False River, page 20
I spent the last day of my father’s life with him in Waitakere Hospital. My sister was due around lunchtime, to boss around healthcare professionals and demand answers and information. She’s very good at this. But one of us needed to be there at all times in case doctors, specialists or the palliative care team drifted in.
When I arrived, my father’s face was masked with a nebuliser. When he opened his eyes he was surprised and pleased to see me. I settled myself in the chair between his bed and the window, and sent some emails from my laptop. The curtains were part-drawn for privacy. Daddy looked tired and yellow, but he could still talk. He whispered to me about the man in the bed opposite.
‘You’ll be able to understand him,’ he said. ‘He speaks Italian.’
He wanted to know when my sister would be there, when Tom would arrive. He wanted me to tell the meal-deliverer that he only drank chocolate Ensure, not vanilla. I feel as though I spent half that day saying ‘My father needs a chocolate drink.’ After Kevin, the nurse who was as slight as a pixie, gave him a shower, I rubbed fatty cream over my father’s back and combed his hair. Most of the time he didn’t feel like talking, so I sat holding his hand.
His chest infection, the reason he’d been admitted to hospital, was still bad. I held the white plastic container to his mouth when he coughed, and mopped the phlegm away with a tissue. When the doctors came to discuss the infection, we all stared into the plastic container to assess the colour of what he was coughing up: was it green or yellow? They wanted him to have some kind of scan, and I asked if it would do anything to prolong his life or make him more comfortable. The answer was no.
I emailed my sister and brother to tell them I’d refused the scan on Daddy’s behalf, afraid that I’d done the wrong thing.
There were three other men in the ward. The man opposite, who was almost certainly not speaking Italian, kept soiling his bed. The man in the far corner was having audible bowel issues and swore or cursed every three minutes.
‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ!’ he shouted when the cleaner came in to empty the rubbish bin.
‘How can you stand it?’ I asked her.
‘I’m ready for him to go home,’ she said.
The man in the bed next to my father’s was much younger than the others. I couldn’t see him but I could hear a doctor talking to him. It seemed as though he had mental rather than physical problems. When his lunch was delivered, it wasn’t what he ordered.
‘Fuck this!’ he shouted, and smashed his plate onto the floor. ‘Real men don’t eat quiche!’
‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ,’ grumbled the man in the corner.
I’d had enough of this ward. My father had said he wanted to die at home or in hospice, not in a room of incontinent foul-mouthed oafs. One of the medical battalions that had marched in and out that morning had said they’d make sure he got a private room. I marched out to the nurses’ desk to ask for the private room ASAP, making the mistake of glancing to my right as I passed.
‘What are you looking at?’ the plate-smasher screamed. ‘Why don’t you put a pillow over your old man’s face? He’ll be dead in a week!’
I stood in the corridor, shaking and crying, spluttering with rage. The plate-smasher kept shouting about how my father was going to die, how he should be suffocated. The nurses eddied around me, patting me on the shoulder, asking me if I wanted to sit down, telling me they were getting the room ready right away.
‘It’s a public hospital,’ one said. ‘We have to let everybody in.’
I went back in to sit with my father, whose eyes were closed. I sat by the bed sobbing, wishing my sister would arrive and fix everything. She would have got the private room sorted by now. She would have told off the entire ward.
The young man was still talking.
‘I’ve upset that lady,’ he said.
Because my father’s eyes were closed, I hoped he was asleep. But he wasn’t asleep. He’d heard the whole thing.
He reached for my hand and squeezed it.
‘Don’t be upset,’ he said.
Dr Tamer is Egyptian and works in a group surgery on Symonds Street, near the university. His identical twin brother also works there, and Tom and I see him — Dr Yasser — if Dr Tamer isn’t available. Sometimes I’m not sure which one I’m seeing, as they look alike and have the same last name.
After my father dies, Dr Tamer is worried about my mental and physical health. Apparently I need to lose weight, drink less and take a higher dosage of citalopram, the medicine Tom refers to as my ‘crazy pill’.
