by Tembi Locke
Inside, the house had swelled with the necessities and unfamiliarity of hospice. A nurse passed me, people came and went. I stepped over a game of Twister while I talked to Margaret, a social worker, on the phone. It was Tuesday midmorning.
Margaret worked exclusively with kids who had lost parents to cancer, AIDS, ALS, and other illnesses. After asking a series of questions about how old our daughter was, how long Saro had been sick, and what our funeral plans were, she sped to the heart of her counsel.
“Children, especially those your daughter’s age, are prone to magical thinking. You will need to help her understand what is happening because her brain will want to forget. Her brain and heart will not be able to hold it.” Her voice came to me slow and steady.
I had to sit on the floor, moving Twister out of the way.
She continued, “You must let her be part of this process. When her father dies, bring her to him. And do not let them take his body away without her seeing it. Let her have a moment with him. Let her touch him. Ask her how it feels. This is important. She’ll need to remember how his skin felt.”
“I don’t know if I can do this.” My voice echoed in my head.
“You can, you will,” she said. She struck me as the kind of woman who could perform field surgery in the trenches of war under a starless sky. “Do you have someone to help you? Family?”
“Yes, sister, dad, stepmother. They’re here,” I said.
“Then you can.” But she wasn’t done; she had more. “And I know this sounds morbid. But you need to take a picture of your husband after he has died. Not with your daughter and him. But of him. Take the picture of him.” Her repetition was deliberate and direct.
“I don’t understand.” I hunched over, unsure if I still had bones in my body.
“Then I want you to put that picture away.” She said it as though it would be as easy as pulling a pie from the oven. “And here’s the good news. You may never have to see it again. But one day you might need it. And you’ll be glad you have it. One day when she’s sixteen and all her grief is new and fresh, triggered by all the ways he is not in her life, she will be angry and hurt and confused. And mad at you, mad at life. She may say, ‘And you never let me say good-bye to my dad’ or ‘I never got to go to his memorial service.’ And she won’t be making it up. It will be real to her. Children can bury what is too big to bear. That is why you will have the picture.”
Margaret was flashing forward ten years into a future without Saro. To Zoela as a teenage girl who was angry and hurt. To me as a single parent. She was describing a world I had not yet even dared to consider.
It was only days earlier, before we had brought Saro home, that I had told Zoela that her father was dying. A friend had gone to get her from school while I had rehearsed the words in my head the way I did while learning lines of dialogue for an audition. I tried saying “Babbo is dying” three different ways. With three different intentions. With three different approaches. Comfort her. Be clear with her. Empathize with her. But this was no acting exercise. Each time I choked on the words in my mouth. No amount of rehearsal could prepare me.
When she got home, I invited her into my room. She played on my bed, and I told her she could sleep with me that night. I asked her to tell me about a recent school trip to the California desert. She spoke of coyotes, desert squirrels, and six-foot cacti. They all sounded like words from another planet. The planet of the living. Not the world I had been inhabiting in hospital corridors. I tried to focus on her eyes as she spoke. I took in the fall of her pigtails. I wanted to cup her face, kiss her. Then I said, “Sweetheart, I need to tell you something. It’s about Babbo.”
“I know,” she said, her voice registering neither surprise nor distress. Prescience.
Seven years old, and she said, “I know.”
“I know he is dying, and it’s breaking my heart,” she continued. Her eyes didn’t leave me, as if there were a possibility that this wasn’t happening. A possibility that I could pull her close and say “Oh, no, baby, not that.” Instead, I said this.
“Yes, mine is breaking too.”
“When?”
“I don’t know, but soon.”
She looked away then, lost in thought, in irreconcilable thoughts. She stared, unseeing, at the drawn curtain behind my bed. The look on her face, her composure, gnawed at my heart. It was too much for seven years old. “Your heart is breaking, and so is mine,” I said as I reached to take her. “Come here, sit with me.”
