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. He looked so small, so scared, so reduced. Nothing showed up on the films. Finally they put him in the hospital and gave him a colonoscopy, which found the blockage.
He was avid for the operation. “Cut it 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