A Good Death

by Gil Courtemanche

  “Never… mind… ha!… ha!… I… like… rosé!”

  He nearly chokes laughing. I laugh with him. My mother follows suit like the good team player she is. She laughs out of solidarity. If it’s a joke, she’s on the right side. If it isn’t…

  The Geographer stands up. He’s had enough. Sacrificing a perfectly good Puligny-Montrachet on the altar of debilitating senility is the last straw. Jean-Maurice, the Banker’s husband, likes Bernard and, after fifteen years of ignoring him suddenly wants to get on his good side. My father is now after the yule log. My mother watches him wolf down an entire serving in three mouthfuls and shrinks a little more. I marvel. My father has always been a greedy pig, but never so much as now that the doctors have told him that his greediness will kill him. I envy his lust for life.

  Dad, do you remember that time when we were lost in Mont Tremblant Park? I don’t ask the question aloud. I think it. His portion of yule log gone, he scans the table for more, his gaze finally alighting on the far end, where more cheese has appeared. Someone is cutting up portions of Camembert and brie, both perfectly runny; there is also Saint-Nectaire, Roquefort and Crottin de Chavignol, not to mention a fougasse that smells deliciously of golden straw and warm milk. We wouldn’t be eating cheese at all if we weren’t our father’s children. When I was seven or eight and the others much younger, he had come home one Sunday and plunked a hunk of something smelly on the table, a small, soft, orangey-coloured substance that bore no resemblance whatsoever to what we in those days called cheese. As far as we knew, cheese came in a jar, like peanut butter, a sort of gooey spread made of melted cheddar, or else in thin, plastic-encased slices. What he’d brought home, he said, was Oka, a great cheese made by Trappist monks in their monastery. He made us taste it. We didn’t want to, but gradually, because our father insisted, we educated our taste buds, as it were, and became cheese lovers. And on our cheeseboard, Oka reigned supreme. Even when the American company Kraft bought the cheese works, retired the monks, changed the product in every conceivable way—texture, odour, taste—except that of appearance, we remained faithful to it. We still buy it, if only so we can say, in a rare show of familial unanimity, that the Americans killed our Oka.

  Father raises his hand over the table.

  “Dad, do you remember when we were lost… and it was me who…”

  “Chee . . . ee . . . se.”

  He turns to me with the kind of smile normally associated with idiocy, or innocence, or someone on drugs. “Yes… I was… com… plete… ly… lost… ha! ha!” He’s gloating. To confess to something in private is like writing something in your will; you don’t do it to get at the truth, but to liberate yourself from the burden of having lied. He isn’t asking my forgiveness for cuffng me, or for lying, or for the troutless dinner. He is simply confessing and laughing it off. When he tries to stand up, I assume to get at the cheese, which no one has passed to him, the entire family having pretended not to have heard his thunderous call for “Cheese!” he sets his hand down on his plate. He stops, lifts it up, looks at it, sees it smeared with yule log and icing sugar, and licks it clean with his tongue, beginning with the palm and moving along the fingers one at a time, still with that beatific smile which is perhaps not as idiotic as I’d thought. “Lost,” he says again, with a nod towards the cheese.

  He has won again. Ever since that day of the oldest rock from the Canadian Shield he’s known that it was his own pigheadedness that got us lost. Fifty years ago. That story has been told any number of times, usually when someone new was being introduced into the family circle, and each time he defended his own infallibility. And now here he is, with his air of saintly beatitude, confessing to a terrible lie that destroyed my respect for him once and for all, and not only for him but for any kind of authority.

  Because my life since then has been a broiling revolt against lying authority. That’s what I told my analyst, and he seemed to agree with me. It confirmed his own theories. A dominating, authoritative father, my own inability to direct my rebelliousness against that authority. Finally he explained that my father was a crafty, benevolent dictator and I was afraid that I would never have the strength to challenge him. My analyst did not wear a goatee, swore by neither Lacan nor Freud, played tennis, and refrained from scratching his head during our sessions. He seemed perfectly normal to me, a sort of friend whom I paid to listen to my ramblings. I told him a great deal; our sessions went on at great length. None of them did me any good. But what a good talker I was, a model client! I would dredge up so many telling anecdotes that I must have paid for a whole new kitchen in his house, as well as a few trips to Provence. It lasted right up to the time he made his diagnosis, when he decided to explain my problem to me. He should have kept his mouth shut. You, he said, are a typical Québécois son of a typical Québécois father. He would have gone on to elaborate except that I suddenly had had enough of his uncomfortable couch, reeking as it did of other people’s psychoses. If my father and I were typical, then we were neither ill nor marginalized. We were normal, and there is no cure for normalcy. Normalcy isn’t a disease, it’s a state of being. I’d been going to a shrink for five years in order to rid myself of my father. Tonight I tell myself that if I spent more time with my father I would learn a lot more than I learned in those five onerous years.

