The Truth About Death

by Robert Hellenga

  She liked to chase live squirrels in the little park by the depot. She liked to lie on the living room floor with Simon. She liked to smell us, and she liked it when we smelled her back, pushing our noses into her neck fur. She liked to bump my arm when I was reading. She liked to patrol the whole house—including Nana’s apartment and the bedrooms on the third floor—just before bedtime. She liked to “vacuum” the kitchen floor for things that I had dropped or spilled. Crumbs, cereal, sometimes an olive. She’d hold the olive in her mouth for a while and then spit out the pit. She liked to do this when there were guests. She liked running in the park at night, walking too, smelling all the messages left by other dogs, putting together a kind of olfactory map of the park. She liked running through the snow with her nose down. She liked wearing her uniform where there were a lot of people in the house, either in the children’s room upstairs or in the visitation room downstairs. There was always one person who needed her most, and she liked to stand by that person.

  She liked to bark when no one was around; she liked to lift her leg to pee instead of squatting; she liked to poop right in the middle of the little Girl Scout garden on Mulberry Street, at the edge of the park. She liked greeting people at the door. She liked chasing the Frisbee in the park. She liked putting on her uniform and going out with Simon in the middle of the night. Just the two of them. She liked to sit in the front seat of the van. She liked going duck hunting with Simon. Just the two of them. Simon was not a very good shot, but he usually got a couple of ducks. Olive liked to dive off the little boat into the water or burst out of the duck blind. Simon said it was something she’d always known how to do.

  She liked to tease me by bringing me things and provoke me by peeing on my tomato plants. She liked to snooze in the sun on the Oriental rug up in Simon’s tower. She liked the baby carrots that I tossed up in the air for her to catch, and she liked to break all of my rules about not getting up on the couch or bed. She liked sitting quietly with Nana up in Nana’s apartment. She liked to put her nose in Simon’s crotch when he was sitting on the edge of the bed trying to tie his shoes. She liked having her teeth brushed, which Simon did every morning. She liked sitting by my chair when I was reading. She liked Simon telling me not to baby her. She liked putting her head against Simon’s leg when he was shaving. She liked to lie down and cradle her head on her paws till someone came to talk to her.

  Olive didn’t like my shooing her off the couch or off the bed or out of the kitchen. She didn’t like walking on the leash when she could be running free. She didn’t like not barking sometimes or not jumping up on me. She didn’t like being left alone with Megan Thomas, who came to babysit the phone when everyone else was gone. She didn’t like not being allowed to go into the prep room with Simon. She didn’t like taking a shower with us and getting soap in her eyes. She didn’t like it when I wiped her paws with a towel when she came in from the rain or the snow. She didn’t like it when Simon and I packed our suitcases.

  Olive was a natural comforter. Her stores of friendliness and attentiveness, open affection, and loving-kindness were inexhaustible. She put people at ease—extending the paw of affection, placing her head on a lap or a leg. Word got around and more and more people requested Olive. For the children. For the elderly bereaved. For everyone. It was fun for her. It was work too, and after a visitation or a funeral she would lie down on her bed in Simon’s office or else on the quilt that she’d dragged into the back of our bedroom closet.

  She comforted us too. Sometimes at a visitation she’d go to Simon as if he were the one grieving hardest. And Simon would have to shoo her away.

  Simon was working too hard. “You take all the difficult cases,” I told him one evening after a difficult funeral, “the suicides, the organ donors … You’re everyone’s friend and comforter. But let’s face facts: you’re getting older; you worry about money all the time; you’re drinking too much; you have to get up three or four times in the night to pee. And you’re angry all the time. You’re turning into your father.”

  I think this last remark hit home.

  I was sitting at the little library table in the tower. Simon was in his big chair-and-a-half. The deceased—a chemistry professor at the college—had wanted to donate his organs. All the paperwork had been in place for weeks. At the last minute, just as the doctors were about to take him off the ventilator, his wife changed her mind, brought her lawyer to the hospital; she wanted Simon to pick up the body at the hospital before the surgeons had a chance to harvest the organs.

