The Madwoman and the Roomba

by Sandra Tsing Loh

  “You have to cut that—snip it,” I say, fumbling for the vocabulary. But we don’t have any of those—what are they? Choppers? All I can find in the house to cut things are kitchen shears, a nail file, and a pizza wheel.

  Oh boy, this is getting more and more pathetic. Instead of a rake, we have a back-scratcher. What will we attack our plants with next? A Swiffer? Egg beaters? Febreze? Chopsticks? Shoehorns?

  Our helplessness is too much. From across the street, from the fussy “Green Arrow Award” house itself, our Herculean Latino neighbor Lorenzo, in hefty-weight jeans and sparkling white T-shirt, rumbles toward us. He is pushing a gigantic red Toro power mower. Hello, Eleventh Husband!

  “Hey, neighbor!” he calls out, all business. “I’ll be done in five minutes.”

  He rips the cord. There’s a roar.

  Sally and I are startled. And ashamed. Also grateful. But—we shoot each other a look—should we tell him about our gestalt English garden plan, to leave the charming mini flower meadows as they lay, maybe go around them? No! As his machine roars right over them! He is crushing our dream!

  But, disturbingly, huge insects are flying out. First butterflies and ladybugs, but then weird bees and weird not-quite-bees. We hear the shuh-duh-duh-duh-duh of wings. I’m actually a little spooked.

  “Mosquitoes,” he rumbles. “Tonight there will be mosquitoes. That’s why you have to keep it cut.”

  Oh. Darker moment. It’s clear we’ve been not just a neighborhood embarrassment but a danger!

  Done with the mowing, now our hero rolls over an actual weed edger. It’s like having wikiHow, live, in front of you.

  I bring him a tall glass of water. He quaffs it, hurls away the ice, magnificently, continues with his labors.

  And indeed, within fifteen minutes, incredibly, a front lawn appears. It is a beautiful, rectangular, neat, straight male thing.

  “To thank him,” I tell Sally, “we should bake some cookies.”

  She agrees: “Knowing us, he won’t expect them to be good.”

  And we give thanks, today, for our Gentle Gardening Giant.

  Mr. Loh’s Not Afraid to Be Naked

  “YOUR PHONE HAS been going off.”

  Charlie hands me my coffee, tosses the New York Times on the bed. I look at the digital clock on my bedstand. It’s 6:37 a.m.

  Both girls are with me, under my roof. I can hear the chatter of media, bursts of song, showering.

  There’s no late-breaking scandal I’m involved with. No international incident is hitting the wires.

  There’s no possible job that would have any “coasts” urgently calling me. This is not Mission Impossible. I’m not a spy. Not a firefighter. Not . . .

  “Did you see who?”

  Charlie takes the phone out of his bathrobe pocket. “Your sister, and Thomas.”

  “Oh.”

  And in that moment, I know. My ninety-seven-year-old father has died.

  If my dad had just been rushed to the hospital, there might be one frantic call from Thomas en route. But the calls would not keep coming, in sonar-pinging succession.

  With the extremely old, there’s a pattern. Typically, there’s the emergency home event—a fall, sudden shortness of breath, failure to stir. From the urgent care unit, bedside, there’s the rapid medical litany: “His pulse is low, he’s drawing in just 10 percent of his own oxygen, his renal system is failing. . . .”

  For normal adults this would seem fatal. But by ninety-seven, so many things have been falling off my dad for so many years. He’s like Charlie’s VW Beetle, whose driver’s-seat armrest is currently secured with duct tape, front bumper held on with zip ties.

  Which is to say, as has happened so often, immediately, a battery of devices are strapped onto my dad, pumping him with oxygen, chemicals, fluids. There’s a twenty-four-hour wait-and-see “stabilization” period where there are no updates—we have time to soberly shower, snack, put on our “ER face”—and then, with a deep breath, push open those swinging doors. . . .

  And literally every time, my dad would mysteriously reemerge. Or at least, various levels on the machines would drift back into green.

  Never quite managing to graduate, my father has failed out of hospice three times. As a life form, my father is like a kind of alga.

  In short, when considering the notion of his death, I feel just slight relief. Amazement.

