Despite having been diagnosed with cancer several months before, my father continued to feel well. Sandy and I, his only children, had been told he probably wouldn’t last another year but Abe had not wanted to hear the prognosis. He just kept telling everyone: “I’m going to beat it.”
My sister and I live in Vancouver and as the year progressed it became unbearable to think of Abe living alone in Montreal. My job at a used bookstore was more flexible than Sandy’s and though I dislike moving and thrive, or at least think I thrive, on routine, I decided to move back east.
We were able to rent an apartment in the same building my father had lived in for the past thirty-five years. Sandy went ahead to furnish it by scrounging surplus furniture from relatives and making sensible buys at Ikea and the dollar store so when I arrived, weeks later, I could move right in.
After decades of being thousands of miles apart, I was now a flight of ten stairs away from my father whom I idolized and wanted to emulate until I was five. Since his eating habits were the easiest thing for me to copy, that’s when I acquired my taste for pungent-smelling foods such as garlic, cooked cabbage, liver. Also, I’d follow him around our small flat, stick to him like glue.
Until gradually my father’s halo tarnished. His soft nature and malleable style were no match for my mother’s ferocious need for control. She held on to it so tightly, it cracked and left her cracked. He took refuge in invisibility, which left my sister and me at the mercy of our mother. As a teenager I boiled over into confrontations with him, which were never really resolved; we kept in touch with yearly visits and weekly phone calls.
Over the years Abe had periodically asked Sandy and me if there were a chance either of us would ever consider living in Montreal and we’d always answered with an emphatic “no!” Being near him now gave me a certain peace of mind, partly because I figured it would serve as an insurance policy to allay future guilt.
My father seemed delighted but curious that I was there. Since I couldn’t tell him I’d come back because he was close to dying, I told him a semi-truth, that I’d returned to work on a piece of writing. He didn’t ask what it was about and I didn’t say it would be about him.
Abe lives in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (known locally as NDG) on the west side, in an old working-class building on one of the area’s main streets. Somerled Avenue is a stream of stores from which you can purchase anything from halal meat to upholstery fabric. Its row of restaurants reflects its diverse population.
My father’s daily life centres around Dahlia. They began a relationship when they were both in their early eighties. Dahlia, who was born and raised in Egypt, speaks Arabic and Italian with her family, and with Abe, French, which was his first language, learned on the east end’s Frontenac Street. With her diminutive stature and melting brown eyes, Dahlia resembles a rounder version of Edith Piaf. A plump sparrow. She wears sweaters and skirts to show off her shapely figure, delicate leather shoes. Her dark hair is always coiffed, nails polished.
A few years ago she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and these days, alternates between being as sharp as a tack or else totally bewildered about who or rather “when” she is. Her current memories and identities flow like water through her clenched fists.
Because she wanders and gets lost if left alone, her family has put her into a private boarding house near where they live and not far from Abe. It’s good in terms of location. But the owner’s barely repressed hostility is as eroding to his residents’ spirits as the dingy décor of the place and Dahlia’s family has her on the waiting list for a better home.
Abe’s told Dahlia he’s sick but she can’t remember and has no clues to jog her memory. He looks hale as ever, his complexion ruddy, his blue eyes bright, his snow-white hair thick. Irons all his clothes, except for his jeans. He still drives over almost daily to pick her up to go to Tim Hortons for coffee and donuts, to Adonis, the Middle Eastern market, for feta and tabouli, and then to his house to spend the rest of the day.
My mother, long dead, had been the enthusiastic cook, my father the enthusiastic eater. Abe had a brief infatuation with cooking which began and ended when he was eighty-seven. He prepares hot cereal in the morning, with a spoonful of olive oil (“to keep regular”), and puts together intricate salads with sardines for lunch. His dinners, his biggest meals, consist of frozen or fast foods, which he doesn’t really like.
Though I’m concerned to not undermine their independence, Abe and Dahlia readily accept all my offers to run messages, do chores and cook for them. Whereas I only sporadically accept their invitations to go along on drives and join in on their card game, coquille. I worry about my lack of space from them and their lack of space from me.
Once in a while I know for sure the lovebirds want to be alone, I assume to be intimate, because these are the only times my father makes a point of instructing me to “call first” before I come by, which I always do anyhow, and hope he never drops in unannounced on me either.
He’s far more casual about visitors than I am, gets dressed first thing in the morning, ready to greet the world. Given the chance, I’ll slop around in my nightie, my second skin, for hours. Especially if I’m writing and want to keep the transition from being asleep to being awake as smooth as possible. Before my mind takes over in inhibiting ways.
Finding room at my kitchen table can require an archeological dig, but Abe’s a meticulous housekeeper. Nor does he go into a tailspin about what to serve guests. A cup of instant coffee and a couple of social tea biscuits at his circa 1950s tidy arborite table are just fine by him. And he’s right.
