The work of dying (2018)

So they knew. There was no avoiding it for my parents now. They heard the clock ticking. Yet as chemotherapy and radiation began, he remained as entangled in our lives as ever. This is a photograph we had taken at an arts fair that year. It still sits on a windowsill in my mother’s living room.

They told us what they had finally learned. We were all together in the station wagon. I was sitting backward on the flat floor behind the seats, looking out at the cars behind us. My father drove, and my mother sat half turned in the front seat. My sisters sat pressed against each door on the seat between us. They told us that the cancer had spread. And that he might die. I heard them. I asked some questions. And then I promptly forgot the conversation.

There was a moment later when I understood how my mother’s life would change. Only briefly. That strobe-light effect. There was a split second when the light came on, when once again I knew he was dying, and I glimpsed the impact his death would have on her.

He is home from chemotherapy, and I have just come up the stairs to the second floor. I have come up on all fours. My hands are on the rug in the second floor hallway, my feet still on a step below me. At one end of the hallway is a bathroom. At the other end is a linen closet. The bathroom door is open on my left. My father kneels in front of the toilet, vomiting. The linen closet is open on my right. Folding laundry and facing the shelves, my mother has turned her head to watch him.

I listen to my father vomiting, but I watch my mother’s face. She is not speaking to him—not offering sympathy or support in any way right now. She is not even thinking about him. She is thinking about herself. The whole project of our growing and becoming will rest solely on her shoulders. She will be alone in the garden. Just one point of view, not two. Just two hands, not four. And no one to talk to after we are all in bed. The look on her face frightens and confuses me. She is angry. She is so angry.

Yet we still felt like a family. This seemed odd to me later, when our family had changed so much, but grief and grieving had to compete for time with the rest of family life. We still took a photo for our Christmas card. We took it in mid-December, before my father’s hair started falling out. We had bought two ponies in the past few years, but there were three of us. Emily was good humored about having no one to ride.

Then my father offered to be her ride. My mother joined him, and this became our card that year.

“Life is one damned separation after another.” This was something my father used to say. My mother repeated it for years afterward, striving to help us accept and understand. As December passed and January began, he was more often in the hospital. He wore a wig now. His clothes hung ever more loosely around him, and his right arm dangled almost useless at his side. And then a few days after Christmas, a car struck and killed our beagle.

My father went and collected the dog. He carried her home in his good arm. I remember her corpse stretched out on the rough cement floor of our front porch, still soft and supple and warm. All of us stood together around a hole in the garden as my mother wrapped her in a blanket and laid her in the dirt. It seemed cruel that we would lose our dog now, and the experience was magnified by two deaths in his family. One that happened six months before. And one that happened a few days later.

In that big family, twenty years lay between my father and his two oldest siblings. Before anyone knew my father was sick, before he knew it himself, his oldest brother John had died suddenly of a heart attack. This was in early July—perhaps two months before he coughed up blood. And then on New Year’s Day, his oldest sister Emily died in a car accident. She was riding in the passenger seat, without a seat belt, when her husband swerved to avoid a skunk and lost control of the car.

My bedroom connected to my parents’ room through a closet. The closet had two doors, one into their room and one into mine. Both doors were open when the phone rang. My father was still in bed. I saw him answer the phone. He sat on the edge of the bed. I could only see his back and the receiver against his ear. I wasn’t aware of any conversation until I heard him sobbing. Then I went in to comfort him. His head was in his hands, each elbow on each knee, and his sobbing sounded like despair.

Aunt Emily raised him, my mother explained in the kitchen. She was like a mother to him while Granny preached. Sitting at the kitchen table, while he sat alone upstairs, I imagined him still sobbing. It worried me how sad he felt. I didn’t feel as sad as he did. My mother was listening. I didn’t know Aunt Emily very well. I felt so much more upset about the dog. We talked about this for a while, as she cleaned the counters, and then I told her a joke I had heard. She stopped and watched me tell the joke, still holding the sponge in her hand.

A boy loses his dog. The dog dies. And the boy cries and cries for weeks about that dog. Then his grandmother dies, and he doesn’t cry at all. His father sits him down and asks, “Why did you cry for a dog but not for your own grandmother?” The boy nods. He thinks for a moment. And then he says, “Because I didn’t raise her from a puppy.”

I remember her happy, surprised laugh in the midst of all that sadness and her pride in my effort to understand the difference between his grief and mine. But I kept thinking about the sound of his sobbing.

“When you are dying,” my father told my mother, “everyone you love grieves just for you. But you must grieve individually for each of them.”

He knew what his death, the third death in less than a year, would do to his remaining brothers and sisters. They each came and sat in the chair by his bedside, the one against the wall and near his head. With those who said ‘yes’ to faith, he talked about death in the language of their childhood—stories and quotations from the Bible, words and phrases from Sunday services. Some of my uncles told me years later that he had come back to God before he died. My mother and Joe both flatly denied that any such thing ever happened. But this was his first language, after all—his first language for talking about loss and the human experience. I’m sure he felt some comfort returning to it, and I can see how that comfort would have sounded like ‘yes’ (at long last) to them.

He couldn’t have understood what his death would do to us. But he worried about it often. And he wept.

“I don’t want to leave you all,” he said to my mother.

She wanted to comfort him. She wanted to remind him of her strength. “We’ll manage, Clint,” she said. “I think we’ll manage.”

Then he raised his eyes and grinned through his tears. “That’s what I am afraid of.”

“What?” my mother exclaimed. "That we won’t really miss you?"

He could still make her laugh.

“Clint, more than most of us,” Joe remembered later, “was blessed in having many friends.” But their grief for him and his grief for them took so much energy, and he had so much less of that in his final weeks. A friend sat down by his bedside and asked what he could do for him. “Get me well,” my father said with his eyes closed. To someone else, my father whispered, “Sit down, so we don’t have to talk.” A long silence followed. “Don't worry about me,” his friend said. “I’ll just sit here awhile.” And then my father cried. They both cried next to each other without saying a word. And that was their goodbye.

There was an old cemetery at the farm. It sat on the hill above the house, with a view of the valley. The dates on the stones were all from the 1800s, and most of the names were families that once lived on the road. A rusted metal fence, maybe a century old, sagged and buckled around it.

Sitting in that same chair by his bedside, my mother asked him where he wanted to be buried. He wanted to be buried there. She asked him what to do about the fence. He wanted us to replace it. He wanted us to build a stone wall. She laughed. A stone wall was a huge project! He still had enough energy to grin at her. “But I don’t have a second choice,” he said.