How They Died
Without intending to, my mother ended up alone in a hospital room with my Great Uncle Sidney when he died. In that moment of impossible clarity in which his life was fixed for all eternity because it had at last assumed its complete and definitive form, Sidney said something that my mother knew she needed to write down. Then, in the hubbub following his expiration – the doctor who had to come to certify his death, the necessity of calling relatives and the undertaker, etc. – she forgot to write down what he had said and, by the time she tried to remember, had already forgotten what it was.
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I happened to be visiting my parents in Milwaukee when a call came in from Batya, my grandmother’s closest friend during the last decades of her life and also, purportedly, a relative, though nobody seemed capable of mapping the network of genetic connections within which we were linked. It seemed that the little emergency medical alert device she wore hanging from a lanyard around her neck had started beeping. My father and I drove to her apartment, which was always immaculately kept and a little sad; there, Batya prepared cups of tea that we did not want while we fussed with the device, a little electronic unit with a red button in the center that, when pressed, would send a signal to a 24-hour response center from which a phone call would be placed requesting nearby authorities to dispatch emergency resources to the location from which the signal had been sent. We were unable to put a stop to the beeping on our own, nor with the assistance of the two different individuals on the device manufacturer’s dedicated helpline, who in consultation with one another eventually determined that the best course of action would be for them to arrange to have a replacement unit sent by overnight parcel. In the meantime, we removed the batteries from the defective unit in order to stop the incessant beeping. That night, Batya died on the couch in her sitting room. The position of her body when we found it the next afternoon, after she failed to respond to any of our phone calls regarding coming over to help set up the new emergency medical alert device that had by then arrived, indicated that she had tried without success to reach the telephone nearby.
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I was eight years old and my sister was either four for five (our respective birthdays are such that I am four years older than she is during only part of the year). Our father, who had stayed home from work with a flu and fever that seemed already to have lasted much longer than it should have for someone as young and healthy as we took him to be, was waiting for us at the door when we got home from school. Before we could unburden ourselves of our bags and coats (though it might not yet have been the time of the year during which we needed to be wearing coats), he got down one knee and gathered us up close to him. He said there was something he needed to talk to us about. His tone was grave, and in a flash of terror I realized he was going to tell us was that he was dying. Instead he told us that my grandfather had died and because this meant that he, my father, was not going to tell us that he was dying, I felt nothing but relief and gratitude in response to the news, even though I was old enough to know I was meant to experience grief. My grandfather was sedentary, maintained poor eating habits, and was generally unfriendly, though he did his best to project kindness toward my sister and me by feeding us from a stash of jelly beans he kept on hand for our visits. It must have been some years later that I wrote a poem, a kind of elegy to him, entitled “No More Jelly Beans.” My mother, who periodically found and read the private journals I kept at that age, soon discovered the poem and was so moved by it that she typed it up and gave it to my grandmother, who put it in a frame and displayed it thereafter on the little end table to the left of the sofa in her den. Neither she nor my mother knew that the poem was not a reflection of my feelings about my grandfather’s death but an attempt to provoke the feelings about his death I still felt badly for never having experienced.
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Clarice, who was hard-hearted, died ironically (that is to say, of a heart attack). Bernice, who was unremarkable, simply died.
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Goldie, known as “Big” despite her diminutive stature because at some point in the distant past she had been the older of two Goldies in the family, died mercifully, after fifteen years denouncing life. Those years of bitterness and rage began with a hairline fracture in her tailbone. Until then, she had been known as a cheerful person; afterwards, and with indifference to the fact that it took no more than several months for the fracture to heal, whenever someone asked her how she was doing she would furiously reply: “My ass hurts!”
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My grandmother died in the middle of the night in a fourth floor hospital room with a window looking out over the lights of the city. I was sitting in a chair holding her right hand and, in another chair on the other side of the bed, my mother was holding the left hand. At a certain moment, both of us felt something, a cessation or a departure, and knew that she had died, but in fact she drew one more breath after that. At some point during the strange twilight of the soul that followed, the four of us – my father and my mother’s sister were also there – drifting in and out of consciousness or perhaps no longer certain of the distinction between the two states, while we waited for the undertaker to arrive and take her away in a bag on a gurney, I took a picture with my phone of my grandmother’s face, which already had the waxy, hollow-eyed look of a death mask. The following summer my rental car was vandalized while I was swimming in the Atlantic waters off the south of Spain, and the bag into which I’d packed most of my valuables, including my mobile phone, was stolen. I still wonder if, before disposing of the phone’s memory card, whatever small-time Andalusian criminal had punched out the lock on the driver’s side of my car and stolen my bag scanned the photographs that were saved on it, whether in search of something in particular or merely out of passing curiosity and, if he did, how he felt when he came upon this picture of my dead grandmother, a picture I had never been able to bring myself to look at.
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There were others, of course – Miriam and Mr. and Mrs. Cohn and Selma, whom I hardly knew, and Uncle Doctor, who was a terrible doctor and an even worse uncle, and Ethel, who was smart, and Bernice’s husband Cal … one at a time their time came until one day we looked around and realized that all of them were gone, a whole generation vanished like condensation from a windowpane. It was then that our parents became the old people and we, by the same law of succession, the adults, who, if we hadn’t already, soon enough began having children of our own.