapes, the men grunting and shouting to each other, as respectfully as they could, to hold him up! or wait wait wait! all the way down the three flights of stairs. At one point, we heard a boom and a clattering that suggested one or both of them had lost his grip on the board altogether.
I cringed, wondering what to say. Before I could think of anything, though, Millie sighed and grabbed my hand. “It’s okay,” she said, still staring at the open door her husband had just gone through for the last time.
When we finally heard the downstairs door slam, Millie walked over to the window and watched as they put Anthony’s body in the back of the hearse. “It’s a beautiful life and then you leave it,” she said. I’m not sure if she was talking to her husband, me, or herself. Maybe she was talking to God.
Pink cherry blossom petals blew off the stunted tree in the median between the sidewalk and street and floated around the three men. She turned to me with shoulders slumped and threw her hands out to the side.
“What now?”
• • •
I’VE HEARD PEOPLE SAY—usually in an attempt to comfort or motivate others, or sometimes to stifle their grieving—that loss, tragedy, trauma don’t define you.
That, of course, is utter bullshit.
Anyone who has been through a great loss or a terrible trauma already knows that the experience defines you. If there is one truth that runs through my patients’ stories, it’s that. At the very end of their lives, they defined themselves by the stories they chose to tell, of the hard things they had been through.
But in watching how their stories developed—how they reflected on and reassessed and made new connections between those losses and other events of their lives—it had become clear to me that if those hard things define us, it was equally true that each of us gets to decide exactly how they define us. We get to decide what the definition is. We get to decide what it means.
Is your life one of regret or hope? Does it have to be one or the other? Is your body the locus of trauma, or a source of joy? Can it be both at the same time? Can you find kindness toward yourself and others amid your pain and anger and fear? Is there something real in all the facades and personas we create, or in the mysteries we encounter? Can life be both beautiful and crushing at the same moment?
When I was in orientation for my first job in hospice, the chaplain training me encouraged me to write down in the visit notes whatever lovely things patients said, even if it was just a phrase. Even if no one ever read those notes (and I’m certain almost no one ever has), the patients’ hopes and ideas and thoughts would still exist, and would not be lost, she explained.
So when I sat down the next day to write up the visit from the night before, I started to write what Millie had said. It’s a beautiful life and . . .
I put my pen down. That couldn’t be right, what with the utterly awful way the funeral home had had to remove her beloved husband’s body. She must have said, “It’s a beautiful life but then you leave it,” I thought. I crossed out the “and” and finished the quote.
I looked at what I had written. No, no. No, that wasn’t right, either. I distinctly remembered the “and” because even in the moment it had startled me. Yet the next day it seemed impossible.
I usually write a note for a visit right after the visit has finished, but I hadn’t this time. I’d wanted to get back to Friendly’s to join my children for dessert. And now, the next day, I was no longer sure what Millie had said. How could I have forgotten so quickly what had struck me as so poignant just half a day before?
I think it’s because it’s startling every time—every single time—that such beauty and such loss coincide in every life, in every soul, in every memory. It doesn’t have to be that life is beautiful but it must end. It can be that life is beautiful . . . and still, as much as we may not want it to be so, it ends. It can be both beautiful and, by the very truth that it ends, full of loss and tragedy and trauma. The two can coincide. They do coincide.
Here’s how I now think about what happened to me when my first child was born: I still don’t understand what happened. I don’t know why it happened. I still don’t know what was real and what was hallucination, but I know with certainty that it has value. It has meaning. It created who I am today. If there’s one thing my patients have taught me, it’s that the concept of real and unreal is not as black and white as I once thought, because this life is not as black and white as I once thought. I’ve learned that it’s far more interesting and ultimately peaceful to live in the space between. I’ve learned that my burning shame did not blot out love. I learned that I could lose my mind, my identity, my ability to function, and yet still be someone. I learned that the best thing to alleviate the suffering of the soul is the kindness of another human being. I learned that there is more mystery in the world than anyone taught me when I was growing up. My life veered off on a path I had never imagined on a hot Iowa Bloomsday when a thunderstorm blew through, and yet I don’t regret it. I wouldn’t wish it on the Devil, but I don’t regret it, because everything I hoped for was there among the pain and terror. It’s the path that led me to work in hospice, in large part because I was afraid of death and illness and wanted to see what was on the other side of that loss. What I found were the patients who healed me. They were all so broken, and so beautiful.
If life were like a novel, and I could tie things up nicely with a bow, I would claim that it was Gloria who gave me my parting advice. But it wasn’t. It was a little old Jewish lady who gave me a blessing every time we met. She’d fled Poland with her parents and brother in the 1930s and arrived in the United States ten years later alone. A woman whose story I haven’t told here, and will instead keep bundled in my heart with the hundreds of other stories. I’ll leave you with it, as she left it with me: “Promise yourself,” she said that last time we met, “promise that you’ll have a great life, no matter what happens.”