She curled up in my lap and began to cry. I caressed her head. We let ourselves fall back onto the bed in an embrace. We lay there for a long, sacred moment, tethered to what we still had. Each other.
I was shaking as I hung up the phone with the social worker. All I wanted was to be near Saro. I picked myself up from the floor and went to him. I pulled back the pocket doors of the room that, just a few days earlier, had been our study. Friends who had learned of the latest news had been dropping by with flowers. Buds and blooms filled the room. On the table next to the hospital bed was a candle, his favorite book of poetry by Rumi, a prayer card from Nonna in Sicily, and a crystal. Where my desk would normally have been there was now the oxygen machine, humming low and steady. Our study was now a hospice womb.
Saro’s head was turned away. He was lost in thought.
“Ciao, tesoro,” I said, coming around the foot of the bed to face him. Zoela’s stuffed animals were on top of the coverlet at his feet. She had lined them up in formation to face him. Tied to the bed’s side rail was a WELCOME HOME balloon from the supermarket, a silver Mylar heart that Zoela had picked out and then decorated with her first-grader print: “TI AMO.”
When I settled on the edge of the bed, he met my eyes, paused, and then looked past me.
“Just me,” I said. “Nurse Cathy is outside.”
A smile came across his face.
“Apple juice?” I offered the plastic cup with a rainbow straw that Zoela had left at his bedside before going to school that morning. We had all agreed a normal day for her was best. But she had wanted to have breakfast with him. The apple juice had been her parting gift.
He nodded, and I bent the straw and held it to his lips. When I did, he shifted and motioned for me to draw closer. His skin was warm, I could still smell his signature earthy mix of salt and spice over the scents of medicine, iodine, and baby wipes. I kissed him long and hard on his forehead.
“Where is Zoela?” he asked. He had forgotten.
“School.” I smoothed his coverlet, then walked over to turn up the volume on his iPod at the other end of the room. Then I returned to sit at his side. Over the years, I had given thought to the eventuality of this moment. It was one way I wrestled with the anticipatory grief. I’d be driving on the freeway stuck in traffic on the overpass of the 405 near the Getty Center en route to an audition, and instead of going over my lines in my head, I would think of what music I might play for Saro in his dying hour. I knew that sound is the first sensory connection humans have in utero, and I had seen a documentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead that explained that sound is also the last sensory connection we have when dying. Saro would be able to hear me, hear everything around him, even if he couldn’t eat, see, or speak.
The theme song from Cinema Paradiso played in the background.
I could sense him drifting toward the infinite.
“Sto passando una primavera critica, la più critica della mia vita—I’m passing the most critical spring of my life,” he said to me as the music played.
For a flash I could smell the eucalyptus and spring grass. I saw Zoela running around laurel bushes, her honey brown skin glowing in the spring Sicilian sun. Spring. He had called this moment his “spring.”
“I want you to know love someday. Another love. Your love is too beautiful not to share.” He said it with ease, not a trace of distress or ambivalence. As if it were the most natural thing for a husband to say to a wife. “I want you to live your life.”
“Don’t. Please. Don’t,” I said. But I knew he was saying what he needed to say. He was strangely lucid. Clear as a bell. Then he became less so.
I felt the shift of energy as I lay there next to him. From the moment we met, his body had anchored me. Now I could feel it transforming, searching for a new axis.
“Where am I going?” he asked, looking at me but through me.
“I don’t know, but I think it is beautiful. It is full, you will be peaceful.” I caressed the back of his hand, let my fingers massage his.
“Wake me when Zoela comes home.” He closed his eyes.
“Of course.”
I left the room to let him rest.
Two doors down I heard the church bells strike 11:00 a.m. Sometimes I hated that we shared our street with a church. The bells punctuated moments that needed no punctuation.
