Fear of Dying (16 page)

What I am I going to say? Keep my sick dog for free?

Of course, I take my credit card to the cashier. After they ring me up for thousands, I am invited to visit Belinda in the doggy ICU. She seems dead till she looks up at me with her big questioning eyes.

Then they take her away for more tests and I am invited to leave her overnight yet again.

We named her Belinda Barkawitz because she was a happy barker—a big black standard poodle who spun around in circles, making her joy audible. Everyone loved her—strangers on the street, dog people, cat people, people who loved no one.

Because dogs live only a short time, they represent passages in our lives. Belinda came to us when I was in my fifties and she saw me through many losses. She was smart and gentle, as loving as a rescued mutt and as joyous as a jumpy baby bichon. When I visited her in the ICU on subsequent days, she always perked up at the sound of my voice.

I had always admired standard poodles but I'd never had one as my companion. Belinda was my first. When I met her, I kept asking her, “Are you my dog?” And she kept barking happily—which I took as a yes.

She had a routine at night. She fell asleep in my office, then made her way onto our bed at three in the morning. We woke up with her furry sighing at our feet. She was a daily lesson in living one day at a time. Anticipation and regret were not in her lexicon. We wanted nothing more than to be like her. Live in the moment, we tell ourselves. But only our dogs fully practice that. They are our Zen masters. We want to emulate them but rarely achieve it fully.

I made the mistake of allowing the vets to remove a tumor from Belinda's flank. The tumor was benign but the operation was the beginning of the end. In trying to save my beautiful Belinda, I may have hastened her demise. I may never forgive myself, but I know she forgives me.

She was the most extraordinary bitch. Hair black as the moonless night sky, eyes brown as milkless chocolate—or indeed “olives of endless age,” and little hairy feet with ebony nails that clicked when she pranced on poodle paws. Belinda Barkawitz was joyous and free.

The breeder had called her Bella, but we preferred Belinda—an eighteenth-century name from “The Rape of the Lock” by Alexander Pope.

Now lap-dogs give themselves the rousing shake,

And sleepless lovers, just at twelve, awake:

Thrice rung the bell, the slipper knock'd the ground,

And the press'd watch return'd a silver sound.

Belinda still her downy pillow press'd,

Her guardian sylph prolong'd the balmy rest:

'Twas he had summon'd to her silent bed

The morning dream that hover'd o'er her head

On the bone-shaped silver tag we purchased for her collar we inscribed: “I take care of Vanessa and Asher. ‘Pray tell me sir, whose dog are you?'” So we knew she was a witty bitch, well versed in English literature. Like me, she was without a BA or an AB but no less clever for all that. Like my Russian grandfather, she was an autodidact.

I knew I was in love because the first time she barfed on me in the car, I was as entirely unbothered as if I'd given birth to her. Vomit is vomit but a beloved child's vomit might as well be your own.

She was of noble poodle pedigree, but like many aristocrats, she was inbred and suffered a genetic flaw. Had she been a rescued mutt, she would have been hardier. Instead, like JFK, she suffered from Addison's disease. It meant that her adrenal glands ceased to function when she was only five. Or was it six? We loved her the more for that because she required more care. Oh, we knew we were besotted, but we were not ashamed. We were in love. Love knows no shame. Does it really mean never having to say you're sorry?

She was dearly predictable—her bed, the floor, our bed at three
A.M.
I often awoke at seven to her philosophical doggy sighs. She rarely farted. But her sighs were profound.

And if she farted, we found the complexity of the scent another sign of her humanity. She loved not only biscuits but bagels, smoked salmon, and chopped liver. Yiddishkeit was her middle name. She was a Jewish poodle, a
Jewdle
, you might say. But not shrewish, totally sweet and kind. She loved even yappy small dogs. And kids.

We didn't love her because of the admiring glances she evoked on the streets of New York. No. We loved her for her intuition and her conversational skills. She knew us. Deeply. And believed we knew her.

Virginia Woolf claims in
Orlando
that dogs have no conversation. I dispute this. Belinda's conversations were infinitely wittier than most of the mots you hear at charitable benefits—those unique forms of torture New York City society so favors.

Why must we parade our charity in public when true charity is anonymous? The people who give and give yet refuse to put their names on buildings are my heroes.

As for the conversations to be had among self-celebrating philanthropists—inaudible mostly. No one can hear a word over the false compliments and the clinking of glasses. And if one could, their platitudes would stimulate little thought—unlike Belinda's sighs.

Her sighs plumbed depths we could not measure. Her sighs were conversation of the truest sort, for they told of smells and tastes and gopher holes and deer. And what can be better conversation than that?

Nature is the best conversationalist of all.

Unlike male dogs we'd had, she didn't stray. She knew enough to stay where she was safe. And yet what is safety among mortal creatures? Does it even exist?

*   *   *

I leave you to ponder this. We pass this way swiftly and but once—or twice. Who knows? Perhaps the Hindus are right and we are born again and again in different forms. I am sure that I was once a dog—which is why I have such an excellent sense of smell and such empathy for canines. I can tell immediately whether a perfume is based in roses or jasmine and a moldy closet offends my nose worse than a sewer.

In New York City we have many aged ladies who fill the elevator with pungent camphor smells when they exhume their ancient fur coats. Truly, I hate that smell.

Why camphor offends my nose I do not know—unless I was once a moth or even a butterfly. But I digress, and actors are not supposed to digress. We must stick to our lines. We are not writers.

*   *   *

When Belinda came home from the hospital we entered an impossible routine. She would lie in her bed seemingly lifeless for hours. We would make the decision to let her go and then she would perk up and drink water, eat a bite of food, and then lie lifeless again.

I would summon the vet to perform euthanasia. Then I would cancel the appointment. The decision was mine but I could not make it. Every time she got better, I would decide she was cured.

