LOOKING FOR AN ANGLE by Deborah A. Lott
When I arrived at my Uncle Nathan’s house that afternoon after a few days’ absence, all signs of his dominion over the family room had been erased. The hospice nurses had opened the always closed shutters and taken away the bedside lamp by which my uncle liked to read. For the first time in months, maybe years, the TV sat silent. Instead, the sound of my uncle’s breathing filled the room. With each inhalation came a raucous vibration that emanated from his throat or chest, or somewhere deeper, accompanied by a wet gurgle. I tried to tell myself that the sound wasn’t particularly ominous, not so different from snoring – and hadn’t Nate always been a king among snorers?
Nate remained in the middle of the room, in the hospital bed that had been positioned so he could still watch a baseball game on the big screen TV from bed. Even though he’d grown less and less capable of following the action, and no longer had money riding on the outcome, baseball held him in the realm of the living. “It doesn’t take much to make me happy,” he’d always said, “just give me a baseball game and a chili dog.”
Set at a severe angle, the bed forced Nate into an unnatural sitting position. Though propped up by pillows on all sides, he slumped forward as though he might topple at any moment. As soon as I got close enough to see Nate’s face, I realized he could not have been watching the TV even if it had been on. His eyes looked dull and vacant, his skin gray. I touched Nate’s hand, but if my presence registered at all, it flickered faintly at the edge of a rapidly receding world.
Carrie, this afternoon’s hospice nurse, moved to the foot of my uncle’s bed and spoke to him in the syllable-elongated singsong of a nursery school teacher. She also dressed like one, her bulky, squarish body outfitted in scrubs in an oppressively cheerful pastel repeat pattern of baby animals and their mothers. “Can you hear me, Nate?” she said. My uncle nodded almost imperceptibly.
“You’re doing just fine,” Carrie said. “Just fine.”
My Uncle Nate, my father’s baby brother – my charming, voluble, eccentric, narcissistic, impossible Uncle Nate – was dying. He was the last blood relative of my parents’ generation to succumb – the closest approximation to a father I’d had since mine suffered his final, fatal stroke when I was 29. The fact is, Nate had stepped in as a paternal figure long before that. When my maternal grandmother died from cancer when I was thirteen, my father let go of an already only intermittent grasp on reality. Whatever Nate’s failings, he had one incontrovertible strength: when my father went crazy, he stayed sane.
Regarding himself as family patriarch, Nate dispensed advice for every situation. He bestowed nicknames on the boys I dated. “That Shlepperman’s family is in the furniture business – that’s good, people are always going to need furniture,” or “Moronsky’s got a funny chin – are you sure he’s not mentally defective?” “Don’t sell yourself short,” he’d say. “So what if you grew up in a nutty family, you’re still the prize.”
Nate was bedrock and Nate was dying.
“It must be very hard to breathe,” Carrie enunciated loudly from the foot of the bed, lifting her eyebrows and opening her eyes wide in a demonstration of empathy. Nate weakly mouthed “Yes,” but lacked enough breath to make a sound. It took all his energy to hang on to this small measure of what he recognized to be life-and-death interaction.
“Would you like me to suction your airway?” Carrie held up a large plastic device with an intrusive looking curved end attached to a vacuum bottle.
My uncle shook his head with a little more vigor, “No.”
“This is the only way I can help you breathe. Wouldn’t you like to breathe better?”
An emphatically mouthed “Yes.”
“Can I suction you then?”
“No.”
This went on for several more rounds. As usual, my uncle wanted what he wanted but refused to accept the ordinary channels for attaining it. An inveterate gambler, he was always looking for an angle.
In the days since hospice had deemed Nate to be “actively dying,” they’d begun to provide round-the-clock nursing. Continuity of care being a hospice value, I expected that Vladimir, the buff, kindly Russian male nurse who’d been treating Nate all along would be with him at the end. But Vladimir left on vacation, and a parade of unfamiliar contract nurses – Carrie the latest among them – arrived in continuous shifts.
Leaning over my uncle’s side, Carrie examined Nate’s forehead, then chest, then arms, in a state of gathering agitation.
“I knew it!” she said. “He’s got scabies. Hasn’t anyone told you?”
How could it matter now, I thought. Carrie yanked me by the arm across the room, and once under a bright light, thrust her own forearm before my eyes.
“Look,” she said, tracing her finger over an indistinct rash of raised bumps and scars. “Scabies. I caught it from a patient.”
I shrugged.
“For months no doctor could diagnose it. You only see what you’re looking for. Otherwise you can miss what’s right in front of you.”
Carrie ushered me back across the room to my uncle’s bedside where, after putting on fresh surgical gloves theatrically, she proceeded to pull down the sheet damp with Nate’s sweat. Then she wrenched up his hospital gown, undid the velcro closures on either side of his adult diaper, and exposed his groin. His legs looked inordinately pale and thin, his pubic hair still blonde. Though he was the fairest person in my family, the blondeness of that hair still shocked me. Carrie spread the hair with her gloved hand and traced a path, connecting one red mark to the next.