  The organs were harvested nonetheless. First Person Consent makes your decision to be an organ/tissue donor legally binding—family consent is not necessary—but it was an ugly scene, and later the widow was unhappy with the way the body looked. There’s only so much you can do with a dead body when the corneas and the organs have been harvested—tissue too, including some major bones, which had been replaced with plastic tubes.

  Louisa had died in June and we’d canceled our plans to take Olive up to the lake. I had changed some of the prints around. Simon was seriously depressed. Hard work wasn’t helping, and there was only so much Olive and I could do. I wanted something to keep his spirits up, but nothing too obvious. I didn’t want the tower to look like a dentist’s office with uplifting posters on the ceiling, but I did put up lots of Impressionists—Monet’s gardens, Renoir’s cafés, Matisse’s dancing boys and girls—along with Giovanni di Paolo’s Five Angels Dancing Before the Sun (from the Musée Condé in Chantilly); a picture of a Korean bowl that charmed with its imperfections, reminding us that we don’t have to get everything perfect; and De Kooning’s Villa Borghese and Woman on the Beach, which hang side by side in the Guggenheim.

  Simon poured himself a second drink from a bottle of Bushmills that was standing on a little table next to his chair-and-a-half. He put his feet up on the ottoman. I was working at my laptop at the small library table.

  “Let’s go up to the cottage,” I said, “for a dirty weekend. It’s been a long time.”

  “It’s October.”

  “It’s still warm,” I said. “Maybe warm days will never cease. We can take Olive. She’d love the lake.”

  He looked at me as if I were crazy. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t think you were interested.”

  I was indignant. It wasn’t my fault that we hadn’t made love since Hildi’s death. It had been over a year now. “Not interested?” I said. “Simon, do you really believe what you just said?”

  He shook his head. “Lizzy, Lizzy, Lizzy,” he said. “What’s going to become of us?”

  “I like it when you call me Lizzy,” I said. “I want you to keep doing it. I want to drive up to the cottage for our dirty weekend and I want you to call me Lizzy the whole time. I want you to call me Lizzy in bed, Simon. It’s been over a year. Remember how horny you used to get after a funeral or a removal, and I did too? I could feel the heat coming off your body, both of us ready for a good no-holds-barred, sheet-ripping fuck. And then spooning afterward. We’ll take Sally’s mindful meditation DVD and watch it together. I’ve got the Zafu meditation cushions she gave us for Christmas. There’s even a meditation on Tantric sex. It’s a dance. There’s no beginning, no end, no goal. Just slowing everything down.”

  “You’ve been working too hard too,” he said.

  I’d finished a draft of Marginalia and had sent off a proposal to Douglas Richardson at Princeton University Press. I was ready for a break. “By the way, there’s an e-mail from Checco. We could see if he’d like to come. We could pick him up at O’Hare. And we could scatter Hildi’s ashes in the dunes. We could do a jigsaw puzzle together,” I said. “You could throw the Frisbee out into the lake for Olive. You could read the first two chapters of Marginalia.”

  Hearing her name, Olive, who was lying on the Omani rug, stirred and looked up at Simon as if to endorse the idea. As if she needed a break too.

  “We could build a fire in the fireplace.”

  I could see that
Simon was on the edge of tears. I’d gotten through to him. “I’ll call Mrs. Burian,” I said, “so she can get things ready. I’ll make all the arrangements. You can just lie back and enjoy it. I’ll e-mail Checco too.”

  The vacation, however, was not a success. Checco could not get away; the jigsaw puzzle—The Vocation of Saint Matthew—reminded Simon of his mother. “I’m no good at this,” he said. “I like the idea, but I don’t think I’ve ever, in all the years we’ve been coming up here, been able to fit a single piece in. Not once.” Simon was too restless to read my first two chapters, and Sally’s mindful meditation DVD made him even more nervous. The goal was to slow the mind down by focusing on your breathing, but Simon couldn’t sit still. “The minute I try to sit still,” he complained, “my body starts to talk to me: to itch, to cramp, to tingle, to twitch, to ache.”

