The next day at the hospital, Margy said, “Bet you found the apartment lonely last night.”
“Not particularly,” I lied.
“You don’t have to soft-pedal me just because I’ve got the Big C. It’s real Early Nothing, my place—and it’s my own damn fault. A testament to my inability to expend energy on anything but the here and fucking now—the next meeting, the next deal, the next schmooze session with some hack who writes for an in-flight magazine. That’s the sum total of my existence—the peripheral, the inconsequential, the—”
I put my hand on hers and said, “Don’t do this.”
“Why not? I love self-flagellation. More to the point, I’m good at it. My mom always used to say that my biggest problem was that I saw things far too clearly.”
“I would have thought that a strength.”
“It leads to ongoing four-in-the-morning dread.”
“We all deal with that sort of thing from time to time.”
“Yeah, but I do it six nights a week.”
“And on the seventh night?”
“I medicate myself with enough scotch to conk out for eight straight hours and wake up with the mother of all hangovers the next morning. Jesus, will you listen to me? Little Ms. Self-Pity on top of everything else.”
“Considering what you’ve just been through . . .”
“No, hon—the self-absorption has nothing to do with the cancer. I put it down to a lack of nicotine. You don’t think you could smuggle me in one of those nicotine patches they sell to junkies trying to kick the habit?”
“Somehow I think your oncologist might not like the idea.”
“Fuck him. All the surgery and the chemo-dreck to come is just damage control. This thing is going to get me.”
“Yesterday you said you’d beat it.”
“Well, today I’m celebrating the Power of Negative Thinking. It’s weirdly comforting, feeling doomed . . .”
“Knock it off,” I said, sounding stern and schoolmarmish. “You have the good kind of cancer.”
“And you’ve just uttered the biggest fucking oxymoron going.”
I had to fly back to Maine the next night, but called Margy midday on Monday at the hospital once the results of the biopsy were in.
“Well, they’re pretty certain the cancer hasn’t metastasized into other parts of the body,” she said.
“That’s fantastic news.”
“No, it’s bad but it could be worse, and they’re going to have to run about a half-dozen more tests to make certain there isn’t any metastasis they haven’t caught. The final upshot of everything is that I will be starting chemotherapy just as soon as I am completely over all my postoperative shock. And if you fucking tell me that all this is very encouraging, I’m going to hang up, got that?”
The news, in fact, was encouraging. Dan—bless him—had his lung surgeon friend at Maine Medical call Margy’s oncologist in New York (they’d been at Cornell Medical together) to get the complete inside dope on her case (I needed to know the actual nuts-and-bolts realities of what she was facing). They felt they had gotten all of the tumor out during surgery—and though they would only know after tests if any cancer cells had invaded the other lung, they were pretty confident that metastasis hadn’t taken place. But—oh yes, that great medical but—they couldn’t completely rule out metastasis, and they were going to run vast amounts of tests to see if the cancer might have traveled elsewhere.
And so, over the next few weeks, Margy endured assorted procedures—including a course of chemotherapy to zap any rogue cells. As Margy explained it, chemo involved sitting in a recliner all afternoon while they dripped poison into her arm. I flew down to see her a week after the first course. She was back at home, but had hired her housekeeper to come in every day to cook and shop for her, as she was incredibly weak from the chemo. Her hair had started to fall out, her skin had taken on a yellowy tinge, and she complained of pain in just about every joint in her body.
“Otherwise, I feel fucking fabulous.”
Amazingly, she had started to work again. There were client files spread across her bed at home. When I wondered out loud if this was a good idea, she said, “I’ve got nothing better to do—and anyway, what else is there in my life but work?”
Her resolve was astonishing. As the first course of chemo was successful, two subsequent series were ordered. By this point she was back at the office, and merely took off a couple of days to get over the appalling side effects. Just a month ago, she had to go back into the hospital for another week for a surgical procedure known as a lobectomy—to remove the scar tissue in the upper bronchus of her lung that had resulted in a lot of catastrophic coughing.
“However, as I’m certain you saw on CNN this morning,” Margy said a few days after the operation, “my lower bronchus turned out to be undamaged, which means that I get to keep my lower lobe of my lung. Sounds like a game show, doesn’t it? Too bad that you didn’t win our grand prize of an Amana Fridge/Freezer with a built-in ice cube maker, but you still get to keep the lower lobe of your left lung!”
I laughed. But before I could make a comment, Margy said, “And don’t tell me how great it is that I have kept my sense of humor. I don’t find any of this funny at all—except the irony that I only started smoking at fifteen because I thought it looked sexy. But I bet every damn oncologist has heard that line before from some lung cancer loser, bemoaning the fact that they reached for their first Winston because they were insecure about how they looked and hoped it might get them laid. Anyway, the thing is—and this is really a diabolical admission after all the medical fun I’ve been through—I’d still kill for a cigarette right now.”
