Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death (6 page)

Perhaps because of our efforts, or perhaps just by luck, a bed

opened up at Gaylord. Relieved that things seemed on the way

to being settled, at least for the moment, I booked my return

flight west. A close friend of my mother’s promised to help

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ensure that my father’s transfer to Gaylord went smoothly, and

one of my father’s former colleagues drove me to the airport.

Within hours my plane was descending over San Francisco

Bay, the dark silhouette moving across the steely waters in the

late afternoon light. At its southern edge, the vast Cargill salt

evaporation pans welcomed me home—as they often would

over the next eight years—their algae-tinted yellows, oranges,

and blue-greens patched together as oddly and beautifully as a

Gee’s Bend sharecropper’s quilt. Behind me in Connecticut lay

my father, wounded more grievously than I knew, and a mother

who had never balanced a checkbook.

The seatbelt sign blinked off.

I did not think of my father as dying. I did not even think of

him as “in decline.” I thought of him as staggering from a ter-

rible, unexpected blow.

Brian would meet me at the gate. I’d pick up my life where I’d

left it. I’d deploy the skills I’d acquired as a journalist to help my

formidable parents, whom I considered embodiments of ingenuity

and the can-do spirit. Between their guts, my research, and their

doctors’ expertise, I dimly hoped, things would come out right.

I was like the drunk who searches for his keys in front of the

streetlamp because the light is better there, even though he dropped

them up the street. The kaleidoscope that had been our family’s

life—with its familiar roles and hierarchies, its intricate alliances,

secret wounds, loves, and memories—had shifted in ways I didn’t

yet understand. What once looked like a jeweled snowflake was

now a dark flower. We came from a long line of doers and strivers,

and from now on, doing and striving would carry us only so far.

It would take me more than a year to realize that my father

had walked through the invisible gate that separates the autumn

of healthy old age from the hidden winter of prolonged and

attenuated dying. The time for fixing was over. The glass was

already broken. The landscape had changed.

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On a midsummer morning eight months after the stroke, my

parents and I sat meditating in their spare, impeccable living

room on Pine Street in Middletown. The sliding glass doors opened

onto the deck, and the last of the night’s cool air seeped through

the screens. My privacy-mad mother had sited the house so care-

fully that no neighbor’s dwelling was visible—only the Dutchman’s

pipes that enclosed the deck in a cutwork of translucent green.

Beyond that lay a long, sloping lawn, the birch trees she’d planted

forty years earlier, and the rolling hills of the Connecticut River Val-

ley, glimpsed through hedges and clumps of trees.

The knobs of my sitting bones pressed onto my meditation

bench, and my shins rested on the fleece of the white Flokati

rug. My father sat flaccidly on the couch, his only hand curled

upward in his lap, and his right shoulder slumped. In out-of-

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character red suspenders and a neatly trimmed beard, he looked

more like a retired hippie watchmaker than the dignified, clean-

shaven academic he’d once been. My mother had stripped him

of most of the markers of adult life: his belt, keys, wallet, Wes-

leyan ID, and credit cards—even, for reasons I couldn’t fathom,

his stainless steel watch on its expandable metal band. She was

sitting on her own bench in dark yoga clothes, her spine fiercely

erect, her lovely white hair falling over her shoulders.

I cast my eyes down. My mind repeated phrases I’d learned

more than a decade earlier from Thich Nhat Hanh, my Viet-

namese Zen teacher
: I breathe in, making my whole body calm

and at peace. I breathe out, making my whole body calm and at

peace.
My shoulders let go. The dial of the kitchen timer at my knee, set for twenty minutes, turned a little closer to zero.

The room was so clean and orderly and the views so tranquil

that I felt as though I were at a retreat center. It was nothing like

my chaotic life in California.

I breathe in . . .

Not long after I moved west, I learned not to visit my parents

more than once a year or to stay for more than three days in a

row. After the first excited, intimate babble of catching up, I

could count on my mother exploding over something, or a series

of somethings, that I considered trivial: not hanging my towel

up to dry each day in the basement; wanting an extra blanket;

eating too much expensive Manchego cheese; leaving three

grains of rice in the dish drain; using too much heat, hot water,

electricity, paper towels, or dish soap.

Sometimes I was the one to explode over things my mother

found equally trivial: entering my bedroom without knocking;

hinting that I should lose or gain five pounds, wear more neutral

colors, or stop tinting my hair brown when it would look so mar-

velous gray. My father, in his vital, prestroke days, would croon,

“Dooon’t Es-ca-late!” over our rising voices, my mother would call

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me selfish or oversensitive, and I’d race upstairs to book an earlier

flight home, hating her and craving her love at the same time.

I breathe out . . .

In many ways, she and I were mirror images, both in love

with the same preoccupied and now severely damaged man,

and each brilliant in realms where the other could barely cope.

She couldn’t spell, had no idea how much they had , saved,

made any room she entered more beautiful, and ran her house

with the precision of a fine Swiss watch. I left something askew

everywhere I went, paid my own mortgage, and had never been

supported by a man or taken care of a sentient being more com-

plex than a ficus tree. She wanted a different daughter—one

more feminine, graceful, and considerate. I wanted a mother—

warm, tolerant, nurturing—that she’d never been nor could be.

