by John Barth
"Jesus," Tim wondered. "Can we even consider it?"
They could, his wife (the family investment manager) assured him. But what about the fact that Bayview, no less than the other places they'd checked out, got it's share of bad reviews as well as good? On the one hand were those happy Golden Agers in the brochure photos, duly apportioned by gender and ethnicity and handsomely decked out in "country club casual" attire while bird-watching or flower-arranging, painting and quilting and pottery-making, or smiling at one another across bridge and dining tables. On the other, such Internet chatroom grumbles both from some residents and from their relatives as The food sucks, actually, if you've been used to eating real food, and Be warned: It's college dorm life all over again—at age eighty!, and Frankly, it's the effing pits. The best Margie and Tim could guess was that temperamentally upbeat, outgoing, people-enjoying types were likely to find their continuing-care situation at least as much to their liking as what had immediately preceded it in their curriculum vitae, while the more easily dissatisfied were, well, dissatisfied. They themselves, they supposed, fell somewhere between those poles.
"May we not fall on our geriatric asses between them," they more or less prayed; then gave each other a determinedly cheerful high-five over white wine and champignon cheese at Happy Hour on their screened porch overlooking Oyster Cove, and took the plunge: what they'd come to call the Old Farts' B.M. Move. Given the ever-rising value of Heron Bay real estate, Margie figured they could list for $400K the free-and-clear villa for which they'd paid slightly more than half that amount fifteen years ago, take out a $300K mortgage on it to finance either a midrange Bayview cottage or one of those high-end apartments, pay of the mortgage shortly thereafter when good old 1010 Oyster Cove Court sells for, say, $375K, and shift across the river with most of their present furnishings at a tidy profit—the more since ex-realtor Margie would be handling the sale and saving them the seven percent agent's commission.
Thus the plan, and thus it came to pass—even a bit better than their projection, but at their age a wrench and hassle all the same. In a mere five months, the villa found a buyer for $380K, and between it's sale and closing dates a high-end Bayview apartment became available, it's widowed and emphysemic tenant obliged to move into the Manor's Medical Center. While they'd thought that "transitioning" to one of the cottages might be less of a jolt, they took the apartment, reminding themselves that they had, after all, rather enjoyed that interim condominium over near Annapolis, and that as they grew older and less able than presently, the apartment would be more convenient—to that same Medical Center, among other things. So okay, they would miss gardening, outdoor barbecuing, and the relative privacy of a house. But what the hell, they had adjusted readily enough back in the '80s from detached house to duplex living; they could hack it in a comfortable apartment.
So hack it they did: quite admirably all in all, given Margie's physical limitations. As their nation enmired itself in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Mannings bade goodbye to their Oyster Cove neighbors and other Heron Bay friends (who were, after all, a mere thirty-minute drive from Bayview), scaled down from two cars in a garage to just Old Faithful in a designated parking-lot space, and packed and unpacked their stuff for what must surely be the last time. Over the next year-and-a-bit—from late summer 2003 to mid-autumn '04—they repositioned their furniture and knickknacks, rehung their wall art, reshelved as many of their books as they had room for, donated the rest to the Avon County Library, and gamely set about making new acquaintances, sampling the Manor's sundry activities, and accustoming themselves to their start-out meal plan: breakfasts and lunches together in the apartment, dinners in the dining hall except now and then in a Stratford restaurant. Pretty lucky they were, T.M. supposes in retrospect, to have made their "B.M. Move" when they did, before the nationwide housing-market slump just a few years later, not to mention before the recent, all-but-total destruction of Heron Bay Estates by that spinoff tornado from Tropical Storm Giorgio in an otherwise eventless hurricane season. And most certainly not to mention ... the Unmentionable, which however is this His-Story's defining event and therefore must be mentioned, to say the least, not far hence.
