This Close to Happy

by Daphne Merkin

  * * *

  After going in and out of the hospital for various treatments, my mother came home for the last time with tubes that had been painfully inserted in either side of her chest so that she wouldn’t drown in her own liquids. In early July, I had flown to Europe for several days on a writing assignment and returned on a Monday evening. Although she had gone to see the latest film at the Paris Theater with my sisters the day before, she struck me as inescapably different when I came into her bedroom to wish her good night. She was alert enough but seemed far away, as though she had sailed out to sea while the rest of us stayed on dry land. By Wednesday she had all but stopped speaking and eating, and on Thursday afternoon she fell facedown on the bathroom floor because she insisted on not being accompanied. After that there was no engaging her. On Friday evening her doctor instructed us to up my mother’s morphine and take her off all other medication, asserting that my mother was now “actively” dying. My youngest brother argued that it was against Jewish law to withhold liquids, but in the end we reluctantly acquiesced. A hospice nurse arrived the following afternoon.

  From Wednesday evening on, I slept next to my mother in my father’s bed, and the night before she died I held her in my arms and whispered to her that she would be all right. She had lost a lot of weight, and felt feathery-light; for a moment, I felt that our roles had been reversed, that she was the child and I was her mother. I kissed her cheek, inhaling her pale freckled skin, which had stayed miraculously smooth. Her jawline was as tight as a young girl’s. On Saturday night, shortly before midnight, I stood together with my siblings and watched as she took her last gasp—five gasps, actually, I counted them. Her jaw dropped open and I leaned forward and closed it.

  28

  The second-to-last time I saw my mother was the evening before her memorial service at Fifth Avenue Synagogue, after her body had been cleaned and prepared for burial by the Jewish Burial Society, known as the Chevra Kadisha, a group of women (or men) from the synagogue who volunteer for precisely this chore. It was considered a great mitzvah to perform the tasks of the Chevra Kadisha and it was entirely in keeping with her unfazed approach to a task that others might have seen as unsettling or gruesome that my mother had been one of this select group when she was alive.

  She was lying under a white sheet on a gurney in a small room at the Riverside Memorial Chapel on the Upper West Side. The only part of her body that was exposed were her feet, which looked blue and forlorn. My sister Dinny and I had been called in to tie linen booties around them, in keeping with German-Jewish burial customs, but the booties were difficult to maneuver and the woman from the Chevra Kadisha was visibly impatient with our clumsy efforts. I kept studying my mother’s feet, with their very clean and short toenails, expecting them to start twitching, as though this were a fantasy scene from Six Feet Under, and at any moment she’d sit up and start talking to me as though nothing had happened.

  I would see my mother—although she could have been anyone, all wrapped up in white linen shrouds as she was—once again at her actual burial, which took place in Jerusalem a day after the New York memorial service. That service, at Fifth Avenue Synagogue, was packed tight, with hundreds of people filling the men’s section downstairs and the women’s balcony. I spoke, among a small number of others, from the bimah, feeling slightly daunted in the presence of so many bearded rabbis, wondering whether my eulogy, with its reference to my mother’s acceptance of my more candid writings, was too blatantly intimate in tone for such a gathering. “My mother was one of the most vivid people I’ve ever met,” I began, my voice parched with nervousness. “She was full of contrary impulses, all of which she conveyed with equal emphaticness, which makes it the more difficult to speak about her today in her absence, which is very real but also very recent. Indeed, I’m half convinced that, despite the evidence to the contrary, she is still listening somewhere with her hypercritical ear attuned to every potential misstatement, lapse in grammar, or misperception. Daphne, I can almost hear her say, speak slowly and clearly. And remember: no one wants to hear another word about your childhood…”

  After the service was over, the six of us went straight to the airport to board an El Al plane to Israel. (We flew business class, courtesy of my mother’s estate, which was something she would have considered wasteful and excessive in her lifetime.) As was the custom in Jerusalem cemeteries, my mother’s body was taken out of the coffin and lowered directly into a plot of earth next to my father’s grave in a peaceful hilltop cemetery on Har HaMinuchot—the Mount of the Resting Ones. The setting was lovely and dignified, but, surrounded by Israeli relatives, many of whom I didn’t know, I felt lost. I looked around for my mother, the one person with whom I could discuss my impressions of her funeral, but she was nowhere to be found. I felt her absence blow through me like a gust of wind. As inconstant a presence as she had been during her lifetime, I still counted on her to ground me. I felt a radical sense of dislocation with her gone, as though the world had spun off its axis.

