Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death (8 page)

realizing that I was doing too much for Jeff—and not letting

him struggle through himself.” The next morning, she refused

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to brush my father’s teeth and walked away after laying out his

clothes. He brushed his teeth sulkily and, after what he told us

was “a tremendous struggle,” got himself dressed.

Over tea at the kitchen table a couple of days before my

flight left, my mother and I talked idly, as if my father weren’t

there, about what I would do if she died first. Would I move my

father to The Redwoods or try to keep him somehow in Middle-

town, perhaps with me or a hired caregiver? Worriedly he asked

us, “What are you talking about?”

I was tongue-tied in matters of the heart. I sometimes felt

like the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s
Snow Queen,

whose heart turned to ice after it was pierced by a shard from a

mirror that emphasized a critical and spiteful view of the world.

I liked to go at things sideways, quoting the morning paper, or

poetry, or a self-help book.

But my father could no longer understand long strings of sen-

tences.

I caught my breath. I was about to make a vow more deep

and true than the wedding vows I took in my thirties and in my

forties disavowed.

“If Val dies,” I said slowly, looking directly at him and calling

my mother by her first name, “I will take care of you.”

My mother never returned to the caregiver support group. She

couldn’t spare the time, she said. Half a century after coming to

America, she remained a stranger in a strange land. She never

understood why my two brothers and I liked baring our lives

to people to whom we’d never been introduced. I called my

brother Jonathan and vented, but I didn’t press him to go east,

at least not as hard as we both would later wish. My friends

on the West Coast made all the right noises of sympathy, but

few had ever met my parents, and none could take my father

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katy butler

to the movies and give my mother a break. I thought of going

behind her proud back and asking more of my father’s former

colleagues to take my father out to lunch regularly, but I was

afraid she would find out.

At night I worried about her agony and my father’s stasis. In

the daytime I worked the Rolodex I’d assembled in a decade

of reporting on health and human behavior, beating a trail to

a geriatric social worker in Middletown and a retired doctor

in West Hartford who consulted with families facing medical

catastrophes. I missed work deadlines and had trouble com-

ing up with bright new story ideas for magazines. My income

dropped in half.

My parents went to the social worker and didn’t think much

of him. The catastrophe doctor came to the house and suggested

my father get involved in regular water aerobics: the longer he

stayed physically independent, the doctor told my mother, the

longer she could keep my father out of a nursing home. My

mother nodded, signed the check for two hundred dollars,

closed the door, and never took my father to the pool. She was

too overwhelmed, it seemed, by the day-to-day. So I flew back to

Middletown again, and that is how I found myself sitting on my

meditation bench in the midsummer of 2002 with my parents

still stuck together with glue, my father stripped of his wallet and

watch, and my mother slapping at a fly with her flip-flop.

After breakfast, I drove my father to the Red Cross office down-

town and filled out the application form for the free paratransit

van ride service , cramming the lines with the list of his myriad

disabilities. When we got home, I asked my mother for his Wes-

leyan ID and wallet—to my quiet surprise, she handed it over

without resistance—and drove him to the Wesleyan pool, where

I helped him show his ID to the attendant. Once inside, I swam

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laps while he strenuously pumped his knees up and down in the

water at the shallow end, doing the physical therapy exercises

he’d been taught in rehabilitation.

On Monday and Tuesday, I got the Red Cross van to pick us

both up at home and take us both to the pool. On Wednesday and

Thursday, I put my father on the van by himself, drove to the pool

to meet him, swam with him, put him back on the van, and met

him back home. In his short-sleeved shirt, carrying his swimsuit

in a drawstring bag, he looked like a little boy coming home from

day camp, and I felt a wave of motherly, protective tenderness.

With the excuse that he needed to be on time for the van,

I drove him to Pelton’s Drugstore on Main Street and bought

him a waterproof Timex with a black woven plastic band, to

replace the stainless steel one my mother had taken away. The

next Monday, as I swam my laps and he did his water-walking,

he looked over the string of floats and said, in a burst of elo-

quence—he often spoke better when my mother wasn’t there—

“You know, this is something I could really come to enjoy.” He

looked at his watch. “It’s so nice having a watch.”

That moment was more important to me than most of the

articles I’d ever written, more valuable than the awards on my

bookshelf and the hunk of Lucite engraved with my name. My

self-confidence took a leap, and so did my capacity for love.

By the time I’d packed to leave one midsummer morning, my

father was taking the van to the pool three mornings a week, doing

his water aerobics on his own, and enlisting random strangers in

the locker room to help him put on his shirt. One tiny, mundane,

nontechnological intervention—water aerobics—had set a chain

of good things in motion, helping him construct a life of small

but real independent pleasures. It wasn’t a life I’d have wanted to

prolong unnaturally had it been mine, but it was his own.

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katy butler

The day my plane left, my mother’s eyes filled with tears and

she told me she didn’t want me to go—a first. After years of com-

petitive jousting, we’d finally worked together as a team. “If only

you lived closer,” she said, stroking my hand at the kitchen table.

“If only you lived an hour and a half away. If only you lived in

Boston.”