And a pretty good job they did, all in all (he believes he was saying), of making the best of their new life. Okay, so they shook their heads occasionally at the relentless professional cheeriness of some of the Bayview staff; and they had no taste for the bridge tournaments, square-dance and bingo nights, and some other items on the Activities menu; and the dining hall fare, while it had it's fans, was in their opinion mostly blah. But on the plus side were some of the Manor's sightseeing excursions to places like the du Pont estate's Winterthur Garden, up near Wilmington, and the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum down in St. Michaels (the Mannings had got out of the habit of such touring), the Happy Hour and dinnertime socializing in the Blue Heron Lounge and dining hall, which one could do as much or little of as one chose (sipping from one's personal wine supply at the bar), and the comforting-indeed knowledge that, if needed, assistance was as near at hand as the Help Alarm button conveniently located in every residence unit. They were doing all right, they assured their children and their Heron Bay Estates friends; they were doing all right ...
Until, on a certain chill-but-sunny midmorning in November 2004, as suddenly and without warning as that above-mentioned fluke tornado two years later, out of nowhere came the End of Everything. After a late breakfast of orange juice, English muffins, and coffee (they'd been up past their usual bedtime the night be fore, watching with unsurprised dismay the presidential election returns on TV), Tim had withdrawn to his computer desk in the apartment's guest-bedroom/study to exchange disappointed e-mails with Son and Daughter, who shared their parents' stockliberal persuasion. Margie, still in her nightclothes, lingered at table over a second coffee to read the Baltimore Sun's painful details of John Kerry's unsuccessful bid to thwart George W. Bush's reelection—a disaster for the nation, in the Mannings' opinion—after which she meant to move as usual to her computer in their little den/office/library to do likewise and attend to some family business before lunch and whatever. But he had no sooner sat down and booted up than he heard a crash out there and, bolting kitchenward, found his without-whom-nothing life partner, his bride of half a century minus one month, his Margie!Margie!Margie! face-down and motionless on the breakfast-nook floor tiles, coffee from the shattered porcelain mug staining her nightgown and the crumpled pages of the Sun. With a half-strangled cry he ran to his fallen mate, her eyes open but not moving, her face frozen with alarm. Some years previously, the Mannings had signed up at the Heron Bay Estates Community Activities Center for a half-day course in Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Warning Signs of Stroke and Cardiac Arrest, and had vowed to review the various drills together at least annually thereafter—but never got around to doing so. Now he desperately felt for a pulse, put his face near hers to check for respiration, and detected neither; dashed to locate and press that Help button (on the wall beside the main-bath toilet); dashed back to try whether he could recollect anything whatever of the CPR routine; pressed his mouth to Margie's in what was meant to be some sort of forced inhalation but dissolved into a groaning kiss and then collapsed into a sobbing, helpless last embrace.
Helpless, yes: He still damns Tim Manning for that. Not that anything he or anyone else might have done would likely have saved her, but had their situations been reversed—had the thitherto undetected and now fatally ruptured aneurysm (as the Cause of Death turned out to be: not, after all, the news of Bush and Cheney's reelection) been his instead of hers—Margie Manning, for all her alarm and grief, would no doubt have taken some charge of things. She'd have dialed 911, he bets, and/or the establishment's Medical Center; would have shouted down the hallway for help and pounded on their neighbors' doors—all the usual desperate things that desperate people in such situations typically do, even if in vain. And would then have somehow collected herself enough to deal as needed with Med Center and other B
ayview functionaries; to notify children and friends, comfort and be comforted by them, handle the obligatory farewell visits, and manage the disposition of the Departed's remains and estate and the rearrangement of the Survivor's life. But except back in his high school history-teaching classroom before his retirement and in a few other areas (tending their former lawn and shrubbery, making handyman repairs, presiding over their Oyster Cove cookouts), Margie was ever the more capable Manning—especially in emotionally charged situations, which tended to rattle and de-capacitate her husband. Now (i.e., then, on Election Day + 1, 2004) he lay literally floored, clutching his unbelievably dead mate's body as if he too had been stroke-stricken, which he desperately wished he had been. Unable to bring himself even to respond to the Manor's alarm-bell First Responder (from the nurses' station over in Assisted Living) when she presently came knocking, calling, doorbell-ringing, and doorknob-twisting, he lay closed-eyed and mute while the woman fetched out her passkey, turned the deadbolt, and pressed in with first-aid kit and urgent questions.
