The Death Chronicles
Diane’s sister, Patti, was diagnosed with breast cancer at 42 and died at 50. Her illness nearly destroyed Diane, and it carved up our marriage. We worked in tandem to do our part to care for Patti, from her first treatment through her remission and on until she died, a shriveled version of the former long-tressed and sometimes topless bareback rider. Patti’s misery and anger at her illness were understandable, but less so her need to wrap those feelings around those closest to her.
Patti’s stomach defined her illness. She vomited food, pills – everything – including her anti-nausea medicine. Rare was the visit when we didn’t watch her wretch. A year before she died, we celebrated Thanksgiving, not in our dining room with linen table cloths, flowery centerpieces, and the chatter of multiple conversations, but at their neighbor’s in NH, serving turkey and gravy and bottles of scotch.
I remember our last Thanksgiving together as Patti sat motionless with that vacant stare of someone with a forever more nightmare. I sat with her that night, and she told me she’d been haunted by a dream during her last hospitalization. Patti said she shivered on a cold steel table in an airport hangar, with people passing by, ignoring her. A nurse approached and told her she had no blood and then turned off her I.V. Patti couldn’t escape the dream; she couldn’t shake the loneliness, which felt to her like death. Too sick to last the evening, we drove Patti back home to her own bed and left her … alone?
Patti’s vacant look informed her sister Diane’s every subsequent decision about her treatment – terrified she would die the same empty death as her sister.
With Matt, our son, and Diane’s mother, Florence, in the backseat, Diane, haunted by Patti’s stare, cries all the way home. We drop Matt off with his grandmother, and as soon as we pull into our driveway, Diane steps out of the car and howls. I can bear her tears but not the sounds of a dying animal caught in a leg trap. I gaze at the stars, the high, thin clouds scudding past the moon, and feel trapped in my nightmare as Diane’s wails echo. She flees outside for refuge in the downstairs bathroom but cries for hours lying on the hard linoleum floor. I can do nothing to console her. It was the worst day of her life, yet she had another year of Patti’s misery to face. She knew it, and I knew it.
When Patti’s cancer returned, sometime before that Thanksgiving, we called her husband, Peter, and told him we’d help tell his girls, Kate, sixteen, and Emma, thirteen, that their mother’s disease would now end her life. We sat down at their dining room table, Peter and the girls on one side and Diane and I on the other, gingerly explained the unexplainable. “Your mother’s cancer is back, and she probably won’t get better.” Kate sobbed, and Emma looked at her sister and cried too.
During Patti’s last months, we visited her weekly at home or in the hospital. When we weren’t caring for Patti, I’d drive to Indiana to help my dying mother contend with my crazy, angry father and my soon-to-be crazy, angry siblings. Months passed, and as Patti withered, so did my mother. I was convinced they would die the same day, but Patti died in November ’05, and my mother did not until July.
I became Diane’s only target during much of Patti’s last year. She felt I didn’t support her when she disciplined our son, that I belittled her, that I scorned her. “You disdain me,” she said. Her words felt so foreign that I couldn’t help but laugh, which increased her rage.
My head was full of her yelling at me as we drove home after dinner with friends. I didn’t pay her enough attention; she’d say I was dismissive or mean in some way. That couldn’t be where her fury came from, but instead, alcohol and her grief about her sister. Minor transgressions, surely, don’t merit this. Diane’s gone, and I now see how right she was; I just couldn’t see over the walls I’d built and face my failings. I was passive-aggressive and, therefore, just as mean as she. We had a lifetime together: I’ll take half the blame.
Everyone, including her older sister, Susan, knew Diane drank too much – all they had to do was hear her slurred speech. I couldn’t stop her and was embarrassed to sit next to her as she spoke. It always happened: dinners here with Matt’s friends, dinners alone, meals out. One night, she fell down the basement steps and nearly broke her nose – her forehead bloody and her cheeks black and blue. I gave her no comfort; I was too angry. She stopped drinking for a short time.
