“Pull it together!” I say to myself. “Stop crying!”
I palpate my breast lump again. Fuck. It’s still there.
Skip Notes
*1 Palin invented the lie of the “death panel” during the 2009 debate over healthcare legislation, falsely claiming that it would lead to U.S. citizens being judged as to whether or not they were worthy of healthcare.
*2 Renamed The Chicks in 2020.
TEN
Chiaroscuro
DECEMBER 2008
“Pull it together! Stop crying!” said my mother, dragging me by the armpit into a nearby kitchen with a door that shut. “Everyone can hear you!” Suddenly I was on the floor, my back up against a refrigerator.
“What the fuck?” I said, shocked. I was, I should add, forty-two years old. I’d just stepped out of the hospital room where my sixty-seven-year-old father, dying from pancreatic cancer, had told me he loved me and wanted to make sure I understood this, because he wasn’t sure he’d be able to say it again, which he wouldn’t.
A few minutes earlier, my father’s doctor had followed me into the hallway, where I’d escaped to pace the floor and maybe look for a sandwich, since I hadn’t eaten in…I wasn’t sure. A day? Two days? Hospital time is different from regular time. Both faster and slower. You look up, a day is gone, while the seconds tick by in slow motion. Dad’s liver was shutting down, said the doc, as were his kidneys. It was only a matter of time—twenty-four to forty-eight hours, give or take—before the rest of his body would follow. And so hearing this news had made me cry. Okay, loudly.
“You are bothering the other families!” said my mother. There were no other families in the hallway. They were all in their loved ones’ hospital rooms, saying their own goodbyes. Could they hear me? Sure. Probably. Had I heard the same lamentations dozens of times in those same hallways? Yes. Every day.
“But this is a terminal cancer ward!” I said. “I’m pretty sure the other families will understand.”
“You’re scaring them!”
“I’m not scaring them, Mom! Death is.”
“You will stay here and compose yourself until you can be quiet!”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. My father is dying. If I can’t cry in public now, when can I?”
I have countless memories of my mother caring for me—bloodied knees bandaged, doctors visited, food cooked, shoes purchased, carpools driven, school supplies bought, front-row seats to the school play saved, she was nothing if not responsible, always early, and on the ball as a parent—but what I craved was comfort. Her hugs, quick and contrapuntal, had to be rationed out between towels folded or dishes loaded. Meanwhile, breastfeeding was still frowned upon when I was born back in 1966, so I have no preconscious memories of the comfort of her breast either. I don’t blame her for not breastfeeding me or my sisters. At all. I blame the industrial revolution. I blame bad science. I blame a society that not only told women that breastfeeding was kind of icky, indecent, and strictly for those in the lower classes who couldn’t afford formula, but that also frowned upon a woman breastfeeding in public without providing any viable alternatives.
My dad, on the other hand, while incapable of care or even of the organizational skills necessary to do so—he never even had his own ATM card, my mother so firmly took charge of every aspect of family logistics and child schlepping—provided comfort. It wasn’t until I was a mother myself that I understood that being the sole caretaker of children could sap one of the energy, time, and patience required to provide simultaneous comfort and care. Comfort was a luxury for the unfrazzled. And Dad took full advantage of the hours and mental space he was given, by never having to think about folding, rinsing, meal preparation, or care, to provide comfort to his four daughters. An expert hugger, his was the lap into which I’d collapse.
And now that lap was hours away from growing cold. And I was on the kitchen floor of the hospital, losing precious moments of his final hours.
I composed myself, blew my nose, stood up, and returned to my father’s room to sit with him, my mom, and my three younger sisters, for however many hours we had left. Dad was passed out in a Dilaudid haze after having mustered enough energy to sit up and sign his hot-off-the presses book to my sister, Jen, who’d just arrived from California. “Dear Jen, I love you so much. We have said what we needed to say last night. All my loe always. Love, Dad,” he wrote on the title page, leaving off a v in one of the three loves in his short message—as clear a sign as any that though his heart was as expansive as ever, his normally tack-sharp brain was contracting.
