out. Get the bastard,” he said. He believed that if they got the cancer, he’d be good as new.
How many times have I seen that avidity for the knife? “Cut it out,” they say, as if mortality were no more than a tumor. But if death can’t march in the front door, it’ll sneak in the back. They excised the cancer from his gut, but the anesthesia invaded his brain.
The first day after the surgery he was fuzzy but fine. As in the old days on our family car trips, we sang our way through the alphabet from “All Through the Night” to “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” But the following morning he was holding The New York Times upside down in one hand and making up bizarre stories to explain the headlines. After that, two burly guards appeared in his room because he had bitten the nurse. I talked him down and stroked his hand and he went to sleep. But the day after he became even more agitated. First they thought it was the meds, Klonopin or Haldol or the anesthesia, but then a convocation of doctors decided it was “something physical” making him tremble, rant, shake, and grasp the air. They intubated him, catheterized him, and took him to a step-down, then to the ICU. There I prayed for him to come back, and in a way he did. Now I wonder about the wisdom of such prayers. Life, I now know, is the step-down unit of all step-down units. The only cure for the agitation of life is death. And the cure, as they say, is worse than the disease.
“Stop,” he says now, “you’re hurting me.” Can he hear my thoughts? I think so.
“Veronica!” he calls. “I want to go to the toilet.” And Veronica comes to take him. When he emerges, he seems exhausted and curls into the fetal position again.
“Is he sleeping all day?” I ask Veronica later. She takes this as a slur on her professionalism.
“I told you before and I’ll tell you again. He doesn’t want to wake because he’s depressed and he doesn’t want to sleep because he’s afraid he’ll die in his sleep. So whenever he feels himself drifting, he thinks he has to use the toilet. It only happens fifty times a day. He can’t stay and he can’t go. I told your sisters the same thing. Why do you all keep asking?”
“Because we love him,” I say.
“I know you do,” Veronica says. “So leave him alone.”
“But we want to help him.”
“How you gonna help him die?”
How indeed? If I could give him that final draft of painless poison, I would. Or would I? When my grandfather asked for sleeping pills at ninety-six, I didn’t have the nerve to provide them. I have regretted my cowardice to this day.
How do you help anyone die? I read with amazement the stories of people who reached a certain point of illness or of age and decided it was time to die. It seems the height of both courage and cruelty. Courage because anything so counterintuitive takes courage. And cruelty because it leaves your children wondering if they did something wrong. There’s no act you can initiate that doesn’t involve other people. We are all interwoven. Even the most rational suicide may come as a blow to someone else.
“Vanessa!” my mother cries out. “Where are you?”
I go in to my mother. My father is curled up beside her, nearly motionless.
“He never talks to me anymore,” she says, pointing a bony hand at my father. “All those years he was the closest person in the world to me and now he doesn’t even talk to me. What can you do?”
Until his operation, my father was always complaining that my mother was senile, but now, despite moments of memory loss, she seems far saner than he. She lies by his side all day, enduring the most terrible rejection. Fortunately, she can only focus on it intermittently.
Abruptly, my father gets up. “Veronica!” he screams. Veronica runs in and takes him to the toilet again.
My mother looks at me. “I don’t think he really has to go,” she says. “I just think he wants to be alone in the bathroom with that woman.”
“She’s the nurse’s aide,” I say.
“Don’t believe that malarkey,” says my mother. “She’s only pretending to be a nurse’s aide so she can undress him. I’m wise to all her tricks. I wasn’t born yesterday. But I pretend I don’t know. One of these days, I’m going to throw her out of the house.”
It wouldn’t be the first time. When my mother was a little stronger last year, she fired people constantly. “Get out of my house, you big fat thing!” Sometimes: “You big fat black thing,” she would scream—my mother, who had never been a racist in her prime. I told myself she was more rational now, but she was only weaker. She was biding her time. One of these days, she’d get up screaming like her old self and throw all the strangers out.
“If I should go with the High Class Angels, who’ll take care of her?” my father used to rant in the old days when he was strong. The “High Class Angels” fascinated me. Whom did he mean? The Angel of Death? Or was he wrestling with angels as he slept, like Jacob?
And hearing about these mysterious angels, my mother would shriek: “Nobody has to take care of me! I’ll bury you all.”
Sometimes I think she may know more than she lets on.
“I’ve seen a lot of people die,” Veronica says later, “but your father is one tough old bird. He’s going to fight like hell before he leaves this earth. Your mother too. She never stops watching me. You know that time she fell out of bed and had to go to the hospital? She was worried I was doing something with your father. Don’t believe she’s out of it. She’s more together than she looks.”
“How can you stand this work?”
“Who’s gonna do it if I don’t? You girls? You gonna clean up the shit when it runs down their legs?”
I go in to my mother again.
“When did you get here?” she asks as if we had not seen each other before, as if we had not just been talking.
I sit on her side of the bed. My father is there but not there, asleep, awake, and drifting in between.
“You know, when you get old, you see that everything is a joke. All the things you were so passionate about don’t mean a thing. You only did them to keep busy. I used to think it was important that I could dance better than other people, but now I see I was only fooling myself. I only did it to keep busy.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“It is. Even if you’re well known, what difference does that make? It doesn’t keep you from getting old and dying. People see you come into a restaurant and they say, ‘Isn’t that so-and-so?’ Well, what good does that do you? Or them, for that matter. It’s all a joke.”
“But you still want to live, don’t you?”
“To tell you the truth, I’m bored. I’m bored with every-thing. Even the things I used to love—like flowers—bore me. Everything except my children. In the end, that’s all that matters, leaving children behind on the earth to replace you when you go. Why do you look so sad? What’s the matter?”
“You know what’s the matter. I don’t like you to say you’re bored with life.”
“Do