In the dining room, my dad, my stepmother, Aubrey, and my sister, Attica, were gathered at the table. They were heading up what can only be described as a hospice command center—receiving all the phone calls, notifying family, coordinating visitors. Between the Friday night when we had brought Saro home in an ambulance and that morning, a world of change had happened. My mother had left L.A. to return to Houston for work. My dad and Aubrey had arrived to take over the family support role in her place. My sister shuttled between her own home and mine, picking up food, running hospice errands, offering care, and making sure that Franca and Cosimo had food and anything else they might need. One of Saro’s cousins had flown in from Buffalo, New York, to share a final good-bye. Franca and Cosimo had gathered around Saro’s bed for their own final good-bye before they boarded a return flight to Sicily, petrified with grief. The comings and goings of family and friends were dizzying.
When Zoela came home from school that day, she went straight to her dad’s room. She called him “sleepyhead” and asked if she, too, could have an ice pop.
Later we ate dinner at his bedside while he rested. Then Zoela watched Puss in Boots and painted her grandfather’s fingernails because it was what she wanted and no one wanted to take more away from her. She said good night to Saro, she told him she loved him. Then I put her to sleep.
She had been asleep about two hours when Saro’s breathing changed. I called Nurse Cathy in immediately.
“Is this what I think it is?” I asked. The hospice nurse had given me a pamphlet about what to expect in the final stages of dying.
“Yes.” She was calm, solid, a lighthouse in my darkness.
The oxygen tank whirred.
“How long?”
“Depends. Everyone is different. Could go on like this for a while, even a day or two days.”
I leaned forward onto the bed rails. The chrome was cold despite the heat that rushed to my head. I can’t do days.
I took Saro’s hand in mine. He didn’t reach back. But his touch still contained his presence. His aliveness. I massaged his index finger and looked toward Cathy. She knew us well enough to know to leave the room. The pocket door rolled to a squeaky close behind her, and I turned to him.
This was the moment. It had arrived.
“Saro, go easy on me. Please, honey, make this easy for me.”
Over the next six hours, as night pushed into morning, I sat at his bedside. I held his hand, kissed him incessantly, kisses not unlike ones I had given him for nearly twenty-one years, quotidian but rich. And I talked to him.
“You have been an extraordinary partner and an incredible father. You have honored my life. I will love you for all eternity. It is okay to go, my love.”
I spoke softly into his ear. I felt the warmth of my breath come back to me.
“This body has served you well, but now you will leave it. Amore, I will always welcome you in my dreams and look forward to our next time together.
“Ti amo, amore mio bello.”
I repeated this like a poem. A mantra. A refrain of my love. Over and over. When I tired of my own words, I read Rumi out loud. I caressed his feet. I stroked his hair. I climbed into the bed. I got out of the bed. I adjusted the covers each time he kicked them loose. And when his body seemed in distress, I called the nurse. Then I whispered, “I love you” as she dropped liquid morphine from a baby dropper into his mouth to ease his breathing and relax his muscles. With each drop, I felt the shiny sting of betrayal. Morphine. He hated drugs.
I knew he wanted to stay clear and unburdened by the fog of sedatives for as long as he could.
“Is it too much, do we have to do it?” I asked Cathy. My voice was low but full of new fear. Am I doing this wrong? I knew that morphine was necessary to ease dying. All the hospice pamphlets said so. Yet nothing about dying was easy. Not for him nor for me. It was labor, as much labor as coming into this world.
“Yes, it is for the best, and I’m giving him a small amount,” Nurse Cathy assured me. I watched her crush half a white tablet. It dissolved quickly in water before she put it into the dropper. “It will ease the respiratory distress.” And it did. His tongue released the swell at the back of his throat.
By 3:00 a.m. I was exhausted. I asked my sister to stay with Saro. I went upstairs to lie down next to Zoela.
In my room, Zoela’s body felt warm and small. She was peaceful, emitting a gentle snore. She seemed to me in that moment both angelic and strong. I thought for the first time that it was us in the world, just the two of us. Then I allowed myself to close my eyes. To savor the respite. Just for a moment, I told myself. I’ll sleep just for a minute.
