Fear of Dying (11 page)

All my life there had been war. And what had it accomplished? Inflated the price of oil and Halliburton stock and killed the brown-skinned children. The younger the children, the more they died. And the women died. And the youngest men.

When I thought about the legless children, I couldn't sleep. How could anyone sleep?

Well, my father could. At least if he was sufficiently drugged. He had been an athlete once and now he was Mr. Bones. You could see his hips and pelvis through his coverlet. His legs were skeletal. He weighed less than one hundred pounds.

*   *   *

What can you wish for as you watch a beloved parent struggling against the end? Should you wish for death, or life? And how much do your wishes matter?

The lucky ones die in restaurants after a good dinner. Or die in their sleep in bed during an erotic dream about a lover long since passed to the other side. I hope to merit such a death.

The tall, skinny geriatrician from the palliative care team strides in.

“Mr. Wonderman,” he says to my father, “I'm your doctor. How are you feeling?”

My father pulls out his tube with great élan and croaks,
“Malpractice!”

“Dad, you really know how to get along with doctors!” I say.

“Let me out of here!” he mutters, trying to scream. He's undoing the tubes, detaching himself from the IVs and the peg and trying to stand up. He's very shaky but he almost manages. The male nurse arrives.

“If you put that tube back in, I'll kill you!” says my father.

Standing there, I am proud and terrified at the same time. I take the doctor aside.

“Leave the tube out. If he dies, he dies,” I whisper. “Don't torture him.”

“Okay,” the geriatrician agrees. But my father refuses to get back in bed. He doesn't want to be here. Who can blame him?

“If I promise not to put back the tube, will you settle down?” the doctor asks.

“I don't know,” my father croaks. But the nurse comforts him and somehow gets him back in bed without tubes and monitors.

“I want to go home! Home!”

So we start to make plans to bring him home.

*   *   *

It's not an easy proposition. We need to rent a hospital bed, hire a nurse, get morphine prescriptions filled. But, having gotten his way, my father seems to have made an astounding recovery. He is hoarsely yelling at everyone, ordering the palliative care team around, and they seem cowed.

“What is palliative care? It's how you turf the old out on the ice floe! You're the Angel of Death team, that's what you are.”

In my heart, I'm cheering him on.

“Take me back to Eleven West!” he shouts. That's the swanky-hotel floor of the hospital, where they overcharge you to death.

My sisters return and we accomplish the transfer out of the ICU and to the hotel floor. My father is triumphant. He's talking and breathing and screaming like a champ. His old strength seems to have returned. He is coasting on the propellant of anger.

“You know what Mark Twain said?”

“What?” I ask.

“‘Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated!'”

“You know what Art Buchwald said?” I ask.

“No,” mumbles Daddy.

“I don't either, but he
refused
to die.”

“Refused!” screams my father. “Refused!”

*   *   *

How this happened, I don't know, but even in his parlous condition, my father has made a special friend at the hospital. He's a geriatric psychiatrist named Dr. Cragswell, first name Fin for Finnegan. He has a long braid down his back and iron-rimmed spectacles like an anarchist from the early twentieth century, and he thoroughly disapproves of the ministrations of the palliative care team. He has taken me aside several times to tell me that he thinks my father has “an acute but not fatal illness.”

“He's playing to you, Ness,” my younger sister says. “He's a star-fucker.”

“He's crazy,” my hysterical older sister says. “We love crazies because we're so crazy ourselves.”

But he seems to be able to reach my father when no one else can. For this, I'm grateful.

“If you take your father home, I'll come see him,” Dr. Cragswell says.

“Thanks,” I say.

My sisters ignore him.

They think he's
playing
to me. They think being an actor protects you!

Hah. It
exposes
you rather than protects you. Everyone butts in. You spend your life surrounded by buttinskies. For three and a half decades I have been the actor the world hailed or hated. That certainly brings the kibitzers in. And the crazies.

