2
In seven phone calls, and a prayer to Angela, who had been dead for forty-two years, Mother said something different to each of us. “I think you should be here,” she told me—I was languishing in Polynesia. To Fred: “As the eldest, it’s up to you to take charge.” To Floyd: “Dad’s ill. I think he’d like you to be there.” To Franny, “I don’t think I can manage without you.” To Rose: “Franny will need your help.” To Hubby: “We’ll need you to do the driving.” To Gilbert: “Your father’s been so difficult lately. I’ve honestly felt like hitting him.”
The sterility of the hospital was like a preparation for his going—the cold place seemed like an antechamber to a tomb, his room as bleak as a sarcophagus. There was nothing in this unornamented place that I could associate with Dad, who was untidy, and like many frugal people not a minimalist but a pack rat. Dad was a hoarder and piler of junk, a collector of oddments, a rifler of dumpsters. His garage had the stacked shelves you see in a Chinese shop, and the same dense, toppling asymmetry. How happy he was to live near the sea, for he was also a beachcomber. “That’ll come in handy someday.”
He lay like wreckage under the complex apparatus monitoring his heart and lungs. Mother had remained in the corridor, signaling for each of us to slip in and greet Father. We had not been together this way for years, and toward evening we grouped around his bed to pray for him, looking like superstitious jungle dwellers muttering to the gods, the first intimation I had in many years that Floyd was right: we were at heart nothing but savages.
Father struggled to speak, then gasped on his ventilator, “What a lovely reunion.”
We had barely recovered from the shock of seeing him so physically reduced when Mother ordered us all into the hospital corridor. Standing there, swelling with authority, she took charge and said, “We think it’s best to take him off his ventilator. He’s so uncomfortable.”
Taking him off the ventilator meant: let him die. I started to object, but she interrupted.
“The doctor says he doesn’t have long. I think it’s best.”
I said, “But he’ll die without it!”
“We should respect her wishes,” someone said, so softly I could not tell who it was.
Mother was glassy-eyed and seemed determined, not herself but a cast-iron version, so nerved for the occasion and standing so straight she seemed energized, even a bit crazed, as though defying any of us to oppose her. She was eighty-three years old, though she was so strong, so sure of herself, you would have taken her for a lot younger. I did not know her. She was a stranger, a substitute—fierce, deaf to advice. She was not the tremulous old woman who had suffered through Father’s illness; she was someone else entirely, a woman I scarcely recognized.
My throat narrowed in fear. “Where there’s life there’s hope,” I said lamely, and thought, “Uncomfortable” is better than dead.
“Don’t you see this is for the best?” she said, in a peevish tone that implied I was being unreasonable. It was the tone she used when she said, “The TV is on the fritz again. Junk it.”
Her implication was that I was being weak and obstructive. He ought to be allowed to die, she was saying, in a merciful way; while I was urging her to let him live, something she regarded as cruel and insensitive. And I was misinformed.
“What’s the point of letting him suffer?”
She meant that by suggesting ways to let him live, I was inflicting suffering on him.
“Why don’t we all go out for a meal?” Gilbert said in an easy, peacemaking voice. “Soft-shell crabs are in season.”
Franny and Rose stood on either side of Mother, less like daughters than like ladies-in-waiting, seeming to prop her up. Yet they were bent over, grieving in rumpled sweat-stained clothes.
“I think I’ll stay with Dad,” I said.
“We should keep together,” Mother said.
“We could all stay with Dad.”
She said, “Let’s just leave him in peace,” again in a tone that implied I was being uncooperative and cruel.
“Let’s do what Mumma says,” Franny said.
“It’s not asking too much,” Rose added.
Mother just smiled her challenging smile.
Fred said to Mother, “You should do what you think is right.”