And there I was, sitting quietly in their living room, back in

their house on Pine Street for the third time in eight months,

for yet another open-ended stay.

My father coughed and shifted in his chair. A fly buzzed, hit the

screen of the sliding door, and stopped. It shifted first a front

leg, then a back. I consciously let my shoulders go.

My mother rose on her haunches, stripped off her flip-flop,

and thwacked at the screen.
What’s wrong with her? Can’t she sit

still for twenty minutes!

Right Speech is an integral part of Buddha’s noble eightfold

path. I composed tactful words in my head:
Ma, I was hoping.
. . .

She thwacked and thwacked. The fly leaped. I rose, giggling, put

a soft hand on her shoulder, and whispered my request that she

wait till we’d finished meditating She smiled back, let go of her

flip-flop, and sat back down. Ten minutes later, the timer went off

with a ding, and the three of us went into the kitchen for break-

fast. That was all.

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It was a small thing, perhaps—that fight we didn’t have. But

later, when I looked back on our first year in the long corridor of

my father’s dying, I would treasure that moment of grace. Was it

our daily meditation, my mother’s forbearance, my attempts to

practice my latest self-help technique, called Nonviolent Com-

munication? Our stunned humility? The fact that my parents

needed me? All I know is that during that first year, carried in

part by gimcrack hopes, we rose above our ordinary selves. Our

hearts opened. We were on honeymoon. And we needed to be.

I did not believe in God then, and I don’t now. But the closest I

can come to explaining what happened during that year of grace is

to describe a Christian poster I once saw and thought at the time

was sentimental, of footprints along the damp sand of a beach.

The script along the bottom read, “During your times of trial and

suffering, when you saw only one set of footprints, it was then that

I carried you.”

That year of grace began in a state of stunned despair. My father

came home after just three weeks at Gaylord Rehabilitation Insti-

tute, far from dead and far from fixed. My mother told me that he

could not fasten a belt or put on a shirt, and he walked with his

right foot dragging. At night he wet his bed. On the phone to me,

his speech was a flurry of blithers and stutters, of words sought

and missed, of phrases begun and halted in midair, followed by a

pause, a garbled “I must go,” and a sudden hang-up. Then, once

in a while, he would come out with a complete sentence, clear

as a bell.

One day he said to my mother, “I don’t know who I am any more.”

A Medicare-funded speech therapist named Angela came

to the house and helped him learn to write again and to do

simple arithmetic. She told my mother not to give up, that my

father was still in there, intact, just unable to speak. “
Every day

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sees improvement for Jeff,” my mother wrote cheerfully to my

father’s three elderly sisters in South Africa. “In some ways he is

ahead of the game, having lived with his one arm since he was

twenty-one. So you see I have reason to feel optimistic.”

On the phone with my brothers and me that winter, she cried.

She loved my father. She’d vowed to be with him in sickness and

in health, she told us—and who was she to think they’d escape

the sickness part? He’d taken care of her for fifty years, and now it

was her turn. But in ways we were only beginning to fathom, my

father was no longer her husband, and she was no longer his wife.

His stroke devastated two lives. The day before it, my mother

was a talented amateur artist and photographer, a woman of

intimidating energy, and a spectacular housewife. She sewed

almost all her own clothes and was halfway through knitting a

sweater out of pale blue chenille ribbon, mimicking one she’d

seen in an Eileen Fisher catalog. She took hikes with women she

liked, cooked wonderful dinners for my father and their friends,

went to the bookstore and the library, read voraciously, especially

about Buddhism, nagged my father and happily bantered with

him, cleaned and gardened, and practiced Japanese calligraphy

in her spare time.

After the stroke, she cared for my father the way she’d cared

for my brothers and me when we were three or four. In the morn-

ing, she helped him up from bed, brushed his teeth, gave him

a shower, laid out his clothes, buttoned his buttons, tucked a

thick incontinence pad in his underwear, and helped him put on

his shirt, pants, socks, and shoes. She fastened his belt, cut his

toenails, put in his hearing aids, put on his jacket, brushed his

hair, and then took him to appointments, often three or more in

a single week, with his neurologist, internist, physical therapist,

dentist, or eye doctor. She helped him get up and down when

he took a nap. She tried to wait patiently when he couldn’t find

a word. When he wanted to go to the bathroom, she helped him

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take down his pants and wiped his bottom. She even took him

grocery shopping—she did not feel comfortable leaving him

alone. At night, she repeated the process in reverse, starting with

his hearing aids, and then collapsed into a single bed in the for-

mer guest room , under a poster of the artist Frida Kahlo. Some-

times at night she would get up two or three times to change his

wet sheets.

She no longer went to yoga classes or to the bookstore or invited

people to dinner, and rarely walked alone or with her friends. In

time, most dinner invitations from others stopped as well. Her

sewing machine was silent. Her half-finished ribbon sweater

sat in her sewing basket for six years. At seventy-seven, she had

become one of twenty-nine million unpaid, politically powerless,

and culturally invisible family caregivers—9 percent of the U.S.

population—who help take care of someone over seventy-four.

On a routine visit to her internist, Dr. Fales, two months after

the stroke, she burst into tears. “Even though she is a rather stoic

individual,” Dr. Fales would write in his clinical notes, “She seems

to be beside herself because she can simply not cope with trying