What little writing I do on my laptop reinforces my illusion that I’m here to write, and since it’s focused on my father, I pretend it’s my way of being with him. But really it just gets in the way. The only thing to do is to give up or rather in to why I’m really here.
The more time I spend with Abe, usually in his place where he’s the most comfortable, the more time he wants me to spend with him and I’m constantly on edge if I’m not close by. That he too is aware of how finite this period is I sense only viscerally since neither of us says a word about it.
The cellphone the kids give me is great in theory, it’s to free me up so I can leave the building without being petrified that my father might suddenly need and not be able to reach me. But, in practice it’s used only once when I call him from Yagel Bagel to ask, “Sesame or poppy?”
Aside from being a bit slower and slightly less steady on his feet, Abe’s hardly encumbered by either his health or his age. But after several weeks, I start to notice a very uncharacteristic irritability and impatience about him, particularly when he’s with Dahlia whose repeated questions have stretched everyone’s patience but his. It finally dawns on me to ask, “Dad are you in pain?” He nods his head “yes.” Points to his upper back.
It’s been almost a year since he’d been diagnosed with lung cancer caused by his having installed asbestos into the walls of the SS Letitia to convert it into a hospital ship during World War Two. In a month he’ll be eighty-eight.
My father doesn’t cotton to drugs of any sort and rarely admits to pain. When I suggest he take a pain killer he says, “I don’t want to get addicted, suppose I become immune and when I really need it, it won’t work?” It takes a couple of hours before he’ll agree to a regular-strength Tylenol.
Within a couple of days we’re with Dr. Crankstone, his pulmonary specialist, whose office is at St. Mary’s, the local hospital, a shambling structure built in the early twentieth century. Crankstone previously thought of Abe as a medical anomaly because of how well he’d been doing. But now his lung is so full, Abe has to be admitted to the hospital immediately.
The emergency ward doctor, a spry, bespectacled woman in her late sixties with a wren-like quality, climbs onto my father’s bed and swinging her dangling legs says “you’re cute” at which he grins and away they go flirting with each other.
Only when I ask her questions about his condition does she reluctantly slide off her perch to pay attention to me. Her initial reaction to him had probably been a big health boost in itself and I probably shouldn’t have interrupted their little liaison in my misguided attempt to be responsible.
From the stretcher-filled hallways I call my sister at work in Vancouver and cry, “Daddy’s in the hospital. I’m ascared.” Regressed in language and every other way. Sandy also bursts into tears, tells me she’ll be there as soon as she can. We’re suddenly two little girls again, totally dependent on one another. But now we have grey hair and have to look after our father.
Based on all the stories about scarcity of space, I expect Abe will be stuck in Emergency for days but within an hour he’s been brought upstairs into a room where there’s a bald-headed person in the other bed. My father whispers to me, “Man or woman?” He’s shared hospital rooms with both. I tell him, “I saw a bra in the closet when I was hanging up your clothes.”
The next morning his roommate, a very muscular woman in her seventies, bristles, “Your father came over and kissed me last night.” She looks tough, like she wouldn’t think twice about belting him if it happens again. But it won’t because he’s now hooked up to a pump and it’s very awkward for him to move around.
With each of its ghastly sounds, we watch the pump as if it were TV, as its transparent container slowly inches up with more pink-tinged fluid.
He complains only of constipation. The staff ply him with laxatives, race to place him on a commode when he has the urge. “Your father’s the talk of the town. We’ll all celebrate when Abe’s had a bowel movement,” a nurse jokes. My father is on a palliative care ward. In the hallway there’s always someone weeping away from the eyes of a dying relative or friend. The sympathy and empathy are palpable. We are a tribe.
A chaplain, in her thirties, elegant enough to have been a model, comes by to offer Abe spiritual solace only to learn that he is Jewish and that his socialist parents had raised him to reject all organized religion, including his own. But he takes pity on her, asks her about herself so she can stay and talk, feel she’s done something to fulfill her function.
Sandy, my daughter Joey and her boyfriend Craig from Toronto, and my sons Noah and Daniel from New York, all arrive the following evening. Abe thinks they’re there because it’s close to his birthday. After three more days, the pump can drain no more fluid. No one says it directly to us, but there is nothing more to be done, and Abe, armed with laxatives and stronger Tylenol, is sent home. The medical staff has told us he will be fine for a few months more. Only I’m convinced otherwise.
The kids, who’ve been crashing on my apartment floor, go back to their respective jobs right after Abe’s eighty-eighth birthday celebration, a small party at Antico Martini where he has his customary large plate of cannelloni. Dahlia and the waiter yak it up in Italian about their first impressions of Montreal—que fredo qua—it was initially colder, temperature-wise and temperamentally, than they’d ever anticipated.
