Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death (4 page)

before. In my makeshift study there—formerly his oldest son’s

bedroom, with a
Fight Club
poster still on the wall—I revised

an article I’d written for
Tricycle,
a Buddhist quarterly. I was fifty-two, my parents’ oldest child and their only daughter.

My father had lunch at the Wesleyan faculty club, listened

to a former colleague lecture on Cuba, drove home, and took

a nap. He was taking a break from revising the book that had

consumed nearly twenty years of his life, a fine-grained study

of racial inequity and apartheid in Cradock, the South African

desert town where he was born. His editors at the University

of Virginia press had asked for substantial cuts, and my mother

believed that “the bloody book” was ruining his retirement; she

wanted him to permanently abandon it.

At a quarter to four, in the kitchen of their open, sun-filled,

mid-century modern house on a grassy slope above Middle-

town, Connecticut, my father put on the kettle for tea and fell

to the floor making burbling sounds. Somewhere in his heart

or brain, in an aged, stiffened, and partly clogged artery, a yel-

lowish-white clump of fatty cells and microscopic chalky debris

about the size of a baby aspirin had worked its way loose from a

vessel wall. Carried by the tides of his pumping blood, it drifted

upward to the left side of his neck, plugged a secondary branch

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katy butler

of his carotid artery, and deprived whole neighborhoods of his

brain of blood and oxygen. Among the neighborhoods that suf-

fered most was Broca’s area, beneath the thin bone of his left

temple, where specialized chains of cells help us find words and

speak sentences. Another damaged area lay on the left side of

his motor cortex, a strip of brain cells that arches over the top of

the skull, like a hair band, from ear to ear and is responsible for

physical movement. My father was paralyzed on his right side;

he couldn’t get up from the floor.

He was still burbling there when my mother came downstairs,

let out a cry, and called 911. By the time his ambulance arrived

at the doors of the emergency room of Middlesex Memorial, the

town’s excellent nonprofit hospital, whole swaths of the father I’d

known for half a century were gone. The machinery of advanced

lifesaving swung into motion: he was scanned and tested and

moved rapidly into an intermediate intensive care unit, where he

was given an oxygen tube and, because he could not swallow, a

temporary feeding tube as well. About seven hundred thousand

Americans have strokes each year. It is a predictable hazard of

late old age: people over seventy-five are ten times more likely

have one than those in their late fifties. One of my parents’ clos-

est neighbors, the historian William Manchester, who was almost

exactly my father’s age, had recently had two. Nevertheless, my

father’s stroke came as a complete surprise to us.

There had been omens over the prior year, had any of us wanted

to see them. A CAT scan, taken when my father was complain-

ing of terrible headaches whose origins were never pinpointed,

revealed what a radiologist called “mild generalized brain atro-

phy”—that is, shrinkage—“consistent with the patient’s age.” On

a vacation I took with my parents to Jefferson’s Monticello, my

father came back from a meeting with his book editor in Char-

lottesville strangely thrown by the prospect of revising his foot-

notes. Finally a gastroenterologist, alarmed by detecting a slow

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heartbeat during a routine colonoscopy, referred my father to a

cardiologist to be assessed for a pacemaker. Before the cardiac

tests could be completed, however, the stroke hit, taking with it

all our illusions of my father’s immortality.

My mother did not call me until she got back from the hospi-

tal hours later. As soon as I heard her strangled, defenseless cry,

before I could even decipher her words, something visceral and

hot rose up in me, pulling my heart and guts toward Middletown.

“Katy! Jeff’s had a stroke,” she wept, and then took a breath and

said, “Don’t come.” I don’t think I’d ever heard her say, “I need

you,” just as I’d rarely said those words to her since I was a lone-

some girl of sixteen and she’d dropped me off at boarding school.

“What should I do?” I asked Brian after hanging up. He was

fifty-one then, bearlike and gentle, with a beautiful singing

and speaking voice. He sold operating room tables and lights

for a living, and loved to play guitar and recite poems learned

by heart. “Don’t listen to her,” he said calmly, holding me. He

grew up in a warm, extended Irish-American family in a duplex

in Queens still occupied by his widowed and arthritic eighty-

seven-year-old father, who got by with help from a daily house-

keeper and support from neighbors and cousins.

“Find a flight,” Brian said, “and just tell her when your plane

is landing.”

My two brothers, when I called them, made no move to drop

everything and go. Neither had been as close to my father as I

was in childhood; it was almost as if we’d grown up in different

families. My brother Michael was forty-eight. Lean, empathic, a

natural mimic, and a wonderful guest at a dinner party, he had

a genius for living elegantly on next to nothing and was studying

improvisational theater at a community college near me in north-

ern California. His relationship with our parents had long been

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katy butler

difficult. Much to their distress, he faded in and out of their lives

like a distant lighthouse, often going for months without phoning

and for years without visiting. As soon as he was sure our father

wasn’t actively dying, he showed no interest in flying east.

I reached Jonathan, my ebullient youngest brother, in the

garage of his shared, rented house on Lake Elsinore in the south-

ern California desert. He was living on his tax refund, taking a

break from driving eighteen-wheelers across the country, and

rebuilding the engine of his own truck, a secondhand 1986 Ford

F-150. Forty-six, bright, and dyslexic like our mother, with no edu-

cation beyond high school, he was intensely practical, the kind of

person you’d want next to you in an earthquake or a hurricane.

