Eli and I are loading the groceries into the trunk. “Is Leon OK?” he asks me. I remember when my mother died and the child psychologist had stressed the need to focus on the presence of the other living grandparent. I assure him that Leon is fine, and that he’s taking care of Gloria. “Soon I won’t have anymore grandmothers,” Eli says. “It will be like with Papa Joel. I’ll only have grandfathers.” He asks me whether I think Gloria will definitely die from the cancer. I tell him, “Yes, because it’s a cancer that has already spread through her body, and her body is old so it can’t fight the cancer.
“Do you think she’ll live for a year?” Eli wants to know.
“I don’t think so.”
“How long?” He’s focused now.
“I don’t know. Maybe a month.”
“Maybe more?” he bargains.
“Maybe,” I say. “But not much more. Her body is very weak. Maybe less.”
Gloria has been taken to the hospice, her wish to die at home overridden by Leon’s anxiety about being her physical and emotional caregiver. He tried the around-the-clock nurse, but it hadn’t worked out. Leon was just too overwhelmed by Gloria’s descent. She has completely stopped speaking. We think it’s because she’s furious about being moved out of her home, or maybe she’s just plain angry that her body will no longer allow her to communicate. She keeps her lips tightly closed. Her stiff body expresses her overt opposition.
Roy thinks that the move to the hospice will make Gloria shut down more quickly. Based on our uninformed calculations, we’d been predicting that Gloria had two or three more weeks of life. But now, Roy says he thinks it’s down to one week.
“Gloria will die soon,” I tell the kids again at dinner.
“In a month?” Eli asks again.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe less.”
“Maybe a couple of weeks,” Roy says.
“Death is part of life,” Eli states too wisely for a seven-year-old. “It’s OK because death is part of life.” I’ve noticed that this is becoming Eli’s new mantra.
“It is,” I agree. “It’s a sad part of life. It’s especially sad for the people who lose the person who’s dying.”
“But it’s part of life,” Eli repeats again. “I know how you feel, Dad,” he says to Roy. “You having your mother die is like it would be for me if you died. Only it would be worse for me because you can take care of yourself and I can’t.” His speech seems almost canned. “My friend James is very scared of dying,” he continues. “But I tell him not to be afraid. He won’t die until he’s very old. Not for a very long time.” Roy and I nod at Eli, some kind of miniature soothsayer.
Roy’s been visiting Gloria at the hospice every day since she arrived there three days ago. I haven’t seen her for almost two weeks, but when we visit her today she doesn’t look that different than when I last saw her at the house. She’s just thinner. The worst part is that she’s entirely unable to express herself with words. She sleeps most of the time except when you hold her hand and talk to her. Then she opens her eyes and moves her head and mouth as though trying to respond, but she can’t make her body cooperate. When she rests, breathing through her wide-opened mouth, she looks beautiful, her skin translucent, her body purely existing. If this is truly one step away from death, it’s remarkable how close it is to life.
The hospice is an enlightened place, not at all what I imagined for a home for people in the last days of their lives. I’ve never seen anyone just as they’re about to die until now. With my brother, I only saw his body after he died. When my aunt Cecile died of cancer over the course of a few months, I’d never managed to get myself to the hospital to see her during the final weeks of her life. I must have been too afraid to watch. In the case of my mother, the physical reality of her death remains completely in my imagination. But the hospice isn’t frightening at all. It’s a calm shelter where the hospice workers shepherd people to another world, and they do it knowingly and kindly.
The next day, when Roy calls me from work to tell me that Gloria has just died, for some reason I’m completely surprised.
In the evening, Roy goes down to the Jersey shore to be with his father and his brothers, and I take the kids out to dinner. I let them have anything they want—soda with their meal and dessert afterwards. We talk about going to the cemetery the day after tomorrow. There’s just going to be a simple burial, nothing ceremonial.
“Will they take Gloria’s brain out?” asks Eli.
It takes me a minute to realize he’s talking about Egyptian funeral rites. “No,” I assure him. “Definitely not. They only did that a very long time ago in Egypt.”
Eva asks, “Will we make Gloria’s body into art?” For a few moments, I’m puzzled by her question, too. But then she asks me again. “Will we be able to put art on Gloria’s body?” she wants to know. And I get that she’s still talking about the Egyptians.
“They did that with mummies a long time ago, but not anymore.” I try to explain without smiling too much. I know that Eva could really get involved in what Gloria wears when she’s buried. I’m sure she’d suggest exotic jewels and other artistic touches. I don’t know if she’d approve of Leon’s choice to dress Gloria in the denim skirt and jacket that was her favorite.
I sort through my emails, trying to create order before our trip to Jersey for Gloria’s funeral the next day. At about 12:30 p.m., I pick up the ringing phone, and hear Eli’s little voice at the other end. The school allows the kids to call home from time to time, usually to report on some small ache or pain that the nurse has already deemed unimportant. On the occasions when Eli calls, I can never quite believe it. The image of him picking up the phone and taking charge of his own life always makes me laugh a little. But today his voice is very solemn, and I know it’s something serious.
“It’s Eli. I don’t feel well,” he says. “My stomach hurts, Mom. And I have a headache. I can’t concentrate.”
“Try to stay at school a little longer,” I say, “and see how you feel.” I hang up, and start to clean off my desk so I can go to the school to pick him up. In a few minutes, he calls again.
“OK. I’ll take a cab right over,” I promise.