The nurses tuck my father into bed and admonish him not to get up again. They dress the wound from where he pulled out the tubes, the peg. The nurses are all so gentle—especially the male nurses. They gentle my dad. He responds to their caresses.

The sun is going down and the sky has that neon blue color that tugs at the heart because it's so fleeting.
L'heure bleue.
I stay a little longer and then run to the other hospital to see my husband. I'm so exhausted that I fall into a deep sleep on the reclining chair in my husband's room.

*   *   *

Now it's midnight. The park has been snow-frosted all of January and February so there are icy patches on the walkways and a crust of frozen snow over the hills. The snow seems blue in places, black in places. A gibbous moon lights the treetops. The streetlights leave puddles of blue on the snow.

A procession of very old people in hospital gowns, some leaning on walkers, some on canes, some in wheelchairs rolling along by hand, appears. My father and the tall thin doctor with a long braid down his back lead them. My father has a staff he has made from a stout fallen branch. Dr. Cragswell has a scythe. The scene looks like an Ingmar Bergman movie filmed in New York.

My father is exhorting the old people to move along, not to give up, to disinherit their ungrateful children. His voice is scratchy and faint but I can almost hear him from where I watch.

At first, the procession consists of only a few people, but now my father has put down his staff and he's drumming on a snare drum he wears on a strap around his neck.
Mamapapamamapapa
it goes—as he used to say when he tried to teach me to play the drums. (My high school dates always loved coming to my house because of the full set of timpani.)

And with his drumming, the procession gets longer and longer. He seems jubilant. He has triumphed. All the ancient people are following him over the snowy hills of the park. As they follow him, they get younger and younger. The bent straighten up and throw away their walkers. The wheelchair rollers sprint out of their wheelchairs. My father has become the Pied Piper of the Park.

“I never realized how much the old resent the young,” I tell my father in the dream.

“Of course we do!” he shouts. “If we could be young again, we'd know what to do! What did you
think
?”

“I thought you loved us!”

“That's secondary!” he shouts. “We got here before you!” I try to shout at him, shout my shock and disappointment, but I wake myself up.

*   *   *

“You certainly are a noisy sleeper,” Asher says.

“I have a great deal to be noisy about. That was a crazy dream.”

“Tell me.”

“You know dreams—fascinating to the dreamer, boring to everybody else. I don't want to bore you.”

“What do you remember?”

“My father in the park, leading a procession of dying ancient people over the snow.”

But even as I describe the images from the dream, they waft away like smoke in the wind.

“We have no rituals for death,” I say. “That's why it's so hard. We're supposed to disappear when we're no longer young. Our parents make us uncomfortable because they remind us of our fate. And we make them uncomfortable because we remind them of what they've lost. We need new rituals, new philosophies. If only we
believed
.”

“In what?”

“That's the problem. How can you believe in God after the Holocaust, the Vietnam war, Iraq, Afghanistan?”

The question lingers in the air like the smoke of my dream. My husband invites me into his hospital bed. He hugs me. Weakly.

“But why can't you enjoy what we have now and forget about the future? The future doesn't really exist. All we have is this moment.”

“I know.”

“If I die, I don't want you to wear mourning for the rest of your life like Queen Victoria. I want you to live. I want to
liberate
you to live. You liberated me.”

“I know.”

“For most of my life, I had no idea how to live. Now I do. Because of you. I want to give back what you gave me.”

“I know,” I say. Asher has a vulnerable side he reveals to me that nobody else ever sees.

“You know but you don't know at all.”

“I know.”

He hugs me very tight.

*   *   *

I try to go back to sleep and reenter the dream. I want to hold on to the vision of my father stomping through the snow. But it is gone.

My husband is getting better as my father is getting worse. Asher is still in the hospital, but he is talking to his pals on the phone. He has shortened his aortic aneurysm to “a heart attack” for their sake. No point in going into long discussions of open heart surgery and grafts. His buddies are shaken up enough by his absence. They depend on him. And he depends on them. Talking to them on the phone makes him feel useful again.