  Back in New York, after the shiva, I would have been happy to leave everything as it was, to preserve the apartment she died in as though it would eventually be opened up to a roped-off public, like Thomas Jefferson’s house. But my siblings had different ideas, and in due order we gathered around the oval dining room table to make our claims on the contents of my mother’s apartment. The dispersal of her goods was done in a lottery-like fashion, with all of us bidding against each other for a previously distributed list of items; if two of us wanted the same piece of art or furniture or decorative clock, we were meant to wrangle it out between us.

  This bizarre and unlikely way of dealing with her material remains was specifically designated by my mother in her will, and in many ways it felt like her last joke on us, reducing all of us to scavengers. I was the only one without a spouse by my side and I left early, in some mixture of sorrow and fury. After everything had been sorted through and emptied out, the apartment was sold. I largely absented myself from this process, returning to the apartment only to go through the books that had been left behind and gather all the ones that either had my mother’s name written in them or that I knew she had liked, in homage to our shared literary love. (I immediately dumped this collection in a storage unit, where I continue to pay a monthly fee and they continue to molder to this day.)

  Somewhere along the way, my sister Dinny had taken it upon herself to go through my mother’s desk drawers and throw out what she saw fit. Included among the things she threw out, she informed me after the fact, was a piece of paper on which my mother had apparently written the observation, “Daphne is just like me.” I felt enraged by my sister’s presumption that she was the sole decision maker as to which documents were too personal to be distributed, she who was the least close to my mother of her three daughters.

  I wanted that piece of paper, not that it really explained all that much—I knew my mother had identified with me more than with my sisters—but then again, in another way, it explained everything. I wanted it as proof, then, of what I knew in my heart to be true: that she had failed to see me as I was, that I had been no more to her than the carrier of her ambitions and dreams, for better and worse—and of her own self-hatred, for that matter—with all that implied in the way of unwieldy projection. No wonder I couldn’t get clear of her, no matter what I did or what I wrote or however lucidly I saw into the toxicity of the situation. We were tangled up like bedclothes, intertwined like two gold hearts on the kind of cheap necklace that might be sold at a subway kiosk to a besotted teenage couple.

  29

  In the first years following my mother’s death, the much-longed-for sense of liberation didn’t come; instead she kept putting in an appearance in my dreams, many of them unsettling. In one of them she came equipped with a penis and the two of us made love; I remember waking up with a feeling of great joy, as though my long search for completion were over. Small wonder that I continued to feel as if a big hole had been made in my life, a
nd thought on and off of trying to join her. The trouble was I didn’t believe in an afterlife (neither had she), so I figured there’d be no meeting up with her again, even if I arranged to die. Meanwhile, I was growing older and Zoë was aging out of being my boon companion.

  Just the winter before we had gone to a posh resort in Turks and Caicos together, where I had used my travel writer credentials to get us a discounted rate. The resort was one of those places that specialized in the chicest sort of simplicity—everything was done up in whitewashed walls and natural fabrics—and it attracted celebrities and ordinary rich folk who were looking for ostentatious privacy. As it turned out, there was so much privacy on hand that Zoë and I sat in splendid isolation on the long stretch of glorious beach day after day, with barely another person to disturb our view of the glistening turquoise water. Even when we took ourselves to the poolside restaurant for lunch or dinner we were pretty much left to our own devices, with only two or three guests besides us in evidence. I found the lack of other people slightly disconcerting, even loneliness-inducing, and, as was usual when I first arrived anywhere, considered leaving early. But soon enough I began reveling in Zoë’s uninterrupted company and in the peaceful non-exertion of our days, spent talking and reading and taking swims in the ocean—and, for the sheer diversion of it, having intense discussions about what dishes we planned on ordering from the resort’s limited menu for dinner that night.

