Should I Still Wish

by Evans, John W. ;

  I don’t want anyone else I love to die alone wasn’t the clearest logic. For one thing, Dad would arrive soon to keep vigil. Probably, he would get there before I did. He would have Mom for support, and they were good in a crisis. I owe it to Grandma for flying out for Katie’s funeral was closer to what I really felt. In a wheelchair, paralyzed on her right side, forced to accept the charity of airline officials and an estranged sister, Grandma had never once invoked her self-pity in place of my sorrow. Even at the nature preserve, after the funeral mass, her hazel eyes sharp and her gray brow tucked under her silk scarf, tied properly even in that heat, she withheld any criticisms. To spread Katie’s ashes after the mass was distinctly un-Catholic, but Grandma had said nothing against it. There was a sense of scale to her empathy that had surprised me, a light behind the darkness that seemed more than grief. Grandma had loved Katie. She had genuinely liked Katie too. For anyone else, Grandma’s death would not follow Katie’s. But I could do this last thing for Grandma. Whether or not she knew it—and following her stroke, there was no way to be sure she did—I would be there.

  The hospital where Grandma was dying, where her husband had died fifteen years earlier and her mother ten years before that, was the only public hospital in the region for a good fifty miles. A row of squat buildings lit through each room and along the exterior pitched floodlights at a slight elevation to the fields around it. The effect was to see at first a baseball diamond, county fairgrounds, the state university: a placed filled with skilled people who required a lot of light to do exceptional things. Even the concrete was painted to look like white stone. Two signs moved traffic in opposite directions: into the visitor’s parking lot at the front or along the new wing down the hill to the emergency bay. Bodies arrived and departed from a discreet berth. Catholic, I thought, to the end. Everyone was welcome to walk through the front door, so long as they first climbed the hill.

  I parked near the entrance and stretched my legs. Seven hours driving: twenty-six minutes faster than the computer had predicted. It felt good to stand, better still to walk. The coffee was wearing off and I was hungry, but the hunger had a way of sharpening my senses, magnifying the need I felt to do something important. Go inside already. See it for yourself. I walked around the building to get my bearings. Somewhere close, I knew, was Dad’s hometown, and beyond that, the city where I had lived for the first fourteen years of my life. Grandma was upstairs. Each time the automatic doors opened, a burst of cold air whipped out through the muggy heat. I signed my name at the desk and stuck an ID on my shirt. I followed the lines on the floor to the western bank of elevators, then out to the floor and wing, turning a short hallway toward a room where my parents sat on either side of the bed, holding Grandma’s hands and praying.

  *

  We arrived mornings, first thing, for the doctor’s rounds. We went back to the hotel for a late breakfast and rebooked flights. A representative for the airline offered to waive the cancellation fee if Dad mailed a copy of Grandma’s death certificate. “But, she isn’t dead,” I said, trying to sound helpful. The manager kept our rooms indefinitely, on a discounted rate for family emergencies. “Except for holidays,” she explained, “the place doesn’t really fill.” We thanked her for her hospitality. In an empty conference room off the lobby, we spread brochures on a table and checked what we thought we understood against what the Internet seemed also to explain. We spent long afternoons and evenings with Grandma, at first together and then in shifts, watching the Beijing Olympics on the in-room television. I tried to make small talk. “They like to know you’re here,” a nurse told me. But isn’t she brain-dead? I wanted to ask, except I couldn’t think of a nice way to ask it, and then, what if Grandma had heard me ask it?