  I literally didn’t know he had it in him, I think.

  I take my time and finish the Monday New York Times crossword. Sadly, today it only takes eight minutes. Both KenKens take all of two minutes. That’s the end of my escape pod. I can’t hold off the day any longer.

  I sigh and listen to my three messages, one from my sister, one from Thomas, then another from my sister. My father has indeed died, that morning, just after six. Thomas and Kaitlin sound a little breathy, lightly sad. No one is hysterical.

  I feel nothing. It’s like if someone said, “Oh, I paid your parking ticket.”

  “In fact,” I say to Charlie, “if there’s anyone who was to be found dead on this sunny Monday morning, my father is first in line.”

  I call my sister, who says I don’t have to do anything. The necessary phone calls have been made, the coroner will come, he will issue a death certificate. That’s the key document, which will trigger the estate stipulations, life insurance, benefits. Thomas has a lot to do, so I might just be in his way.

  While Charlie is driving the girls to school, upon thinking about it, I decide I will make the seventy-five-minute drive, mostly for moral support of Thomas. He will definitely be the most traumatized. For the last eight years, he has been housing and caretaking my father. They are close. Also, now Thomas is going to lose anywhere between $7,000 and $12,000 a month in income. (It varied a bit—after a while, I just put my hands over my eyes.)

  I drive to Palmdale on a beautiful morning, enjoying the mountain views of the Angeles Crest Highway.

  The Chevy Volt screen jumps to life. Incoming phone call. ANDIE. Her slightly underwater-sounding voice beams into the cabin.

  “Okay,” she says. “I think I finally finally have a drought-resistant gardener for you.”

  “Great. Just text me the number. My dad just died.”

  “Oh no! Honey! I’m so sorry! Are you okay?”

  “I feel weirdly calm,” I say, winging through slopes of burned forest that, due to the recent rains, are just beginning to green. “I’m just admiring nature’s plan. You just can’t be upset, when someone with Parkinson’s, who basically sleeps all the time, dies. In fact, considering how screwed up the world is, with war and school shootings and all the madness? How elegant for this gentleman to check out, leaving a full suite of kids and grandkids intact, shutting off the giant money leakage of his care, making a bit more room on the planet, first thing on a Monday morning, gettin’ it done.”

  “I know. But it’s your father. You only have one. You must be feeling sad.”

  “Well, I’m not. It’s one of the best things he has ever done. The timing is great. I’ve just filed an article. Both my Monday and Tuesday are free. Thank you, dad!”

  I PULL UP TO Thomas’s brown and beige ranch-style house in Palmdale.

  A police car is parked at the curb. No sirens. There’s a sleepy, Mayberry-like feeling in this scene. The cop might as well be having a sandwich or a nap.

  This death is overstaffed.

  The front door opens and Thomas runs out. He looks stricken, like he has been wildly weeping. I see his face and am glad I came. His wife, Nina, runs out behind him, also looking stricken. We hug each other.

  I enter Thomas’s house. It’s pleasantly cool, with its fancy black leatherette furniture, giant-screen TV, massive fish tank, huge faux-Grecian vases of artificial flowers. There are usually a few addled seniors in wheelchairs around, but today they have been moved to his other house.

  A foam mattress is on the floor. A cream-colored blanket is covering a small, prone form, with feet in clean fluffy w
hite socks sticking out at the bottom. A candle flickers nearby on a TV table.

  Even the socks look snowy. That’s Thomas’s art. He has always kept my dad so fluffed and buffed, possibly only in the way you can when your charges are not really sentient.

  “Do you want to see him?” Thomas whispers. I don’t particularly.

  To be polite, though, I make a grateful face and say yes. Thomas lifts the blanket.

  There is my dad. He looks much as he does when sleeping, but he’s definitely a lighter shade of yellow. He has that distinctive pinched, hollowed-out look around the mouth that my mother had in death two decades earlier. My mom’s death was more tragic, occurring in a nightmarish convalescent home when she was just sixty-nine, and all of us children still so young (in our thirties!). That said, coming a brutal ten years after her early Alzheimer’s diagnosis at fifty-nine, the sad relief of her death was just as welcome.