  During our long walks on the beach, we would pretend to be British or French tourists, making conversation in elaborately feigned accents and laughing hysterically at our own cleverness. Back at our beach chairs, Zoë would sit next to me under an umbrella, wearing a straw hat, her fair skin all covered up in a T-shirt and long skirt, looking like someone out of the Bloomsbury set, a younger sister of Vanessa and Virginia. I happily exposed myself to the rays of my beloved sun, hardly bothering with sunscreen, until such moment when Zoë would cry out: “Mom! You’re burning to a crisp! What is wrong with you? Do you want to get skin cancer?” At which point I would dutifully slather on some cream or lotion, with Zoë attentively applying it to the parts of my body I couldn’t reach.

  But now Zoë’s graduation loomed, and she was more interested in spending time with her gaggle of school friends than with me. This was as it should be, I knew; still, the thought of her going off to college had me in the grip of a wordless despair. I had been on one of my downward trajectories since the beginning of the year, despite gobbling down my usual medley of pills and wearing something called an Emsam patch on my arm, which was supposed to deliver antidepressive relief transdermally. I was horrified by the inverted form of separation anxiety I was experiencing at the prospect of Zoë leaving me. How could I be so unprepared to accept, much less welcome, her inevitable transition to an independent life—a transition that I had been trying to effect unsuccessfully from my own mother up until the moment of her death? Nevertheless, the severity of my depression was impossible to ignore. I had no appetite and over a period of four or five months had dropped thirty pounds. When I was awake (the few hours that I was), I felt a kind of lethal fatigue, as if I were swimming through tar. Phone messages went unanswered, email unread.

  In my inert but agitated state I could no longer concentrate enough to read—not so much as a newspaper headline—and the idea of writing was as foreign to me as downhill racing. The idea that suffering would eventually yield to creativity, probably best expressed in Edmund Wilson’s “the wound and the bow” theory of literary inspiration, had always appealed to me, but from my present depleted perspective it seemed wishful rather than actual. James Baldwin’s no-nonsense dismissal seemed far more to the point: “No one works better out of anguish at all; that’s an incredible literary conceit.”

  Shortly after Zoë’s high school graduation that June, I checked into an under-the-radar unit at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, hidden away in a small building on Riverside Drive and 178th Street. I had resisted for as long as I could my doctors’ suggestions that I enter a hospital. It seemed safer to stay where I was, no matter how out on a ledge I felt, than to lock myself away with other desperate people in the hope that it would prove effective. Added to my usual attitude of resistance was the fact that I had written an article on my last hospitalization, fifteen years earlier, for The New Yorker (I had become a staff writer there in my mid-forties under Tina Brown), musing on the gap between the alternately idealized and diabolical image of mental hospitals versus the more banal bureaucratic reality. I had discussed the continued stigma attached to going public with the experience of depression, but all this had been expressed by the writer in me rather than the patient, and it seemed to me that a part of the strength of the piece had been the impression it gave that my hospital days were behind me. It would be a betrayal of my literary persona, if nothing else, to go back into a psychiatric unit.

  Another factor that worked to keep me where I was, exiled in my own apartment, was the specter of shock therapy, or ECT. My therapist, Dr. K., a modern Freudian analyst whom I had been seeing for several years and who had always struck me as only vaguely persuaded of the efficacy of medication for what ailed me—he had once proposed that I consider going off all my pills just to see how I would fare, which I did, only to plummet badly—had suddenly become a cheerleader for ECT. I don’t know why he grabbed on to this idea, why the sudden flip from chatting to zapping, other than for the fact that I had once thrown it out as something I might try. Then again, for the drowning, any life raft will do. ECT, which causes the brain to go into seizure, was back in fashion for treatment-resistant depression after going off the radar in the sixties and seventies in the wake of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Undoubtedly I had frightened Dr. K. with my insistent talk of wanting to cut out for good. I spoke about watching myself go splat on the pavement with a kind of equanimity, a sense of a foretold conclusion.

