All the Lives We Ever Lived

by Katharine Smyth

  Virginia Woolf was well acquainted with the unique psychology of sickness, sending regular dispatches from those foreign lands to which our maladies expose us. An attack of influenza brings to light the “wastes and deserts of the soul,” she writes; a trip to the dentist’s chair carries us “down into the pit of death.” She may be exaggerating for effect—though her own episodes of madness almost certainly bared her to such chasms—and yet hers is a serious argument for how illness separates us from the healthy, whom she calls “the army of the upright,” and how, for the invalid, “the whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea.” My father’s operation had taken place nearly a year before—he had been cancer-free for almost twelve months—but he still behaved as if he were stuck aboard that ship. It must be so difficult to bid farewell to one’s secret world of illness, and perhaps more difficult still to reclaim and trust in one’s new place among the living. When my father spoke of sailing to Cuba, though, it was as the promise of passage ashore.

  * * *

  IN THE MONTHS that followed, I started worrying less about his death. He refused to attend the AA meetings his doctors recommended, but he did go to Faulkner three times in the next three years. (His returns from rehab were always excruciating—I couldn’t speak to him on the phone without searching his voice for traces of alcohol, and if I was home I found myself sneaking sips of his cranberry juice to see if it was spiked. It never was.) I always nurtured a sliver of hope that this time his sobriety would last, but it was almost a relief when—in two weeks’ or two months’ time—I watched him pour himself a glass of wine. To know he was drinking was less exhausting than being suspicious, and less agonizing.

  Shortly after Christmas, he decided to sell our first boat, Mistral, and buy a sailboat my parents named Solent, for the strait where they’d first sailed together. On the weekends I spent in Rhode Island that summer, I found him flushing water through the bilges or scrubbing weed from the propeller; in the evenings we went for spins around the island. Then, while my mother took the wheel, he and I threw overboard the yellow polypropylene line and let ourselves be towed downriver as we had done when I was little. He was consistently contented and relaxed—he even put on weight—and the gloominess that had for the past year governed his mood was largely gone. Was the rediscovered pleasure of messing about in boats a necessary piece in making real to my father the verity of his own good health? I can’t say for sure. But while it would be a mistake to align this acceptance, whatever its cause, too closely with Mrs. Ramsay’s own epiphany, there’s something about her recognition that our moments of joy are sufficient to sustain us in the face of death that feels enlightening. I believe my father found a kind of happiness during those hours spent on board, and perhaps even that it, too, was enough.

  At the end of the summer we sailed to Newport; it was the only overnight trip I ever took on Solent. I was already in bed when my mother called me up on deck. She was standing at the stern looking down, and when I joined her I saw below the shape of my father, halfway through a late-night swim, floating on his back and buoyed by a cloud of brilliant violet light. Jellyfish. Tiny globes that flushed and flared in the blackness, their purple cilia like longitude lines, trembling and collapsed. Burned, burned out, and burned again; the ocean flickered on and off. At first I pretended I was not moved, but then warmed slowly at the beauty of it: my father’s pale, healthy body in the raven sea, carrying with it a fragile lavender halo, now this way, now that, and he grinning, kicking his arms and legs, stirring, whipping the water into a churn of light.

  17

  In St Ives, the fury of the sea is at the heart of things. If you take a cruise to Seal Island, hugging the crumpled, lime-green Cornish cliffs, your guide might be a lifeboat captain, retired now, who remembers climbing the seal-strewn rocks as a child and being stranded as the tide rushed in. If you dine at Alba, a restaurant named for a 1938 shipwreck that drowned five sailors (and would have drowned many more had not people waded in with torches), you might see through the window the rituals of the current lifeboat crew—they hold up beers and laugh and flirt while hosing down a blue-and-orange vessel on the wharf. If you stop in at the coastguard station, where you can buy used paperbacks for twenty-five pence to benefit the cause, you’ll find the latest incident report tacked to a bulletin board and full of small-town drama: “Reported large drifting object to Coastguard. RNLI Lifeboat returning from another incident confirmed it as a dead seal.” And if you roam the town’s twisting cobblestone streets, you will probably chance upon a large bronze plaque, tarnished and sweetly wordy: IN MEMORY OF THE MEN OF SAINT IVES WHO LOST THEIR LIVES IN THE PURSUIT OF THEIR PROFESSION OF FISHERMEN WHILE WORKING IN VESSELS REGISTERED IN THE PORT OF SAINT IVES. It offers up a long list of the departed: brothers and cousins, it seems, and perhaps also fathers and sons.