  One afternoon, over lunch, a specialist visited the room. Things were not progressing. The insurance company would pay for hospice care at an approved facility. There were three “homes” within five miles of the hotel. We left the hospital to meet with an administrator. We held interviews, signed applications, studied fact sheets, and checked for vacancies. Mom and I stood in hallways while Dad sat in one vacant room after another, trying to get a feel for how Grandma might live in the space and whether she would like it. After a while, he had a checklist. Was there a window view, sunlight, noise at night, a comfortable bed? A hospice care facilitator was assigned to our case. He wore bow ties and dragged his left leg when he walked. Every morning, he explained the latest deadline for each step of the pending transfer. He suggested that we wait each one out and not take them together. There was no point, he said, really, to working ahead; when the time came, we’d move Grandma, if it came to that, and it either would or wouldn’t; we just had to wait. We waited like that for one week and the start of the next. In the last facility we visited, the hallways were filled with men attached to IVs, women in wheelchairs, someone lying half-awake on gurneys or holding an arm out to a nurse, oxygen tubes stuck up his nose. No one would choose to come here to die, I thought, and I couldn’t help thinking of the room in the funeral home where the director had laid out Katie’s body. Of course, they don’t. Someone chooses it for them.

  *

  Aunt Lillian, Grandma’s youngest sister, came by in the afternoons to sit. We talked about the Cubs, California, Michael Phelps, the heat. She held out the back of my Kosuke Fukudome t-shirt and laughed. She thought his last name was an obscene pun. Lillian had doted on me as a boy. I had loved visiting her small ranch house with the giant satellite dish in the backyard of, what seemed to my youthful eyes, all of Kansas’s corn and soybean fields, just out the porch window and under her husband’s watchful eye. Lillian and Archie hosted Easter. She made terrific deviled eggs. She would always sneak me a few as she took the plastic wrap off the main dishes, before calling everyone in for supper. Aunt Lillian was the baby of her family too, several years younger than her other sister, Soph. She knew something about pecking orders. Lillian’s smile lingered with little of her sisters’ sadness. I wasn’t allowed to do so very often, but I spent a few nights on her farm, sleeping in my third cousin’s room. I have always romanticized rural life on a working farm because of it.

  Archie died the year I graduated from college, on his tractor in a field. The neighbors came out to help finish the harvest and get everything to market. A local newspaper ran an article about it, with a picture of folding tables in the field topped with hot plates, and men standing around drinking coffee and smiling. I knew Archie as the gruff cardplayer who sat in his recliner after supper drinking beer and watching the Lions play the Cowboys or the Royals play the Tigers, though much later, I saw something of his mischief too. At my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, he leaned over to my sister and me as they cut the cake, smiled, and whispered, “That’s the first time in fifty years I’ve seen them kiss each other.”

  “I feel him there sometimes,” Lillian said to me one afternoon as I walked her to the elevator. Older now, even when she smiled, she looked so much like Grandma. “I’ll be lying in bed and having a dream, or I’ll wake up from a dream, and there he is, right next to me. I don’t mean—no, no—just—I know he’s there. And I’ll start talking to him about this or that, and he’ll listen.”

  She smiled at me.

  “It must happen to you too,” she said. “You must miss Katie and get awfully lonesome.”

  I wanted to agree with her. I did miss Katie. I did get lonesome. I might even notice it in dreams about Katie, how they were very different from those in which she didn’t appear. But did I ever wake thinking Katie was next to me? No, that never happened.

  “I sometimes dream she’s there,” I said, wanting to meet Lillian halfway. I wanted to tell her all about Cait, and all of the happiness I could not wait to find in Montana. I wanted to say that I was falling in love. Again. “But I really don’t think she is.”

  Lillian smiled again and hugged me. I could smell the powder on her skin, rosewater, as she kissed me on the cheek.

  “She’s th
ere, John,” she said, “whether you know it or not.”

  *

  “It’s time,” the nurse said over the phone that last morning. Dad made his way to the hospital quickly and I came later. There was neither haste nor coldness in anyone’s manner. No one panicked or tried to stop the inevitable. I felt separate of that work. We held hands. Dad prayed. I stood outside the room while Dad and Mom went in, and after a while, the nurses came and went, a doctor, a medical officer, a police officer, and eventually, even, the coroner. All in a couple of hours, neither rushed nor overly deliberate, but rather, following a schedule, Grandma’s death was witnessed and accounted for, and yet, in the end, for all its pacing and deliberation, this death was nothing like Katie’s. Or, it was like Katie’s in the broad sense that I was there and, just after the fact, the interventions of strangers came fast enough to make familiar the unreason of death and, then, to dismantle all of its attendant architecture—stripping the bed, removing the effects, bleaching the equipment and room—until it seemed that the room was reset and that no one had ever stayed in the room before, and certainly, no one had lived there at the end of any life. Otherwise, nothing changed.