“Scabies travel,” she said. “See, you can follow their tracks.”
What I saw didn’t look any different from the mysterious eczema that had plagued my uncle ever since he returned from ground combat in World War II.
“I don’t think my uncle would like this, I said. “His niece looking at his pubic hair.” I knew I didn’t like it and turned away.
“He should be quarantined immediately,” Carrie said.
When I looked back at Nate, he silently mouthed the word “water.” Like his brother, my father, Nate had always imbibed copious amounts of fluids – water, coffee, lemonade, soda, whatever he could get – and eaten massive amounts of food. As long as I could remember, if I called and asked Nate how he was, he’d respond, “Can’t complain, I’m sitting up and taking nourishment.” Consumption equalled health. But for days now, Nate hadn’t been able to eat at all. He had reported this alarming loss to me, as he had each preceding decline, in an early a.m. phone call. “It’s the daily medical report,” he’d announce officially, before launching into a phonetic rendition of his latest lab result or the insert on his pain prescription. Born into a family of hypochondriacs, I’d taken the counterphobic tact of immersing myself in the facts of disease and becoming a medical writer. My family often called upon me to act as the interpreter. With Nate, I felt more strongly than ever the tug of an unspoken demand: if I could understand the words why couldn’t I mitigate their meaning? While my family gave free rein to the hysteria that seemed our most instinctual response to any medical crisis, I had identified myself as the one who would remain rational.
But Nate’s morning calls unnerved me. Before I’d had a chance to collect myself from sleep, before I’d even had a cup of coffee or spoken to my husband, Nate’s still-booming voice would hijack me into consciousness: “I’m dying, goddammit,” he’d say. As if I could forget. “Maybe if you took a little more Vicodin in the evening, you’d sleep better,” I’d say. Or, “Ask for a bronchodilator to reduce the tightness in your chest.” Focusing on the body to avoid the emotions. Nate had enough of the latter for both of us. His impending death not only saddened, but outraged him, it constituted the ultimate affront to his narcissism. If he’d survived WW II by contracting pneumonia and winding up in the infirmary on the day his company perished, how could old age have the audacity to get him now?
“I never really believed that anything bad could happen to me,” he said. He’d had the same trouble at poker. He never believed a losing streak could last. Even with all the aces laid out on the table, Nate expected there to be one left in the pack just for him.
I couldn’t believe it either and Nate knew it.
“Ah, you think I’m going to live forever!” Nate snarled on the phone one afternoon. “Otherwise you’d come and see me more often.” “I’m on deadline,” I said. “Forgive me for getting distracted by my own life.” For the past few years, I’d held my work up as a shield to avoid marathon telephone conversations with Nate that had grown more and more one-way. He couldn’t hear me over the phone and wasn’t interested in listening anyway. He had so many life lessons to impart about his hero Winston Churchill, and the loss of civility, and how we “women’s libbers” didn’t understand men. Over and over again the same lessons: did I realize how much of a travesty it was that my grandmother never let me meet my grandfather? Not that my grandfather who was on the other coast ever tried to meet me, of course, and not that he hadn’t died when I was still a very young child, but Nate still idolized his father and considered his mother the force that had kept him away. “He was a great, great guy,” Nate said, “not a by-the-book kind of guy, not like your Socialist in-love-with-their-own-martyrdom parents. Maybe he could have convinced you that you shouldn’t work so hard; only suckers work so hard when you can just hire other people and make it off their labors.” No matter the contentiousness of the preceding conversation, my uncle always closed tenderly and with the same words, “Be a good girl.” Who would tell me to be a good girl now?
Carrie brought a glass of water and raised the straw to my uncle’s lips, but he didn’t have enough breath to suck. Over and over he asked for water, and when the straw met his lips, could not drink. His repetitive, automatic asking reminded me of a battery operated toy whose wheels keep spinning even after it has crashed into a wall. Perhaps he could not remember from moment to moment that he could no longer swallow, or some satisfaction remained in the illusion of having his needs met.
Carrie’s shift ended.
“Wear gloves,” she cautioned Maureen, the incoming night nurse as they crossed paths at the front door. “Don’t let it spread.”
Maureen rolled her eyes. In her mid-50s, her rugged, deeply lined face suggested she’d spent a lot of time in vigorous outdoor activities. She’d pulled her graying blonde hair back in a severe ponytail, and wore simple rimless glasses. Maureen approached my uncle’s bedside, stood silently, head cocked, listening to him breathe. The sound had grown louder and more insistent.
“Wow, it might be tonight,” she said. “He might not even make it to morning.” Maureen sounded excited, as if death were an event worthy of her attendance as opposed to the day-to-day monotony of caring for the terminally ill.