I want to feel useful too. I start taking notes on what is going on. I don't want to write a memoir, but I am sucked into the immediate life-and-death crisis. Isadora had suggested this as catharsis. I am willing to try.

Now I am keeping notes on my father and my husband. I realize how alike they both are and how much I have depended on men to complete my life. Once, I'd had an idea for a movie in which a woman revisits all the old lovers in her life and they all turn out to be the same man. Is that my story? Is that every woman's story?

*   *   *

In my notebook I try to imagine climbing the mountains inside my husband's head. If love is empathy—I want to be him, become him.

Asher never remembers his dreams—nor will he this one, in which he glides down over the Green Mountains, slightly bumping the anvil-shaped thunderclouds, climbing again as if on a giant eye. Is this heaven? It might as well be—a green strip between two mountains with biplanes, triplanes, monoplanes, and slivery gliders studding the verdancy of a lush Vermont summer. But heaven is not ready for him yet because the next thing that happens is a gust of wind that lifts the wings of his Cessna 210—his very first plane when he was in his twenties—and whirls him up into a thermal over the mountains. His flaps will not deploy, so he knows he cannot land. He keeps whirling like a leaf in a storm. He is trying to undo his seat belt, but it is stuck. His headset is issuing only deafening static.

I know what to do, he thinks. I'll wake up rather than crash.

He wakes to find himself intubated with lines leading away from his penis. He can't remember how he got here or why.

A hospital, he thinks. An aortic aneurysm. What are the stats? One in ten survives? The stats must be better now, mustn't they? Maybe this is heaven? Or hell? I'll know when I meet my father and mother. If I see them, I'll know it's one of the two. But it must be hell because I can't speak. Or maybe heaven because of the clouds. Then sleep overtakes me again. My mother and father are reduced to the size of Ken and Barbie dolls I can hold in my hand. They are dressed as if for a Palm Beach function. My father in a Turnbull & Asser tux with a scarlet bow tie and cummerbund, my mother in Angel Sanchez midnight blue chiffon and all her emeralds and diamonds. They are carrying party hats and tooters as if it's New Year's Eve at the country club. But what year? Am I eighteen or thirty-six or sixty? I must be dead because I know Palm Beach is hell.

Or are we in the Hamptons at some ridiculous screening or benefit? The carefully fixed and lacquered Sally Smerdykaf drifts into view holding a clipboard full of boldface names. I'd rather be dead than in a place where you have to dress up at the beach. My idea of heaven is Vermont—with its country inns, its horse farms, its grassy landing strips, its old hippies making pottery and growing pot. Hippies who march down Main Street on the Fourth of July wearing battered tricorns over their long gray hair and down-at-the-heel Birkies on their gnarled old feet. The scent of cannabis drifts down—though we no longer partake.

We got married there. I remember saying:
Harei! At mekudeshet li, b'tabaat zu k'dat Moshe v'Yisroael.
Behold! You are married to me with this ring according to the laws of Moses and Israel.

A justice of the peace did the legal stuff. Our friends and family were there by the pond. Both sets of parents alive and looking relieved that we'd finally found each other—as if it always was
bashert
and they knew it but wouldn't tell.

You couldn't tell the bride's family from the groom's. They were all one breed. And cousin Ira taking bets on how long it would last. We were such bad marriage risks. Both of us bouncing off walls through our twenties, thirties, and most of our forties—our similarities sealed the deal. Plighted our troth. Sex inevitable, not easy at first because of fear of having everything and losing everything. And then—giggling in bed, multiple orgasms—and omelets, old jokes, and Yiddishkeit. What bonds two people? What makes two one? Pheromones? Brains? Genes? Nerves? You gotta have nerve, moxie, and chutzpah, and nothing is ever guaranteed. All your nerves know before your brain and your nose. How else do you know? And you keep knowing.

She would say—Do that one more time and I'm leaving. And he would say: Where would you go? And she would laugh. No place to go when you've bonded like that. Every year you get more bonded. Crazy Glue.