  *

  On the way to the funeral, my sister and I stopped at Grandma’s apartment. The room was as I remembered it from my visit that spring: two green easy chairs from the old house now set by the window with white towels on the headrests, a coffee table, a television with a box remote. All of it was meticulously ordered and, in its own way, spartan, showing nothing more than what day to day she had needed and could not get from the nursing home staff, at the cafeteria, or in the common rooms. At first glance, the cupboards were sparse—cornflakes, salt and pepper, decaffeinated tea—though, on closer inspection, Grandma had kept a high shelf stocked at the far back with hundreds of pills, of every shape and color, round pills and oblong pills and tabs, half and quarter doses, in the original plastic blisters or under the orange stoppers with her name, the dosage, and instructions printed down one side and up the next. The pills were crammed into the space, a store of what she would need one day far in excess of what she might ever use: stacks of old pennies, expired credit cards, the Soviet nuclear arsenal. How closely, I thought, that shelf resembled the cellar she had stacked to the ceiling with preserves, a near wall of green bean jars that Katie and I had finally thrown out, labeled with Scotch tape and dated far too many years too late to eat, the pounds of butter smashed into the deep freezer next to the frozen juice, tubs of whipped topping, and sides of beef. We had chipped the freezer ice to liberate and name the last pieces. We hardly recognized what Grandma had dug in. She stocked up, yes; there was no denying it. She hated to have too little of anything. Really, I think, she hated pain more than she liked pleasure. Or, she hated the idea of pain and ever being unready for it more than she liked the idea of avoiding it. Pain proved something that no other feeling could test: courage, but also the ability to withstand the worst, to suffer with dignity, to make a space in oneself for what others by habit avoided or tried to avoid. Grandma guarded cautiously against being made to feel strong or weak. Perhaps the pills were a kind of makeshift sanctuary, a shelf too high to ever reach. Seeing them all in one place, I felt humble and weak. No one could survive on such provisions. My sister and I took mementos from the apartment. Grandma had always stocked the candy dish for our arrivals with spice drops. Along the sides, the dish was carved into elaborate ridges, nearly crystal, except the edges were sharp and the top, as I twirled it on the table, made no music. Glass. I’ll take it, I thought, and it won’t be empty. From the cupboard I took down a few bottles and rolled the pills in the glass.

  That night, we took a driving tour of the city in Dad’s rental car. One last time, we crammed as a family into a sedan. Our adult selves still held the space of our designated seats with all the adolescent marking out of territories. We bumped elbows and giggled. We started at the childhood home on the south side and made our way north and west to the ranch-style house with the steep yard. From the curb, it seemed unchanged: two windows, green shutters, the short porch, the empty lot once a garden where Granddad kept his store before it burned down. Who knew what the new owners had done with the rooms inside. I could still imagine Grandma and Granddad in that kitchen, just married, arguing, according to family legend, about money. Granddad says that he wants his own business in St. Joe, clear and outright, and that his father will stake him to start it. Grandma is too proud to take anyone’s charity, but she likes the idea of owning a business. She is a nurse at the state hospital. When she does dishes, she fills the sink with an inch of water: more than enough. Out the window, the neighbors are building a deck that reaches all the way to the property line. If they take the money, she thinks, will that be the end of it? Meaning, have they gotten as much as they should? Can they get more? And I have to hear it in her voice, so many years later, that first inkling of a resentment that she will nurse the rest of her life, before any other. What do they take us for, anyway?