September 03, 2005, a month before Patti died, Diane’s older sister, Susan, called me at 7:30 in the morning and said, “Michael, Jimmy died.” She explains that her husband woke up in the middle of the night after a full day of house-related projects, feeling not in pain but odd. Alarmed, Susan calls 911, and Jim dies while she is yelling, “I love you, please don’t die on me.” I refuse to wake Diane to tell her and instead wait until she comes down for breakfast two hours later. Diane stares at me in disbelief.
A month later, on November 08, Peter calls me as I’m rebuilding a porch, and hems and haws before he says, “Patti died. Can you tell Diane and Susan?” I say, of course, and I drive to Mclean to comfort Diane, who cries but is also relieved that Patti, after so many years, is finally free from pain. We go to New Hampshire with Matthew to see Patti one last time, and I reminisce about the thin, auburn-haired fifteen-year-old, her first marriage and photos I snapped in front of the screaming yellow forsythia, her second marriage to Peter, the birth of her two girls, but mostly about her last year, her final days.
A month before the end, Sally, Patti’s lifelong friend, leaves her job and family to move into Patti’s house, where she sleeps on a mattress in the living room and helps Peter with round-the-clock care. The last week of Patti’s life is behind a drawn curtain. I watch Sally beg Patti to pee in bed. “Baby, just go in the bed. Fuck it, baby. Please, pee in the bed. Fuck it. Just fuck it.” Patti’s dignity prevents her, and I help Sally move that frail, pain-wracked body from bed to commode. I fully understand the pathos around me and feel my tenuous connection to reality. So much of what I see feels like the worst chapter from the worst book. Three months later, I’ll be helping my mother from her bed to her toilet.
The service for Patti was well attended by friends of Kate and Emma, Peter’s work friends, and many family members. Susan, too bereft by the loss of her husband a month before, can’t manage to travel east. I print photos of Patti: On her horse, at her wedding, of her with her children, bumming around California, under the quilt donated by her library friends as she lay dying, and glue them all to poster board. The funeral director walks me to the corner of the room, and I set up my gallery. After the service, we drive back to Peter’s house to share drinks and stories. Peter can’t force himself to bury his wife’s remains, though Patti had picked a spot in the yard under the shade of a growing tree. What’s left of her rests on a shelf in the closet with beer and winter jackets.
In late June ’06, I returned to Indiana to look into hospice options for my mother. My younger brother, Peter, is exhausted from his round-the-clock care, and my father finally admits that he’s unable to manage his wife – he can’t possibly handle the toilet transfers from bed to commode. Peter finds a hospice center nearby, and I walk with my father, praying he simply gives up control and agrees to allow his wife to die there. My younger brother is obsessed with his mom dying the death he wants, in his control, and will resent this move.
The building is bordered by busy streets and single-family homes. The rooms are airy and have beds near sliders that face the outside courtyard, fountains, flowers, and birds flapping in bird baths. This is a place I know my mother will love and which looks ideal to me. My father reluctantly, at first, agrees, but when he learns that insurance will cover the costs he smiles broadly. A wealthy enough man but forever the child of the depression.
My mother moved to the Hospice where she’s loved by staff, serenaded by friends with cello and flute, given massages, and visited endlessly. We’re all happier except my younger brother, who feels alienated from the process (“Hospice was meant to be a respite only, not the place where she’d die!), and then my sister, Joan, arrives. I’ve urged her to come to see her mother before she dies, as Joan’s absence the last year has been troubling. I’d ask my mother, “Where’s Joan?” and she’d turn her palms up. However, Joan wars with my brother, Peter, over appropriate nursing care, and with my brother Brian and me over the money, we agreed to pay Peter for his time. It’s vicious and public and unwarranted, and as my mother dies, so does Joan’s relationship with her brothers, whom she will later accuse of killing her father and trying to steal his assets.