“What’s that noise he’s making?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s the death rattle, honey,” she said. “Didn’t you know?”
My stomach lurched; although I knew that Nate was nearing the end, I did not want him to die today.
My uncle was at home with hospice largely at my urging. In the final months of my mother’s life, though I comprehended that her congestive heart failure would be fatal, I was so terrified at the prospect of losing her that I instructed her doctors to do everything short of putting her on a ventilator to save her. I put her through indignity after indignity, torture after torture to keep some faded facsimile of her in the world. Her doctors colluded in these last-ditch efforts to preserve life at any price. They cheered each time an infection reversed, regarded it as a triumph whenever she emerged from delirium into a few moments of coherence. They seemed nearly as phobic as I was about her dying. Notwithstanding these efforts, of course, my mother did die – still receiving hourly breathing treatments, a feeding tube down her nose into her stomach, an IV in her arm. I didn’t want to make the same mistakes with Nate and he took immediately to the notion of hospice; if the doctors couldn’t cure his lung cancer, why should he let them “mess with” him? Besides, hospice provided better service, “I won’t have to go to them, they’ll all come to me!”
Hospice promised more than a way of avoiding unnecessary medical treatment. I anticipated a crew of gentle, selfless Mother Teresas, enlightened, otherworldly beings operating on some elevated spiritual plane. They would have learned how to accept death with grace and equanimity and could show us lesser mortals how to do likewise. Secretly I wished that they knew something, had seen something that could counter my visceral conviction that death meant a mere dropping off into the void. Perhaps, I thought, their faith would rub off on Nate as well. For my uncle and I shared a deep faithlessness and the existential angst that accompanies it.
When Nate first discovered Ernest Becker’s book The Denial of Death, he called me. “This guy’s got it exactly right,” Nate said. “Everything people do is a way of denying they’re going to die. We think if we make great art, or write a book, or shtup better than the next guy we’re going to live forever. When I’m on a winning streak at the poker table, I feel immortal. But we’re all kidding ourselves because we’re scared. “Am I right? Don’t you think I’m right?” On a roll, Nate demanded my agreement.
“I do,” I said. “But people don’t want to hear it.”
My uncle and I both regarded death as annihilation, and annihilation as horrible.
Maureen took Nate’s vital signs. I held his other hand, bluish along the nail beds. He didn’t react.
“How do you do this work?” I asked.
Maureen said she’d been in the hospice business since the 1970s. She’d raised three children on it. “This work is all I do,” she said. She didn’t date, didn’t have hobbies, she lived – Death. “This week, I’ve already witnessed three – if it happens tonight, this will be four – ” she said.
So this is the Angel of Death, I thought, the one they send in at the end to seal the deal. The Closer.
However intellectually satisfying my uncle found the premise put forth in The Denial of Death, it brought him no solace when he was dying. As death impended, Nate grew panicky. He didn’t long for an afterlife so much as another go-round at this one. “I squandered my life,” he said. “I fucked it all up.” He’d botched his marriage, wasted his talents, done too little for his sons. He demanded that hospice send him one “spiritual adviser” after another. Each in turn trotted up his doorstep, stood at the front door shouting until they could be heard over the blare of his beloved The Golden Girls and my uncle yelled for them to come in: Catholic priest, Protestant minister, and then, the rabbis.
“This rabbi they sent me is just a kid,” he hollered into the phone one day, rejecting a pert but tentative young woman who’d shown up on his doorstep. “I need an old man like me, someone who’s also facing death.” I suspected he longed for the Orthodox rebbes he’d rejected during his Detroit youth, with their massive white beards and long black coats. But most of them were already gone. My uncle had renounced Judaism as a young boy, blaming his mother’s Orthodox faith and her meddling religious parents for turning her against Nate’s father, a gambler and roustabout. When their parents divorced when Nate was only four, my father allied himself with his mother’s family and became religious; Nate with the maverick father whom he romanticized but rarely saw.
When a series of rabbis and none of the other spiritual advisers sufficed, hospice brought in a psychologist, social worker, and finally a psychiatrist. I’m sure Nate didn’t bother to tell them that he’d already spent twelve enthusiastic years in thrice-weekly therapy, ranting and raving, before dismissing his therapist as a quack.
“We didn’t have any rapport,” he hollered into the phone about each of the advisers in turn. “I need rapport.” In Nate’s final days, hospice found him a mystically oriented psychiatrist who assigned the nearly 300-page Tibetan Book of the Dead for him to read. He could barely hold it up. “I can’t get into it,” he told me. “Not much of a plot.”
Maureen and I stood at the foot of my uncle’s bed as she appraised the situation.