Target Culebra was his first and only book. He’d been an international lawyer, representing the government of Puerto Rico, and the book described his years-long, pro bono legal battle against the U.S. Navy to persuade them to stop bombing the inhabited island of Culebra and using it as target practice. Apparently, “People live here” wasn’t good enough.
Because his law practice was fairly intense, at one of those white-shoe Washington, D.C., law firms that requires its partners to bill many hours on top of whatever pro bono work they’ve got going on, it had taken Dad the better part of his life to finish that book, on weekends, nights, whenever he could squeeze in a minute to work on it. Some of my earliest memories, in fact, involve the sound of his typewriter on Sunday mornings. And no, the parallel has obviously not been lost on me that to write the book you’re now reading, while holding down a full-time job and two other gig jobs as a single mother, I’ve had to do the same. It’s 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning as I type these words. It’s always 5 a.m. as I start typing these words. Understanding the fragility of the human body, on a personal and cellular level, has had its generative upsides.
While other kids played hide-and-seek, my friends and I played goin’-to-Culebra: You were either a good guy, trying to save the island from being bombed, or a bad guy in the U.S. Navy, trying to bomb it. We even had our own theme song, sung as you rocked back and forth at the top of the playground slide before gliding down and starting the game: “Goin’ to Culebra, goin’ to Culebra…” One day, a friend challenged me on the premise of my game: We pledged allegiance to the United States every morning at school. How could our own country’s military…be bad? “Haven’t you watched the news?” I said.
It was 1972. Nearly every night, Walter Cronkite presented images of American soldiers burning villages in Vietnam. “A country can be founded on good principles but act in a manner contrary to those principles,” Dad used to say, as we watched the nightly horrors unfold: words I would revisit hundreds of times over the course of my life, whether while learning history in school or living through it as a journalist. Target Culebra was officially scheduled to be published two days hence, on December 9, 2008. And while Dad was able to see and hold the finished book in his hands as well as sign several copies to my sisters and me, I was hoping—in vain, as it would turn out—that he’d live long enough to wake up on his publication date.
“Please, Deb,” he’d said, a few days earlier, when we were alone. “I’ll need you to be my representative on book tour.” I promised I would, not understanding that his book tour would culminate in a three-hundred-person banquet in his honor hosted by the former governor of Puerto Rico and the former mayor of Culebra in a massive ballroom at which I, his still freshly mourning daughter, would be the substitute guest of honor. During this formal dinner, they would show footage from an old 60 Minutes story on my father’s victory against the U.S. Navy, including shots of me, age nine, sitting on a dais erected on Culebra’s famed Flamenco Beach, where Dad was giving a speech announcing the end of the bombing.
The camera first panned to then lingered on little Debbie smiling, clapping wildly, beaming with pride at her father’s victory, which, even then, she understood had been hard-won. Present-day Deb, seeing these moving images of past her for the first time, would be unable to stop sobbing. She would end up having to excuse he
rself from the festivities, leaving the banquet a half hour earlier than planned, to wander the streets of Old San Juan in the pouring rain, until she found herself, at dawn, on her Jewish knees inside a Catholic church. “I get it!” she’ll shout to a wood-carved Jesus. “You’re suffering. We’re all suffering. Now what?” A nervous breakdown, my doctor would later call it. “Meshugganah,” my family would call it. This message has been brought to you by Lexapro.
My mother was now in the corner of the hospital room on her cellphone, periodically nodding and saying, “Mmm-hmm.”
“Who’s Mom talking to?” I whispered. My sisters shrugged.
(L to R) Jennifer, Richard, and Deborah Copaken in Culebra, Puerto Rico, 1975, © Margie Copaken
“Tomorrow at 8 a.m.?” she said. “Yes, good, I’ll be there. Thank you.”
