Love and Fury (2 page)

Joe and I wanted to get him help with whatever continued to afflict him, depression or post-traumatic stress, to either of which, it seemed to us, he held clear title. Once he told me that sometimes during the day he sat there in his chair just thinking, and that when he looked up at the clock, hours had passed. “What if you had all your thoughts at once,” he asked me, “do you think that would be heaven or hell?”

In our household, it's my daughter Veronica who's most given to spiritual questions. A few years ago, she prodded me about my atheism, about my turn, long before she was born, from Catholicism, from religion in general. “So, Dad, you really think that when you die that's it. That there's nothing after that?”

“Well, think about it. There is no ‘after that,' not for the person who's dead.”

“But what happens to you?”

“I think you just become part of the fabric of things. You get buried or burned, and everything gets used making new life. That seems beautiful to me, don't you think?” I may have used the Buddhist metaphor of a raindrop falling into the ocean. I may have quoted the Canadian poet Irving Layton: “Death is the name of beauty not in use.”

“But that's your body, Dad. I'm not talking about your body. I'm talking about
you.
”

“Yes, but I don't think there's a me separate from my body. I think I'm a story, maybe a poem, that my brain composes. That's how come I've been so different at different times in my life. I'm composing from the materials at hand to be what I need to be. Once I don't need to be anything, I can let all that go. I mean, it will go when my brain dies.”

“No, wait. You said
you
were composing yourself, not your brain. Your brain is what you use to do it. What about
that
you? See what I mean?”

“I just think that all that makes me useful or important is what I do, and this one life is all the time I have to do it in. Maybe you live on in other peoples' memories.”

“Aarrrrgghhh! You are so frustrating!”

I didn't mean to be. It just seems to me that to believe in a separate spiritual destiny is a kind of metaphysical flight from our common predicament: we're dying. And what is perhaps worse: people we love die. But I understand her yearning, and her wonder. It is impossible not to wonder what happens to the dead. To insist that nothing at all happens is one thing, but not to
wonder
means refusing to allow the play of imagination on the very ground that probably gave rise to it. Whatever else might our inescapable fear be for, if not for us to transform it to wonder? It is foolish to put all of one's energy into not speculating, into a refusal to allow the mind both comfort and enchantment. Why diminish life? In this case the absence of dogma is the same as dogma; both positions are orthodoxies that forbid the myriad stories that offer themselves: not for belief, but for further wonder. It is to answer
What if?
with
So what.

“It's a death sentence is what it is. Clear and simple.” I'd been on the phone with him from my desk where in the ten minutes since he told me of his diagnosis, I was Googling and scrolling through websites about myelodysplasia, cherry-picking any stray bit of information that made things more hopeful. A premalignant condition. Often leads to leukemia. Often isn't always. “What kind of treatment are they talking about?”

“It's all about good days now. So long as there are some more good days I'll hang in there and fight. Once there are no more good days ahead, then the hell with it.”

“I'm looking at it on the Internet right now. Some people beat this thing.”

“Not when you're eighty. Don't be fooled. When you're eighty, you don't beat anything.” There was no self-pity in his voice. There was something to his inflection, his timing, his timbre, that was different, something that seemed strange and out of place to me. I figured he was in some kind of shock.

“I want to read up about this and talk to some people here,” I said. “I'll call you tomorrow.”

“You do that.”

Half an hour later, my brother called me. “Yeah, hi,” he said. “Dad told me to call you. He said call your brother and see if he's okay. He said you seem to be taking this worse than he is.”

Soon after that I had a dream: I was in a room with a giant map of the world on the wall. I held a long wooden pointer with a black rubber tip like the nuns used to use in school. My father was sitting on a kind of black leather throne with a gold seal of some sort above it while I advised him, explaining that this little war here, and this one here, and this one, and this one, were threatening to soon run together and become World War III. As I waited for his response, I saw fire at the windows, fire all around outside. It had begun. “I told you! I warned you!” I yelled at him.

“Yes, but what the hell did you expect me to do about it?”

How do people know how to grow old, how to cope with diminished physical prowess, with pain and stiffness, how to “act their age?” My Aunt Kitty, even at her ninetieth birthday party, insisted, “Don't you treat me like an old lady! I'm not an old lady!” And we had only her chronological age as evidence; nothing else, nothing in her behavior anyway, suggested she was wrong. At her party she wore a golden plastic tiara one of her great-grandchildren had bought for her, several leis around her neck, jingling bracelets, and high heels. Though the party was in her honor, she went from table to table making sure people were having a good time, sometimes chiding the shy, pulling them from their folding chairs and leading them across the room to introduce them to someone. The party took place at an assisted-living facility where my aunt volunteered. She lived alone in her own home and drove to the facility every day “to help take care of the old people.”

I recall watching my aunt at that party and thinking that if her joie de vivre was denial, then I hoped I had developed something like her capacity for it.

Only a year after that party, she fell in her living room with her well-dusted Hummels and dolls and family photos covering every surface, and broke her ankle. She was able to turn on her television for company, but she couldn't reach the telephone. One of her five daughters found her that evening when, unable to reach her by phone, she grew alarmed.