The next thing I knew, my sister was standing in the glow of twilight at my bedside.
“His breathing has changed a lot. I think you need to come now,” she said.
I took the forty steps from my bedroom to the hospice room.
When I pulled back the pocket door, his face was looking toward the door. He was staring straight at me. I could hear what I knew were his final shallow breaths.
Oh, my love.
I crawled into bed with him. A single tear had formed in his eye.
“I am sorry I made you wait. I fell asleep. But I am here now. I am here.”
He had waited for me to be at his side. I kissed his tear away. Then there were only a few more breaths. They were shallow, faint, then faded into nothing as I lay beside him. I was breathing in new air, air in which he was gone.
He had waited for me, the same way he had waited for me in Florence, standing by the lamppost in the winter rain. He had left this world characteristically tenacious in his love, and I couldn’t help but feel he was telling me he’d also be waiting for me in the next.
I lay there in silence for a long time. The air was pregnant with an energetic pulse. I kissed him again. Maybe I needed to be sure of his physical goneness. Twenty minutes passed. No breath. Finally I felt oriented enough to stand up. I was willing to brave my first step into a new life. I had to go tell my daughter her babbo was gone.
I turned the knob of my bedroom. It was just after 7:00 a.m., and sunlight filtered softly into the room. The day was carrying on.
“Sweetheart.” I rubbed her back. I didn’t want to wake her, because when I did, her life was going to be completely changed. My words stuck like glue in my mouth. Saro’s tear was still on my lips. But I willed myself forward because what happened next, how I handled everything from this moment, would stay with her for the rest of her life.
“Zoela, amore.” I pulled her close. I kissed her cheek. “Zoela.” She turned over. I kissed her again. I wanted to bring her from the sleep state to reality as gracefully as I could. That morning was one she would remember forever.
When her eyes were sufficiently open and she was folded into my body as we had done so many mornings since she was born, I said, “Babbo has died, sweetheart.”
“When?” Her eyes were barely open.
“While you were sleeping.” She stared at me expressionless, flat of understanding. “I think we should go down and see him. He wants us to say good-bye.” She didn’t protest. I hoisted her onto m
y hip, and we walked out.
When we got downstairs, I did all the things the social worker had told me to do. Zoela read a poem. She put a flower on him. We told him we loved him. Twice I reassured her that he was not just sleeping. As hard as it was for me, I didn’t rush her. The whole process lasted fifteen, maybe twenty, minutes. Then I told her that her grandparents were in the other room. Her grandfather would take her out for breakfast. She would get to pick the place.
I sat with Saro for another hour. Then I called Nonna.
“È andato via—He is gone,” I said.
Her voice wailed before I could form more words. Then it went silent. I could hear her on the other end of the line as she cried. Silence conjoined us, and we stayed like that for a while until she asked how Zoela was doing.
“Così così,” I said, and we let silence shroud us again.
Then I heard her rise and push her chair over the ceramic floor of her kitchen. “I am going to church to pray. Everything now is in the hands of the saints.”
* * *
The logistics of death took over. I called and spoke to my mother-in-law in Sicily every day. She told me about a dream in which Saro had appeared to her, and she reported who in her Sicilian town had stopped by to offer condolences. They were hard, brief three-minute conversations in which every day she would ask about funeral arrangements. In rural Sicily, the dead are buried within twenty-four hours. From the moment of Saro’s death, Nonna had been asking where he was. “Ma dov’è il suo corpo?—But where is his body?” She couldn’t imagine her son suspended in limbo between death and final rest in a foreign country. She couldn’t picture his body being attended to by strangers, his American wife not even sure where he was. I could only tell her what I knew. That his ashes would be ready in ten days for pickup or delivery and that there would be no funeral but rather a memorial service a week later. I tried to explain the concept of a memorial in Italian to a woman for whom no such ritual existed. Still she kept asking about his body.