The next day Sandy and I take Abe back to the doctor for something stronger than the strongest Tylenol. Crankstone hastily rips off his pad a prescription for OxyContin (known on the street as “hillbilly heroin”) and within hours Abe, who’s been diamond sharp and upright as a soldier, descends into dementia. He is curled over like a question mark, tries to peel the phone as if it were a banana, dances on rubber legs with the curtains.
He comes out of this hideous high and says, “I’m going cuckoo, I need a psychiatrist, my brain’s going as well as my body.” Once we’ve convinced him it’s the side effects of the medication, he adamantly refuses to take it again saying, “I prefer the physical pain to losing my mind.”
Without the pills he’s shattered, can’t get out of bed at all, but recoils at the mention of a bedpan or diapers. His daughters become Big Nurses, order him, “Swallow your pill.” In one of his brief respites from physical agony and or insanity he says, “This only happens to other people, I never thought it would happen to me. The jig’s up, I know how this story ends. I want you to help me commit suicide.”
Never have we seen our father defeated or else we’ve never recognized it when he was. On the contrary he’s been steadfastly, supremely optimistic with his “we shall overcome” comment to every blow, every setback life has dealt him.
To have anyone admit they want to end their life is intense, but to have our own father appeal to us to help do it, this is horrifying. What is almost as awful is that we can’t muster up strong arguments to persuade him to keep living. His attitude is admirable, his approach lofty.
Once again, after all these years, I want to emulate Abe. Hope I have the courage to do exactly what he wants to do, die on his own terms. Only when it begins to dissolve do I realize how large is the stone I’ve been carrying in my heart about my father.
Sandy and I are on automatic pilot, in crisis mode, our filters gone. Unable to process the ramifications of Abe’s request. We are detached from our bodies. Walking heads. Frantically calm in our determination to act, we discuss various ways to kill our father. After Sandy tells me about a friend who’d had to resort to suffocating her mother with a pillow, I’m off to see Crankstone.
Either because I’ve offended his medical oath to keep people alive at all costs, or had the temerity to suggest he become involved in euthanasia, my request provokes the taciturn Crankstone into screeching, “Your father’s fine, he’s just depressed.” Yo, Einstein! I leave his office tremendously depressed myself.
Not knowing about my visit to Crankstone, Abe says he wants to see Magnus, his family doctor, who’d he’d gone to for the past half century. We assume he wants him to help end his life and to say goodbye.
Magnus returns from examining him, brushes the cigar ashes off his rotund belly and announces dramatically: “Your father can make more babies.” From the little Sandy and I have known about this doctor, he’s always regarded sex as an elixir, it’s been his biggest prescription. Still we’re startled to hear this pronouncement, then grimace to one another to signal our disdain. See him simply as one old man crowing about another. Do we really need to hear about our father’s potency? Even genetically this information is useless to us. As useless as we figure Magnus is by now.
But when he switches Abe’s opiates because “old people don’t do well on OxyContin” and shows us how to do acupressure on him, we’re even more surprised. Magnus has kept far more up-to-date about pain control than the much younger Crankstone.
He’s also kinder, straighter, as he says, “Abe might be better off in a hospital or a hospice, your father may have received his travelling papers.”
Abe had sat in Magnus’ office nodding off like an old junkie. But he’d heard everything we’d been discussing and once the new medicine’s kicked in he makes it clear he doesn’t want to go back to the hospital, wanting to die is no longer mentioned. Maybe Magnus’ statement about his virility gave him incentive to live.
Magnus hooks us up with the CLSC, the community-based health team of doctors, nurses, social workers, etc., run by the provincial government. It’s designed to help the infirm stay at home, charges on a sliding scale; for Abe it’s free.
Simone is the doctor assigned to him. In her forties, petite with snapping eyes and curly hair, she radiates energy, sparks with it. When she enters his bedroom, Abe says, “Turn around please,” reaches for his teeth, which have been smiling in a glass of water on his night table, and slips them in to give her a big wolfy grin. The doctor reads his flirting like his blood pressure and heart rate, as one of his vital signs.
She teaches us how to inject Abe with Dilaudid (synthetic heroin) every twelve hours with spikes in between. Tells us, “His pain might not increase. Some people die of cancer with absolutely no pain.” Gives us her cellphone number, to “call anytime” and says she will call us at least once a day. Simone is the dream doctor, always available.
Abe’s infinitely more comfortable, lucid again, but mostly withdrawn. His portable radio, which he’d listened to faithfully for years, is no longer on, not even for his precious newscasts and weather reports, nor does he want to leave the house.
Joey calls from Toronto and knowing his love of food, she suggests Le Jardin de Chine as a way to lure him out. It takes an hour with lots of stopping to rest on bus benches to walk the four blocks to the restaurant. After he’s had a small bowl of wonton soup, he says: “Okay, I’m ready for Freddy.”
We’ve finished eating too, ask for the bill so we can leave. He waves us down with both hands. “Sit, sit. Do you know what ‘ready for Freddy’ means?”