  Later, reading up on Godrevy Lighthouse—which sits upon a long, treacherous reef they call the Stones, and which Virginia Stephen visited in 1892, signing a guestbook that would later fetch £10,250 at auction—you’ll learn of dozens of additional disasters, among them my favorite: the 1649 wreck of the Garland, a ship carrying the clothing and furniture of newly beheaded King Charles I and his fugitive queen. Of the sixty or so passengers, a man, a boy, and a wolf-dog were the sole survivors; they scrambled up Godrevy Island, where they briefly lived on seaweed and rain. For years afterward, it was said, gold buttons would wash up on the beach at Hayle. Or another: the 1939 wreck of the John and Sarah Eliza Stych, a lifeboat that capsized three times while trying to rescue an unfamiliar vessel in a storm. The only surviving crewmember was William Freeman, who managed to swim ashore near Gwithian; in his youth, he had worked as a boatman for the Stephens. (“On Saturday morning,” wrote ten-year-old Virginia in the family newspaper, “Master Hilary Hunt and Master Basil Smith came up to Talland House and asked Master Thoby and Miss Virginia to accompany them to the light-house as Freeman the boatman said that there was a perfect tide and wind for going there.” Then, with casual brutality suggestive of her future writing, “On arriving at the light-house Miss Virginia Stephen saw a small and dilapidated bird standing on one leg on the light-house. Mrs Hunt called the man and asked him how it had got there. He said that it had been blown there and they then saw that its eyes had been picked out.”)

  And if, on your last morning, you clamber up the steep path to the headland known as the Island, you will reach St Nicholas Chapel, a stone sanctuary built in the early fifteenth century for the patron saint of sailors. Its silhouette dominates the landscape—it may have stirred you with its mystery that first night when, stumbling upon an unknown beach, you looked up to see it glowing high and yellow on the cliff, a lighthouse of a different kind—and now, astride the threshold, you will find yourself startled by its smallness and simplicity. The day is somehow bright and cloudy all at once; sea pinks blanket the hillside like clumps of melting snow, and the beaches below are radiant and white as bone. (“It’s because of the sand,” says your proprietor of Cornwall’s famous light, “it’s made of silica and blinding at low tide.”) And looking out on the ocean, soft as velvet today and just as dull, and murmuring those rousing lines, We perished, each alone, Mr. Ramsay’s lines, But I beneath a rougher sea, you will marvel that it could hold such violence, that such a pacific-looking body would take from us even a single man.

  18

  “But it would be a mistake, she thought, thinking how they walked off together, arm in arm, past the greenhouse, to simplify their relationship.”

  My father had been free of cancer for nearly four years when my parents decided to join me for Thanksgiving in New York, where I had settled after college. I was looking forward to seeing them, and particularly to seeing my father—recently returned from a visit to rehab, he hadn’t had a drink in two months. On the evening before their arrival, I tripped across a dead mouse that was lying on my carpet. It was on its back, its lit
tle teeth bared; its gray fur was matted, as though chewed on, and one of its hind legs was bloody. I yelped, and that night dreamed that the walls and windowsills of the house in Rhode Island were swarming with rats.

  The following day my father carried up the bags and promptly stepped on a second dead mouse that was prostrate in the entryway. “Ah—a nest!” he exclaimed. We put the turkey in the fridge next to the nonalcoholic beer, went for a walk along the river, and then sat in my living room waiting for the kettle to boil. When there was a lull in the conversation, my mother looked at my father, then at me. “We have some bad news, I’m afraid.”

  I looked at my father. “You’re sick.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Several weeks before, his routine CAT scan had revealed black spots on his lungs. There were three possibilities: lung cancer, which was untreatable; kidney cancer, which was untreatable; or bladder cancer, which could be contained with chemotherapy. Because my father’s oncologist had recently retired, it took nearly a month to schedule and receive the results of a biopsy. My parents had learned only the day before that the spots were bladder cancer.

