can’t make him do anything,” she said. And then she clutched her chest. “I feel faint,” she said, rolling her head to the side. She moaned loudly.
My sisters ran in.
“Call the ambulance!” Emmy ordered me.
“I don’t need an ambulance,” my mother said, wailing.
My sisters looked at each other. Who would be the irresponsible one who neglected to call the ambulance on the ultimate day? Nobody wanted that onus.
“I really think it’s unnecessary,” I said, but my sisters’ panic was beginning to stir the old anxiety in me. What if it was not a false alarm this time?
Before long there was an ambulance downstairs and we were in it, bending over Queen Lear on a stretcher in the back. Our father was in the front seat with the driver, prepared to flash his big-donor card when we arrived at the hospital. We careened around corners, screeching our way to Mount Sinai. On one abrupt turn the mattress from the gurney went slithering into the attendant sitting behind the driver.
“Oops,” he said.
“Be careful! That’s the only mother I’ve got!” I said.
“She’s my mother too!” said Emmy—always pissed off no matter what the occasion.
Our father sat by our mother’s side as long as she was hospitalized, and when she came home, he began threatening us with being disinherited unless we came to visit her every day.
Now, only months later, he is too exhausted to threaten us and I yearn for his old truculence. Ever since the surgery for the blockage in his colon, he has been a shade of his former self. I sit on the edge of the bed, watch him sleep, and remember the conversation we had in the hospital the night before the operation that saved yet also ended his life.
“Do you know Spanish?” my father asked me that night.
I nodded. “A little.”
“La vida es un sueño,” he said. “Life is a dream. I look forward to that deep sleep.” And then he went under and never quite came back. Three days after the surgery he was babbling gibberish and clawing the air. Six days after the surgery he was in the ICU with a tube down his throat. When he was diagnosed with pneumonia, I stood at his side in the ICU and sang “I gave my love a cherry” while his eyelids fluttered. We never thought that he would emerge from that hospitalization. But he did. And now he and my mother spend their days sleeping side by side in their apartment but never touching or speaking. Round-the-clock shifts of aides and daughters attend them. Every day they sleep more and wake less.
The ancient Greeks believed that dreams could cure you. If you slept in the shrine of Aescalepius, you could dream yourself well. But my parents are not getting well. They are deep into the process of dying. Watching them die, I realize how unprepared for death I am myself.
It doesn’t matter how old they are. You are never prepared to lose your parents.
Even my sisters have tried vainly to make peace with each other now that we have entered this final stage. We seldom go to an event where some aged acquaintance doesn’t get carried out on a stretcher.
No wonder I was advertising for Eros. I was advertising for life.
2
My Father (Boy Wanted)
There is a dignity in dying that doctors should not dare to deny.
—Anonymous
There is no substitute for touch. To be alive is to crave it. The next day, when I go to visit my parents I decide I will not even try to talk to my father, I will only stroke him, rub his back, and try to communicate with him this way.
I ring the doorbell and am greeted by Veronica, the main day person. She’s a Jamaican woman in her sixties with a lilting voice and a family history that could break your heart. Her son has died. Her daughter has MS. Yet she soldiers on, tending the dying.
“How’s my father?”
“He’s okay today,” she says.
“Is he sleeping?”
“Not sleeping, not waking,” she says. “But on his way somewhere . . .”
I go to his bedside and begin to massage the back of his neck.
“Who’s there?” my mother says. “Antonia? Emilia?”
“It’s me, Vanessa,” I say. And I rub my father’s neck until he stirs.
He mumbles: “I feel the love in your touch.” This encourages me to go on until my arms are tired. As I massage him I am taken back to the time he sat on my bed when I was six and told me he would never leave my mother because of me. My parents had had a huge fight and I was terrified they’d divorce. My father quieted my fears.
“I would never leave you,” he said.
My sisters have always accused me of being his favorite. But what good did that do me? A marital history of searching fruitlessly for him in the wrong partners until I married someone I thought could be his stand-in. And now we are all old and so is our story.
About a year ago, when my father was still robust enough to threaten us with being disinherited, I had come over to find him in an ebullient mood.
“Did I ever tell you about my first job?” he asked.
“No.”
“Well, I walked around the neighborhood looking for signs in the windows that said ‘Boy Wanted.’ When I found one, I walked right in and said: ‘I’m the boy you want.’ I knew even then that your own enthusiasm had to carry the day. It was the same with show business. The reason I got the job in Jubilee when I auditioned for Cole Porter was because I had so much enthusiasm. I wasn’t the best musician. I was only the most enthusiastic.”
“Maybe he thought you were cute,” my mother said. “He also had a sign out that said ‘Boy Wanted.’ Everyone knew that.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said to my mother. And then, in a burst of sheer bumptiousness, he began to do jumping jacks there on the bedroom floor. He did about thirty in a row.
“Look at your father,” my mother said. “He thinks if he keeps exercising he’ll never die.” And it was true. My father worked out as if his life depended on it. All through his eighties, he walked to the bookstore every day, then came home to walk another five miles on the treadmill. He was full of contempt for our mother because of her sedentary life. He starved himself down to a skeletal weight.
“Learn to go to bed hungry,” he told me. “The thinner you are, the longer you live. It’s been proven.” He ate sparingly but gorged on vitamins. The dining room table was full of seaweed extract and HGH and all manner of trendy supplements. But there came a day when he could barely eat at all because of the pain.
My sisters and I went with him for the CAT scan, the sonograms, the X-rays. He sat in a little dressing room in the radiologist’s office shivering in his shorts and T-shirt.