The German Requiem faded into static. I was deep in the White Mountains. Up ahead, I could see the grave, stern silhouette of Mount Washington—and remembered how I had once climbed it with Dan right after our final exams in . . . good God, could it have been 1970? Hiking up it was his idea. I complained frequently during the initial ascent—a boring, steep trek through woodlands. But then, just as I was about to suggest that we return to base, we turned a corner, the forest vanished, and there in front of us was this immense ravine. It was shaped like a bowl and veiled with thin cloud. There was a small glacier in the middle. To the right of it was a rocky trail—free of snow. Above that was a boulder field, which led to the summit—all 6,288 feet of it. I felt a stab of fear as I looked up at that ravine. Fear mixed with a strange sense of exhilaration, because how often in life do you get to do something as challenging and extreme as climb a mountain? Dan must have read my mind, as he said, “Don’t worry, you’ll make it to the top.”
We did get to the summit—even though, halfway up the ravine, we got caught in a hailstorm, accompanied by a nervy half hour of high winds. I lost my footing at one point, and nearly took a three-hundred-foot fall that would undoubtedly have resulted in my death. What saved me was instinct and luck. As I slipped, I grabbed for some sort of support. In front of me was a thin rock, jutting out near my left hand. Had it given way under my weight, I would have been sent sailing southward. But it held—and saved my life.
The whole incident couldn’t have lasted more than five seconds—the misstep, the moment of panic, the mad grab for anything stable, my left hand connecting with the rock. Dan was up ahead of me and saw nothing. I needed a minute to collect myself, then continued the ascent. When I caught up with Dan around fifteen minutes later and he asked me how I was getting on, I made light of what had just happened. “Lost my footing back there and nearly went over the side . . . but otherwise, no sweat at all.”
“Okay. Just watch your step, eh?”
Watch your step. Story of my life. And with two exceptions, I had done just that. But whereas the business with Toby Judson was an instance where I had let dumb romantic impulses rule my head, the misstep on Mount Washington was just a bit of bad luck that could have proved fatal, if the instinct for self-preservation had not taken over. And I’d like to believe that, as ha
rd as this life is, most of us want to cling on to it. Like me grabbing for that rock. Or Margy showing an inner ferocity against the cancer that may have been self-inflicted, but had now become an enemy to be vanquished before it vanquished her. Or Mom . . .
The Vermont border was up ahead. The snow was thinner here—the hills gentle, understated. My native state has none of the epic grandeur of New Hampshire’s alpine terrain or Maine’s jagged coast. Its scenic pleasures are serene, subtle ones that always sit well with me—because they invariably let it be known that I am home.
I hit the scan button on the radio and found the Vermont NPR station. On it, there was a Talk of the Nation discussion about family falling-outs over politics—and the wide dichotomy that existed between old sixties radicals and their more conservative children.
How about grandchildren? I thought, remembering how horrified Dad had been when he was down in Boston one weekend and took his granddaughter out for dinner, and she insisted on picking up the tab. And when the chivalric old school gent in him politely told her that grandfathers are supposed to pay for dinners out, she said, “But hey, I’m earning $150,000 a year—so it’s not like I’m a student.”
Dad was shocked at the size of her salary. He’d never made anything like that in his life, and it went against all his egalitarian principles. But Lizzie turning into a corporate type was nothing compared to Jeff becoming such a Bush-loving Republican. That was simply beyond Dad’s comprehension. He asked me once or twice what Dan and I had done to make him so conservative. All I could say was, “It’s not like he decided to mutiny because he was raised in an ashram, or by a pair of potheads. And we didn’t exactly send him to the Emma Goldman Camp for Young Trotskyites every summer. Hell, you know how straight Dan is—and how undemonstrative he is about political stuff. Jeff, on the other hand, seems to be the original True Believer. America is God’s preferred country, and the Republicans stand for all the right upstanding values. Personally, I sometimes think it’s like he’s having the teenage rebellion he should have had years ago.”
Dad really took Jeff’s conservatism personally. He saw it as a complete refutation of everything he stood for. When he joined us for Christmas last year—still amazingly vigorous and sharp at eighty-two—he tried to get Jeff engaged in a political discussion, because if there’s one thing Dad loves, it’s a good debate. But Jeff refused to be drawn in, always changing the subject whenever Dad went into an anti-Bush tirade, or even walking out of the room.
“Why won’t you talk to your grandfather?” I asked him after Dad tried to raise a question about the Patriot Act.
“I was talking to him,” he said.
“Oh, please. The moment he brought up your beloved president, you excused yourself and went upstairs.”
“I wanted to check up on Erin. And, by the way, Bush is your president too.”
“There’s a school of thought that says that Al Gore was actually elected president.”
“There you go again, spouting the usual liberal bias.”
There you go again. Didn’t Reagan score a knockout punch with that comment during one of his debates against Carter?
“I didn’t know I spouted liberal bias, Jeff.”
“Everyone in this family does. It’s in the blood.”
“I think you’re exaggerating . . .”
“All right, I know Dad isn’t a raging lefty—”
“He’s a registered Republican.”
“But he still supports candidates who are pro-choice. And when it comes to dear old Granddad, well, his history and his FBI file speak for themselves.”
“So should the fact that he’s an eighty-two-year-old man who happens to think the world of you . . .”