  “But bladder cancer is good?” I asked.

  They hesitated. In the past few weeks, my father had also been complaining of back pain, and his new doctor thought that the disease—which, I suddenly realized, must have been lurking in his body all along—might have already spread to his bones. If that were the case, then his chances of survival were much lower: bladder cancer patients with metastatic deposits in the lungs often respond well to treatment, but those with bone metastasis have an average life expectancy of one year. A bone scan was scheduled for the following week.

  That night we rented March of the Penguins—eggs cracking in the cold and fluffy chicks being carried off by vultures. We were still watching the opening credits when there was a scrabbling in the kitchen: Oscar, my cat, had caught a third mouse. He held it tightly in his mouth and ran in excited circles around a kitchen chair. The mouse was only a baby; still trapped between Oscar’s jaws, it waved its tiny legs and a minute later died. My father scooped it up and dropped it down the garbage chute, and we continued with the film. But the incident had left me distracted. When Oscar later sat on my lap, I was repulsed—I couldn’t expel the image of the animal struggling inside his mouth.

  My parents left as soon as the movie ended. I was brushing my teeth and Oscar hovering by the stove when he suddenly lunged at something underneath it. He emerged with a fourth mouse that was very dark gray and even smaller than the third. “Okay, Oscar, drop it,” I said, assuming he would kill it as quickly as he had the one before. But instead he carried it into the bathroom, and when I followed him, he turned on me, crouched low, and hissed. I was frightened—I’d never heard him make such a sound before. “Please, Oscar, just kill it,” I pleaded. “Please just kill it, please.” I watched as again and again he let the mouse run alongside the bathtub, only to attack it when it reached the wall. In its brief moments of freedom, the mouse sat motionless on hind legs, front paws raised. Finally it made a break for the living room: it refused to die. There Oscar caught it again and batted it across the wooden floor; he caught it again, and this time succeeded at lifting it into the air with his two front paws. When he finally dropped it, the mouse ran into the closet and inside one of my boots. I sat on the floor and wept.

  Eventually Oscar retrieved his prey and carried it back to the bathroom. The mouse had grown weak; now when he dropped it on the floor, it simply lay there. It was still alive when, forty-five minutes after the initial pounce, I could stand the game no longer and swept it into a dustpan. Once inside, the mouse curled up with its eyes closed. No wounds were visible, so it looked peaceful, as though it were sleeping. I was still crying when I took it out into the hall.

  I called my father soon afterward to say that Oscar had caught mouse number four. “Tomorrow we’ll block up the mouse hole,” he said. I told him I felt sorry for it. “Oh, Katharine,” he said. “Your heart’s too large. You saw the movie—nature’s cruel.”

  * * *

  MY FATHER DID not have cancer in his bones, which is why his doctor gave my parents permission to postpone chemotherapy and travel to Australia. Once there, though, he began to feel very ill. He made an appointment with a second doctor, and the resulting X-ray—taken just six weeks after the original CAT scan—showed that the tumors in his lungs were dramatically enlarged. “If I were you,” the Australian doctor said, “I’d get on the next plane home.” So my parents flew back to Boston, where my father would start chemotherapy just after Christmas. They said that the speed with which the tumors had grown was not necessarily bad news—according to a third doctor, chemotherapy is more successful at treating fast-growing cancers than slow ones. I clung to the comment, as I did to a statistic that someone had mentioned in passing: bladder cancer is successfully contained in two-thirds of cases. But these were just words.

  The imprecise nature of treatment became even clearer when, during winter vacation, I went with my parents to meet my father’s new nurse. Erika gave us what she called “Chemo 101”—the treatment would last six months; it would be two weeks on and two weeks off; the most significant side effect would be fatigue; my father would lose his hair. She was careful to stress that we were not in a curative mode, but a maintenance mode: the cancer would never go away, but with luck it could be put into remission. Earlier that day I had happened upon my father’s list of questions for the meeting. “Side effects?” he had written. “Time frame?” And at the end, “Worst case? When?” When he asked Erika for a prognosis, though, she said only that it was too soon to tell.