  “Try to interrogate the itch,” I said, trying to guess what Sally (who taught yoga) would say. “Follow its progress, the way you might follow an insect crawling through a patch of tall grass.”

  “What about the tingling? What about the cramps?”

  “Interrogate everything,” I said.

  “What am I, a goddamn prosecuting attorney?”

  Sally could sit through the half-hour lectures without moving. I could manage about ten minutes. Simon couldn’t last even thirty seconds. “Try to put your expectations aside,” I said. “Wanting things to be other than they are is the problem. Attachment.”

  “I don’t want anything,” Simon insisted. “Wanting is not the problem. The problem is not wanting. I don’t want anything.”

  He was on the phone a lot with Gilbert. The chemistry professor’s wife had refused to pay her bill and was threatening to sue the funeral home. Simon wanted to go home that afternoon. I persuaded him to stay till the next morning.

  “We still have to scatter Hildi’s ashes,” I said.

  “We can do it this afternoon and then take off.”

  “You can leave if you want to, but I’m staying here till tomorrow.” I wanted to spend one more night in the cottage, though I’d pretty much given up on a no-holds-barred fuck.

  If it hadn’t been for Olive, who was always in good spirits, I’m not sure what we would have done. It was her first time at the lake, and she loved it. Like all labs, she had webbed feet and was a strong swimmer, and she never seemed to tire of swimming out into the lake after the Frisbee.

  On the last morning the lake was very calm, flat as a pancake. It was foggy. Simon threw the Frisbee farther and farther, as if he were trying to set some Olympic Frisbee record. I begged him not to throw it so far, but he wouldn’t listen. You couldn’t see farther than fifty feet.

  “Not so far, Simon. Please.”

  “She loves it. You can’t throw it too far for her.”

  “I don’t want to watch.”

  “Go up and check the cottage to make sure we haven’t left anything. I’ll be up in a few minutes.” But I didn’t go, and after an especially long throw we watched Olive swim right past the Frisbee, saw her heading out into open water. Into the fog. We could see her, and then we couldn’t see her. I was furious. “What the hell’s the matter with you? Why did you throw it so goddamn far? What the hell were you thinking? What’s the matter with you anyway? You’re determined to spoil every fucking thing. You can’t even take a fucking vacation.”

  “Everything is already spoiled,” he shouted, kicking off his sandals and running toward the water. He wasn’t a strong swimmer, but he was going to swim out after her. I ran after him and tried to hold him back, but he was in panic mode and fought me, as if he were drowning and I was trying to rescue him. There was no sign of Olive.

  Simon suddenly collapsed at the edge of the water. There were not many people on the beach, but those who were there had cell phones and called 911.

  By the time the ambulance arrived, Simon was unconscious. By the time Olive dragged herself up out of the water with the Frisbee, the ambulance crew had arrived, coming down the big wooden stairs at the public beach and running along the hard sand at the edge of the water.

  Olive licked Simon’s face, and Simon woke up and struggled with the paramedics, who strapped him onto a stretcher and carried him across the beach to the waiting ambulance.

  * * *

  They kept Simon for two days in the small hospital in Coloma, and then we drove home in our Mazda. Olive sat in the front with me and Simon lay down in the backseat.

  Simon was out of danger, but I worried about a second heart attack, a sudden hammer blow striking from behind, a dark horseman galloping toward us across a fertile valley, swinging an ax or a mace. Simon refused to have bypass surgery, refused to do anything his doctors had suggested. He refused to cut back on salt and saturated fats, refused to cut back on his drinking, refused to take his ACE inhibitors, refused to keep his angina diary.

  And so on.

  He kept a copy of his living will on the table next to the bed: No heroic measures. Do not resuscitate. He mailed fresh copies to Dr. Currie and to both of the local hospitals, and he made me promise not to call 911 till it was too late. I had mixed feelings about this.

