A Good Death (6 page)

I have to admit, on the other hand, that my father has given us the worst example we could have of growing old. Even before he reached his advanced age he never did anything to endear himself to us, or to intrigue us or give us anything to admire in him. No family stories, no memories, no projects with us. The first time he ever shared a confidence with me was this evening, when he admitted to having been lost in Mont Tremblant Park. More than fifty years had to pass before he would let his pride waver. Progress, I suppose, but I still haven’t heard about the walleye he stole from me, or about a thousand other things that I still prefer not to bring up. It’s too late to start settling such large scores, but there may still be time to discover the human being hidden behind the fearful personality, behind the seemingly unemotional man. It’s true that life didn’t make it easy for him. A large family, blue-collar job, diabetes, uneducated well into his thirties—such things don’t lead a person to happiness, or to culture or self-respect. Or any sort of delicacy of feeling. He hasn’t a single personal memory that could be the subject of an impassioned conversation. He dislikes Arabs, Blacks and Jews. Anyone, in fact, who isn’t exactly like himself. He’s not really a racist, but he doesn’t like being around Blacks; however, he’s outraged by the Holocaust, and by what’s happening between the Israelis and the Palestinians. He firmly believes that Americans are racists.

So, when we see my mother suffering from his old age, we worry about how much time she has left, and how much of it he may be depriving her of. In short, we worry that my father’s illness is killing my mother. What a disturbing paradox, that a dying man can assassinate his perfectly healthy wife.

Mireille the Homeopath tells my mother that my father must be made to understand that exaggerating his illness will only make it worse. He’s not stupid. Maybe there’s some kind of therapy… What doesn’t he understand? Life, his new life as a person who’s dying? Mireille, would you accept the fact of your own death, sitting like this at a table groaning with cheeses and Christmas cake and bottles of wine, none of which you are allowed to touch? But I don’t ask you the question. My mother is looking at me, knowing how much I would like to say something cruel, and nothing makes her sadder than to see her children, whom she loves equally, not loving each other the same way.

“Some wine, Mother?”

She perks up (amazing how she can shift from distress to obvious pleasure in a matter of seconds) and holds out her glass to let me pour her a finger of red. She looks up at me, pleadingly, it seems to me, though I’m not sure what she wants me to do. Probably not get into a discussion that she fears would end in discord. I think about the man who had to work so hard to lie down on his bed and let his eyes make their slow and painful voyage from the piano to the organ and the stereo. My father the deposed dictator, asking for a glass of wine, like Pinochet begging for mercy because he is old and senile. And so I speak up, wanting all the parallel conversations around me to stop, but of course they’ll never stop in this family, and so I find myself speaking mostly to myself.

“Let’s be serious here. Wine, cheese, bacon, fat, steak, never mind lobster and calf’s liver—none of these things are good for Dad. And since emotions are also dangerous for him, it would be best if we deprived him of the pleasure—which is an emotion—of coming to our wedding. Walking isn’t good for him, either. I know, he falls down regularly. He no longer likes to listen to music. He used to love the sound of his own voice and now he can no longer talk. We argue with him, tell him he can’t do any of the things he likes, in the hope that it will prolong his life. We let him live while we await his death.”

“You want to kill Mother.”

The voice is both Medical and a bit Buddhist. My mother studiously nibbles a crust of cheese, like a mouse, oblivious to everything around her. She even picks up the crumbs from the table with two trembling fingers.

Two deaths have been announced. My father’s death will free my mother, hers would kill him. A nice problem for a family.

I’m beginning to realize how hard it is to watch someone you’ve been living with for sixty years die, even if you don’t love him. Just as it is to watch someone who’s supposed to be dying go on living. I know how much my mother’s life has shrunk since my father’s began to end, neuron by neuron, and how, tired and defeated, she no doubt prays to God to give her back the husband she married. She has chosen to become the protector, the guardian, the nurse, but she also has to be the mistress of the house, the decision maker as well as the one who carries out the decisions. Did she choose that? No, probably not. Women of her generation have a sense of duty and long-suffering stoicism that benefit everyone around them, children, brothers, sisters, husbands. She has become both the father and the mother of the sick child that is her husband. If my mother is shrinking, it’s probably because she is neither a man nor a woman, because she has assumed the responsibilities of both sexes and none of the pleasures. She doesn’t actually live in her house, she functions. Although I understand these things, I say nothing. I keep my own counsel.

“Well, the neurologist told her that…”

The neurologist, as his title suggests, talks a lot about neurons but rarely about my father. He measures electric impulses, notes which ones are malfunctioning, describes deficiencies, forecasts storms in my father’s brain and the destruction they will leave in their wakes. Neurons feel neither happiness nor pain. He, too, thinks that all strong emotions must be avoided—for electrical reasons, if I understand his explanations correctly. A too-strong emotional charge would overload the circuitry, possibly causing a power outage. At this he gave a small smile of satisfaction, apparently pleased with his own reductive joke. I asked about happiness. He replied that in such cases—that is, in the world of electricity—happiness and pain belong to the same family, demolishing in a few words everything previous generations have taught us when they said that happy people live better and longer lives than unhappy people. Science has progressed backwards. My father is an electrical panel.