‘Don’t worry,’ I tell the doctor. ‘I’ve got my father’s La-Z-Boy in my office at work.’
Tom and my brother had hauled this into the city for me when we cleared out my father’s apartment. Now I can semi-recline while reading, or even meeting with students. When the weather turns colder, I plan to take a blanket in with me. It’s the closest thing I can get to a Bath chair.
‘So now,’ I say to Dr Tamer, ‘if I feel stressed I can sit in it and put my feet up.’
‘It would be better for you if you went for a run,’ Dr Tamer says, advice I will ignore. I don’t need to run, because I rush about everywhere, always late and in a panic. And anyway, Dr Tamer doesn’t know how delicate I am, how likely I am to fall over just walking across a road. In New York I sprained my ankle walking to a Kmart to buy a Martha Stewart bed skirt. In Auckland I sprained my wrist walking home in the rain after an Ayurvedic spa treatment.
After my ninth or tenth appointment with Neil, the chiropractor, he gives me a card with the word HASTE written in black felt-tip pen. He’s drawn a downward arrow next to it.
‘Less haste,’ he says, giving me a stern look. ‘Carry this with you everywhere.’
Before our next appointment I’ve mislaid it. I’m still hurrying everywhere, trying to cram too much in. The summer is over and I never went to Pakiri, or Little Barrier, or Great Barrier. The summer is a blur.
The evening my father died, I was at home. I spent about nine hours with him at the hospital that day. My sister had come and gone; we’d moved him into a private room. The palliative care team told us a bed might be available at the hospice the next day, but it might be too much strain on my father to move him.
He’d be OK at the hospital, we decided, as long as he was in his own room and had family around him. Tom and I went home to have some dinner.
‘Bye Daddy,’ I said, kissing him on the forehead. He looked at me but didn’t speak. ‘See you tomorrow.’
My brother-in-law left to collect my sister. So only my niece, Rebecca, and my brother were with my father when he said he wanted to get up, to go to the toilet. They tried to help him, but he was too heavy; they needed the help of two nurses. Then my father fell back, gasping for air. The nurses told them to step aside, or outside: I’m still not sure of the specifics. My brother said he was told my father had stopped breathing. But a minute or so later, my brother told me, my father gave a great gasp. That was it. It was awful to witness, my brother said.
My niece rang us, crying. ‘Grandad’s died,’ she said, and a noise came out of me that I’ve never heard before, an animal noise I didn’t believe I could make. Anguish is a sound, I know now, as well as a feeling.
In his hospital bed my father didn’t look peaceful or at rest. His jaw was locked, mouth wide open. His handsome face looked ugly in death, suctioned and mask-like. I sat by his side and took his hand; it was still just warm. The sheets were damp and yellow with urine.
‘Come back,’ I said. It was more of a screech than a sentence. ‘Come back!’
My lower lip trembled, like a pouting child’s. I held his hand and waited for him to wake up, get out of bed and come to me, the way he’d always done whenever I needed him. But he couldn’t come back, and we could do nothing for him. We left the room while two nurses cleaned and prepared him for the undertaker. And then we sat for hours — my brother, me, Tom — waiting for another young doctor to write the final notes in my father’s file, to fill out the necessary pieces of paper.
City to be Abandoned
In 2005 we were living in Louisiana, where I was teaching creative writing at Tulane University in New Orleans. We’d moved there a year earlier, from Iowa City, and had already evacuated for Hurricane Ivan. But this time the hurricane on its way was Katrina, and it looked much worse for the city than Ivan.
On the last Saturday of August I flew back from Denver, where I’d been visiting a friend; the plane had to land in Baton Rouge, 130 kilometres away, because New Orleans airport was already closed. Tom picked me up and we wended our way back along the old river road, past the cane fields and the remnants of nineteenth-century plantations. The highway, I-10, was entirely turned over to contraflow, to help people leave the city.
