The Peacock Feast, page 7
“And then what happens? After you stop breathing?”
“The doctor will take his fingers and close my eyelids.”
“You can’t do that yourself?”
“No.”
“Can I do it for you?”
“I don’t know if they’ll let you. But do you want to do it now?”
“Yes.”
She made herself very still and stared up at the ceiling. He leaned over her and put his middle fingers on her eyelids and pushed them closed. “That’s all you do?”
“That’s all you do.” She stroked his arm. “Now there’s one more thing I want to tell you. I don’t want you to worry about being here at the exact moment I die. Maybe you’ll be at school. And that will be just fine. I don’t want you missing your classes to sit next to me waiting for me to take my last breath.”
“But I’m going to want to be with you when you die.”
“I know, darling. And maybe you will be. But no one can say precisely when that will happen, and it would be awful for you to be cooped up in a dark, airless room with all of the adults weeping and carrying on, which I’m afraid they will. I don’t want you falling behind with your schoolwork and not getting to see your friends. It will be hard enough on you without your having to catch up with your assignments and getting weak from not running around every day the way boys your age should.”
Leo started to cry. He could not bear the thought that he might not be there when his mother died. For a moment, that seemed even worse than her dying itself.
“And here is the most important thing, so I want you to listen very, very hard and then we’ll talk about it again tomorrow and next week and maybe more than that.”
She handed him a tissue, waited for him to dry his eyes and blow his nose. She looked at him, as though gauging if he was ready to hear what she was going to say.
“I’m going to always be with you.”
He felt a moment of panic. Was she saying she would become a ghost?
“Oh, darling, I’m sorry. That must have sounded spooky.”
It seemed like another life when he’d loved having his heart race: their hide-and-seek games with his mother jumping out from the back of a closet with a loud “Boo”; pretending they were French tourists when they rode the cable cars, answering the conductor with “Merci, monsieur,” Leo hardly able to contain himself until they got off at the top of Russian Hill, when he would squeal, “Mama, he believed us!”
“What I mean is that I will live on inside of you. You will be able to have conversations in your head with me. You are old enough to know what I would say about things.”
His chest felt heavy, as though something were crushing him. He could hardly breathe. He wanted to throw himself onto her, but he was afraid he might hurt her. He wanted to stamp his feet, but then Angela would hear the noise and race in and make him leave his mother to rest. “I am not. I am not old enough. I do not know what you would say.”
“I will give you an example. You are sitting at the dinner table and Angela has put some lima beans on your plate, and you think they look like rabbit turds. You don’t want to eat rabbit turds, you only want to eat the roast beef and mashed potatoes. What would I say?”
“‘Just take a bite. Just give it a try. You didn’t want to try a raspberry the first time you saw one, you thought it looked like a gross hairy bug, and then you loved it.’”
“Exactly!” His mother laughed, a strange laugh, and Leo could tell she was forcing herself and that it was difficult for her. “You know exactly what I would say. And you will be able to ask yourself, ‘What would Mama say?’—and I will answer in your head.”
“Okay.” He could feel his brow furrowing. It still seemed a little spooky. “Do you promise?”
“I promise until the end of time. And there is something even better that I haven’t told you yet.”
“What is that?”
“There are things you will want to talk with me about as you get older, things that don’t interest you now, like girls…”
He made a face.
“I know it sounds impossible now, but it won’t be long before that will change. Or what kind of career you should pursue. This is the most wonderful part. Even though you don’t know now what questions you might want to ask me, when the time comes, I will understand and you can ask me and we will be able to have conversations in your head.”
“So it’s like you don’t really die. You just don’t have your body anymore.”
His mother closed her eyes. Was she too tired to go on? When she opened them, she reached for his hand, inside which he held a crumpled tissue. “No, darling. I really will be dead. You must never forget that. I really will be dead—but if you allow me, I can live on inside of you, as part of you.”
Hearing the sweetness, the hesitation, in her voice, he burst into tears again. “But, Mama, of course, I will allow you.” And then, forgetting all about his mother’s sore belly and the pain the weight of his torso against hers might cause, he flung himself on her and wept and wept and wept while she murmured to him and made circles on his back with her thumbs and then dried his face with the edge of her shawl and kissed his forehead.
Years later, long after he stopped letting her talk to him because he didn’t want to hear what she would say, he would still feel her lips on his brow.
* * *
“I will always watch over you,” she’d told him. “You will always be in my heart, and I will always be in yours. Only, after I die, it will be Angela or your grandmother’s driver who will pick you up from school, Angela who will sit with you at dinner, your father who will check your homework and read to you at night.”
He’d nodded solemnly. She’d made it sound like something simple, like a changing of the guard, but when it happened, it was nothing like that. His grandmother screamed at the funeral. His grandfather stumbled and fell on the way to the cemetery, spraining his wrist so that Leo’s memories of the day would include his grandfather’s arm in a blue canvas sling. Angela lit candles in every room of the house so no evil spirits would slip in as his mother’s soul slipped out to join the other world.