The last year of Helen’s life was a gift to us all. She rarely complained; she exercised by walking around her block and did so even as her last aided walks were better measured on the face of a sundial. Friends who stop in to make her feel better leave feeling better themselves. As Caroline, one of her caregivers, said, “Your mother wakes up in the morning with vomit on her shirt and all she wants to talk about it what she learned from last night’s This Old House. Today it was how to make mortise and tenon joints. It’s as if her life is a juicy peach and she’s determined to suck every last drop from it.”
Two weeks before she dies, Helen slips into what looks like a coma, but most probably was too much morphine. I assume this is the end of her, but when a friend visits and plays his flute, she opens her eyes. That afternoon, Helen gathers her husband, two sons, and Diane at her bedside, asking for reassurance that we’d all be okay if she left. She’s worried about her cat and her husband, and then she turns to me and says, “I worry the most about you.”
I need to get back to work, so I fly home to Acton, and I’m on the job when my cell phone rings. I put down my saw, looked at the caller ID, and knew my mother’s gone. Our family friend, Bambi, is gracious and sad, and I thank her for what was a difficult phone call. I sit down, stand up, sit down again, then decide to continue working. When I arrive home hours later, I talk to Diane about her work and Matthew’s school, and then she says.” Have you heard anything about your mother?” I say, “She died.” Diane says, “What, you weren’t going to tell me?”
I bought more poster board, printed more photographs, drove to Indiana, found a caterer, and arranged a memorial service for my mother in a nearby community center. At the end of the evening, which included countless tributes, I drive to the house of longtime family friends three blocks from my father’s house. The weather in southern Indiana in mid-July can wring the life out of you, but this night is only hot, and I’m carried on the currents of the love shown to my mother. As I’m standing alone under the tall oaks, my ninety-two-year-old father shuffles past and asks if I’d like to join him on his walk.
I assume we’ll review the night’s events, but my father never mentions his wife or the service. Instead, he asks me to help him regain control of his life. He wants me to consolidate his bank accounts and probate my mother’s will, and he muses about how long it will be before my sister and her husband leave his home. We walk together past the park with the swing sets and his favorite library made of stone, over to the store-lined street with smelly buses, and then back towards his house. We hurry past the last traffic light, and then he slows, bends over, and grips his dangling left arm. He looks stricken, frightened, and hurt, and he kneads his arm as if to rub the pain away. Vomit drips from his mouth, beads of sweat forming on his brow, and I look at him and say, “My father is dying in front of me, three days after my mother.”
I think back to sitting on the rocks at Halibut Point thirty-eight years ago after I’d pulled myself from the waves, unable to rescue my brother, Peter, who’d been washed off the rocks by stormy February seas. ?I’m watching my brother drown.? Will the waves of pain recede and let my father live another day as the waves mercifully brought Peter back to shore? I walk away and phone for an ambulance, but by the time the flashing lights appear, my father recovers and stares at me in disbelief and then in anger. He rejects all medical help, and we walk to his house in the dark.
Seven months later, my father underwent, at ninety-two, open heart surgery. I arrived soon after his operation, and he greeted me warmly. It was the first I’d seen in years. He knew I’d come to see him just as I had so many times to care for my mother. I knew he thought he would get better, but I knew he wasn’t, that he was doomed the minute he decided to have his surgery. Maybe he was doomed anyway – his angina was so severe he couldn’t walk that block without chest pain.
His kidneys fail, and he acquires the sometimes fatal bacterial infection C-Diff. The recovery course from that disease is arduous, so besides the maze of tubes, machines, and wires keeping him alive, he also requires a catheter in his anus to evacuate his fecal matter. He in bed is a ghastly sight for me. A man of strong will and determination suddenly reduced to the now-small dying man he is. He’s unable to speak, and he can move only his arms. He flexes his long fingers and massages his spindly and bruised forearms because he wants to live, and his hands are all he can move. He never leaves his hospital bed.
For days, I sit in his ICU room and read the paper. I look at him, but I can barely say a thing. I’m angry at him, my brother, for letting this happen and the doctors for cracking open his frail chest. I’m angry that the last fifteen years have been a waste because my father withdrew from me after my son’s birth. He’d become a diminished version of himself, reclusive and full of rage. As his bones shrunk, so did his world, and he turned more verbally abusive to my mother.