  *

  Katie and I had helped Grandma move out of that house and into the nursing home. There were boxes lined to one side of the dining room, Grandma’s large vanity, a few larger pieces to drive to the city dump. In the attic, we found Grandma’s beautiful silk-and-fur dressing gown, with a wedding note from her future mother-in-law. The family into which she had married was, by all accounts, generous. Katie had held the delicate fabric in the tips of her fingers and smiled. The coloring had yellowed with age. Along the seams there were holes where insects had eaten their way to the other side. All the wedding presents were still in the original boxes. When Katie had asked Grandma about them, later, at dinner at the home, her eyes had lit up. The store was the best in town, she said; the gifts had all been so nice. She hadn’t wanted to ruin any of them by wearing them.

  At the end of our long moving day, Katie and I went for coffee at the franchise shop on State Highway. It was a weeknight, not too busy. The smell of roasting coffee and the high-gloss jazz were ritualized and generic; we might arrive at that exact moment mid-song to any franchise in the country. But we were beat after the move and homesick to be anywhere else, so I sat with the newspaper while Katie got to chatting with a woman sitting alone at the next table. Her daughter, the woman said, was visiting for the holidays. Her son had just left. She was out doing some shopping for dinner and needed a pick-me-up. I didn’t quite follow the conversation, but I watched Katie’s face for that familiar sequence of frowns and nods, her matter-of-fact tone, her careful listening. Katie had reverted into sounding-board mode. They were working out a problem together. To me, the woman was lonely in a way that made me nervous. I thought that any chat might become still more exhaustion after our exhausting day. Katie listened and smiled and asked questions. I put the paper down and turned my chair, though by then the chat was pleasant and general. Perhaps my joining made it less intimate. Or Katie had steered the conversation, as she usually did, toward easy rapport. As the woman left, she wished us a Merry Christmas. She smiled at Katie and thanked for her listening.

  Why didn’t I remember that Katie more often? The question troubled me with its suggestion of certainty. Was I only remembering one Katie now, a Katie whom I had married young, and now happily set on the pyre and pushed into open waters, offering my eager sacrifice to unhappiness, that she had died and I would live as though I was supposed to love someone else? I had said all year that I would not make Katie into a martyr or a saint, that I would remember all of Katie and honor that memory by telling the truth. Had I told too much of it? Did I remember the bad in order to live well after the good?

  The day after Grandma’s funeral, we said our good-byes over breakfast at the hotel. I left first thing and drove north all day to Sioux Falls, then west across South Dakota to the Badlands. Even without a reservation, a last-minute cancellation meant I could spend two nights still in the national park and the next night at a motel near its entrance. The morning after that, I would meet Cait in Billings.


  *

  Badlands. In translation, the hard place to cross, the wasted land, the empty valleys inside black hills. Fossil hunters still went there to find imaginary sea creatures. Homesteaders lost their farms to locust plagues and frosts and the Dust Bowl. I was there for Theodore Roosevelt. I had read all summer about his self-imposed exile in the Badlands after the death of his first wife, Alice. How he had set out to make a second life, to grieve and revive a different past, one from which he might become instead the naturalist Rough Rider, the industrial ornithologist—a life to which the past could not, in the end, cling. He wrote it this way in his journal: “The light in my life has gone out.” He wrote nothing else about it. He refused to say or write Alice’s name ever again, even to their daughter, her namesake, though friends noticed how he worried during his second wife Edith’s five pregnancies, so different were his moods then from the usual ebullient and willful happiness.

  Hadn’t widowhood suggested clear rituals for doing things carefully and right in order to see a grief finished? In the storage locker across town, I had broken down the last boxes of our life. I had given away Katie’s shirts, jewelry, books, posters, and cowboy boots, even her bowling ball. We had planted wildflowers near her ashes. And yet, a corresponding peace of mind was never entirely forthcoming. It lingered in the near distance, shrouded in a haze I kept thinking would lift, which time did not clear. The feeling was of having skipped important steps, but also of working too quickly toward an end, of trying and failing to be done with grief. Real widowers, I told myself, wheeled the samsara of grief indefinitely, perpetually bereft, unsteady in the living—the loving—world. A feeling of cutting away the past seemed nearly equal to my ambition to cross the Badlands, where I was sure such ambivalences would end, if only that a next life, as fragile and susceptible to chance as the life before it, might finally begin.