“Sure, it’s an expression, like ‘even Steven,’ it means you’re ready for something, ready to make a move,” Sandy says.
“Well, that’s part of it. Freddy was the undertaker in a comic I read when I was a kid.” He chuckles a bit, remembering the strip. “I’ve had a great life. Now I’m ready to make a move, I’m ready for Freddy. How about some help?” All this he says with total equanimity.
Sandy and I are even more devastated than the first time he’d mentioned suicide—he’s once again relatively pain free, on good drugs, eating. We’d already geared down several notches, had begun operating on an even keel, without rushes of adrenaline, hoping this phase of Abe’s life would be a slow and gentle decline.
Comparing notes later, Sandy and I confess we had each suppressed an urge to scream at this point, not at Abe—just to let out a long, loud primal scream. Although the smallest, meanest part of me wanted to yell at Abe too, “Stop putting us through this.” Instead we quietly protest that we’re not ready. But we understand why he wants to die. This we respect. He needs to know we’ll help him die with dignity. This we promise. His spirits are visibly lifted.
When Daniel comes again he drives us all to spend the day in Sutton, in the Eastern Townships, to visit a friend who lives in an old brick farmhouse. We bring with us brie and peaches, barbecue chicken, fresh baguettes, red wine and green grapes, for a mid-afternoon meal on the verandah. The surrounding hills are covered with maples tinged with russet, the sky splashed with colour, a Rothko painting.
Dahlia rhapsodizes about the schoolgirl visit she made to Italy, how this scenery reminds her of “la maison de mon oncle dans les alpes Italien.” Abe is so invigorated, he needs only one nap. The day is poignant, bursting with emotion. I’m there and already not there, aching to stay enveloped in this idyllic tableau and at the same time wanting to remove myself, hold on to it by writing about it.
Returning along the ribbon of highway into the city that night, Dahlia begins to talk softly to herself in the back seat. Abe is once again in pain. We can tell by how rigidly he holds himself. Our day in the country is over.
He spends his mornings and afternoons resting in bed. Sits on his tiny second-floor balcony in the warm evenings to watch the end-of-August sunsets, the patterns the car lights make on the pavement. During these interludes Sandy and I are not sure whether to join him or leave him alone deep in his thoughts. When we do go out and ask how he is, he says, “I’m sad about the fall.”
Being told he can no longer drive because of the pain-killers he’s taking has been a bigger blow to Abe than being told he has cancer. Cancer he was sure he could beat, but he can’t challenge the edict against driving under the influence of drugs.
Abe started driving when he was a kid, with the old Model Ts, when licences didn’t exist, measures his life by what vehicle he had. That he was a cabby meant he could drive a car as much as he wanted and realize his greatest ambition, to work only for himself, never for a boss.
He went from the nickname “Red” when he had rooster-red hair to “The Dean,” the oldest driver around. A couple of years before Expo ’67 he took a course to become an accredited tourist guide for the city, whose beauty he claimed was incomparable. Visitors and Montrealers alike hired him to see the sights, learn more about the history.
One of his regular customers was a blind man who wanted Abe to drive him around describing what he saw …
My father continued as a cabby until his seventies when he sold his permit and worked unofficially driving for friends and neighbours until he was eighty-five. Bought his silver Toyota when he was eighty-six. Since he keeps his cars an average of ten years, it was a testament to his optimism that he’d live a long time yet: “I’m determined to get a chunk of my old age pension, the letter from the Queen when I reach one hundred.”
Now he frets that his new car isn’t being used, it’s equivalent to having his wings clipped. Sandy never learned to drive, so Abe wants me to, though it’s been ages since I’ve driven, and never in Montreal.
When I took a driver’s test years ago in Vancouver, the inspector, clad in white trousers, sat down on several blueberries which had lodged in a crack and somehow began rolling around in the middle of the passenger’s seat. I blithely drove the wrong way on a one-way street.
Had the inspector been vengeful, he could have failed me just for the stains on his pants, never mind my major driving infraction. But he must have realized what it would mean for a young, single mother to have mobility, to be able to drive her kids around in her old jalopy.
In those days I was very distractible. After a series of minor accidents, I quit driving and just kept renewing my licence so I’d never have to take the test again, just in case I ever needed to drive. This went on for a good twenty years.
I ask Daniel to practise drive with me and he says, “Sure, Mom, right after I take a handful of Ativan.” Even without it, he doesn’t shriek when I almost smash into the canary-coloured van a foot from my face. Again I’m distracted. I take one more brush-up lesson with a driving instructor who says, “Everything was okay, except for going through that last stop sign.” “What stop sign?” I ask.
Abe is ecstatic to be out in his car again, even if it means sitting in the passenger seat. We’re going on errands together, picking up Dahlia to go out to Dunkin’ Donuts, its various locations chosen by him as a test for me to negotiate busy intersections.