  I put my hand on his forehead. It’s impossibly smooth, and still pretty warm. With a start, I realize, catching him just a few hours after death, I can still feel some of his warmth, the last life that is leaving him.

  Not quite knowing what else to do, I decide to lie down next to my dad and take a selfie. With surprise but support, Thomas literally applauds the idea. “Sure, sure,” he says, taking my phone. I crouch down and arrange myself next to my frail, inert father. He is smaller than me at this point. It is like lying next to a doll. Thomas snaps a photo of me with my dad, then we change places and I snap some photos of him and Thomas.

  In the photos, my dad is yellow, like a melon. His fingers are curled talons, like a type of Asian fruit literally called “Buddha’s Hand.” All is an empty shell. The soul has left his body.

  WHILE WAITING FOR the funeral home director to come, I think back again to when my mother died twenty-two years ago.

  The doctor informed us of her “gradual electrical systems failure.” We all arrived, my father and his (second Chinese) wife, Zhuping. My mom died shortly thereafter. Afterward, my sister, brother, and I went out to Gordon Biersch and threw back shots of whiskey. (It seemed when a parent died you drank whiskey. First time around anyway.) Like newly minted grown-ups, we began babbling to one another about our sex lives (why?).

  We orchestrated the memorial for my mom on the back deck in my house in Van Nuys (where I would get married one year later). We moved our grand piano right out onto it. The memorial ended with the “Victory March” from Aida, waving palm fronds operatically to send my mother off into the cosmos. My sister would go on to scatter my mother’s ashes all over the world—at the Paris Opera House, Egyptian pyramids, China’s Great Wall.

  Shortly thereafter, my mother came to me in an extremely vivid dream, so vivid it felt more real than life.

  It was clear and extraordinary.

  Whoomp!

  Fade into a panorama of mossy interconnecting small islands, like atolls. The air around us is heady, silvery. The sky is light.

  Spirits whip by quickly. A soccer team in striped jerseys zips by on the left. Then the right. Then they zip into the horizon.

  Just beyond, I see my mother joyously dipping in and out of the Pacific Ocean, like a dolphin. I run after her. It is a chase.

  Because it is my reality and in this moment, if I wish it, I can make it so, I eventually do catch up with her. She sits down before me on a grassy berm. Her attitude toward me is gently loving and ever-so-slightly resigned to the fact that she has somehow agreed, in this space, to tarry a few minutes longer to humor a conversation, even though she would truly prefer to go on with her swimming and cavorting and joyousness, even though she knows I am going to be asking questions that make no difference, and to which her truthful responses will provide no satisfaction.

  My first anguished questions: “When I came and visited you in the convalescent home, did you know I was there? Did you recognize me? Could you hear me?”

  She looks at me carefully, as though weighing my anguish, and says kindly, but not very convincingly, “Yes. Oh yes. Of course.”

  I try some other questions to confirm various where, what, and whys, but the more trivial questions I try, the more a certain unknownness builds in the center.

  A new idea comes to me, something I would never before have thought to ask: “So, can you tell me, what was your happiest day on earth?”

  I anticipate that it will be the birth of my sister, or my brother’s valedictorian speech, or perhaps my own graduation.

  Her gray eyes looking out at the sea, my mother’s dreamy answer is “Lunch with Betsy.”

  Betsy? There’s no “Betsy” that I know of. But I immediately sense that “Betsy” was an amalgamation of that sort of very good neighbor/girlfriend/confidante, whom you could go to lunch with, or talk on the phone without censoring oneself, in that sort of floating hammock 3:15 pocket in the midafternoon. The free moment where you did not have to think about anyone else—their worries, fears, GPAs, groceries, or their other pressing CVS and Walgreen needs.

  Then she says, “Oops, here come the sprinklers!”

  Sprinklers erupt all around us on the green berm. She happily runs off and dives into the sea.

  “No!” I yell, reaching out after her. But she is gone.

  THERE’S A KNOCK on the door. It’s the funeral home.

  The man who arrives is a large Caucasian man in an ever-so-slightly wrinkled black suit. It is disturbing. He is like one of those Town Car drivers who hold those signs up in baggage claim at LAX.