Early on Sunday morning the mayor, Ray Nagin, declared a mandatory evacuation, the first in the South since the Civil War, when Sherman and his troops were bearing down on Atlanta. We spent the morning carrying things upstairs and packing the car. We lived in a two-storey house, and downstairs was essentially an aboveground basement, typical in New Orleans. Our laundry was down there, along with boxes of paperwork and photographs, furniture we couldn’t fit in our small rooms upstairs, hiking boots, Tom’s bike, all the memorabilia of two lives lived in cities around the world.
We lived on Cucullu Street, one block to the river side of Claiborne Avenue, just below sea level. (In New Orleans, people talk about the lake side and the river side, meaning Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi.) Our street tended to flood in heavy rain, so things we didn’t lug upstairs we placed on shelves or on pallets that kept them just off the ground.
We weren’t sure how long we’d be away. Ivan had kept us away a couple of days, and we imagined this would be about the same, even if the hurricane swept much closer. Our neighbour, Sarah Doerries, kept dropping in to hurry us along; we were going to travel in convoy, with her and her friend, Joe. I worked with Sarah at Tulane; she was my closest friend in New Orleans.
Margaret Orr, the meteorologist on the local NBC affiliate, WDSU, was crying on TV. ‘That bitch!’ Sarah said. The then-governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, seemed weepy as well. Ray Nagin just looked confused, as though he’d just heard about the hurricane and wasn’t sure what to do. Sarah went home to light more candles to St Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.
‘Sarah is a nut,’ Tom said, carrying another plastic tub — Christmas decorations — up the stairs.
We drove in our convoy into Mississippi, creeping along I-10 and then I-55. For the first few hours we kept the windows down and the air conditioning off, even though it was a sweltering day, to save gas. No one was allowed to leave the highway — to refuel or exit — until well into Mississippi. Every car on I-55 had a Louisiana licence plate.
Sarah’s car broke down across the state line and we had to all squish into our Ford Escort. She’d insisted we take this route even though it was the long way to Marksville, where we were going, and Alexandria, where she and Joe had places to stay. The drive to Marksville from New Orleans usually takes around three hours. On the day before Katrina hit it took us fourteen.
Marksville is the seat of Avoyelles Parish, in central Louisiana, with a population around five thousand. Alexandria lies about 50 kilometres to the northwest, on the banks of the Red River: it’s the seat of neighbouring Rapides Parish, and a city ten times the size of Marksville. It was burned to the ground by Union troops during the Civil War. Marksville is a key location in Solomon Northup’s memoir Twelve Years a Slave: the nearest town to the plantation on which he was a captive, it was home to the courthouse, the post office and the gallows. Northup saw it as ‘a small and insignificant hamlet’, and that description stands today, the chief attraction in town no longer the gallows but a monster-sized casino.
Tom and I were staying with Rodney and Paige Rabalais, who we didn’t know very well: we’d met Rodney in New Zealand in 2001, when he was visiting his son, our friend Kevin Rabalais. Rodney and Paige lived in an old wooden house just outside Marksville, near an old Civil War fort site, with a lush garden and an outdoor shower. The house was named Slowness, suitable for the sluggish pace of central Louisiana, where there’d been a drought for months and the September temperatures were in the high 90s every day.
We were anxious and unhappy guests; we drank a lot, and paced the floor. Rodney and Paige let us hog the internet and drove us to friends’ houses to watch the Weather Channel and Survivor on big screens and drink other people’s alcohol.
Late on Monday the hurricane hit, and it all seemed OK until the levees on the lake side of town broke and storm surge flooded in. People died. Houses were submerged. Sarah’s boat, moored in Lake Pontchartrain, sank to the bottom. Our street, like 80 per cent of the city, was underwater. On Tuesday we could see an aerial view on the internet: the lower floor was invisible. We were by no means the worst off, but we did have five and a half feet of water. Everything left downstairs — furniture, papers, our washing machine — was destroyed. ‘City to be Abandoned’, I read in one newspaper online. We were not allowed to go home.