“No, he thinks the world of the sound of his own voice. And I’ve read all about his ‘heroic’ role in the ‘struggle’ against this country’s institutions in the sixties.”
“But that was more than thirty-five years ago, before you were born. Anyway, if you had been a student then, you would have been out on the barricades with him.”
“Don’t be so sure of that,” he said. “My political views aren’t based on fashion.”
Well, isn’t it fashionable now to be a conservative? I felt like telling him. Hell, you and your “friends” dominate the media. You’ve got your own all-news channel to tell you exactly what you want to hear. You’ve got your own very loud commentators who shout down anyone who disagrees with them. And the country is so damn jumpy since 9/11 that if you even dare question the administration, certain folks . . . like you, my dear son . . . will immediately question your patriotism.
Patriotism . . . what a peculiar obsession.
“Look, Jeff,” I said. “It’s Christmas. And as a practicing Christian, surely you know it’s essential to be tolerant of others, especially . . .”
“Please stop talking to me as if I were twelve years old,” he said. “And I really don’t appreciate being lectured about Christianity by an atheist.”
“I am not an atheist. I’m a Unitarian.”
“It’s the same thing.”
Later that evening, after Jeff and Shannon had gone to bed, and Lizzie had headed off with friends to some downtown Portland bar now popular with the city’s young professionals, and Dan had retired to our room to watch Nightline, Dad sat by the fire in our living room, sipping a small whiskey (“My doctor says one a day will keep the blood flowing”), the melancholy showing.
“Do you think that the great central sadness of old age isn’t just the realization that the end can come at any time,” he said, “but also that the world has fundamentally passed you by?”
“Doesn’t everybody over a certain age think that way?” I asked.
“I suppose so,” he said, sipping his J&B. “I suppose all lives are like political careers—at best, they end in regret; at worst, in failure.”
“You’re morbid this evening,” I said.
“Your sonny boy’s to blame. What’s wrong with that kid?”
“That kid is now nearly thirty, and he thinks he knows all the answers.”
“Conviction is a terrifying thing.”
“But you always had strong convictions, Dad.”
“True, but I never thought I had the answers. Anyway, back then, we had a legitimate grievance against a corrupt government running a corrupt war. Now we also have a legitimate grievance against a corrupt government, but people are reluctant to get on the barricades.”
“Everyone’s too busy making and spending money,” I said.
“You have a point there. Shopping has become the central cultural activity of our time.”
“Don’t say that to Jeff. His company is—how did he put it?—‘the biggest worldwide corporate insurers of retail units.’ And he won’t have a word said against them because as far as he’s concerned, they’re spreading the gospel of good American consumerism, blah, blah, blah.”
“He really despises me, doesn’t he?”
“No, Dad. He despises your politics. But don’t take it personally. He despises anyone who doesn’t see things his way. And I often wonder, if we had raised him as a strict Assemblies of God Christian, refused to let him have anything to do with godless folk, and sent him to a really tough military school . . .”
“He’d probably now be reading Naomi Klein and going on antiglobalization marches,” Dad said. “Oh, and by the way, there is no such thing as a lax military school. Your tough military school is a tautology . . .”
“Ever the pedant,” I said with a smile.
“You sound like your mother.”
“No, she would have said, ‘Ever the fucking pedant.’”
“That’s true.”
“Have you been over to see her recently?” I asked.
“Around two weeks ago. No change.”
“I feel bad about not making the effort to see her more.”
“She wouldn’t even know who you were, so what’s the point? I’m only twenty minutes from the hospital, and I can
only face it every two weeks or so. Frankly, if they had legalized euthanasia in this damn country of ours, I’m certain that Dorothy would be much happier not to be here now. Alzheimer’s is so damn cruel.”
I swallowed hard and felt tears welling up. In my mind’s eye, I could replay our last visit to the nursing home where she lived now. A frail, hunched old lady, sitting up most of the day in a chair, staring off into a bottomless void, not aware of anything around her, unable to make the simplest connection with anyone in the room. Someone whose entire spirit had been erased, the memory of everything that she had done over her seventy-nine years of life wiped clean. Five years ago, when the Alzheimer’s arrived, it was like watching a light gradually diminish—the occasional burst of illumination in the midst of an ongoing series of electrical short circuits. And then, just two Christmases ago, came the final blackout. Dad arrived home from the university one afternoon—he still kept an office there—to discover my mother had vanished. Oh, she was physically present in their living room, but her mind had closed down. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t make eye contact, couldn’t even respond to stimuli like touch or the sound of someone’s voice.
He called me immediately in Portland. I asked the headmaster at my school to find a substitute for a few days and drove straight to Burlington that night. Though I had known for some time that this day would eventually arrive—Alzheimer’s always has the same dreadful denouement—I still broke down when I reached the house and saw my mother sitting on the end of the sofa in the living room, mentally conquered by her illness. In those first horrible moments, when I found myself crying uncontrollably, all I could think was how she had always been such a torrential, troubling, essential force in my life—and how she’d been reduced to this empty shell who would now have to be fed and changed like an infant, and how I somehow wished that we’d been able to take it easier on each other, and how so much human argument is irrelevant.
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