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WHEN I USED TO grieve for my mother, and later for my Aunt Kate, I told myself that although they were certainly as dead as they were ever going to be they were still mine, that they inhabited my interior world, which was at least as noisy and various as life itself. From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared, believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone. Memory still seems a gift to me and I hold tight to those few things that are forever gone and always a part of me, while the new life, the changing view, streams by. Theresa, I feel sure, has been able to achieve the healthy balance between cherishing what was and forging ahead. Howard has made the last several years a blank. Sometimes I think he tries to trick himself into believing that Prairie Center was an impossible and foolish fancy, that we fell asleep in a field of poppies shortly after we met, and were out cold for six years. When we woke we found ourselves in a surprising and yet inevitable location. If I mention Lizzy, he has to stop and stare at his shoes and then he shakes himself, as if he has had to dig back into a dream to remember our friends’ daughter.
At the hospital, Theresa’s oldest sister organized the family so that there were always six or seven people in the prayer circle. Those off duty brought food and pillows, shuttled Grandma to and fro, gave back rubs, and made phone calls to relatives out of state. Theresa’s youngest sister cried outside of room 309, not for Lizzy at that moment, but because at nineteen she was still the baby and couldn’t do anything right. She had brought the wrong order from the Chinese restaurant: one grease-stained shopping bag with twelve cartons of sweet and sour pork, six cartons of rice, and twenty-four fortune cookies. The girl had so much misery in her face, her mascaraed tears running into her mouth, that Howard had taken off to the end of the hall to look out the window at the heating plant.
Hour after hour I sat, confessing my fundamental unworthiness to God. I was going to try to do much better, was going to put all my strength into forcing love into my heart. If only I had more Shakespeare on my tongue, more than a few lines knocking around; if only I could rise up, climb on the end table and with nothing but verbal wizardry rout the angels from their warrens. I had so little, no complete poems or Bible verses lounging in my brain like firemen on cots, waiting for the disaster. I could only get as far as, “Do not go gentle into that good night,” and “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief.”
The only thing I had that was close to religion was the weekly pilgrimage Aunt Kate and I used to make to the international folk-dance group in Hyde Park, at first glance, nowhere near the Judeo-Christian path to the divine. Much as I tried to concentrate on Lizzy, what was not only her bone and flesh, but also what was the pure stuff of her soul, I couldn’t help drifting, occasionally, going back to Hyde Park, dancing, swirling around and around with my Aunt Kate. Every Friday night the oddest assortment of people gathered in Ida Noyes Hall and executed dances from the world over. The leader pulled out meticulously catalogued records from pink metal boxes and carefully guided the needle to the chosen band. That was our church, our communion. My Aunt Kate tried in vain to teach me to forgive the men in their thirties still fighting acne, who stepped on my feet and were always popping up to ask for the next dance. Most of them had spent far too long in a lab, feeding, I thought, out of their Petri dishes instead of eating a decent meal now and again. Aunt Kate used to answer my complaints about so and so’s bad breath by saying, “Yes, my dear, it’s dreadful, like an old goat—but be kind, be merciful.”
“Have you been praying?” I asked Howard, as we were adjusting the pillows on the hospital sofa. We were preparing to rest in the lounge again, for the second night. I wouldn’t go home, couldn’t bear the thought of Nellie’s inquisition, couldn’t stand the idea of waiting in the midst of everyday life. It was one thing to wait stubbornly, to hold out in the rarefied atmosphere of the hospital lounge, a place where, like purgatory, we accounted for our sins and hoped for mercy. I needed to devote myself to the waiting; I had no interest in trying to pass the time with mindless chores and food and people. Howard had only just returned from the farm. It was past ten o’clock and everyone else had pulled up stakes and gone to sleep in their own beds.
“Have I been saying what?” he said, trying a position flat on his back, finding it unsatisfactory, and turning over. He twisted his mouth to one side and felt his bristly cheek. “What if Lizzy doesn’t get better?”
“What?” I said.
“What I mean,” he whispered, “is what if nothing happens?”
I had told Emma and Claire over the telephone that I was staying at the hospital to help Lizzy get well. Howard was looking at me without flinching and I could see plainly in his eyes, Dan and Theresa moving the tubes and machines home, Lizzy forever suspended between life and death. She would lie in the living room; the girls would think of her as someone on the order of Snow White when they visited. She would grow and they would roll her from side to side every day, so that she would wear evenly. She would be ugly and ungainly as a preteen and beautiful again at sixteen. She would menstruate and never be bothered. Years would pass and the family might gather in the living room without even thinking about Lizzy’s presence, taking the sleeping child for granted. Every now and then they might think she had heard; on Christmas Day Dan would say grace in the dining room and he would mention how much they loved Lizzy, and out of the corner of her eye Theresa would see the girl move her head and look at them, and then turn back to sleep.
I clutched Howard’s forearm as if he too had seen. “I’ll visit her every day,” I brayed. “I’ll stay with her while Theresa goes to the grocery store, the library, the therapist, I swear I’ll—” Theresa and I, at seventy-five, our husbands long dead, would sit and wait by the side of the gray-haired woman who had never woken.
Time went on, unbroken by usual mealtimes and sunsets and ablutions. It was Howard who finally wondered if all the novenas and Hail Marys weren’t serving to usher Lizzy into the next world. I shook my head and told him, No. It could not be true that there was nothing behind her eyelids. The doctor had put her through a series of tests to evaluate brain activity in relation to eye responses. At the first, apparently, she did not have even the most primitive reflexes. Lizzy’s pupils did not react to light. She didn’t sneeze when her nostrils were tickled, up inside, with a Kleenex. It could not be true that she was like an egg that has been blown out. I wasn’t always sure there was any such thing as a soul to begin with, if there was an essence that was independent of our bodies, and that doubt made it all the more difficult to think of a little soul. Was Lizzy’s soul like a bird with its wings clipped, inside that bloated body, growing quiet and still, and then closing its eyes? Or had it flown out, up and up, days before, when she began to sink in the pond?
Dr. Hildebrand dispensed his diagnoses gradually, until the final decision seemed to be a mutual one made by him and Reverend Nabor and Dan and Theresa. They were going to let her go. The family filed into the lounge late the third night. The nurse took a wooden rocking chair into Lizzy’s room, with braided circles tied to the seat and the back. In the lounge we all sat trying not to look into the unit, at the window with the curtain drawn, and the closed door, where, somehow, impossibly, a life was coming to an end. Mrs. Clark, the prayer leader, swished her behind in her seat, her preamble to rising, but her daughter reached for her hand and kept her down.
In room 309 the nurse took the I.V. out of Lizzy’s arm, the tube from her nose, switched off the respirator, the heart monitor, removed the blood pressure band, and the catheter. Dan lifted Lizzy out of the bed and took her to the rocking chair. His shoulders were at his ears. He rocked her a little. Theresa kneeled on the floor and put her head on Lizzy’s lap. They could touch her anywhere they wanted now. They talked to her, and believed that her reason had returned, that she could now hear and understand. Dan counted to himself while Lizzy took breaths first twelve seconds apart, and fourteen, and eighteen, and twenty. They waited, bent over her, but no next breath came.