Don't ask T.M. how things went from there. Death is, after all, a not-unusual event in elder-care establishments, whose staff will likely be more familiar with His visitations than will the visited. As it happens, neither Tim nor for that matter Margie had had any prior Death Management experience: Their respective parents' last days, funeral arrangements, and estate disposition had been handled by older siblings, whose own life closures were then overseen by competent grown offspring who lived nearby and shared their parents' lives. The Bayview responder—an able young black woman named Gloria, as Tim sort of remembers—knelt to examine the pair of them, spoke to him in a raised voice, cell-phoned or walkie-talkied for assistance, spoke to him some more, asking questions that perhaps he answered or at least endeavored to, and maybe did a few nurse-type things on the spot. After a while he was off the floor: in a chair, perhaps mumbling apologies for his helplessness while Margie's body was gurneyed over to the Med Center to await further disposition. Although unable to take action, not to mention taking charge, he eventually became able at least to reply to questions. To be notified? Son in St. Louis, Daughter in Detroit. Funeral arrangements? None, thankee. None? None: Both Mannings preferred surcease sans fuss: no funeral, no grave or other marker, no memorial service. You sure of that? Sure: Organs to be harvested for recycling if usable and convenient; otherwise forget it. Remaining remains to be cremated—and no urn of ashes or ritual scattering, s.v.p.; just ditch the stuff. All her clothes and other personal effects to the nearest charity willing to come get them. Oh: and if Nurse happened to have in her kit a shot of something to take him out too, they could do a two-for-one right then and there and spare all hands more bother down the road.
Because what the fuck (as he explained to S-in-S and D-in-D when both were "B-in-B": Billeted, for the nonce, in Bayview): He and Margie had been fortunate in their connection and had relished their decades together. Unlike their Oyster Cove neighbor Ethel Bailey, for example, with her metastasized cervical cancer, Margie had been spared a lingering, painful death; she'd gone out in one fell swoop, a sort of Democrat parallel to their other O.C. neighbor Jim Smythe's fatal stroke in '92 upon hearing of Bill Clinton's defeat of George Bush père. Better yet—so he can see from his present perspective—would've been for the two of them to go out together like George and Carol Walsh over in Rockfish Reach last year, when'T.S. Giorgio's freak tornado flattened most of Heron Bay Estates. On second thought, though, that must have been scary as shit: Best of all (if they'd only known that that god damn aneurysm was about to pop) would've been to take matters into their own hands like those other Rockfish Reachers Dick and Susan Felton, who for no known reason drove home one fine September night from a neighborhood party, closed their automatic garage door, left their car's engine idling and it's windows down, and snuffed themselves. Way to go, guys! Yeah: Pour Margie a glass of her pet pinot grigio and himself a good ripe cabernet, crank up the Good Gray Ghost, hold hands, breathe deep, and sip away till the last drop or last breath, whichever.
Whoops, forgot: no garage these days over here in Geezerville. Nor much get-it-done-with gumption either, for that matter, in this lately overspacious apartment, where T.M. pecks away at his word processor faute de fucking mieux (but No thankee, Barb and Mike: Dad'd rather stay put than change geographies this late in the day). Left to himself, Yours Truly Tim Manning is ... well ... left to himself, making this minimal most of his hapless self-helplessness by chewing on language like a cow it's cud.
Assisted Living? Been there, done that.
So?
Well. Somewhere on this here QWERTYUIOP keyboard—maybe up among all those F1–F12, pg up/pg dn, num lock/clear buttons?—there ought to be one for Assisted Dying ...
