Fear of Dying (22 page)

“Put the blanket over her head,” Em says. “It's a sign of respect.”

“They told me not to touch her,” Ariella says. I later see she's pulled up the blanket to disguise the dead face.

I go into her room, remove the blanket, take the oxygen line out of her nose, strip the tape that holds it there, and say, “I love you, Mother.” She looks like herself but very still and not yet cold. Her expression is her own.

“Don't want to go in there,” Em says.

“She's still herself,” I say. “She's still warm. Her face is her own. We have to say good-bye.” And I take each of them by a hand and return to her bedroom. We hold hands and stare at the ancient, maternal head I've uncovered in the crypt of time.

I make myself look closely at her features—the long, aquiline nose her Japanese fans loved. The high cheekbones. The domed eyes closed. The powerful voice silenced.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” my sister says.

“God gave you a good passage, thank you, God,” says Ariella.

“We all love you so much,” I say. “Thank you for the books, the plays, the music, the poetry, the movies. Thank you for Gershwin and Mozart and Cole Porter and Beethoven. Thank you for Duke Ellington, Gilbert and Sullivan, Mitropoulos, and Bernstein. Thank you for Yeats and Dickinson and Millay. Thank you for Leonardo and Michelangelo and Hogarth and Vigée Le Brun. Thank you for stuffing our heads full of your amazing knowledge of everything.” And I kiss the air as I have kissed her before.

And we all stand stupefied by the power of death.

The hospice nurse is called but does not answer. We leave a voice-mail message saying, “We think she's gone. Please come to pronounce her.” The hospice nurse never comes, never calls. Nor does the geriatric internist, who somehow knows.

As we wait together, Ariella searches her memory for all the details of the day before.

“She was sinking all day. When you came, you heard the noises she was making.” Em swallows hard. I grab her hand.

Em and I had heard it differently. I heard her full lungs trying to clear. Em heard a hard coughing. Ariella heard a cracked tune. What was it?

The hospice people never came, but the funeral director did. Em didn't want to watch. Nor Ariella. I did.

They felt for a pulse. She had none. I knew that already.

They lifted her from her bed, took the sheet, and put her thin limbs into a white plastic bag, like a garment bag. I made myself watch all this to remember how little the body weighs in death. How we all shrimp away to skin and bones—even those of us who worried about our weight.

We never opened the box.

After my mother died, there were many nights when I could not sleep—though usually I sleep like the happiest of babies.

The night after she died, I paced the floor of my apartment, listening for her, and the night after we buried her, I thought of taking a sleeping pill though I never take meds except when jet lag hits. But I refrained. If my mother was around, I wanted to be there to greet her.

One night I dreamed myself in India with my husband. Each of us was sent a tantric guide, his a beautiful woman in a golden sari and mine a little Indian man who looked like Rumplestiltskin in a fairy-tale book I once had as a child. He was brown as a roasted nut and shorter than me, but he promised to give me the satisfaction I needed.

I protested that I was married and didn't want to betray my husband, but he said my husband had agreed. That night he came to me, slipped his hard, small cock into my vagina, and rambunctiously fucked me. At first I seemed to feel nothing, and then, when he withdrew with many sweet words, I felt my cunt pulsing with a fierce orgasm that even comforted me when I awoke.

The tantric sari lady brought my husband a fabulous orgasm too, and we both marveled at how long it had taken us to find this wonderful tantric island within the subcontinent. We had both found what we needed—a place where sexual satisfaction could always be found—without fear or guilt or discomfort.

“How did we miss this place?” I asked.

“We must have been nuts!” said Ash. “This is great!”

*   *   *

Many days later I found the morphine syringes in the box we had never opened.

The ancient Greeks knew that death is a friend. They knew that the story of Tithonus is no comedy.

The goddess of dawn, Eos, fell in love with a Trojan prince and begged Zeus to make her lover immortal. But in her mad passion she forgot to ask for his eternal youth. Tithonus became the man who could not die. He wandered the earth begging endlessly for mercy as his eyes, his limbs, his inner organs rotted and fell out and he grew more and more decrepit.