  Meanwhile, it was the most peaceful time I had spent with my parents in years. My father was tired from the chemotherapy, and his face drawn and aged, but he was also sober, and consistently tender and kind. And as his two temperate months turned into three, four, five, six—I didn’t know how or why—I started to forget the terrible fights, the bloodshot eyes, the silly, sinister moods: all that life had been before. Within a few weeks his hair had fallen out—“I’m a little baldicoot!” he told me cheerfully over the phone, for by that time I had returned to New York. But he was not in pain, and even when he did start drinking again—of course he started drinking again—my parents remained a different couple from the pair they’d been before. My mother attributed the change in him to lorazepam, the antianxiety medication he’d been prescribed. They called them his “Be Nice to Minty” pills.

  One night, around the time we were expecting the treatment’s initial results, I called my father at home. It was too late to phone, but my urge to speak with him was strong and sudden. His voice was small. He had not been asleep, he said, but he was in bed, reading Trollope. I asked if he had heard from the doctor; he said, no, they were doing the tests on Tuesday. Finally I mentioned something I was working on for grad school, an essay about him. I assumed he would be pleased.

  “Oh, god,” he said. “The lengths we go to getting you educated.” I laughed, but his tone made me uneasy. “It’s not the money,” he said, “it’s the ignominy.”

  “I’m not sure I know what ‘ignominy’ means,” I admitted.

  “My voice is croaky,” he said. “You’ll have to look it up.”

  As soon as we stopped speaking, I went to my dictionary. The definition left me surprised and chastened. My father—of whom I expected imperviousness—was ashamed.

  * * *

  WE RECEIVED THE test results a few weeks later. Erika had said we should consider it good news even if the number of tumors in his lungs remained constant, but in fact the scans had shown a marked improvement—“A new lease on life,” he told me over the phone. The tests that followed showed the same. My family’s peaceful period endured. When the doctors discovered a cancerous growth on my father’s spine, and suggested he suspend chemotherapy for a month’s worth of targeted radiation, it seemed just one more obstacle to overc
ome.

  Then, in August, my mother called to say that my father was in the ER. He’d had chemotherapy the previous morning, but, ignoring instructions to take it easy, had spent the afternoon working on the boat. He was unable to make it home before throwing up—my mother said later that his vomit looked like wet coffee grinds strewn across the front steps. She took him to the hospital, where the doctors eventually concluded that dehydration, coupled with too little wine to drink at lunch, had triggered a second case of delirium tremens.

  I returned to Boston the next morning. My father had been moved to intensive care, to a long room with a window at the far end, though the glass was blocked by too many pieces of hospital equipment to let in much light. These machines—sixteen in total—beeped and flashed; one displayed the green scrawl of his heartbeat, another his blood pressure, and another his body temperature. The intravenous drips, when they were about to empty, ping-pinged forlornly; when he later acquired a breathing tube, its papery lung inhaled and exhaled like a scuttling octopus. He might have been sleeping when we first walked in, but for his right eye, which was open and staring at the ceiling. The nurses had tried gluing the eyelid closed—a clear crust of adhesive lined his lashes—but it kept popping open. I approached him and kissed his forehead; it smelled medicinal. Then a team of radiologists came to install a PICC—a twenty-four-inch tube that would wind its way from my father’s inner elbow to his heart. I returned two hours later to find crimson, coin-sized drops of blood speckling the linoleum floor; no one bothered to mop them up, so they dried there and turned rusty.

  It was several days before my father woke. I was excited to see him sitting up, but he looked at my mother and me with no sign of recognition. He shifted in bed; I noticed that his wrists were now restrained. “How are you?” I asked. Accusingly, he turned to me. Who are you, he mouthed. “I’m Katharine,” I said. “I’m your daughter.” I touched his arm. “Who are you?” he asked again, and fell asleep. My mother joined me at his bedside. Alone in the big, empty Boston house we had been fighting like dogs, but now, seeing her bent over her husband, smoothing his thin hair, I found myself moved. “Poor Geoffy,” she said. “I hope he’s not miserable.”