His only criticism, “It’s dangerous to consider people trying to cross the street. No one expects it here. It’s safer to do the wrong thing. You’re too BC.”
I want to put up a big “New Driver” sign in the window so drivers will stop blasting their horns at me. I’ll write it in French, English and every other language deemed necessary. The Regie informs me it’s against the law because such a sign would cause others to treat me differently and therefore promote discrimination. So I wave, smile, shrug at the jeers, swearing, shaking of fists from drivers furious with my tortoise-like pace, my tenuous turns. Ignore the shocked stares of pedestrians as I slam on brakes for them in the middle of the road. Or watch them flutter with fear out of my path.
Though his energy is waning by the minute and it takes him an hour to get dressed, even with us helping him do up his shirt buttons, fasten his belt, slip on his jacket, tie his shoes, still Abe wants us to go out every day. My parking, more than anything else, leaves a lot to be desired and when Sandy quotes Woody Allen’s “It’s okay, we can get a cab to the curb,” he cracks up.
Within a couple of days he can barely get out of bed but insists we go out to practise four-way stops. When he says “stop” he means “go,” when he says “left” he means “right,” he repeatedly directs me to turn the wrong way onto one-way streets.
Because I can’t make even the most basic decisions we’re sure to crash. Sandy sits in the back seat whispering instructions to me. She is my navigator, our guardian angel.
But we get as lost as my mind. Circle the base of the mountain, tail-gate the car in front of us, think they’ll know the route out. End up at a big sign that says “Cul-de-sac” to discover we’re at the gates of Mount Royal Cemetery. Through the rear-view mirror, we give each other looks of horror, and hope Abe won’t notice where we are.
Everyone tumbles out of the car ahead of us dressed in dark clothing from head to toe and Abe remarks, “Poor people, to have to wear black for a funeral on such a hot day.” Sandy and I are soaked in sweat.
The next day he is no longer able to leave his bed and the nurses put him into diapers. We’ve never seen our father naked before and the first time we have to change him ourselves, we’re terrified of our feelings of shame and transgression. That he too will see us seeing him as an affront to his dignity.
We dread crossing a line we never imagined coming anywhere near, to have to see our father’s penis, this source of us. Try to rationalize—it’s only his “body,” that it’s similar to half of the world’s, that he took care of us in this way and it’s our turn to take care of him. Still we dread. Until Abe instinctively does something to make it bearable. He closes his eyes, acts oblivious to what’s happening. Changing him becomes just something that has to be done. Nothing more, nothing less.
But it’s becoming more and more difficult to catch his pain with the right amount of medication, before either it or the medication engulfs him. He is spiralling in and out of consciousness. I remind Sandy of our promise to help him die. Somehow we should get him into his car, turn on the ignition, leave him in the enclosed garage. Late at night when none of the other tenants parked there are liable to find him. Or we can use the pillow. Sandy says, “Not yet, not yet.”
One morning Abe tells us in a voice that echoes from whatever place he’s been, he’s dreamed about his parents, his sister and brother, all dead. “We’ve had a family reunion and I want to be buried by my father.” His father, Isaac, is in the oldest part of the Jewish cemetery, in the Workman’s Circle section, a labour and cultural association he helped found.
“Dad, that part’s been all filled up for years,” Sandy says. No response. Our parents owned one piece of real estate, their small gravesite bought long ago in a newer part of the Jewish cemetery. Last year after he’d been diagnosed with cancer, Abe said, “There’s no refund on my part of the plot but I’ve changed my mind. I want to be cremated, my ashes placed in the mausoleum on the slopes of the mountain. It’s got loads of parking and it’s on two bus routes. And it’s got one helluva view.”
What was left unspoken was that he didn’t want to end up next to Florence, with whom he’d had a marriage he referred to as the “forty-year war.” With his new request the closest we can get him to his father is to bury him beside his wife. A judgement call for Sandy and me to make. Because we can’t bring ourselves to ask him if he is willing to lie beside our mother.
He’s no longer eating, asks only for coffee which Sandy gives him in a glass, “à la russe” she says. After a few sips through a straw, he hands the glass back, reaches out to her, she holds him clasped in her arms and they both weep. I watch this scene from the frame of the doorway. Soon he stops eating and drinking altogether. We let him be.
The amount of support we’re receiving is phenomenal, the nurses are dropping by every few hours, Simone daily. We have meetings about how to keep Abe comfortable, how to keep Sandy and me from cracking from the escalating pressure. They all say this part will last weeks, they’ve seen it so often. I can’t believe it.