My mother’s skin turned yellow and papery as she lost weight, just like Patti, and she suffered in that last year. I’d visit, and she’d ask me to turn her heating pad on to warm her cold feet, and my father would turn the heat off. She’d ask for vegetables, and he’d mix in potatoes, which made her sick. She wanted fresh air and outside sounds, and he’d lock the windows. I’d drive those eleven hundred miles, and he’d smile only the night before I left. His refrigerator was full of moldy food he’d boil and eat. At the same time, he’s berating his wife and calling her foul names; he’s mowing his neighbor’s lawn and cleaning out their gutters. He’s as hard on his family as he is gracious to friends.
I left my father’s bedside, and he died ten days later, still unable to talk, but not before my sister visited and told him that he was dying because of what his sons did to him.
My father died other than he lived. His fierce independence manifested by his ability to simultaneously put three kids in college and build the transformer that ran our train set, paint our house, and pour his own concrete driveway. He trusted a few people, and none of them were doctors. I don’t know why he let some people in; I know how he excluded them: by his perception of incompetence and their intent. He’d kvetched about his own death and limited lifespan since he was seventy-two, the same year his grandson was born. As his wife lay dying, he talked about “predeceasing her.” After she died, he brightened as if he could finally see a future. In his exuberance, he let his guard down, he opened himself to others, and his trust was betrayed. As he would have known.
Seven months later, my mother died; I bought more poster boards, printed more photos, and set up my father’s memorial service, providing food and time for testimonials. Most of the same people attend.
My mother’s ashes were scattered, but what do I do with my father? I drove him to Kansas with no family in Indiana and buried him. I found the old family plot, arranged to have the hole dug, rented a van long enough to hold his coffin, and enlisted my brother, Peter, and my wife, Diane, in this journey back in time. We drive west for eleven hours, and I’m haunted by my father’s dead in his coffin in the rental van, but I’m convinced what I’ve undertaken is right and good. We drive into the cemetery with the iron gate and the huge maple tree that hangs like a weeping willow and pull up to the freshly dug grave.
We meet Keith, who’s trucked in the concrete vault and will lower my father into the ground, and he looks at us, puzzled. Where’s the minister, the men from the funeral home, the hearse, and all of this man’s friends and family? I say it’s just us. Keith says the grave is too small, and the vault won’t fit. I could jump in and help dig it out, but Keith calls the gravedigger, and an hour later, it’s ready. I help set up the lowering device, after which we lug the coffin from the van to the vault and ease my father into his grave. Keith closes the vault lid, and I stare at the ground, at the rolling prairie, keeping my back to his hometown that is now a sepia photograph of despair. I’m back on the cusp of reality and ask myself, “Will this ever end?” On our drive back to Indiana, back pain causes Diane to fidget in her seat.
I thought, Diane thought, that after my father died, we’d have time to heal our relationship. Jimmy gone, Patti gone, Helen gone, Mack gone, now it’s just us with Matt away at Temple. Maybe it was false hope, but we’ve no time because Diane’s back pain is caused by breast cancer, which has spread to her bones. At our first oncology visit, her doctor points to her cancer sites. She says here, and here and here, and in my head, I’m screaming – stop. Then she says, and here and here, and here and here, I can no longer breathe. Then her blond physician, with blue eyes and what we later learn is a heart of compassion, says there are tumors in Diane’s liver. Diane is dead; she knows it, I know it.
The oncologist leaves us alone, and I put my head in Diane’s lap and tell her we’re in this together. Hollow words because she’s dying, I’m not. On the way home, Diane says she’s glad it’s her cancer. She says she’s lived a good life, and she’drather not be me. We both dread what we must tell our son, and at home, we pull him away from his friends, into her room, and close the door.