By the time I get to the school, Eli is already on his way out the front door with a teacher, who’s taking him to get ice cream. “You take me, Mom,” he greets me in a sad voice. The teacher explains that she’s been suggesting that Eli think of happy times he’s had with his grandmother, but he says he doesn’t want to. He says it makes him too sad. I take his hand and we go together in search of the ice cream. As we turn onto First Avenue, Eli explains to me it’s a flying saucer ice cream that he’s looking for. And I can’t help it, I start crying, too. We’re never going to find the flying saucer just walking around on First Avenue, so I suggest that we go back to the school to get some better directions. But Eli doesn’t want to go back. “What’s wrong?” I ask. “What’s wrong with going back into the school? We need to pick up your things, anyway.”
“I’m too sad,” he tells me. “If someone asks me why I’m sad, I don’t want to lie. I tell them that my grandmother died. But I don’t want to cry about it. And I don’t want to lie when people ask me.” I feel helpless, just watching as my child grapples so seriously with himself and his seven-year-old world. He keeps on reciting his line, “dying is part of life,” but it’s no longer working.
Eli tells Roy he doesn’t want to go to the cemetery tomorrow. He’s afraid, he says. Afraid of being too sad.
“Everyone will be sad,” I tell him. “Many people will cry.”
“I don’t want to go,” he says. “I’m afraid of being more sad than I am already. I don’t want that.” We decide that he and Eva can stay back at Leon and Gloria’s house with the caterers. They can watch TV like they usually do when we go to visit. This makes them both happy.
Eli’s right about being too sad. Burials are brutal, and so is death. It’s been a full three years since my mother has died and it hasn’t made the reality of death less hard. I see why my mother tried not to look. And what about Gloria’s dying of cancer? I think it’s the death I fear the most. The stories that Cecile told me about changing her mother’s oozing bandages will never go away. When Cecile was dying of cancer, when Eva was only a newborn, I hardly dared to look. Even though I treasured my friendship with Cecile, our many years of monthly dinners together, at the end I never visited her in the hospital when I imagined the devastation must have been the worst. Maybe it’s better to die suddenly—to drown in a beautiful place like my mother did, and not have to think about it. I try to stop thinking. It’s beginning to seem like the childhood question of whether it’s better to be run over by a car or a truck. As if there’s a choice to be made.
Danny must have thought a lot about death before he died, about death and about his body. He tested it by cutting his finger first. And before that when he slashed up his T-shirt in front of my mother. And there had been the jacket that Danny had slashed up, too. It was the brown corduroy one that he’d worn in to perfection. Carefully he’d cut out the entire back, and replaced it with patches that he’d sewn together, mostly from scraps of fabric he must have found in my mother’s sewing bag. One patch was a piece of once-crisp white cotton with bright blue and turquoise circles, from the curtains in the bedroom Teddy and I once shared in Marblehead. There was a piece of red printed corduroy with gray emblems that my mother had used for the matching bathrobes she’d made for Teddy and Danny. And there was a square of white and blue checked linen left over from the pleated skirt I had made in home economics class. That skirt had been my greatest sewing accomplishment. I’d even sewn white plastic buckles onto it to make it look like a real kilt. There was a piece of Danny’s wool suit. And part of an old tie that had belonged to my father. These were the bits and pieces that held our family together, Danny’s final gift to us. His friends told Ted and me that Danny had worn the jacket for at least a month before cutting it into to shreds at the end.
Just before he died, Danny left each of us a personal message, something inscrutable until the meaning became clear later. For me, there had been the phone call about the used clothing store. It was three weeks before he died, the time he came to New York for the Grateful Dead concert and never showed up at my apartment. He called me at work that afternoon, asking for the name of a good used clothing store. “Unique,” I’d told him and gave him the address, knowing it was the perfect suggestion. After he died, that phone call about the used clothes replayed in my mind, never to be forgotten. The last time Danny and I really had fun together had been right before Ted’s best friend Peter’s wedding in Vermont that last Memorial Day weekend before Danny died. We’d all known Peter since childhood and the whole family had been invited. While everyone else was resting or getting ready for the ceremony, Danny and I spent the afternoon trying on old things in a vintage clothing shop in Woodstock. I modeled a pale pink wedding dress that the shop owner told me was once worn on Valentine’s Day, as I vaguely imagined what my future might be.
After Danny died, Ted and I searched for explanations. We examined his room in Providence. That’s where we found the remains of his destroyed jacket. We sorted through the numerous spiral notebooks teeming with meticulous details about his interpretation of life. Even though we knew they were maniacal, we also thought they were brilliant. Maybe we’d try to get them published, we said. We pored over his calendar, checking to see which appointments he’d made before his death, and whether he’d written down plans for any dates following. Our thirst for information was unquenchable, even though we knew that nothing we could possibly find could help us. We braved ourselves, and went into the restaurant where he’d worked and killed himself. The boss wasn’t there, but we sat down at one of the carved wooden tables, just waiting for a while, absorbing the air of the place. We got an appointment with Danny’s psychiatrist, who allotted Ted and me a fifty minute time slot. At least he was smart enough not to ask us to pay for it. In the last months of Danny’s life, I’d pleaded with him to at least see a therapist. And now I could see that when he’d consented to give it a try, Danny had only found someone else to fool. When Ted and I met the psychiatrist, he didn’t say much at all. We managed to pull out of him that he hadn’t even known that Danny had a brother or sister. “What did you and Danny talk about?” I asked, my tone I’m sure accusatory, already certain there would be no answers here. He showed no emotion at all, sitting stiffly in his chair across the room from us. Mostly they’d discussed Danny’s plans for the future, he told us. We closed his door behind us, more unfulfilled than before.