I’d never been prevented from going home before. We hung around Marksville, with its stubby cotton fields and old town square, its giant Walmart where you could only buy white bread, its giant casino on the highway where four hundred people were sleeping, with other evacuees camping out in their cars out in the parking lot. Every house was full, every church. A disused factory had five hundred and fifty people sleeping in it, relying on donated food, cots, toiletries and clothes. I talked to a medical volunteer in town, who said the worst health problem they were dealing with was depression. Everyone wanted to go home, but nobody could.
To kill time, we visited Sarah and other people we knew in Alexandria. The only book shop we could find there was the chain Books-A-Million, which was like Barnes & Noble with a lot more Christian books and no copies of The New York Times.
On our first visit, we browsed a while and ordered coffees. On the counter stood a display of red wristbands, on sale for a dollar with the message ‘I Live for Him’. The sign above it urged customers: ‘Proclaim your faith’.
‘I’m enjoying y’all being here,’ the guy behind the counter said. One evacuee, the day before, had complained that he was chatting with the customers too long, and that there should be more than one cash register open.
‘And I told her, you are our guest here!’ he said. ‘If you don’t like it, you can just go home and swim.’
He told us that his brother-in-law was a paramedic, and he’d driven into New Orleans with colleagues to help the relief effort. After their car was shot at, they turned around and came home.
‘They need to kill some of these looters, he said. ‘Not just wound them, but actually kill them.’
Another customer — grizzled, sitting alone a table without a drink — got up to join the conversation.
‘New Orleans is a terrible place anyway,’ he said. ‘Right now …’
He shook his head.
In Alec we picked up things for the shelters there and in Marksville — towels, diapers, a microwave — with the gift cards friends in other places were sending.
The factory in Marksville — Garan, Inc. — used to make clothes until the jobs moved to Mexico. The sheriff, T-Bill Belt (‘T’ is short for ‘petit’ in Louisiana), owned the building and he’d deputised a guy called Roland Scallan to run the shelter. Roland was supposed to be in charge of a new communications company T-Bill planned to set up there. Helpers were volunteers from the community and inmates from the local prisons, both women’s and men’s.
Paige Rabalais and I visited the factory, a small, stark industrial space with no showers and limited bathroom facilities. In the air-conditioned half, people slept on a multicolour quilt of cots. Folding tables had been set up for food donated by Marksville residents. In the humid half of the factory, beyond plastic flaps, donated items were stored — boxes of old clothes, piles of toilet paper and sanitary items, dozens of bottles of water and canned goods. Someone had donated a refrigerated truck, to store milk, and someone else donated the diesel for it. Another local donated a washer and dryer. Local AC contractors came in to fix the units and make the place inhabitable. Marksville had a population of just over five thousand people, and everyone was helping someone from New Orleans.
Roland was a retired banker with a hoarse voice and a wild look in his eyes. He wore a polo shirt and khaki trousers, and a badge that gave his name but no job title, because he didn’t have one. When I first talked to him, he was clutching a bag from a pharmacy containing an insulin prescription for one of the evacuees, paid for out of Roland’s pocket.
‘People arrived here with just the clothes on their backs,’ he told me. ‘They have nothing. We have children, old ladies — one just had surgery and lost her toes. We just got her a wheelchair. We’re getting prescriptions illegally — we have to. Some won’t go to a nursing home because they want to stay with their families.’
Local pastors visited the shelter to see if they could move evacuees out of their churches and into the factory. People from the state Board of Health came by, ‘asking all sorts of questions,’ Roland said. ‘I’m telling them all kinds of lies.’
The medical professionals there at the factory were volunteers as well, local nurses on their day off. A doctor who was an evacuee himself called in to write prescriptions. The security guards on the door, checking people in and out, making sure nobody had weapons, were volunteers. So were the plumbers who’d come in to unblock the toilets when they got jammed with diapers, and to fix the urinals when someone kicked them loose from the walls. Some evacuees, said Roland, got ‘angry and it’s understandable. There’s so much uncertainty — people don’t know where they’re going next.’
He’d arranged school buses to collect people and take them to the youth centre 15 miles away for showers. Nobody liked that. Nobody liked the way Roland was rationing toilet paper and nappies after he discovered people were stockpiling them, or using them to barter.