All he could do was talk, talk, talk.

Eventually he was turned into a cricket by a merciful god.

Language—the cricket has language too.

In Provence, they know the fertile wisdom of the noisy cricket.

Ash and I had a house in Provence in a lovely little village called Rousillon. The crickets make merry all night there in summer.

*   *   *

But death finishes nothing. Death begins the harvest—the harvest of pain, of administration, of clerical work. And the gradual transformation of a difficult parent into a demi-saint.

Scratch
demi.
Parents get nobler and nobler after they die. They also get funnier and more endearing. They come to deserve your desperate love.

 

 

 

There were many times I prayed for her to die. She was so frail and so sad that I often couldn't bear to visit her. I always preferred to be with my daughter and grandson rather than with her. I did not want to stare at death until the very end. But when she finally died, my whole system went into shock. I became agitated and found it hard to sleep. One night I took a sleeping pill and found myself riding on clouds, at peace for the first time. Another night I paced the floor, unable to sleep and not wanting to take a pill. I wanted to fly with her, leaving all fear behind. I wanted to roll into her grave like some Shakespearian heroine. I wanted to scream, to cry, to exult, to dance, to die. And so the moods alternated for weeks.

There is a finality to death that cannot be anticipated by fears or prayers. When she became mute and could not stay awake for more than a few minutes at a time, I prayed for her to die. But when she died, I no longer wanted her death at all.

I found the public response to her departure quite astonishing. The response was far more than I'd thought possible given her extreme age and how long she'd been out of the public eye. Few living people remembered her but for her children and grandchildren. Nevertheless she was in the entertainment wires—and once there, it seems you never die.

The trades of her time had been bought up by Fox, Thomson Reuters, AP, and the like. So her life was still looping somewhere—perhaps on Mars—with
Curiosity.
Or at least the moon.

That was gratifying to me—even though there were many mistakes in the obit. My father was described as a vaudevillian and so was she, though vaudeville was dead by the time they trod the boards. My sisters got mad at me, as if I were responsible for these errors. I could not convince Em that the press has a life of its own—often completely disconnected from history. I could not convince Antonia either. All the press stressed the same boldface names—mine, Ash's, the artists we'd bought, the much more famous performers my parents had worked with. Gershwin for his apartment, Cukor for his directing, Bibliomania for its famous autographed association copies. The press drove me crazy, but I was used to it and didn't expect accuracy. I knew that eyeballs are driven by boldface names, and all anyone wants today are eyeballs. Nobody cares about truth.

But my sisters blamed me, as always.

They wanted to give away my parents' legacy—when all I wanted was to keep it, exhibit it, make it as real as it was for me in childhood.

“Let's meet at the apartment and discuss it,” Em would say on the telephone. “Antonia even says she'll come.” And my heart would plummet into my thousand-dollar shoes.

“Can't we do it by phone or by e-mail?” I'd plead.

“No—we all have to be there,” she'd insist.

And that was how she roped me in.

*   *   *

There should be a name for the state of the air in an apartment when the inhabitants have gone to another circle—purgatory, heaven, hell. It is not still, but teeming with busy ghosts. Let's call it busy air. The Gershwins, of course, were still there, George, Frankie, and Ira singing at their Steinways and a gloomy cloud hanging over their heads because of the early death of George. Everyone said the Gershwins never got over their brother's death. I heard it from my mother—who was great friends with Frankie Godowsky, George and Ira's baby sister. The Gershwins were from Odessa—like my family. They had those amazing Ashkenazic genes and could plug songs, sing, dance, paint, write lyrics, survive Hollywood, and transplant from Brooklyn to Manhattan without being traumatized. Nowadays, artistic kids transplant from Manhattan to Brooklyn. In those days, they couldn't wait to leave Brooklyn for Manhattan. But I know the backstory. Nothing was as it seemed. Life is a dream; skimmed milk masquerades as cream, etc.