“I’d wager he’s about 6 centimeters dilated,” she said. “Dying’s like labor, there’s no turning back. He’s got to stop fighting it.” She said it like a school teacher castigating a negligent student for not buckling down and doing his homework. “A woman with four young children I cared for,” she went on, “metastatic stomach cancer – every time she ate, she threw up, but she wouldn’t get the message and stop trying to eat. She didn’t want to leave her kids, so she kept fighting it.” Maureen shook her head, as if the woman were frigid and not allowing herself to have an orgasm. “It took her twelve days to die.”
My mother’s doctors had regarded death as an enemy combatant, the opposite of all things good in the Universe. Clearly their interventions seemed overkill on the side of life but now it started to seem as if Maureen had made her bargain with the Other Side.
“So what’s the rush?” I asked.
“Death is just a physical process the body goes through,” Maureen said. “There’s no point in prolonging it. When people have one foot in this world and one foot in the other, they need a little help getting to the Other Side. I’m the midwife.”
Having discounted other spiritual beliefs and practices, I’d held hospice in a separate category, the last sacred cow, privileged somehow by its proximity to death. If hospice workers hadn’t glimpsed proof of an afterlife, evidence of some higher, ultimately benign meaning to human existence, then all felt lost. But talking to Carrie, and now Maureen, I began to think that as skeptical as I was, I’d still been naive: these women were just plain kooks, no different than the other New Agers who crowded the supplements aisle at Whole Foods perennially looking for the next miracle elixir, or the aura readers on the Venice Beach boardwalk. And then it occurred to me that if we still believed in Freud, we would not give hospice workers the status of saints. We would suspect unconscious motives in those who dedicate their lives to helping people die; we would expect them to derive some unconscious gratifications. A woman like Maureen who had no other life than helping people die just might hold some libidinal investment in death. She might get a charge from it, a little goose of erotic thrill. Balancing on the cusp of life and death, having her hand on the motor, being tuned into every downward turn, excited Maureen. Death enlivened her. She liked it. Or did I just need a target? Someone upon whom to project my anger at my uncle’s death – anger being easier than grief.
“And what if there is no Other Side?” I said. Would it feel different for you if you knew there was no Other Side?”
“If I didn’t believe they were going somewhere better, if I didn’t believe we were all eventually going someplace better, I couldn’t do this job without going crazy, now could I?” Maureen hooted.
“Have you ever seen any signs, any proof?” I asked.
“I’ve seen what I’ve seen and drawn my own conclusions. But we’re not going to know for sure until we die ourselves, are we?” Maureen laughed.
Nathan groaned and Maureen delivered an eyedropper of morphine under his tongue.
“I wish he would go to sleep and sleep through this part,” she said. “It’s harder when you’re awake.” Was she suggesting he could sleep through his dying and never wake up? Or wake up for the good part at the end? The good part? If my uncle slept, what would he dream of – his own impending suffocation? I realized then that no matter how much he was suffering, I wanted Nate to hold onto every last minute of consciousness possible so that I could hold onto every last minute of Nathan possible.
“What do you suppose he’s aware of?”
“How hard it is to breathe. I don’t think it feels good. He probably feels anxious.”
Please not that, I thought. On my father’s side of the family, anxiety was the family curse. Nate had always dispelled his with three movies a day, multi-volume accounts of Hitler’s last days, with gambling, venting, overeating, Irish whiskey, and women – or at least the fantasy of women.
A few months before his diagnosis, Nate drove me in his ancient Volvo over to the deli where he ate lunch every day. As we waited in line for the cashier, he nudged my arm, “This gal’s got a thing for me,” he said, loud enough for her to hear. He bobbed his head, trying to catch her eye. The cashier, a voluptuous Latina in her late 30s, appeared weary. She cast Nate the benevolent smile the young and beautiful bestow on the old and infirm. He nudged me again. I strained to regard my uncle as the cashier saw him – not as I usually perceived him, a composite of all the ages at which I’d known him, thirty-five and vital, playing baseball with his boys, a lawyer in a dark blue suit and flashy tie in his 50s – but only as an eighty-year-old. An unshaven, disheveled eighty-year-old with a shock of pure white hair standing straight up, soup drips down the front of his shirt, and an old man’s dribble stains down the front of his pants.
“She’s a lot younger than you are,” I said.
“Ah, only American women care about that. Latin women revere their elders; they want a guy with experience.”
“Can’t you do something about the anxiety?” I asked Maureen.
She flipped through Nathan’s chart. “The doctor should have ordered a tranquilizer,” she said. “The morphine cuts the pain, but not the fear.”
The thought of Nate, locked in one spot, trapped in the body and too weak to voice his anxiety even as it overtook him, seemed the ultimate punishment. Waves of queasiness spread through me; I felt dizzy and faint, trapped in my own body, trapped in my own hyper-reactive nervous system. I didn’t want to be here; I couldn’t watch any more of this. I wanted to yell at every friend who told me that being with my uncle when he died would be awesome or inspiring. I wanted to run. If only I could just slip out of a side door, get in my car, and drive. That’s what my uncle himself would have done – he’d avoided other people’s hospital rooms like the plague.