As for Leo’s father, his grief intensified his fears about what might happen to Leo, funneling into anything that involved water. Leo was not permitted to accept an invitation to spend a weekend with his friend Gary’s family at their house on the Russian River. On the day his fourth-grade class went on a field trip to Point Reyes to study the geological anomalies, his father insisted Leo remain at home. “My son,” he informed the school secretary, “will be unable to attend. He will return to classes tomorrow.” His father strictly forbade Angela from leaving him alone in the tub. So intimidated was Angela by his father’s ironclad prohibitions, she seemed to avoid even water vistas when they went out together.
In his head, Leo would talk with his mother about his father. “He won’t let me do anything. He won’t let me go to swim parties or to another boy’s house unless he calls first to make sure we won’t be going to the beach.”
His mother, in his mind, would take his hand. “I know, darling. It’s irrational. He’s not afraid for himself. He crossed the Atlantic with Mrs. Brown before we were married. It’s only because he loves you so much and he’s so afraid that he could lose you too.”
“I’m not going to drown in the bathtub!”
“Your father would tell you how many children do.”
Then he would think about his father, so gaunt since his mother died, Leo could see his eye sockets, and Leo would imagine putting his arms around his rosewater-scented mother, and he would let go of the anger at his father for another few days, resisting saying aloud the jabs he’d devise while his father struggled to fill the dinner hour with conversation. Am I allowed to drink this glass of water? Or is it too dangerous? What if I cough and water gets into my lungs? Aren’t there cases of children who’ve croaked from that?
* * *
Not until many years after her grandfather had died was Grace able to see the man as a whole rather than as a jumble of pieces, some of them extraordinary and some so difficult, she understood why her father, Leo, had to break loose or die of suffocation—though not why he’d had to break loose and then still die.
By then, she was several years into her work as a hospice nurse. Ben, her friend from nursing school who’d dropped out of a Ph.D. program in philosophy to do what he called real work rather than mental masturbation, had given her his paperback compendium of Nietzsche’s writings. Reading the aphorisms, she was struck by how she’d grown up without philosophical inquiry. Her grandfather had been prodigiously intelligent. After her grandmother’s death, he’d continued their joint studies as a solitary autodidact, expanding his reading to include world history, botany, economics. Every day, he read the San Francisco Chronicle and then a goodly portion of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Every month, he read Scientific American and The Atlantic and The New Republic. He parlayed his studies of finance into shrewd investments of the money he made himself and of the trust from her grandparents that he managed for her brother and her, had an understanding of aesthetics that he expressed in his floral designs. But, he’d never stepped back to ask, What makes a life worth living?
Instead, her grandfather had operated on principles that were for him a prioris. They were good ones—he was uncompromisingly honest in business, he treated his employees and customers with respect, he extended a hand to others—but he never viewed his assumptions as choices, as about himself. For him, they operated automatically, like photosynthesis or osmosis or thermodynamics. Never ever had she seen him question anything he’d done. Never ever had she seen her grandfather wonder what to do.
Never, that is, until her grandfather heard what Garcia wanted, what he was asking of them. Then she’d seen him falter. Briefly, very briefly, but it was the most frightening thing she’d ever witnessed: this man—who’d never budged in his dictates, his injunctions, his mores—broken, defeated.
5
An April Tuesday, 2013
Joy! Riding the elevator up to Prudence’s apartment, two days after their first visit, Grace feels the elation always there after she’s given a presentation. Her first panel, this afternoon, now over: her paper well received and, most important, done, the anxiety dissolved.
The paper was on fantasies about the moment of death. Almost all of her patients and many of their family members have fantasies about how the end will go. Only a few of those whose remaining time is measured in weeks or days, not years or months, imagine the mystical accounts in the bestselling inspirational books: a golden light, a soft voice guiding one through a tunnel, an ambrosia scent of indescribable delight. For most, what they imagine is closer to a horror movie: there is no air, as in drowning or being strangled. A pain so excruciating, they lose consciousness … and then nothing.
Grace has learned that there’s little relation between the fantasy of the final moments and how at peace the dying person and his or her loved ones are with an end looming near—that those anticipating a mystical conclusion are no more likely to have grappled with their goodbyes than those fearing the horror-movie finale. Her job, as she conceives it, is to help a family move the needle, no matter what is imagined, a few notches so as to alleviate the suffering of the last days and the suffering to come for those left behind.
On rare occasions, Grace finds herself privy to something that transcends the focus on the final breath: a dying person so at peace that death is as natural as leaves falling from trees or the waning of the moon. Herman Green, whose sister, Rose, had prompted Grace to wonder what had happened to Prudence, had been such a person. He’d lived alone in the house he and his wife, whose end he’d shepherded three years before, had built an hour north of the city until he had a stroke that landed him in the hospital and catapulted him down the rabbit hole of no return: semiparalysis that made him unable to speak, a broken hip that rendered him bedridden, and then a pneumonia that necessitated breathing supports. When Herman’s doctor proclaimed the discharge options to be a nursing facility or home hospice care, David Green, Herman’s only child, without hesitation arranged to move his father into his San Francisco apartment.