Sandy and I have been alternating between one of us staying with Abe, the other snatching sleep upstairs. A nursing supervisor insists we spend the night upstairs so we both have a proper night’s sleep. The voluptuous fifty-something sitter arrives, immediately lifts up her sweater, whips off her bra exposing her full breasts. I think, “Wow, a wet nurse, these people think of everything.” She says, “I just bought a new bra and it’s really pinching me,” and pulls her sweater down again. Abe might have been in heaven to be able to cuddle with her—Dahlia is no longer visiting. Her family thinks she’d be too upset to see him so sick. When we return after six hours the sitter says, “Abe didn’t sleep a wink because he’s been too excited.” Had she climbed into bed with him after all?
In amazement he exclaims: “The writing’s on the wall.” We assume he’s speaking metaphorically, until he points to the wall saying, “You see? You see?” We don’t see, but focus instead on his excitement, ask him to read the words out loud. He’s frustrated. “I keep erasing them, I blink and they’re gone.” I give him a pen and paper in case he sees them again.
Then, “Get me a bag, I need a bag for my trip, I’m going away.”
“It’ll be beautiful where you’re going, quiet and peaceful,” I suggest.
He pauses for a moment, his brow wrinkling as he considers his destination, contemplates it as if he were still a tourist guide, before he answers, “Yes, but it’s still more lovely here.” Never have we known Abe to express anything spiritual, he’s describing his experience as actually going somewhere.
And he is on a trip. Levitating above his bed he chases after the crimson roses soaring around the room. Reaches up for crisp French fries dangling from the ceiling, giggles at clips from Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, raves to our mother about the pot roast she’s just cooked, discusses the details of his mandolin recital with his Auntie Essie and Uncle Alec, both of whom were actually stone deaf. Words are flowing, pouring out of him, in English, French and Yiddish. Tsvishn meysim; amongst the ghosts.
When Noah phones while on a trip to Turkey Abe pulls himself out of his hallucinations to tell him his Turkish neighbours call him dede, their term for grandfather.
Slips back into his reveries. Rallies with each phone call to tell everyone, “I’m fine, just fine, I’m getting better.”
Late into the night he sits up in bed, like a little boy in his striped pajamas, beaming his flashlight onto surfaces. Enchanted by the shapes and shadows, the light show he’s creating.
Soon he no longer sits. Perched on the side of his bed, we sing to him “Bye Bye Blackbird,” an old favourite. He tries to sing along, but the lyrics are too complicated. Falters on “Alouette, Gentille Alouette,” chimes in on every “shine” in “You Are My Sunshine.”
By the hour he is transforming. When he next hears his grandchildren’s voices he purrs like a kitten, when we show him family photographs his eyes widen. “Ohhhhhh,” he coos in pleasure.
Now he lies wide-eyed and silent, frantically plucking at his bedclothes as if they are on fire, burning his skin. We’re told this awful agitation, this compulsive behaviour, is a classic sign of impending death. Pluck, pluck, pluck. It continues for two days and two nights.
Simone says, “He can go on and on, but you can’t.” We give her permission to give him a sedative. He stares at us glassy-eyed, as we, the invisible, watch him drift into a deep sleep. To begin his orbit around the universe.
“Don’t be afraid that you’re overmedicating him. Give him as much as you think he needs,” the doctor encourages us. “Hearing begins in utero at around twenty weeks and it might be the last sense to go. Talk to him.” Sandy tells him, “Your work is done, you’ve taken care of everything, you can let go.” At the slightest sign of pain we inject him. Day and night, we pump our father full of drugs.
The nurses teach us how to wrap the sheet around him, he is suddenly so heavy, to roll him from one side to the other, to prevent bedsores, show us how to moisten his lips and mouth which have become sandpaper parched, Sahara dry. I dip my finger in water, slide into the roof of his mouth; his lips close reflexively around my finger, sucking like a baby.
His friend Mort, a fellow ex-taxi driver, also in his eighties, calls and we tell him Abe will soon be dead, that there will be no formal funeral, instead a party later at Le Jardin de Chine, where he’d had the last food he’d enjoyed. But Mort is so crestfallen at this prospect, we realize the older people in Abe’s life need the kind of formality they’re used to.
We phone the one Jewish burial service in Montreal, run for generations by the Paperman family, to see if Abe can have a non-religious funeral. Though we’ve heard of this place since we were kids, only now does it occur to us what an appropriate name it is for undertakers, “Paper Man”—transient and ephemeral.
Abe looks peaceful, but with every breath he makes a terrible gurgling sound as if he were drowning, and the doctor gives us yet another set of injections, these to dry up the râles. She says, “This isn’t for Abe who is absolutely okay but for the sake of those who have to hear him.”
A nurse looks at us, haggard with exhaustion, and he says, “Your father can go on for a week like this.” Every nerve in my body tells me differently. Tonight Sandy and I will stay together, one of us will sleep on the air mattress on the kitchen floor, the other on the sofa in the living room, take turns, using the alarm clock, to get up to check on Abe. By midnight neither of us can stay awake.