For weeks my uncle had been asking for his misplaced gun.
“If I had my gun, I could take care of this myself.”
“I’ll be there at the end and make sure you don’t suffer,” I promised.
I couldn’t leave. I picked up the phone.
“You’d better get over here now,” I told my brother Paul. “It’s moving more quickly than expected.”
Half an hour later, Paul arrived. As I believe in nothing, my long-haired, intense, sensitive, eccentric, older brother Paul believes in everything – guardian angels, psychic messengers, visitations from other planets, life after death, ghosts among us. Always ghosts among us. Paul shut off his bedroom in the home where we grew up, and where he continued to live with my mother until she died, insisting that it was haunted.
“What went on in our own family was enough to haunt it,” I’d say. But Paul insisted that real ghosts roamed the room, friendly but capable of turning on him. I woke up one night when I was twelve and Paul was seventeen to find him holding a chair over his head, trying to ward those ghosts off.
We shared a love of Nate. When Paul was a boy and at war with our father, he used to tell everyone that Nate, whom he resembled, was his real dad. “You know Mom was crazy about Nate,” he’d say. “It only had to happen once.”
Paul stood at the foot of Nate’s bed and looked at him, shaking his head.
“Poor Uncle Nate,” he finally said. “He was always my champion.”
Eyes teary but blazing, Paul bounded over to where Maureen and I stood. “There’s a lot of energy in the room, a lot of energy,” he said. “Can you feel it?” Maureen smiled, urging him on. “You know, I lost my faith when my mother died,” Paul said, “because no matter how much I missed her, she never came to me. I’ve been struggling to get my faith back ever since.” Maureen nodded. “There really is lots of proof for an afterlife,” Paul said, “even though my skeptical sister dismisses it.” Paul and I reverted to the patterns of our childhood, triangulating whenever a parental figure came onto the scene.
“When they weigh the body after death it’s always exactly twenty-four grams lighter, the weight of the soul that’s exited, and what about John Edward’s communiques with the dead relatives of the people on his show, there’s no logical way he could know that stuff, and the white light seen by those who survive near-death experiences, and angels picking up people who fall down mountainsides and are unconscious and then wake up mysteriously transported to safer ground.”
To me Paul’s rant seemed a rapid-fire defense against acknowledging what seemed so obvious: to die was to be disappeared, absented, lost, annihilated. My uncle was already more than half-gone.
“Okay,” I said, “so if people have souls that go somewhere when they die, then what about apes, and chimpanzees, our nearest relatives – at what point in evolution does the soul kick in? And what about dogs, and if dogs, what about hamsters, and worms and plants, and bacteria, how far down does it go? Why should we be singled out from all other forms of life?”
Paul and I had sparred on this subject so many times before it felt reflexive. He put his arm on my shoulder, as if he wanted to comfort me, and sneaked a conspiratorial glance with Maureen, “My poor little sister, she’s always been so literal.”
“Where’s the economy in immortality?” I said. “An afterlife just seems so . . . inefficient. “I don’t get it,” I said. “I just don’t get it.”
“Why are you so resistant to spirituality?” Paul said. “You go through so much pain by not permitting yourself to be more open.” He patted my shoulder and I pulled away.
What was so bad about feeling better that I had to reject it at all costs? Didn’t a little self-delusion make life more tolerable? I’d held my rationality up as a defense, as if it could protect me from going crazy like my father, as if his craziness had resulted from a surfeit of belief. But faith didn’t drive my father nuts; the Jewish faith of his boyhood had completely eroded by the time his mother died. Grief was what had driven him crazy; maybe losing the people you loved without any faith to sustain you was what made you crazy. And yet, once my father had lost his hold on rationality, the floodgates of belief opened so wide there was no limit to the bizarreness of what they admitted. And hadn’t my brother Paul’s capacity for faith become an indiscriminate appetite that could not be sated? If I willed myself to blind faith without requiring any empirical evidence, how could I be selective about what I chose to believe? How could I keep out the bad ghosts? And wasn’t it my natural propensity to believe most strongly in the bad ghosts? Aside from that, should the mere wish for solace, the mere wish for something to be true, constitute grounds for believing that it was true? Wasn’t our highest obligation as human beings, the obligation to seek truth? I owed it to my uncle to observe his death without illusion. If something should reveal itself, I would try to remain open to experiencing it.