“Wait, where will you be tomorrow morning at 8?” I said.
Mom held up a finger. “Yes, of course. If anything changes, I’ll let you know.”
“Who was that?” I said when she hung up.
“The funeral home,” said Mom. “We have a meeting tomorrow morning at eight. I want one of you to come with me.”
“But…” I was at a loss. How to respond? Psychologically, I understood my mother’s need for control during a moment when the entire idea of control is shown to be illusory. But practically, I wanted no part of this delusion. I wanted to be able to sit with Dad as he did the hard work of dying. To remain by his side until he was gone. I whispered the obvious: “But Dad’s not dead yet.”
“I have to meet with the funeral director,” she said, “so we might as well do it now.”
“But funeral homes are used to getting calls after the fact,” I said. “That’s their entire business model.”
My sisters bit their lips. The oldest of four, I’m considered the troublemaker, the truth-teller, the one who ends up calling things by their names without whitewashing or soft-pedaling, frequently at great personal cost and periodic exclusion from the bosom of family. Czesław Miłosz, recipient of the 1980 Nobel Prize in literature, once famously wrote, “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” I would argue the opposite: When the family is finished, a writer is born. Writers don’t suddenly drop from the womb fully formed. They’re planted as seedlings, nurtured in soil fertilized with family secrets and false fronts, until they emerge from the darkness into the light and suddenly notice the difference.
A few months earlier, much to everyone’s consternation and disapproval, I’d said, “Why put Dad through chemo right now if he’s stage four? If he wants to go on a cruise through the Greek isles, let him go!” I knew better than to suggest he forgo chemo altogether, which would have been my choice given the same diagnosis, not Dad’s. But Dad had seemed oddly okay at the moment of his diagnosis, which had been made not because he was in pain but because my uncle Stan, an oncologist, had noticed two things when he and my aunt were having dinner with Mom and Dad: My normally plump father had lost a massive amount of weight without trying; and both he and his eyes were yellow.
After his diagnosis, followed immediately by a prognosis of four to six months, Dad started looking into the cost and logistics of the cruise: a trip he’d been meaning to take with my son but kept putting off. When I suggested that night at the dinner table—we’d all gathered in Bethany Beach, Delaware, for what would turn out to be our last family vacation with Dad—that he throw caution to the wind and just go, I was shut down. “No, we can’t take the risk that he’ll get sick on the boat.” Which I countered, less than generously and more than imperiously, with “For fuck’s sake, he’s already sick! So what if he dies on a boat instead of in a hospital!” But families and death sentences are tricky bedfellows: It brings them together then tears them apart. Rationality in the face of a loved one’s terminal illness is not always the most tactful approach. And it is all-too-frequently replaced with magical thinking: If he undergoes chemo, maybe he’ll beat the odds and live. Even though we were told his odds of living more than six months were nil.
In the end, the chemo did shrink the tumor a bit, as promised, but with the cancer already having spread elsewhere, he would die on schedule anyway, exactly four months from the day of his diagnosis. Meanwhile, nearly half of every week of the last four months of his life was spent not out in the sunshine or at his easel, where he was painting the last in his series of abstracts, but in bed, in agony from the side effects of the poison that had been pumped into his bloodstream.
“I don’t care if that’s their business model,” my mother was now saying, growing upset. “I’m going to the meeting with the funeral director at 8 a.m., and I want one of you to come with me.”
“But it’s supposed to snow tonight,” I said.
“Light flurries!” She would not be swayed. “I need one of you to come with me,” she kept saying. Her husband was dying, and people with dying spouses get a pass on irrational behavior, so it was decided that I would be the one to accompany Mom from Baltimore back to my childhood home in Potomac, Maryland, an hour away. My sisters would stay with Dad at Johns Hopkins. “Just promise me,” I said to my little sister, an orthopedic surgeon, “that if it looks like we’re getting close to the end, you’ll call so we can be here.”