  By the time we celebrated Simon’s fifty-ninth birthday, I had signed a contract with Princeton for Marginalia; we had hired another embalmer, installed a new computer system, and hired a young woman to create a presence on the Internet. The website she created featured Olive in her uniform, photos of the family and staff and the home itself, and the opportunity to subscribe at no cost to a daily e-mail to help you through the grieving process. Gilbert composed the e-mails himself, and the first ones were very good—thoughtful and thought provoking—but after a while you got to number twenty and then number thirty. What more was there to say? And he started a blog. Simon wasn’t happy about the blog, though he wasn’t sure just what it was, and he was too tired to do anything about it.

  Simon’s health had not improved. When he read in the paper about new drugs that would enable people to live into their hundreds he became agitated. He wasn’t interested in living that long. He didn’t seem to be very interested in living at all. He was short of breath and couldn’t handle the stairs up to the tower. I thought of moving Rembrandt and Caravaggio and the Impressionists and the Korean bowl and De Kooning down to our bedroom on the second floor. But I no longer maintained my unquestioning faith in the healing power of great art. Maybe Hegel had been right: Art has lost its genuine truth and life, and has been reduced to a mode of recreation or entertainment, decorative rather than necessary and essential. Or maybe I just had to accept the fact that Simon was never going to see what I saw.

  It just wasn’t going to happen. And then something else happened.

  Instead of looking at great art, we started looking at New Yorker cartoons while Olive snoozed on the Omani rug, which we’d brought down from the tower to our bedroom. We’d always looked at New Yorker cartoons, of course, and the attic was full of old New Yorkers, stacked in no particular order in bankers boxes, many of them folded open in the middle of an article or story that one of us hadn’t quite finished, or a cartoon that we’d wanted to look at one more time. You could fit over a hundred New Yorkers into a Fellowes Bankers Box if you made one flat pile and then filled the remaining space by standing another forty copies or so up on edge. We went through hundreds of old New Yorkers, cutting out one or two cartoons, sometimes more, from each issue and taping them up on the walls, not caring if the tape would pull the paint off later. We weren’t thinking about “later.” We were thinking about “now.” About Charles Addams and George Booth and Roz Chast and Sam Gross (My son stepped on a crack and broke my back) and Charles Barsotti (Fusilli, you crazy bastard! How are you?). And the younger generation too—Marisa Acocella’s sexy fashionistas, Drew Dernavich’s woodcuts, C. Covert Darbyshire’s stressed-out children, Eric Lewis’s absurd captions, Matt Diffee’s hapless losers.

  When we ran out of wall space, we made space by taking down the old cartoons and pasting them in scrapbo
oks, till we ran out of old New Yorkers. When a new one came in the mail, usually on Tuesday, we’d go through it quickly, looking at the cartoons; then we’d read some of the articles, and then a few days later we’d go through it again, cutting out the cartoons we liked. Maybe it wasn’t the happiest time of our life together, but it was the funniest.

  For years we’d been unable to keep up with The New Yorker, but now The New Yorker couldn’t keep up with us, and Simon begged me to draw our own New Yorker cartoons. He was enthusiastic, full of ideas. “How about this?” he said one afternoon, lying in bed with his laptop propped up on a pillow. (I’d just come back from lecturing on Rembrandt’s self-portraits.) “Two explorers wearing those jungle helmets—pith helmets, I think they’re called—come to a clearing in the jungle. What do they see? The lost—”

  “The lost graveyard of the elephants,” I said. “Like the explorers in those old Tarzan movies.”

  “No, no. Not the lost graveyard of the elephants, the lost funeral home. Not the graveyard but the funeral home. Get it? Why not the lost funeral home? Picture a funeral home in the jungle. You could draw some elephant pallbearers loading a casket into a hearse. The driver of the hearse is an elephant, of course, wearing a sharp uniform. What do you think? A sign in front that says JUMBO AND SONS, FUNERAL DIRECTORS.”

  “I like it,” I said. “But I haven’t done any drawing for years.”

  “It’ll be a good exercise.” Simon was so enthusiastic I thought I’d better seize the moment.