Like, hey, one of these, maybe:
help
Worth a try:
enter
The End
WE DELMARVANS ... Delmarva Peninsulars? Anyhow, we dwellers on this flat, sand-crab-shaped projection between the Atlantic Ocean and Chesapeake Bay, comprising the state of Delaware and the Eastern Shores of both Maryland and Virginia, are no strangers to major storms. Even before global warming ratcheted up our Atlantic hurricane season—pounding the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and the East Coast of the USA from July into November with ever more numerous and destructive tropical tempests—there had been slam-bangers every decade or so for as long as anybody can remember. The nameless Big One of 1933, for example, cut a whole navigable inlet through our peninsula's coastal barrier islands, decisively separating the resort town of Ocean City, on Fenwick Island, from undeveloped Assateague Island, below it. Hurricane Hazel in 1954 roared over the Outer Banks of North Carolina into Chesapeake Bay, sent crab boats through second-story windows in our marshy lower counties, and sank the five-masted tourist schooner Levin J. Marvel in mid-Bay, with considerable loss of life. Even in George and Carol Walsh's dozen and a half years in Heron Bay Estates, at least three formidable ones have "impacted" that gated community and environs: Hugo in '89, which downed trees and power lines hereabouts after ravaging the Carolinas; Floyd in '99, with it's humongous basement-flooding downpours; and Isabel in 2003—a mere tropical storm packing less wind and rain than those hurricanes, but piling a record-breaking eight-foot storm surge into the upper Bay that tore up countless waterfronts and flooded historic riverside houses in nearby Stratford that had been dry, if never high, since the eighteenth century. Nothing so catastrophic hereabouts to date as the great Galveston hurricane of 1900 or Katrina's wipe-out of New Orleans in 2005, but we tidewater Marylanders keep a weather eye out and storm-prep list handy from Independence Day to Halloween.
That earlier holiday, with it's traditional patriotic fireworks display upriver in Stratford and Heron Bay's own smaller one of our Blue Crab Marina Club pier (rebuilt after T.S. Isabel), was just a few weeks behind us when Tropical Storm Antonio fan-fared this year's season by fizzling out north of Puerto Rico after sideswiping the Leeward Islands with minimal damage. On Antonio's Latino heels a fortnight later came his gringuita sister Becky, who during her transatlantic passage rapidly graduated from Tropical Depression to Named Tropical Storm (sustained winds between 50 and 73 miles per hour on the Saffir-Simpson scale) to Category 1 Hurricane (74–95 mph) before turning north-northwest in midocean, passing harmlessly east of Bermuda as if en route to Nova Scotia, but dissipating long before she got there. To all hands' surprise then—not least the National Hurricane Center's, which had predicted another busier-than-average season—there followed the opposite, an extraordinarily stormless summer: fewer-than-normal ordinary thundershowers, even, along our mid-Atlantic Coast, and a series of tropical depressions only a handful of which achieved named-storm status, much less hurricanehood. In vain through August and September the severe-weather aficionados (of whom the afore-mentioned George Walsh was one) daily checked Weather.com for signs of the promised action. The autumnal equinox passed without a single hurricane's whacking Florida and points north
or west—a far cry indeed from '05's record-breaking season, which in addition to wrecking the Gulf Coast had exhausted that year's alphabet of storm names and obliged the weather service to rebegin in October with the Greek alphabet. This year Columbus Day came and went, Halloween approached, and we were no farther down the list than Tropical Storm (T.S.) Elliott, with the inevitable lame jokes about it's name's proximity to that of the author of The Waste Land.
But then—ta-da!—after Elliott fizzled in the Windward Islands and then Frederika, right behind him, petered out of the Leewards, there materialized in midocean the tempest that might have been dubbed George if that name hadn't been used already, but since it had been (1998), was dubbed Giorgio instead, in keeping with the Weather Service's storm-naming policies of ethnic diversity and gender alternation. And now, perhaps, this nonstory called "The End" can begin.