Paul walked back across the room to my uncle’s bed and put out his arms as if feeling for rain. Then he spun around like Julie Andrews in the opening of The Sound of Music. “Can’t you feel the angels in the room?” he said, exultantly. “Oh, yes,” Maureen said. “They’re here.” Maureen and Paul stared intently into one another’s eyes. Was my brother flirting with my uncle’s deathbed nurse? I felt left out. I walked across the room and stood right next to Paul so the energy could not escape me. I shut my eyes, spun around exactly as he had, once, twice, and then another revolution, and another, until vertigo forced me to stop. “I feel . . . nothing,” I said, then started to cry. My uncle’s face had grown twisted and contorted, every muscle and vein popping out with the effort to breathe. And that rattling sound made me want to scream.
“Just look at him,” I said. “How can you not see what I see?”
“You always get stuck on the body,” Paul said. “What you see is only the body struggling; it’s no longer him.”
“Is that supposed to comfort me?” I said. “When all I want is him. If he’s not here anymore, where, exactly, did he go?”
Like a petulant child, I wanted my Uncle Nathan back, in all his unbearable one-of-a-kind self. Restored to his pre-disease state. Better than that, I wanted him back young again. Vital. The way he looked in his Army uniform at age 19, or clowning in the backyard with his mother. Able to start over and not fuck up his life this time. Further, I wished to start over again with him. I pictured us going back together and being the same age, rather than his being my uncle. If I could just get us out of our rigid placement in time, the permutations were endless: what if I were the aunt and he were my nephew; what if I were the mother and he were my child; I imagined all the ways of erasing, reversing, revising this moment. Anything but this inexorable now.
“It’s changing now, can you hear it?” Maureen said. She had perfect pitch for the sounds of dying. I stood at some distance from my uncle’s bed, watching him but not close enough to catch it, as if death were a contagious disease. My brother Paul, in contrast, danced his hands all over Nate, stroking him, rubbing him, willing comfort into him.
“Labor’s picking up now,” Maureen said. The metaphor seemed apt, Nate working hard to keep the oxygen coming in despite what Maureen called the “extreme congestion” in his chest. Weirdly isolated, Nate’s abdominal muscles caved in and out violently below his ribs, in a fashion that no one, except perhaps a Yogi, could consciously produce. My brother stood over my uncle, held his hand over his head, and blessed him. “Eev-a rechacha adonai Eloheinu, May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord cause his countenance to shine upon you and bring you peace.” It was the Jewish blessing that Nate had last received at his wedding, and before that, at his bar mitzvah.
“It’s okay to let go of the body, Uncle Nate,” Paul said.
“No,” I protested silently. But Nate had nothing in his hand left to play.
“I’d like to change his diaper; can you guys help me?” Maureen asked. My brother and I got on either side of the hospital bed and turned Nate onto one side. Paul held his back and I held his atrophied shoulder. As wasted as he was, he was still heavy. Then, with my hand on Nate, I remembered the way my uncle used to greet me as a child, Debela, he’d say, and pull me toward him with his powerful arms, and go for my head, pulling at my hair or rubbing the back of my neck, sometimes even slapping the top of my head to get my full attention.
“Ow, that hurts,” I’d say.
“Ah, it does not,” he’d answer. “Don’t be such a fragile flower.”
Combining self-protection and affection, I took to butting him with my head before he could touch me, pushing my head as hard as I could into his stomach and chest. I could never budge him. “Debela,” he’d say. “My little billy goat.”
“I took a crap in the diaper for the first time,” Nate had told me about a week before. “I didn’t have the strength to get to the commode and the nurse said, “It’s all right, just let go. So I did.” It didn’t seem to have bothered him much. In fact, Nate seemed to have almost enjoyed it, as if in that moment he reclaimed the ideal infancy he’d never had – doted on and worshipped by two united parents. It only took getting to 80 and being on his deathbed to achieve it.
Maureen spoke his name loudly, then pinched his arm just to check. “I don’t think he’s anxious anymore,” she said and laughed. His mouth opened in a wide O with his lips pulled back over his teeth in a grimace that looked monstrous to me, unearthly. Then I realized that the gargoyles on buildings, the ghouls and monsters in horror movies were based on how people looked dying. We’d lost the connection because we just didn’t see people die that often.
“Hold his hand,” Maureen suggested. “Just because he can’t react with his earthly body doesn’t mean he doesn’t know.” I touched his hand – it shook hard, clenched the sheets with every remaining ounce of energy. Burning hot, the heat in his hand made me recoil.
“You get a fever when you die,” Maureen said. “Too late for Tylenol now.”
Maureen pulled the sheet back and pinched my uncle’s white and nearly hairless legs. All the men on my father’s side of the family had shapely, elegant legs. Gorgeous feminine legs. I tried to take every detail in, knowing that this would be the last time I would look at them.
“Look,” she said, pointing at the purplish mottling.
The blood, unable to circulate, pooled in his legs, causing splotches of color.
“He’s already dead down here.”
Maureen delivered another dropper of morphine under his tongue.