When Margaret, no young woman herself, couldn't get her off the floor, she said she was going to call for an ambulance. “The hell you are! You just bring me some ice for this thing. I'm just going to stay put and get better.”

“Mother, I can't even get you off the floor, and the bathroom's upstairs.”

“You just bring me some ice cubes in a tea towel for this here ankle, and a coffee can to piss in. I'll be all right.”

Although my aunt was treated at the hospital and sent back home, things were never the same. Her daughters took turns taking care of her in their homes, after bringing her back to her own little house of knickknacks and porcelain dolls and framed photographs for a few hours a day just so she could be there, just to try to help her hold on to her life.

As she wasted, she lost her hearing and would not even consider a hearing aid. We experienced her as withdrawing, and my father, in our telephone conversations, always referred to her as “fading” or “disappearing.”

I remember, sometime after that, sitting in her living room with my father, who teased her, loudly, “Jesus, Kitty, you're disappearing. There ain't nothing to you no more. You were always a big strapping girl!”

“Ha,” she said, “I was never big, don't you dare call me big.” And she turned to me and winked, “I had a pretty nice shape on me, though; a pretty nice shape!”

My father, on the other hand, began referring to himself as old soon after my mother died. He was fifty-nine. If Joe or I tried to convince him to take a trip—in my case to come to visit his grandchildren in Boston—or even to just get out and have some fun, he'd reply, “Leave me alone. I'm an old man and I just want to sit here on my ass.”

And in the long view that's what he did for nearly a quarter century after my mother's death. But that's too dismissive. And although he was clearly depressed, I don't want to reduce him to a diagnosis. For company, he had his huge TV, and if he was awake it was on. (Actually, I came into the house on more than one occasion to find him asleep in front of it, even though I could hear it a block away when I parked the car.) Staying in the house, especially visiting with kids, was hard. There was no escape from the massive, booming presence of that TV; it vibrated the walls, the floors. If you went upstairs to bed, you lay there until the late show and then the late-late show were over.

It was a gray November day in 2006 and I was in the supermarket when my cell rang, by the dairy case if I remember correctly. I saw the call was from “HOME” and figured it was Veronica, maybe asking me to pick something up.

“Daddy, are you coming home soon?”

“Soon as I check out here. I'm at the supermarket. Why?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Why? What's up?” I was keeping my tone light, but only because I could hear panic edging into her voice.

“Just come home.”

“Why? What's happened? Veronica?”

“Daddy, just come home.”

I rushed around the store, shopping list in hand, worry mounting. Veronica was only eighteen, but she was already a junior at Boston College, studying nursing. Had she failed a test? Had she cracked up her car?

“Sit down,” she said when I had piled the groceries onto the kitchen table and taken off my jacket. She handed me some kind of stick, something like a thermometer with a window in it. In the window were two pink stripes. Although I'd never seen one of these before, I knew what it could only be. In the chair across from me, her legs pulled up so that her chin was on her knees, Veronica looked terrified.

“Well, wait a second,” I said, “one of these lines is pretty faint, and it doesn't really extend as far as the other. Besides . . .”

“Dad.”

“I know. I know. I'm just trying to slow things down so I can take this in.”

“But what should I do?”

I can't recall exactly how the conversation unfolded. She did tell me how it happened, how she and a guy she knew from high school had met again at a party and gotten carried away. “It was only one time!” she blurted.

I made a face at her.

Laughter through tears. “But what do I do now?”

“It all depends what you want to do.”

“Mom's going to tell me to get an abortion.”

The way she spoke the word “abortion” spoke volumes. The thought crossed my mind that she might carry this baby to spite her mother and her mother's feminism, which of course had afforded her the choice, among so many other things in her life, in the first place. This was quickly followed by the thought, the understanding really, that for all her demonstrated competence in the world and her quick intellect, she was still an adolescent daughter struggling to become autonomous, and that realization made this whole situation seem even sadder.

“It's your decision to make.”

“What do you think?”

What I thought—or at least thought I thought—was that this was not the time in her life for a baby, and not with a young man she hardly knew (and whom I'd never met!). If she wanted to have a child with him, she could choose to do that—later. This was an accident, a mistake, and an ill-timed invitation to a new and very different life, an invitation to be declined.

But what I felt, and what seemed to easily overwhelm my thinking, was something else entirely. I felt a hot splash of joy right in the center of my chest.

My father is explaining that he thought it best to name my brother as executor of the will, since he is local. He has also given him power of attorney when it comes to medical decisions. Well, he hasn't actually filled out the paperwork, including a Do Not Resuscitate order, but he assures us he is going to do so. His signature there will ratify something he'd said to me on the phone a week or so earlier. “Just promise me that when I go you don't let them bring me back, you hear? For Christ's sake, it's bad enough to have to die once.” I know he's had a similar conversation with my brother, so there's something about this meeting at the scarred and wobbly table that is formal, official, like closing on a house. My father is “passing papers.” Earlier he'd said, “After supper tonight I'd like to sit down with my sons and go over some things,” as if we were not the sons he was referring to. And in fact there is something detached and ceremonious about the way this is unfolding. “So. Any questions before I close up this box? Anything unclear you want me to go over again? No? Good.”