My mother has turned the family room into a kind of pantheon to her successes and happiness, which means to her family and her children. We are seated in a kind of shrine, surrounded by icons. Each of us is represented by at least one photograph. We are actually visiting ourselves. My mother chose each photo after patiently going through the hundreds in her albums and boxes, which she dusts off regularly. Those of our children have places of honour. Then come my mother’s favourite brothers, set beside her own mother and father. Then Richard at the piano. The biggest heartbreak of Mother’s life, the schizophrenic child who could play Bach from memory, our whipping boy, who began to die the day he was born because of a stupid hospital error. If he were still alive, I’d be eleven months older than him. We went to the same school for two or three years, and everyone kept asking me why he was so backward, why he was so bad at skating or playing baseball, why he didn’t always understand questions that were put to him, and if I couldn’t duck the question I’d pronounce the fatal sentence, that my brother was a blue baby, he had a bad heart because he’d been deprived of oxygen at birth. I didn’t want him to be my brother, just as in the supermarket, as I walked behind my father, who was dressed like a beggar, I wished he wasn’t my father. I was ashamed of being my brother’s brother and my father’s son. I look over at Richard’s photo, at the timid smile playing at the edges of his thin lips, and I am ashamed. One day my mother told me that Richard was aware of his failings and that that knowledge was the greatest of his sufferings. That was when shame and remorse overcame me. I should have been his hero, the one who protected him, tolerated him, accepted his difference with generosity. But to be that person, I would have had to know who I was and be satisfied with it. I hated being my father’s son, hated being a member of his family, since the family was something he had created. When you feel small and insignificant, it’s easy to seek refuge in spite, which is the pride of the weak.

“Yes, but what about Mother…” someone says.

“Yes, but Dad…”

I don’t quite know why I’m so insistent tonight on my father’s well-being and happiness. Normally our conversations about our parents’ happiness centre on that of my mother, as though my father’s happiness vanished forever with his diagnosis. Perhaps it’s because my father hardly ever talks anymore, and when he does he seems to be giving in, almost as though he’s trying to please us after so many years of arguing, grumbling and shouting. We know nothing of his desires, of his life—nothing.
We make it up.
My mother never hides anything from us. When she has indigestion, when she’s constipated, when she cries or feels sad or angry. But the longer my father lives, the less we know him. We are condemned to speculate about a human being, which is a dangerous exercise.

“You should go over and talk to your brother. He looks sad. He seems to be somewhere else.”

I find him hiding in the kitchen.

“Everything all right?” I ask, steering him into a corner.

“Yes, I’ve never been better in my life.” He hesitates. “I’m having an affair, I’m crazy in love for the first time in my life. But I don’t know what it is, with Mother I feel shy, as though she knows I’ve been cheating on my wife.”

We’ve always known that we can keep no secrets from our mother.

“Have a glass of wine and relax, Claude. That wasn’t what she thought. She thinks you’re unhappy.” But you’ll let her in on your secret soon enough, because lacking something—I don’t know what it is, maybe Dad—we vent ourselves on Mother, confide in her about our worst secrets, our most embarrassing weaknesses, we clamour for her help and understanding, her solicitude, her money, whatever we can get. Maybe that’s why she’s shrinking. With our wives and their lovers and our children and mistresses, it’s like we’re dumping fifty lives on her.

On the walls of the family shrine everyone has his or her
ex-voto,
except my father. In the great hall we are all heroes, except him. When I asked my mother why there was no photograph of Dad on the wall, she didn’t hear me.

“ NOW CAN WE OPEN OUR PRESENTS? ”
IT’S THE TRAGEDIENNE’S SON, THE ONE WHO
EXASPERATES HIS MOTHER BECAUSE HE IS NOT
doing well in school but amazes me with his gift for repartee and his sense of responsibility. When I ask him about his grades he pulls the universal adolescent face, which is a way of transforming embarrassment into a refusal to show any emotion at all. You’d think he was seeing the same doctor as my father. His name is William, in honour of Shakespeare. He’s standing in the doorway and looking at us with a sardonic, almost spiteful smirk, as though we’re all a bunch of degenerates.

He has a point. It’ll soon be eleven o’clock and children believe there is more to life than eating, talking and drinking.

Freed from the difficult task of organizing the lives they’ve been trying to resolve, those attending the informal family meeting at the far end of the table all shout joyfully: Yes! The presents! Come here, children! Come sit by me, my mother murmurs, but no one hears her. She smiles and places herself in the beatific circle of mothers who live only for their children’s happiness. To whom was she speaking? As has been the custom in recent years, William takes his place in front of the enormous pile of presents and begins to distribute them. He produces a red Santa Claus toque and places it proudly on his head. Ho ho ho, he says, choosing a wrapped gift at random and reading the card on it.

“Grandpa…”

He looks around the room. Grandpa’s asleep, someone says. We’ll give it to him tomorrow, someone else adds. I don’t think he’s sleeping.

HE’S STARING UP
at the ceiling. We can both hear the bursts of laughter and cries of happiness coming from the family room. He’s a thousand miles from the Christmas tree, listening in on pleasures he can have no part of.

“I have a gift for you.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you want me to open it?”

“No!… Give…”

It’s an order. He says nothing more, but I understand. I should have expected his response, which more or less says he is still capable of untying ribbons and tearing off wrapping paper, of opening a gift and finding out for himself what someone has given him. I hand him the present. It looks like a book. He rests it on his chest and inspects a different part of the ceiling. He hands the gift back to me.

“I… don’t… hmmm… my… glass… es.”

I show him the book.

There’s really nothing you can give a dying man that will mean much to him, except perhaps opiates or a good death. The former you can only get illegally, and a good death is hard to arrange. You might be able to find him a friend, but a friend isn’t something you can pick up at the drugstore. This is a book, a beautiful one, about ancient Egypt, one of his great interests. It’s the gift of someone who thinks he’s still alive, a kind of acknowledgement of the militant autodidacticism of his past. A nice homage to this man with no formal education but who spent hours telling us about Ramses and Tutankhamen and the secrets of the pyramids and the riddle of the Sphinx. He opens the book, mutters something and closes it again.