  Still, his shift from a psychoanalytical stance that focused on the subjective mind to a neurobiological position that focused on the hypothesized workings of the physical brain left me scared and distrustful. I didn’t doubt that ECT helped in some instances—I knew two men, both accomplished and even celebrated, who swore by its efficacy—but I had no faith that it would help me. There was something about the application of galvanic currents (or whatever they were) to the brain that seemed fundamentally wrong to me—an epistemological mistake, a confusion of categories. I knew that the actual procedure for ECT had been modified. It was no longer administered with convulsive force, jolting patients in their straps, and, except in rare instances, was no longer administered bilaterally. And yet the cartoonish image of my head being fried, tiny shocks and whiffs of smoke coming off it as the electric current went through, still haunted me.

  What I feared more than anything was the memory loss, however minor, that would inevitably come in its wake. What if ECT left me a stranger to myself, with but the vaguest of memories of my life before and immediately after the procedure? The thought of not being able to call up an event or image or conversation from the recent past seemed unbearable; it undid me. And what about my deeper past? I may have hated my life, but I valued my memories—even the unhappy ones, paradoxical as that may seem—and I was convinced that my writing depended on my ability to retrieve them. I lived for the details, and the writer I once was had made vivid use of them. I had ventured so far as to develop my own private theory that it was the ordeal of enduring the cloudy aftermath of ECT that had led Ernest Hemingway and David Foster Wallace to kill themselves. It wasn’t anything one could prove, of course, but it was something I could imagine: the indignity of enforced forgetfulness coming on top of crushing despair.

  In the end, no matter how much I wanted to stay put, I ran out of resistance. I spent the weekend before going into the hospital in my sister Dinny’s apartment, lost in the Gothic kingdom of depression: I was unable to move from the bed in my nephew’s bedroom, trapped in a cacophonous interior debate about jumping off a roof versus throwing
myself in front of a car. Yet somewhere in the background were other voices—my sister’s, my friends’, my doctors’, arguing on behalf of my sticking around. I could half hear them. I wanted to die, but at the same time I didn’t want to, not completely. Suicide could wait, my sister said. Why didn’t I give the hospital a chance? She relayed messages from both my doctors that they would look out for me on the unit. No one would force me to do anything, including ECT. I felt too tired to argue.

  That Monday morning, I returned home and packed up two small bags. I threw in a disproportionate amount of books (disproportionate given the fact that I couldn’t focus enough to read), a couple of pairs of linen pants and cotton T-shirts, my favorite night cream (although I hadn’t touched it in weeks), and a framed photo of my daughter, the last with the thought of anchoring myself. It was because of my daughter, after all, that I had given voice to my “suicidal ideation,” as it’s called, in the first place, worrying how she would get along without me and about the irreparable harm it would cause her if I took my own life. (What had Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton done with their guilt feelings? I wondered. Were they more ruthless than I or merely more determined?)

  In return for agreeing to undergo one of several federally funded studies—which involved either switching my medication or availing myself of ECT—I would get to stay at 4 Center as long as I needed at no cost. My sister picked me up in a cab, and, as I recall, I cried the whole ride up there, watching the brown and beige Upper West Side buildings pass by with an elegiac sense of leave-taking, nursing all the while a conviction that I had stayed around the scene of my own life too long—that I was, in some unyielding sense, ex post facto.

  As soon as my sister gave my name to the nurse whose head appeared in the window of the locked door to the unit and we were both let in, I knew immediately that this wasn’t where I wanted to be. Nothing appeared much changed from the psychiatric setting I had been in more than a decade earlier. Everything seemed empty and silent under the harsh fluorescent lighting except for one fortyish man pacing up and down the hallway in a T-shirt and sweat pants, oblivious to what was going on around him. Underneath the kind of bald-faced clock you see in train stations were two run-down pay phones; there was something sad about the glaring outdatedness of them, especially since I associated them almost exclusively with hospitals and certain barren corners of Third Avenue. And then, in what seemed like an instant, my sister was saying good-bye, assuring me that all would turn out for the better, and I was left to fend for myself.