Floyd said, “I don’t get this at all. This is like climbing Everest with Sherpas and traversing the edge of the crevasse, all roped together. Dad slips and he’s dangling on a rope way down there, and we don’t know whether to cut him loose or leave him or drag him down the mountain. And there’s a blizzard. And we can’t hear what he’s saying. And where is Sherpa Tenzing? I wonder if Hallmark makes a card for an occasion like this.”
Hubby said, “That’s it, make a big drama.”
“Oh, right, sorry, it’s not dramatic. It’s only Dad dying. I forgot, Hubby.”
“Asshole,” Hubby said.
“I’d like to kick you through that wall,” Floyd said.
Franny said, “Let’s not fight.”
“You’re all upsetting Mumma,” Rose said.
“God knows I do my best,” Mother said, not in her usual self-pitying singsong but defiantly.
We went to a nearby restaurant. Whipping off his glasses, Fred surveyed the menu and, as the eldest and bossiest of us, ordered the set meal for everyone. “Gilbert was right about the soft-shell crabs.” We sat like mourners, though Father was four blocks away, struggling to stay alive. I looked at the faces around the table, Mother at the head of it between Gilbert and Fred, Franny and Rose close by, all of them watching Mother with fixed smiles, loyal, submissive, and squinnying at the rest of us. Hubby and Floyd sat with their heads down, looking torn.
“It’s going to be all right,” Franny said.
“This is for the best,” Rose said.
I had heard such clichés my whole life, but I think it was there that I realized how clichés always revealed deep cynicism, rank ignorance, and a clumsy hostility.
Franny and Rose heaved themselves toward Mother and said, “Have some bread, Ma.”
“Dad would have wanted it this way,” Mother said. “All of us together.”
I quietly excused myself, an easy thing to do, everyone at the table assuming I was going to the men’s room. It was a trick I had used as a small boy in Sunday school, raising my hand. “Please, Father.” And the priest in the middle of a pep talk would wave me on my way, thinking I was going to the bathroom, and I would go home.
I went back to the hospital and found Dad alone. The nurse told me that he had been taken off his ventilator and in place of the saline IV was a morphine drip. The fearful look in his eyes appalled me. He was like a terrified captive being dragged away to an unknown place against his will, which was exactly what was happening. I held his hand; it had the heated softness of someone very ill. The morphine dulled the pain, but it also weakened him and loosened his grip on life. I could feel resignation in his slack fingers.
The gauges beside his bed showed his heart rate in a jumping light, the pattern on the screen like that of a depth sounder in a boat tracing the troughs in an irregular ocean floor. The lights and beeps, too, all seemed to me indications of his life, but also his diminishing strength.
And there was his breathing. What had begun as slow exhalation became laborious and harsh, as though he was not propped up (which he was) but flat on his back, with a demon kneeling on his chest. His breathing seemed to give him no air at all. He fought to inhale, but the air stayed in his mouth, did not fill his lungs, and so he went on gasping, without relief, his staring eyes filled with tears. He was wordless with suffocation and fear.
The nurse stepped in and leaned toward the monitors.
I said, “Is he feeling any pain?”
“I can increase the morphine,” she said, and I took this to mean yes, he was having a bad time.
“He seems to be struggling.”
“Agonic breathing.”
She said it casually, yet it seemed to me an awful phrase.
Father labored to stay alive, but I could see from the softening lines on one monitor that his strength was ebbing. Still, I held his hand. I had no sense of time passing, but at one point his breathing became shallow, and all the needles and indicators faltered and fell. Father’s jaw dropped, his mouth fell open. I clutched his hand and pressed it to my face. I kissed his stubbly cheek.
Take me with you, I thought.
The nurse returned soon after. She quickly summed up what had happened.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
I walked back to the restaurant and found that all of them had gone. Of course, four hours had passed. I called Mother.
She said, “Where have you been? You left the restaurant without telling anyone. You didn’t even touch your meal. Fred and the girls ate your crabs. Everyone’s here now. We’re talking about Dad, telling stories. So many wonderful memories. Gilbert was just about to call the hospital to see how things are going.”
“He’s gone,” I said.