We make frequent trips to our beloved ocean. We find motels with windows that face the sea, we leave our footprints in the sand, and we reminisce about the past: Our motorbike rides in Bermuda where the tops of her hands were burnt by the sun, and her whoops of delight, as we sped along the winding roads, joined mine. We remember the thief in Jamaica, our campsites on the verdant bluffs in Nova Scotia, and the turtle skull in Belize. Private memories mean little to others but the world to us.
At home, we’re careful about what we tell Matthew. We talk about her cancer, her health, her treatment. Diane takes her medicine religiously and exercises in whatever water is nearby – all as if there is a future – and we remain in full survival mode until she’s no more. We don’t forgive each other or make up for past grudges, but she knows I love her, and she is gentle with me. I nurture her daily as she fully and consciously manages her treatment.
Diane dies remorseful that her mother’s care was left to me, that she had to lie about her illness, and that Flo would die alone, but not before another daughter. Diane slips away in our bed Friday night during Matthew’s birthday party, but her heart beats until Sunday morning at about 5 AM. I awake then and know she’s dead beside me because I can feel the stillness. I can’t bear to touch her to confirm what I know. I close my eyes and beg for more sleep. That morning, my friend Jennifer brought Starbucks, as she had every morning that week. She drinks Chai, I drink decaf, and she asks:
“Sit inside or out,”
“On the deck,” I answer.
“Don’t forget the baby monitor.”
“We don’t need it anymore.”
Jennifer helps me phone people who come to see Diane before the men dressed in black take her away. Karen O’Neil arrives, and she sits with Matthew on his bed. She tells him his mother is no longer there. Various close and not-so-close friends come to say goodbye, and the hearse enters the driveway. Two men walk up the stairs to our bedroom, wrap Diane in the blue satin sheets Karen bought for us and two of our pillows, and zip her into a body bag. They ask about her wedding ring, and I say leave it on. I drift back to three years ago when the same men came for Patti after Kate steeled herself for one last kiss on her mom’s forehead after I and others saw her for the final time. I remember her stoic husband, Peter, who gave so much; I remember how, as Patti’s hearse pulled away, he walked into the dark and wailed.
I’ve lived with this different, this dead Diane for hours, and I can barely look at her. She reminds me of her sister, who is less gaunt but just as dead. Still, before they take her away, I ask for one last look. The funeral home guy unzips the body bag, and I kiss Diane on the forehead. I say goodbye.
Our memorial service for Diane is held at a Unitarian church in Lexington. Diane’s poster board and photographs are provided by friends, and it is attended by scores of people. When we finish, we drive to the cemetery where Diane, in her casket crafted by dear friends Adam, Mark, Dan, Tricia, and Amy, is borne by six women and then lowered into the ground. Five women her age – her peers, her dear friends – and one girl Matthew’s age. I shovel earth on her coffin and reflect on our trip to Kansas with my father a year and a half ago. How could I be burying my wife so soon after my father? How can I be burying her without her help?
I did everything I could. I juggled work when needed, and I stopped working. I cooked, cleaned, provided, nourished, and nursed Diane and watched over Matthew. I owed it to Diane because she would have done the same for me. I loved her, and she loved me. Everyone knew that.
Less than five months later, Diane’s mother dies in bed in her nursing home. One of Diane’s many worries was that her mother would die alone, so I sat with Florence all day on Friday and watched her breathless periods grow. Matt had said goodbye the night before, and Ginger had sat with me for part of the day. I left for dinner, and when I returned at 7 PM, Flo was warm but dead. I walked down the corridor to summon a nurse, and Liz greeted me with, “The choral group just sang to Flo, and they said they’ll come back to sing again tomorrow. I said, “There’s no need.”
To add or not:
Craig Anderson, Diane’s high school boyfriend and close friend, dies of stomach cancer a year before she does.
Roland, an oddly close relationship for me, died in May before my mother in July.
Bill Perkins dies December 08
Roland’s son Chris hangs himself
Polly’s dying and death on November 09
Susan’s estrangement, and Peter and Joan’s.
Flo’s broken hips and continuous care. Diane’s sadness that she will die before Flo. Diane’s burden.