The sights and sounds of my uncle’s struggling intensified. If I couldn’t bear to stay in the room with them, I felt too agitated to stay away. So I paced, around the bed, and then into the kitchen, and out to the laundry room, and back across the family room, skirting the bed, averting my eyes, and into the living room. I sat down on the living room couch for a few minutes and cried, but I could not stay still for long. Meanwhile my brother, his hand on Nathan’s forehead, chanted and recited prayers, a melange of English, Hebrew, Buddhist, Hindi prayers. Again he delivered the generic Jewish blessing.
When I finally approached the bed, Nate’s mouth had opened into an even more grotesque grimace and his arms shook as hard as if he were back in the butcher shop’s walk-in freezer where he had worked as a young man.
“Why does it have to be so violent?” I said.
“Let’s put on some music,” Paul said. We went through the channels on the radio – country western – no, not his taste – 60s and 70s rock – too jarring – and found classical music. Chamber music heavy on the strings – the music to die by. We turned on the music on the pretense of calming my uncle but it was really to drown out the ever-more cacophonous death rattle.
“You know even if he were still capable of hearing the music, he was too deaf to hear it at this volume,” I said, denying even the possibility of comfort.
“You never know,” Maureen said, “he might be hearing it with other ears now.” So, according to Maureen, my uncle not only had a soul, his soul had its own body. The duality made me dizzy. Why did other people’s faith enrage me?
Back at the bedside, I took my uncle’s hand. For several minutes he didn’t react. But then, suddenly, his eyes moved in my direction, and with his eyebrows raised, he fought for focus. It was as if he were walking through a blinding blizzard, dressed only in a tee-shirt, and finally recognized me on the road trying to wave him down. When he saw me, the grimace on his face relaxed, and the curve of his mouth transformed into a smile. A dopey, rubber grin, a kind of drunken smile, but a smile nonetheless. Nate was happy to see me.
Recently I’d arrived at my uncle’s house and found him asleep. I’d stood by his bedside debating whether to rouse him. I nudged him gently and he didn’t stir. I cleared my throat. Finally I squeezed his shoulder. “Honey, is that you?” he finally said, uncertain until he put his glasses on. Then he smiled with relief. “Oh, I had the nicest nap. But I was sleeping so soundly I think I’d already died. I had to come back from the dead to wake up.” We both laughed. There was something so reassuring about the notion of a trial run, of a dying that could be rehearsed.
In my uncle’s smile now at his deathbed, an image from his childhood came to me. A family photo that could never have been taken: he’s four years old, driving the cobalt blue pedal car his father gave him. Driving in circles, around and around, smiling that same goofy smile. Nate’s father sent the pedal car shortly after the divorce to let Nate know he still loved him. Feeling vengeful, his mother took him into the kitchen so that he could see the pedal car but held him back by the shoulders. “He only gave it to you to spite me,” she said. “So that good-for-nothing shicher could look like a hero when he’s not even paying child support.” Rebecca never let Nate have the car; she put it out with the rubbish.
The pedal car took on symbolic importance after that. It was the parcel of land on the Las Vegas strip that Nate could have had for a song in 1960, the 50,000 shares of IBM stock he should have grabbed, the girlfriend in Germany he abandoned after the war. “How could I bring a Deutsche girl home to my mother? A Catholic girl whose brother had been in the German army? Gotynu. How could I marry her?”
Nathan lived his life in the shadow of the one that got away – the pedal car, the German bride, the final ace, his father. So he’d always had to have something on the side – a girlfriend in addition to a wife, a way around the rules, an escape clause, an inside tip.
But now, on the brink of losing it all, it was if, for a moment, he got it all back. This was heaven for my uncle, I thought, if he could be suspended for eternity in this moment of pedaling his pedal car and basking in his father’s love.
“I’m here with you, Uncle Nate,” I said.
By the next instant the smile on my uncle’s face had eroded, and, as I watched, the familiar face of my grandmother in her final days passed through my uncle’s. He hadn’t looked so much like his mother in life, but now dying, for an instant, he looked just like her.
“It’s Rebecca – ” I started to say to Paul, but before I could get the words out the resemblance vanished. Then Nathan looked like no one I’d ever seen, his skin yellow and waxen, with one popped out bluish cheek. His forehead pulled back unnaturally, his teeth jutted out, all the parts of his body disassembling and fragmenting. “Just give us air,” they screamed. “Just give us air.”
“Why does he have to look like that?” I asked.
“People dying stop looking like themselves,” Maureen said. “He’s letting go of the body. That’s good.”
Maureen heard yet another tonal shift.
“Okay, it’s time,” she said. “Who’s ready to do this with me?” Paul, Maureen, and I gathered around the head of my uncle’s bed. My brother blessed my uncle again in Hebrew.