But Belinda had Addison's disease, so healing was a problem for her. The vets excised the lipoma on her hip, but the wound refused to heal. We tried everything from vacuum bandages to rare antibiotics that cost twenty dollars a capsule. We tried keeping her in a sterile chamber to isolate ourselves from the MRSA and E. coli she invariably developed. We spent a fortune on vets and veterinary hospitals.

“What shall we do, Belinda? Give me a sign, a bark, a bite, a lick. Talk to me.”

I really felt she could talk but couldn't yet make up her own mind. I seemed to have endless conversations with her in which we weighed the choices together, considered transmigration of souls, her last life, her next life, and mine. When would we ever meet again? On this planet or another? We were fated to be partners, that much I knew.

But her right hip had turned into a bloody cave with pus-covered muscles peeking through. What if I caught the MRSA or E. coli? What if my husband caught it? Or my pregnant daughter? I asked Belinda if she was ready to depart. She told me I had to make the decision—which was worse somehow than living in this limbo.

So I summoned the vet for the last time. I held Belinda's good paw while my vet injected her with forgetfulness. Her long pink tongue lolled out of her black lips. We closed her big brown eyes. And she was gone.

For months afterward I heard her skittering around the apartment. Sometimes a door would open and I'd be sure it was Belinda. Sometimes a gust of wind, a sigh, a soft, almost inaudible bark. I saw her on the floor at the foot of our bed. I saw her in the bathtub, where she preferred to sleep on hot summer nights. I saw her on the street being walked. I ached for her. But she was dead, and my mother, at almost a hundred, was still alive.

My near-centenarian progenitor had long since stopped being the fierce mother I had sharpened my teeth against. She now meandered between sleep and sentimentality. Speech eluded her—she who had once been so articulate.

Death can be—dare we say it?—a blessing. The Greeks—who knew everything—knew that immortality without youth was to be feared rather than desired. But who listens to the ancient Greeks? No one. Not even modern Greeks.

Watching my mother smiling in lipstick and pearls, I wondered about her insane tenacity and her low blood pressure.

*   *   *

“What if she outlives all of us?” I asked Isadora on the phone.

“She might,” Isadora says. “But at least it won't be your problem.”

I used to adore my mother. Then I used to despise her. I had spent my life bouncing between these poles like a demented magnet. I had imitated her, parodied her, pandered to her. I knew her death would not be an easy one for any of us. After all, I had spent many hours mourning my father—and what's a father compared to a mother? Not even a blood relative—as they say of husbands. Or, as Margaret Mead said: “A mother is a biological necessity, a father a social invention.” Yet a father of daughters is a man who's been tested. And usually found wanting.

I can't write any of this. It's too damned mean. I used to have no problem being mean. But as I age, I censor myself. You can't be honest if you censor yourself. Mean is part of life and part of me. I have to let it rip. That's my job. Censorship is not my business.

It may be that we atheists are entirely wrong about heaven and hell. Suppose we die and discover that Dante was right in his description of the tortures of the damned? What will Chris Hitchens do then?

So, this is a story about heaven and hell. Just so you know. The hell of writing is self-censorship. The heaven is the freedom of speaking the truth. Women have a particular problem with this.

Not long ago, I reread Marguerite Yourcenar's
Memoirs of Hadrian
. I was amazed to discover what she had written in her note about the difficult composition of the book—which had taken her many decades:

Another thing virtually impossible, to take a feminine character as a central figure … Women's lives are much too limited or else too secret. If a woman does recount her own life she is promptly reproached for no longer being truly feminine.

We all struggle with this—still. The woman who chooses to write disguised as a male character is hoping to avoid the problem. But you cannot avoid the problem of being a woman.

*   *   *

A week after her birthday, I went to see my mother again. She was lying in bed not waking and not sleeping. Her skin looked much smoother. It was as if the wrinkles on her old face were disappearing, as if she were going back to being a baby. This frightened me. I saw it as a harbinger of her end and I panicked. I did not want to lose her.

I sat with her for an hour at least, trying to evoke some response from her. I rubbed her back, smoothed her hair, blathered about my day without any response.

“I love you so much,” I said. “You were a great mother. I thank you for the acting, the rare books, the paintings, all the love you gave us. You were a wonderful mother and I love you.”

No response. So I began again. “I love you so much and I thank you for everything. You were a great mother.”

Again, no answer. Impossible to tell whether she heard me or not. But my mother was sharp. I never could fool her. She knew when I was lying. She was my toughest critic. How could I judge what she knew or did not know? How could I judge her quality of life? Impossible. I thought death would release her, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe my valedictory tone upset her. Maybe she resented the past tense. Maybe I should speak in the present tense.

“I love you with all my heart,” I said. “You are a wonderful mother.”

“I love you more!” she exploded.

And that's my mother—fiercely competitive to the end, overwhelming us all with her longevity, refusing to die. She may have told the story of the baby eaglets and implied she was ready to be left in the nest alone—but it was not true at all. She wanted to hold us all captive. She would never let us go.

When we're born, we can't know if it will be into a nest of vipers or of sweet singing birds. And even the singing birds compete for worms flown in from mama bird, who is capricious with her worms and love. You think the love is equal until you are four or so and then another chick arrives and you are as awful to her as the older chick was to you, trying to peck out her eyes, sweetly singing all the time.

But we had to leave the nest and move on. The fact that my father died, that my mother sits atop her century like a black widow, holding us all eviscerated in her web, that my husband nearly died, does not give me a special dispensation nor excuse me from death. The fate of all humans is my fate. I am entitled to seize what's left of my life with joy.

 

 

 

Can you be joyful with a dead dog and a lingering centenarian mother? There's the rub. If only euthanasia were possible with mothers!