Three hours later Sandy softly calls my name, that’s all. I’m up immediately, say, “He’s dead, thank God,” rush in to see him.
Now he looks exhausted, his head lolled to one side, as if he’d run a race, as if he wanted to be done.
It is Friday, September 13, in Judaism and Buddhism a good luck number.
“We’re orphans,” Sandy and I kid each other. But we mean it. I’m flooded with relief. Anything after this has got to be a lark.
Within minutes I’ll begin to torment myself that I slept through my father’s death. That I let my father die alone was my ultimate pay-back, for his leaving us alone when we needed him. I’ll hear many stories about how people stayed with someone they loved almost constantly and it was only in the brief moment they left that the person died. Begin to wonder if sometimes dying can be hard work, require concentration in order to let go, that it might need solitude. The remorse will lift. Later.
But for this part, Simone had prepared us: “When someone dies, the usual impulse of the family is to immediately call the authorities, an ambulance, the police. When Abe dies, you can stay with him for as long as you want.”
We light candles around him, have a schnapps and a smoke, after which I hurl my glass off the balcony. Normally I try so hard not to break things and at dawn I ruin this unusual gesture by running out barefoot, in my bathrobe, to sweep up my spontaneity, so my fellow bikers won’t puncture their tires.
Leafing through the pad of paper on Abe’s night-table in hopes he’d written down some of the words he’d seen on the walls, we find it’s totally blank except for a list of instructions about how to drive to the cemetery. And a full-page note to his grandchildren. It’s the longest piece of his writing we’ve ever seen.
Eventually we call the city inspectors to sign a death certificate and they give us another piece of paper, a long narrow strip, almost a scroll, with a flat-line on it. It’s the flattest line we’ve ever seen. Sandy and I each take an opposite end of the ECG, close our eyes, make a wish, pull it apart.
Simone comes by to sign another death certificate and she leaves too. But no one takes Abe. He’d donated his body so that science might learn more about his disease, “mesothelioma,” a particular form of lung cancer caused by asbestos. If it’s a suspicious death a body is taken to the morgue, but no one knows what to do with someone who’s volunteered for an autopsy and has to be brought back to the hospital.
For hours, we bounce from bureaucracy to bureaucracy, trapped in a macabre comedy, as Abe’s body begins to show more evidence that we are merely biology. Organic, changing, entities. Until the funeral director rescues us by agreeing to transport Abe to the hospital and then, after the autopsy, on to Paperman’s.
Sandy and I sit across the desk from Mr. Paperman, determined to write an obituary that is not formulaic. The only phrase we can come up with is “Abe was a cool guy.” For ten minutes we quibble over a point of grammar until Paperman refers to his computer program.
A nurse had told us just before death the body releases a chemical to shield the person from what they are about to experience. Possibly it induces the calm tunnel of white light often described in near-death experiences. In our sleepless state, it feels as if chemicals are surging through us too. We are altered. But when the computer tells us we’re right about the grammar, we wink at each other.
Discussing burial options is surreal, we knew our father was dying, yet his death was as surprising as the birth of a baby a second after its head has crowned. And, like a new-born baby, a mystery it will take a long time to understand.
We’d like Abe to be buried directly in the ground, as they do in Israel and in Muslim countries, so there is little intervention between the event and the process. But Mr. Paperman says, “Canadian health regulations insist on coffins. However ours are built without metal to not impede disintegration. Ours are Jewish coffins.” I begin to titter.
He’d described the special features of each from the plain pine box to the vault-like mahogany. Suddenly Sandy and I are left alone to wander the aisles of the starkly lit coffin superstore.
We’re aghast at the prices, except for the pine box. Money, often an issue, becomes irrelevant. Though we can just hear Abe scoffing, “go for the el cheapo,” we want to do right by him, show him out in style, because despite his working class ethics, there was a part of Abe that liked to impress people. In response to a stranger’s question he might answer, “I’m in the transportation business.”
His daughters are not above wanting to make an impression either. We choose the lustrous cherry wood with the blue lining to match his eyes. Something had to help us pick the appropriate coffin. And, if a coffin could be considered “jaunty” this would be it, perfect for the dapper Abe.
Back at his office the funeral director assigns us our forty-five-minute time slot. Paperman’s is a busy business. The next day Abe’s phone starts ringing off the hook and we can’t leave his apartment without being stopped every few steps. Word has spread fast.
If Al Waxman was the King of Kensington then Abe was the Squire of Somerled, though most of his neighbours are bowled over to find out how old he actually was. What is eighty-eight supposed to look like?
When the coroner calls she says icily, “I was shocked by the amount of drugs I found when I performed the autopsy on your father.” Already I’m Nurse Necrophilia. Already I’m at the trial. Crankstone has never been more animated, gushes with embellishments as he testifies about how I “begged” him to kill Abe.