“Go toward the light,” my brother said. “Go toward the light.” I tried to do what the occasion called for but my words sounded lackluster. “Go with your father and mother – they’re waiting for you,” I said. The very notion of this reunion felt preposterous. My grandfather and grandmother had been estranged from each other for all those years in life, so why would they be together now? I didn’t know where in this happy family grouping to place my father either. Nate’s feelings about him varied from love to hate, according to the day, sometimes according to the hour, so I just left him out.
Nate was holding his breath in between breaths. And something smelled bad. Had he filled his diaper? Were toxic byproducts released by dying? Maureen applied the blood pressure cuff and listened. “His BP’s only 70/40,” she said. Beaming. With pride? Satisfaction? His easy dispatch was her accomplishment; it meant she had done her job well.
“The struggle’s gone,” she said. “See how peaceful it is?”
Peaceful was not the word I would have used. His hands clawed at the sheet. He was still shaking. So was I, nearly as hard as he was.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Maureen said. The shaking was involuntary, in my body, a sympathetic reaction. I just wasn’t made to be standing by and calmly watching this, I thought. Everything in my constitution called for me to wail, gnash my teeth, tear my flesh, howl, resist, protest. Do what a four-year-old would do on separation from her sole protector. Yet some equal force inhibited me from expressing the horror I felt. This was my uncle, my flesh and blood, his skin, his heart, his lungs, his radiant blue eyes, all of which I loved, and he was being wrested away, transformed, while I could only stand by and watch. I thought I might implode. I thought his death might explode out the top of my head or the bottom of my feet.
No wonder my father went crazy when his mother died. How could we not all go crazy? How could we not be crazy all the time? How could we believe in the illusion of security when we had nothing but the loss of those we loved and then – THIS – to look forward to? None of this was Maureen’s fault and yet, watching her standing there with a look of serenity on her face, I wanted to tear my uncle’s hospice nurse from limb to limb.
“Why are you so frightened?” Maureen said.
What Maureen didn’t know is that I’ve always been afraid of everything – life, death, illness, abandonment, change, loss, having a body, the prospect of not having a body, but now running through what I felt, I recognized that fear was not the dominant feeling. The dominant feeling was nausea. I wanted to throw up. Not only everything I’d eaten that day, that week, I wanted to throw up everything I’d ever eaten. I wanted to throw up my own fleshliness. My uncle’s distorted, contorted, grotesque, bad-smelling state disgusted me. I felt the primal disgust of the living for the dead.
“I don’t fear death,” I said. “I just hate it.”
“Move in closer,” Maureen said. “We’re about to hear his last breaths.” Nathan was beyond the point where he could gather strength from our presence – listening for his final breaths could only be fetishistic. We held our breaths and leaned in over the bed. What was left of my uncle took one round-mouthed gasp, and then one more, and froze in mid-inhalation, mouth open, eyebrows strained. His face immediately took on an even more yellow, waxen cast; as far gone as he’d been, yet another transformation occurred when he died.
My brother Paul sighed and walked across the room, crying and shaking as hard as I was. What united us now had nothing to do with faith or faithlessness; it was an animal response to the death of a loved one. Perhaps my brother’s ramblings about the soul and my preoccupation with the bodily details served the same function of defending us against the grief that fully felt would overwhelm us. I wanted to hug Paul, to join together in grief, but the total weight of our history stopped me.
I circled around my uncle’s dead body, looking for signs that death had brought release. I wished his hands would unclench, his eyelids shut. “Can’t we at least close his mouth?” I asked. “We’d have to stitch it shut now,” Maureen answered.
At least that awful rattling sound was over, and something did feel lighter in the room. The stillness emanated from him, expanded into the space around him. It wasn’t the stillness of an object, not the stillness of the bottle of pills on his night table that he wouldn’t need anymore, nor the inanimance of a vase on a shelf. The freezing-in-motion that comes over what was once alive feels different from the stillness of objects. This stillness drew me in, transfixed me. Dead, my uncle no longer repelled me. If it didn’t feel like peace exactly, it was something like peace.
* * *
Two months after my uncle died, I had this dream: I find a message on my voicemail, my uncle’s voice telling me he’s not really dead. “Meet me somewhere,” he says. “You may not recognize me because I’ll be in a different form, and we’re going to have to resume our relationship on a slightly altered basis.” There’s something creepy and sexually seductive about the rendezvous he proposes. Maybe it’s not him, I think, but someone else impersonating him. I try to get other family members to listen to the tape. Somehow in the logic of the dream, my Uncle Nathan is among them. I keep asking him to listen to the tape and verify whether the voice is authentic, to tell me whether I should go to the meeting. But he can’t help me. He’s sleeping and won’t wake up.
Deborah A. Lott’s essays have been published in Salon, The Los Angeles Times, Lear’s Magazine, and Psychology Today. Lott’s short childhood memoir, “Elephant Girl,” appeared in Open House: Graywolf Forum Five. Her essay, “Trains,” which appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, was cited as a notable essay of the year in The Best American Essays 2004. This is her third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.