How Not to Let Go

You’ll Wear It

That night I tell Annie about the tree and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. “And I realized . . . you remember the metaphor?”

“The—yes. I’m the sun,” she says, “but also you’re the sun.”

“Yeah,” I grin. “And Simon and Biz, they’re the little birds—but they’re not. They’re grown-up people and they can take care of themselves. I’m not failing them now.”

“But you’re the little birds.”

“Exactly. And I’m the dragon.” In a choked whisper, I say, “He’s not the dragon. He’s just a miserable old man in terrible pain.”

“Hey,” she says in quiet celebration. “There’s that compassion you were looking for.”

“Yeah,” I say. “And it’s not just the cancer, it’s the lifelong pain. It travels across generations, this kind of pain. He feels what his father felt, and his father before him. I don’t know when it started, but I know that I can end it, because I had Mum, attuned to me and loving me. And . . . and I have you, Annie.”

“Yeah, you do.”

And then I say, “He wants to stop food and fluids.”

She says, “How is that for you?” in a voice of such understanding that my chest expands and my eyelids drop.

“It feels . . . like I’m not selling my soul.”

“And it feels like I won’t be alone.”

“You’re not alone,” she says.

“I’ve told him what it’s like, I’ve explained what—” I press my lips together and wait until I can breathe again. “Anyway, that’s how I’ll be spending the next few weeks—unless he changes his mind, which he may do, if only to torment us all for as long as possible.”

“Well, he is a douche bag,” she says casually. “And you can complain to me every day, either way.”

Every day. She’ll be there every day.

He doesn’t change his mind, he doesn’t stop being a douche bag, and it takes most of a month.

The first ten days, we pull food and alcohol. This was only supposed to be a week, and the lack of food is no challenge for him, but he detoxes badly from the alcohol and his tolerance for the benzos means we have to keep him on an IV. Only when we can transition to topical, injection, and suppository pain meds and anxiolytics can we pull all fluids.

That’s when the decline begins in earnest.

Once he’s bedridden, Mum shares with the nurse the task of massaging lotion into his skin and moving his limbs to prevent sores. The nurse he merely sexually harasses with inappropriate comments, and she bears it with remarkable complaisance, reminding him that the morphine suppositories are also part of her duties. Mum, though, he actively belittles and criticizes. She bears it as she has always borne it: in silence and with a quiet, “Charles, dear,” when she sees me.

He never looks up at Mum and sees her patience and beauty. He knows, surely, that he can’t do this alone, but he never recognizes that we are helping him. There is no deathbed redemption—except that each day, at least twice a day, I ask if he’d like to continue, and each day, for as long as he’s able to respond, he finds a new and profane way to say yes.

I talk to Annie every day, for at least a few minutes.

“Nothing is how I expected it to be,” I tell her, trying to describe my disintegration on the plane. “I’m all rawness and vulnerability here. It’ll take me ages to forgive him for failing to be the man he ought to have been, and yet there are moments now when it feels easy to be compassionate toward the man he is.”

“He’s doing his best,” Annie says. “That doesn’t make his best what you and your family deserved. But it was and is the best he can do. It’s unjust to demand anything else from people.”

“I hadn’t thought about it that way.”

“Really?” she says, surprised. “Because I learned that from you.”

One morning past the three-week mark, he responds to my inquiry about continuing, most unusually, by saying my name. “Charles.” His mouth is shiny with glycerin.

His muscles are weak, his coordination poor, but he brings his hands together and pulls the signet from his little finger—it comes easily from his shrunken hand. He holds it in his fist for a moment before he turns his fist and opens his palm.

“You’ll wear it,” he says. “It matters.”

I take it from his papery hand. The gold is warm from his body, the engraved bezel worn to smoothness from two centuries’ wear. I can’t read the words, carved backward over the backward coat of arms, but I know what they say. Par la souffrance, la vertu.

I put it in my pocket.

“I’ve brought something,” I say, brandishing The Oxford Anthology of English Poetry.

It takes approximately half an hour to read all of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner aloud.

That is the last day he’s conscious. There follow five days of Mum and the nurse and me moisturizing his mouth, turning him and moving his limbs, and reading Coleridge and Aristotle to his unresponsive body.

Simon and Biz are downstairs, and Mum and I are sitting with him when he releases his last breath.