The last time I breathed this air my mother had just stopped breathing and the funeral parlor folk had come to wrap her up and take her away. After that came the funeral—like all funerals, but of course
unlike
all funerals in the vast number of people who came—lawyers, accountants, development directors, deranged fans with their tatty autograph books and grubby old cameras. They gather like flies around the dead bodies of the famous, near-famous, once-famous, once-friends of the once-famous. Not long ago I saw them gathering around the side door to the Carlyle on the off chance Mick Jagger might be there.

We played Gershwin throughout the funeral as my mother had once wished. Gershwin piano rolls, Gershwin's “Rhapsody in Blue,” Gershwin's “An American in Paris,” Gershwin's opera about Porgy and Bess. Like Gershwin, my parents were colorblind ahead of their time, and the funeral directors must have seen more people of color at my mother's funeral than they had seen at all the funerals they had organized before. We do seem to segregate our corpses. And so it was at the cemetery.

We buried her next to my father in a Jewish cemetery in Elmont, Long Island, opposite Belmont Park racetrack. The whole
mishpocheh
was there—my grandparents, Ash's grandparents, my parents and aunts and uncles and their kin, Ash's parents, aunts, and uncles, and their kin. Oddly enough, Ash's ancestors had bought plots near my ancestors—probably sold to them around the same time by some hustler/tummler from Brooklyn or the Lower East Side. First-generation Ashkenazim all had burial societies to buy land for
their
dead. Land for the dead is a Jewish tradition. We walk on the earth, then lie under it.

The thudding of earth on coffin is such a desolate sound. You suddenly realize you are
leaving
them there. How can you leave your mother in the frigid earth? And a hole opens in the heart, in the solar plexus, in the
kishkas
.

No, no, no, no, no. How can I leave my only mother there?

So we walked from grave to grave, leaving marker stones, as Jews do. We were here, we mourned, we went home. But not for long.

*   *   *

“So let's go through her things,” Em said.

“Do we have to?”

“Yes, Ness,” my sister said.

So we began the horrible process of combing through trash and treasures.

Em found, in a box, a pair of brass balls. They were probably Ben Wa balls. Why would my father need Ben Wa balls—for my mother? Another woman? Em took them out. They jingled as we moved them in our hands.

“Daddy's brass balls,” she said. “They rightfully belong to you!”

Was it a compliment? Or an insult? I decided to take it as a compliment. One always has that choice.

“Thanks, Em,” I said. “I need them. I'm happy to have them.” I did not say what I thought they were. And my little sister—still five years younger and five years more innocent (though we were both hovering around sixty)—persisted in thinking they were Daddy's brass balls—which as the “boy” in the family belonged to me.

Later, at home, I felt their weight in my hands and I was sure they must have been a “naughty” gift from one of my parents' “naughty” friends. Their friends were always sending jokey sexual gifts, which, when I was an adolescent, I disdained. Open about sex and “naughtiness,” my parents had arty friends like themselves who brought such gifty trinkets to their endless parties. Probably no one had ever used them as Ben Wa balls at all. At least I hoped so.

I remember once, long ago, at a party in the grand ballroom of the apartment, I spied (from the stairs) a woman friend of theirs doing a drunken striptease and singing out, “I love to drink, I love to eat, I love to fuck!”

I was utterly disgusted—as adolescents are about their parents' sexuality. Yet also fascinated. And determined to lead my sexual life differently.

Had I? That is too deep a question for sorting treasures and trash!

The jewelry was a different story.

Everyone wanted it. Three girls and whaddya get? A fight over pearls?

My mother was a bohemian, a rich hippie, a girl with a rose in her hair—but she loved jewelry. Before the seas were dead, she and my father had played Tokyo, so there were pearls and pearls. And such pearls as make daughters sick with longing. Not the silly freshwater junk they pass off as pearls now—but huge pearls, mabe pearls, matched cream-colored pearls, pink pearls that gleamed like young nipples, baroque pearls that glinted blue and green like cartoon aliens (the cheap stuff), golden pearls, silvery pearls, pearly white pearls to drape on nude breasts as if you were one of Colette's Belle Epoque courtesans—or indeed her lover.