As she always tries to do when severely ill patients are being transported from a hospital back to their or a relative’s home, Grace visited David’s apartment the day before to make sure everything—the equipment, the medications, the care plan—was in place. Usually families were overwhelmed by the details of the transition, but David Green was calm. Over the phone, she’d learned that he was fifty-one, divorced, an evolutionary neuroscientist, his two-bedroom apartment a five-minute bike ride from his lab. “My father can have my bedroom,” he said as he showed her around, “and I’ll sleep in my home office.” Gently, she suggested that a hospital bed would be more comfortable for his father—and looking at David’s height, an extra-long one, she surmised.
While she placed the order for the bed, the foam pad to prevent bedsores, the oxygen tank, the adult diapers, the disposable gloves for the aides, David disassembled his own bed frame. A single bed, she noted. Like her own.
“You’re handy,” she said when she got off the phone.
David Green pushed his thinning hair back from his eyes. “Nothing compared to my dad.” He pointed to the standing desk in his office, where he would reassemble the bed frame. “He built that for me just last year. He brought all the wood here himself, cured and stained and precut to size, from his workshop. But he taught me a lot.” The look she’s learned to recognize of a grown child whose love for a parent has been spared the tannin of resentments spread over his broad boyish face. “We built tree houses and sleds and a go-cart when I was thirteen and certain I was going to be a race car driver. Then, when I became interested in science, he helped me build my first microscope.”
During the twenty-seven days Herman lived after he was installed in his son’s room, he never left the hospital bed, never uttered a word. Still, stopping by each day, Grace had come to know Herman better than patients she’d worked with for three times as long who with a brittle timbre to their voices could have filled volumes with the stories they told casting themselves as heroes or heroines. She’d never heard Herman’s voice, but she’d seen his eyes: the way he communicated without language his deep appreciation of the running eulogy David delivered to him over those final weeks.
“I never thought about what you did for me, Dad, until I was fully grown. It just seemed a given, like snow being cold or cherries sweet.” Tears had streamed down David’s face as he told Herman, “You weren’t one of those fathers who insists that his kid be a planet to his sun, polish his shoes with the same chamois cloth, cheer the same baseball team.”
Herman held David’s hand. He mustered a tiny smile beneath the oxygen nasal prongs. Grace rose to leave them alone, but David looked at her with wet eyes that said Please, bear witness to me. So, while David told Herman stories about what Herman had done for him, she sat at the foot of the hospital bed crocheting, as Angela had taught her. Miniature afghans she made for infants in the neonatal intensive care unit run by Sunny, a Korean doctor who, when they’d met a decade ago, she might have fallen in love with for his rejecting any limit on what he’d do for a newborn with a leaking heart. Might have, that is, had sex worked between them. Given that it had not, she’d been relieved when Sunny and Ben, her nursing-school classmate, became a couple, and she could settle into being the friend they insist sleeps over Christmas Eve so she can in the morning open the stocking they’ve made for her.
She listened while David reminded Herman of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search competition when Herman had stayed up all night checking David’s calculations for the caloric intake of mice raised in the presence of television versus not. While David told Herman that he would never forget that when he finally let his parents know that he was dropping out of medical school after they’d already paid two years’ tuition because he now understood that what he wanted was to study the evolution of the brain and what it tells us about intelligence and the essence of being human, and for this, he needed to study neuroscience, not medicine, his father had said only, “I’m glad, son, that you figured it out.”
Bedridden, in diapers, having to be fed with a baby spoon, Herman had remained until his last breath the adult in the room, never abdicating the responsibility he felt for those he loved. Even at the end when he was sleeping nearly all the time and had passed into a state, Grace explained to David and the aides, in which even yogurt was too hard to swallow and impossible to digest, he would rouse himself each time his sister arrived with her shopping bags filled with containers of the foods she’d cooked for him. He’d let Rose feed him a few spoonfuls of her chicken soup and applesauce, squeezing her arm and nodding his thanks until Grace, concerned about how difficult it was for Herman to breathe with the food in his throat, how it could cause painful diarrhea, would take the bowl and say perhaps Herman would have more later.
* * *
And now, her great-aunt, Prudence, 101 years of age, is greeting her at the door with a kiss on each cheek. With no signs of being near death.
“Here”—Prudence nods at the bench in the foyer—“you can put your things here. Are you hungry? Shall we eat now?”
Grace is hungry, she’d been too nervous to eat more than a handful of nuts for lunch, and she guesses that Prudence is on the early schedule of most people her age.
“Yes. Let me help you.”
Grace leaves her jacket and the tote with the wooden box that had belonged to her grandfather on the bench and follows Prudence into the kitchen. From the way the food is so carefully prepared, the bowl of rice and beans and the platter of okra both covered with plastic wrap on the counter, the cucumbers in the salad peeled with scores of decorative skin on the thin edge of the slices, Grace, having hired and fired countless caregivers for her patients, sees that Maricel is a gem.