My heart’s pounding so loudly I can barely hear the coroner as she continues. “Your father was elderly and quite ill, dying soon probably. I’ll report ‘natural causes.’” I begin to breathe again.
We want to bury Abe in his latest good suit, the one he’d worn to the last ten years worth of weddings and bar mitzvahs. But according to Jewish ritual every man has to be wrapped in a tallis, a white ceremonial shawl, a woman in a shroud, to signify that if not in life, at least in death, everyone is equal.
Sandy, the kids and I are in a tizzy about what to wear for the funeral, all of us ending up in our best blacks, not knowing that Jewish people don’t wear black for mourning. It’s the first time my sister and I are the oldest, the “adults,” in the front line of this duty. Daniel cancels the limousine service. Instead he’ll drive us, “So Zayda’s car can come to the funeral too.” Into the trunk we pack four huge cardboard boxes.
The dead must never be left unattended, and a bleary-eyed elderly holy man sits beside the coffin in the anteroom of the chapel. As he gets up to leave he glares at us. Because we’re wearing black? Or maybe it’s the boxes we’re lugging in, found behind a daycare centre near where Abe lived, all boldly marked in day-glo colours, “Toys.”
Mr. Paperman arrives a moment later to open the coffin, for the immediate family to see Abe in privacy, with intimacy. Granted he had been through a lot, including an autopsy. But still he just doesn’t look like himself, he’s too small, too tanned, too unrecognizable. “This isn’t our father. You’ve put the wrong body in here,” I inform the funeral director and flap a recent photo of Abe in his face.
He agrees to check and comes back a few minutes later to assure us, it is indeed Abe. How many times does Mr. Paperman have to humour his customers in this way and what does he do when he’s out “checking”? Call his wife, have a nosh or a pee?
Once Abe’s identity is confirmed, we dip into our pockets to give him change for his journey. It’s Tuesday, a good day to travel. Sandy gives him an egg, one of his favourite foods, I the flashlight he used for his light shows. Daniel slips him a bottle of Bailey’s, Abe enjoyed a bit of its sweetness every evening before he went to sleep. The framed photograph Noah wants to include slipped out of his hands and though we tell him it’s good luck to break glass, he’s upset, “Zayda might be cut.” Joey puts in his portable radio and then worries, “I left it on, the battery will run down.” We are all in denial—denial is our friend.
It doesn’t take a hawk-eye to spot the boxes we’d smuggled in towering conspicuously in a corner of the small room. Three times Paperman asks about them, each time his voice a little higher. Until now he’s been so smooth, that’s his job, to keep it together while all around him are losing it. Now his feathers are ruffled too. Noah tells him. Paperman says, “This has never happened here before, but why not?”
After the coffin is sealed, we set up a bar and as others file into the room, hand everyone their choice of liquor. Then stand in a circle, to raise our glasses, to make a toast: “To Abe” and “l’Chaim.” To life.
The lapse in protocol, that we’ve personalized the event, is as fortifying as the good stiff drink even if it is early afternoon. The funeral consists only of a cantor singing Hebrew psalms in a full baritone voice, a few of us telling stories about Abe that make the rest of us laugh and cry. No one to officiate, no “boss.” As Abe wanted it.
Dahlia, his last great love, is absent on her doctor’s advice: “Soon, his memory will fade from her mind, so she should be spared the news of his death.” And her daughter won’t budge. It makes me wonder if people with Alzheimer’s, and other conditions where they lose their memory, eventually forget about death. What it would be like to live without the concept of dying? Would it take the edge off living?
The six pallbearers we’ve chosen represent various parts of Abe’s life, relatives from his family and our mother’s side, Dahlia’s daughter and his friend, Mort. All the women flock to one side, the men to the other. When it’s time to lift the coffin, though the women struggle valiantly to keep their side from sinking to the floor, it’s considerably lower than the men’s. Watching the totally lopsided coffin being slowly carried out of the chapel, I clap my hand over my mouth to stifle my giggles.
The next instant we’re at the gravesite, beside Florence, our mother, whose presence for once doesn’t overshadow Abe. Détente at last. Their war is finally over. Or maybe about to start all over again.
Sandy and I recite Kaddish, throw long-stemmed red roses on Abe’s coffin. Each of us takes a turn to shovel some earth into his grave, because everyone should have enough people in their lives to do this, no one should have to be buried by strangers.
At the sight of others shovelling I start to sob. There’s not a breeze, not a cloud, just an impossibly perfect fall day. We’re a huddle of mourners, with no shelter from either the bright sunlight or one another. I cover my face. Until Joey reassures me, “You’re allowed to cry, this is your father’s funeral.”
There is still more water. When we return home, we wash our hands in the bowl of water we had left outside our door, so as to not bring death into the place where we live.
Soon family and friends will be arriving to spend the afternoon with us. Company is coming. We have to start the coffee, cut up the tomatoes and the onions. Are there enough bagels? What plate to put the lox on?