He could embroider an American flag on the back of a Levi’s

jacket, pilot a loaded semi through Grapevine Canyon in the

Tehachapi Mountains, and navigate a sailing boat along the rocky

Maine coast. But he lived from paycheck to paycheck and had

long felt that our father neglected him as a child, dismissed him

as an academic failure, and didn’t value his mechanical skills or

his seventeen years of hard-won sobriety. In any case, this wasn’t

Jonathan’s kind of natural disaster. “I’ve seen it over and over,”

he would tell me years later, when I asked why he didn’t come.

“Everyone jumps on an airplane, they go to the emergency room,

and they stand there together for hours drinking shitty coffee out

of the vending machine. They do it out of guilt, they become a

burden, and they accomplish nothing.”

And so it turned out that only my mother and I sat on the empty

second bed in my father’s room at Middlesex Memorial Com-

munity Hospital in Middletown, facing the wreckage of a man

whom we desperately loved and whose future we could not know.

Stripped of his spotless white shirt and nice tweed jacket, his

commanding Oxford accent, his height and apparent confidence,

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he was in a wheelchair, catheterized and naked beneath a pale

hospital gown, a member of the classless fraternity of the stricken.

An occupational therapist bent up his right arm—his only

arm—and asked him to keep it raised. She watched it flop

down. She pointed to her watch and asked my father to name it.

What came out of his mouth were stutters. As the therapist fin-

ished up her notes, she suggested my dad practice pursing his

lips and blowing, so that someday he could maneuver a breath-

controlled motorized wheelchair.

My father pursed his lips.

Thank God, I thought. He understands her.

And Oh God, I thought. A breath-controlled wheelchair.

His lips made a circle and he puffed out his cheeks and blew.

It was a gesture I remembered from fifty years ago.

I was a child of three. I sat on his lap in our garret apartment in

Oxford, England, watching in wonderment as he gravely drew

on his pipe, filled his cheeks, pursed his lips, snapped his jaw,

and puffed out rings of blue-white smoke: a round one, then an

oval, then a wavering square that expanded and broke apart as

it rose into the air. I thought he was a wizard. My mother was

in the kitchen, her hair in a fat blond bun. I was then their only

child.My father sang to me. He told me the story of Little Red

Riding Hood, taking the bus down the Banbury Road to visit

her grandmother carrying a basketful of bananas and tomatoes.

He taught me to read when I was only four. He thought I was

the smartest little girl in Oxford. I wanted to make him proud.

One day he and my mother drove us down the Banbury

Road in a borrowed car to a small brick and stone row house

on Thorncliffe Road in North Oxford, our new home. Out the

kitchen window, beyond the wringer washer, there was a flag-

stone path, a peony bush, and a ladder leaning against an apple

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katy butler

tree. A strange, feathery, white mold grew in the cellar. A black

dray horse named Flower clopped up the street twice a week,

his cart full of cabbages and leeks. Milk was left on the door-

step at dawn under red clay pots, the bottles lidded with silver

foil and collared white with cream. My father was a student at

Oxford. We lived on what he earned teaching at night school

and on the disabled veterans’ pension that came every month

in a windowed envelope stamped with the crest of the South

African government. Food was rationed. Clothing was rationed.

Everyone in England was in the same boat.

In the depths of winter there were paisleys of ice painted in

whorls on the inside of our windows. I would watch my father

leave for his university classes with his breath rising like mist

from the street, his short, black, undergraduate’s gown flapping

like bat wings as he grasped the handles of his bicycle near the

pivot-point with his one hand, mounted and wobbled, regained

his balance, and rode away.

One evening, he was standing just inside the kitchen door-

way when all the plaster fell down from the ceiling. He had

chips of white in his hair. My mother turned to him, eyes gleam-

ing, and said, “It’s coming, it’s coming.” I was sent off to spend

the night with my best friend. The next morning, the plaster was

swept up and the ceiling lath was showing. The midwives from

the National Health Service were packing their black bags. My

father brought me up to the big bedroom to see my new brother,

Michael. But I remember only the gleam of the electric heater

and my mother lying on a rubber sheet with her blonde hair

sweaty and loose on the pillow.

When Michael was two and still in diapers, the midwives

came again, and then I had two brothers. I wished they would

both disappear. One evening, when my mother was crying with

exhaustion at the end of a long day of cleaning, cooking, and

caring for the three of us, my father helped her by pulling my

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brothers’ wet, newly washed diapers through the wringer with

his teeth, turning the handle of the mangle with his only hand.

It was my father, not my mother, who taught me how to take

a bath. First he’d turn on the cold water, for safety, then the hot.

He showed me how to soap up my washcloth and wipe my nose

and ears. To rinse. To stand with the right foot up on the rim of

the tub and scrub between my toes. To sit down and soap my

armpits and the clefts of my body. I put my hands over my eyes

while he poured water over my hair, crowing, “Liquid fire!”

He taught me to read when I was four. He read me
Jock of

the Bushveld,
about a hunting dog and his master who rode ox

wagons in the wild South African interior, between the Cape

of Good Hope and the gold and diamond camps. By the age of

seven I was reading at a twelve-year-old level. He was sure I was

the brightest little girl in Oxford. I wanted to make him proud.

He told me about growing up in a desert so dry and empty

that a farmer could descry, from forty miles away. a neighbor

coming on horseback by the column of dust he kicked up.