I’d wanted to hear her speak like this—the softness, the

need, the appreciation—for much of my life. For a moment I

wished I could stay.

For fifty years I’d watched her take on tasks that over-

whelmed me. Nothing had stopped her—not leaving everyone

she’d known and loved in South Africa, in a doomed society

where African servants brought tea trays to the bedroom door

each morning; not raising three children in postwar Britain with

a one-armed husband who couldn’t change a diaper; not arriv-

ing almost friendless on the docks of New York in 1957 with a

couple of trunks and one good blue wool Jaeger suit.

In the first mid-century modern house she and my father

built overlooking a lake in the suburbs of Boston, she’d painted

the front door turquoise and in the long window beside it hung

strings of orange-juice-can lids strung from nylon fishing lines.

The disks caught the light like glittering golden scales: a work of

art, ingenious, and practically free. She stepped back for a look,

arms akimbo, with a paint smudge on one cheek and a blonde

tendril falling from her French twist, and sang her favorite line

from
Annie Get Your Gun
: “Anything you can do, I can do bet-

ter! I can do anything better than you!”

Decades later, I still felt like a clumsy teenager in her presence.

And now that teenager was supposed to become her parents’ par-

ent. I stroked my mother’s hand, told her that families were never

meant to live this far apart, and went upstairs to get my bag.

*

*

*

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In California a few weeks later, I got a letter of thanks from a

man who, much to my surprise, could think, read, and write

even though he could barely speak.

“Not only did you do what you said you were going to do,

but you did it with great panache, which the French claim they

have lots of,” said my father , in a letter he’d probably labored

over for hours on his computer, his written eloquence utterly and

amazingly at odds with the smiling, inarticulate man I’d kissed

good-bye at the airport near Hartford. Although the stroke had

blasted his capacity for understanding and articulating spoken

language, it had apparently spared places in his brain, highly

developed thanks to decades of academic work, where neurons

process visual data and are at least partly responsible for the abil-

ity to read and write.

“One of those ways was your ingenious devices for achieving

things like the organizing of the swimming,” his letter went on.

“The drivers were touched by your familiarity. You were never at

a loss for a plan when something went wrong. There was a sad-

ness in your leaving which could not be avoided. You made your

Mother and me very sad, but also very proud. We left the airport

in a strange but wonderful mood. So you did what you had to do

without causing any fuss. So my darling, that is what I want to

say. All my love to you. If I have been guilty in the past of being

ungrateful, then I must try to make it good.”

Below the printed text, in a tangle of spidery lines, barely

decipherable, my father had written his first name.

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In the fall of 2002, my father quietly turned eighty with no

particular celebration beyond a handwritten note from my

mother and a letter from me. With the doggedness that is part

of his legacy to me, he’d settled for little victories and accepted

losses. In the year since the stroke, he’d learned again how to

fasten his belt and to comb his own hair, despite his now-limited

reach, with a special long-handled comb I’d ordered from a dis-

ability catalog—against my mother’s wishes: she hated the way

it screamed “handicap.” Three times a week he walked to the

pool to do his water exercises, slightly dragging one foot—my

mother had canceled the Red Cross van because it sometimes

brought him home late after leaving off other passengers in a

neighboring town. Twice a month, his former colleague Richard

Adelstein took him to lunch, doing most of the talking while

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my father did most of the listening. With encouragement from

Angela, his speech therapist, he set to work on an autobiogra-

phy. But the gains were slowing, as the rehabilitation center

brochure had said they would. He was settling in at a new base-

line—with the memories, mind, and reading comprehension of

a highly educated eighty-year-old; the spoken speech of a four-

or five-year-old; and the physical dependence of a boy of six.

I spent Thanksgiving of 2002 in western Massachusetts with

Brian, his sister Ann and her family, and Brian’s eighty-seven-

year-old father John. John had advanced arthritis and had suf-

fered a minor stroke; because he needed a walker to get around

the house and a stair glide to go up stairs, he’d vacated his

house in Queens and moved in with his daughter’s family. (Four

months later we would fly east for his funeral.) After spending a

week caring for him while Ann and her husband took a vacation,

Brian and I drove to Middletown, where I introduced him to my

parents for the first time.

I was afraid they’d think he wasn’t good enough for me, and

to tell the truth, I had my doubts. He wore 49ers sweatshirts

and baseball caps, made his living as a medical salesman, and

sometimes said things like “it’s raining cats and buckets” or “the

candidate didn’t pass the mustard.” His first forays into connect-

ing with my parents hadn’t gone well. When he told my mother

over the phone how wonderful her daughter was, she’d said,

“Well, she’s a handful.” When, at a family lunch in a restaurant,

he’d asked my father for permission to marry me, my father had

grinned, shaken his head, and said—and I will never know to

the end of my days whether he was toying with Brian or saying

an uncomfortable, stroke-freed truth—“You’re just not suitable!”

I needn’t have worried. My father took Brian on a tour of the

Wesleyan campus, just the two of them, and in the end neither

he nor my mother could resist Brian’s persistent goodwill. Only

after their deaths would I learn, from reading the enthusiastic

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