“I promise,” she said.
I kissed my father’s still-warm forehead. I told him I loved him and would be back tomorrow, and off we went.
Five minutes into our silent drive home, both of us lost in our own thoughts, Mom finally spoke. “I’m worried about Bart Dibble,” she said. Not the sentence I was expecting. But as I was quickly learning, terminal illness brings out the odd and unexpected. Bart was my parents’ financial advisor. It was December 7, 2008, the white-hot center of America’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Bart was moving his practice from one large bank to another, which meant Mom and Dad had to sign a bunch of papers to move their savings—which had taken a massive hit just like so many others’ that year—into the new bank as well.
“Don’t,” I said. “He’s fine.”
But Mom had suddenly become convinced that Bart Dibble had lost his job, and she would soon go bankrupt. “How do you know he didn’t lose his job?”
To be fair, my husband had just lost his job, as did so many others that fall. Banker greed and speculation were to blame. “Because he didn’t,” I said. “These guys get million-dollar bonuses to hop from one bank to another. He’s fine. The paperwork is just standard banking stuff.” She’d had my dad sign all the necessary papers in the hospital. Everything was kosher on that front.
“I’m worried,” she said.
“I know,” I said, softening. It was so much easier, I understood, to replace her fears over her husband’s death with fears of losing her life savings. Of not being prepared for a funeral. Of a dying man dying on a boat halfway around the world instead of in a sterile hospital room near home. “But of all the things to be worried about at this juncture in time, Bart Dibble’s career is not one of them.”
By 4 a.m. the next day, the front yard of my childhood home was covered in snow still fluttering out of an ink black sky, and my sister the doctor was on the other end of the phone, saying calmly but firmly, “Come now.”
I woke my mother. “We have to go,” I said. “It’s time.”
“Okay,” said Mom. “I just have to take a quick shower.”
“You don’t have time!” I said, growing agitated. “She says we have to come now. And it’s snowing!”
My mother’s face scrunched into that don’t-mess-with-me look I know too well. “I will not be dirty for the death of my husband!”
Reframe, I thought. Don’t get angry. She hasn’t showered in three days, which in her worldview is unthinkable, but also she is not being rational. It’s not about getting clean. It’s about pushing off the inevitable. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll meet you downstair
s in the kitchen.” I absentmindedly poured myself a bowl of cereal but couldn’t eat it. I flipped through a People magazine on the counter but couldn’t read it. “NEVER GIVING UP HOPE” the cover announced in all caps, over a photo of Parkinson’s-stricken Michael J. Fox. This, I thought, is what’s wrong with American healthcare. Not for Parkinson’s—who was I to deny Michael J. Fox his hope for a cure?—but rather for end-of-life care.
Hope is not a plan when a patient is actively dying. It’s a mutually agreed upon delusion.
What if, instead of remaining passive, I’d gone full metal jacket and insisted everyone just shut the fuck up about shrinking tumors and trials and let Dad sail off into the Aegean? Did I fail him as an advocate and as a child? Or was this the death he actually wanted: on a dark and snowy predawn morning, in a nondescript hospital room an hour’s drive from home, holding on as best he could until his wife and eldest daughter arrived?
“Let’s go!” I said firmly, when Mom finally walked down the stairs, freshly showered, but instead of heading out immediately, she started putting the paperwork for Bart Dibble into a FedEx envelope. “What are you doing?” I took a deep breath. Then another. It was all I could do not to lose it.
“We have to drop these papers into a FedEx drop box before Daddy dies.”
“Wait, what?” Reframe, reframe, reframe. This is not about the FedEx drop box, it’s about being mortal. “No, you don’t! Dad already signed and dated them! The envelope itself doesn’t have to be time-stamped.”
“But what if it does? You don’t know that!” Mom was starting to cry now. She looked like a little girl, not like a sixty-six-year-old grandmother of five.
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