  What was I hoping for? I suppose, like, two massage therapists from a Northern California luxury spa. Young beautiful UC Santa Cruz “wellness” majors in neutral hemp clothing. With lasers.

  This dude looks a little Irish or a little Scottish, which is unusual for Los Angeles’s Palmdale desert area, ruddy in complexion, with elaborately combed, lightly Brylcreemed hair, both full and thinning, in that LAX Town Car driver way. He has almost all of his teeth, but one toward the back that shouldn’t be missing, is.

  I almost wish instead our Styx crosser was a nice tidy Armenian gentleman, like the Lyft driver I recently had, in a shiny silver Camry with peppermint air freshener, and the exact perfect courteous sense to remind you what to do when you have forgotten.

  This is for real and rather grim. It’s as though my father is going to be clubbed over the head, blindfolded, driven to Ontario, and housed in an un-air-conditioned storage unit while thugs call uninterested family members unwilling to come up with the relatively small ransom. Like forty-five dollars. Like in a not-very-good reality show.

  “Sorry for your loss,” he says huskily, as though he himself has just come from knocking off a few people. Behind him, a bald dude in a tie wheels in a gurney, with straps. Both are wearing light blue surgical gloves.

  “Have you said goodbye?” he asks with hooded eyes, waiting to do his job. And suddenly things get very real.

  I realize this is the last time I will ever be in the same room as the physical form of my father, who is the same father I have known for fifty-six years. There are so many memories—beach swimming, fighting in airports, driving in cars as he ate expired sushi, college graduations, him falling asleep every Sunday afternoon in the sun in that circular wicker chair in our old Malibu house—

  It all felt like it would never end— How many times had I sat at the Formica dining room table, in an earlier life, a life so remote it could well have happened to someone else—I saw the click of the clock on our yellow O’Keefe and Merritt stove. Time would proceed so slowly it actually appeared to move backward.

  In five minutes the essence of him will be permanently lost. I am suddenly not ready.

  We ask the Borg to leave and now I crouch next to my dad and begin to freak out. I anxiously stroke his now almost completely cool forehead and suddenly decide that I have to cut off and keep a lock of his gray-white straw-like hair. Thomas thinks that is a great idea, and that he should get some, too.

  He immediately cannot find nail scissors. He has clippe
rs? No. He finally finds some very tiny nail scissors. We each cut off a few hairs and fold them into a napkin. We suddenly giggle, madly, with a sense that we have gotten away with something.

  We invite the undertaker back in and, cumbersomely, almost comically, he and his assistant utilize a sheet and pads and practically bungee cords to get my dad from the foam pad onto the gurney. It feels like with the fussy moving around and discreet curtaining of sheets and blankets they are actually making more work for themselves, and for us. (“One, two, three . . . hup.”)

  The gurney is wheeled out and the van doors close. That is it.

  The undertaker’s voice is oddly husky and high. Like one of the characters in a movie that then rips the mask off and underneath he is made of a column of weevils.

  “Sorry about your loss. We’ll take good care of him.”

  The coroner will take a few days to complete his official tasks, so my dad’s body will lie in a refrigerated drawer for several days. But we don’t know that then.

  I go to Starbucks.

  I take out all my dad’s identification.

  Here’s his driver’s license, from which he beams, in his big black glasses, his spirit eternally ready for another adventure. Five feet six inches and 122 pounds. So small? How is that possible? I cry.

  MY SISTER, brother, and I decide we will hold a memorial quickly, mostly for the sake of grieving Thomas and his family.

  Unlike my mother with her big beautiful memorial, with the grand piano and opera music, my father’s circle has shrunk. Almost none of his friends are still alive. The few who are are too frail to travel.

  It’s just going to be my friends and some of our old schoolmates from Malibu. Culling photos from old albums, it’s astonishing to remember how vastly and vigorously my father traveled. There are photos of him at the Taj Mahal, cavorting with tribal villagers in Tanzania, belly dancing in Morocco, chasing penguins in Antarctica, and yes, in New Zealand . . . bungee jumping. At that particular sport site, over the age of sixty-five, bungee jumping was free, so he did it.