  All right, I know, I’m wandering a bit. It’s Christmas, I’m in love, I’m in a forgiving, compromising mood. Except in my father’s case. Compromise yes, but he has to earn my forgiveness. He has to ask for it.

  BERNARD GIVES ME AN ANGRY LOOK BECAUSE I’M POURING WINE IN MY FATHER’S GLASS WITHOUT FIRST CHECKING THE COLOUR. My father has sat back down slowly (he seems to be moving with so much difficulty that I can’t help wondering if he’s in pain). He isn’t suffering, though, he’s giggling. He has broken through the cheese barricade. His eyes sparkle, shine, speak volumes. He sticks a finger in the Camembert and utters a groan of visceral satisfaction. Ah! ah!, two onomatopoeic syllables that I take to mean the cheese is at its peak of ripeness. My mother notes without conviction that one doesn’t stick one’s finger in cheese, but she’s talking to herself. My father hasn’t listened to her for so long it makes me wonder if he has ever in his life heard a word she’s said. There are those who go through life deaf, just as there are those who go through it blind. My father is one of the deaf ones. I take his arm. Since his stroke and his obvious human frailty I find I can touch him, and for the first time I am in physical contact with him. But when I touch his arm or his shoulder it’s to get a word from him, or to ask a question. To create a sense of security by means of a gentle gesture, as a parent might reassure a child before asking an important question, “Are you pregnant?” for example. In this way I am his superior, for once in my life. If I want to I can become my father’s father. I don’t want that, but the possibility is there, and I must confess that it pleases me, makes me feel more generous towards him. Let’s say I like myself better in the guise of a well-meaning philosopher prince.

  “Dad,” I say, “that big walleye that won first prize in the fishing contest, why did you say you were the one who caught it?”

  He coughs, or perhaps fakes a cough, I can’t tell because he’s the big boss, a real man’s man, as in those old French films. A whiz at manipulation. He takes a crust of bread, smears it with Camembert and adds a pat of butter, stuffs the whole thing in his mouth and, while chewing with his tired jaws, interrupts the operation to knock back half a glass of wine. I stand up. He grabs me by the arm as he used to when I was a child, just above the elbow, and I know he can stick his thumb and index finger right into those folds where the nerves are so sensitive that they scream out when they’re squeezed. It isn’t the fear of pain that frightens me, it’s the memory that engulfs me, and the sense I have that this little reconciliation of ours—and we have to be reconciled sometime before we die—that this small moment of tenderness between us is going to evaporate because of the question I have just put to him. How is it that as
children we want to know everything, whereas at sixty we proudly proclaim that life is a mystery? Simply because children do not stop being the children of their parents. There’s another easy explanation the shrink never bothered to mention.

  He gives a small burp. Afraid that he’ll throw up on the table, I take his arm to calm him down. It’s an involuntary kindness on my part; I recognize it but have no idea where it comes from. I don’t love this man. I don’t even like him. My mother gets up and goes into the kitchen to hide. Her refuge. I realize she doesn’t want to be a witness to what’s going to happen next. She knows the truth but doesn’t want to hear it. Knowing it is bad enough.

  My father’s eyes are those of a fish that has been on the counter too long. He looks at me as though he’d like to strangle me. I know the look. It’s his look of anger and inexplicable violence, the look murderers give policemen, an expression of hideous simplicity. I’m no longer afraid of him, but he thinks he can still terrify me. Why don’t fathers love their children? Or rather, why do children so rarely know that their fathers love them? These aren’t the questions that interest me particularly, although I think they’re legitimate ones. I just want to know. Not understand. Know. What do you think, Dad? What about those trout, and that walleye? What if you’ve never loved anyone? Not even yourself? And what if I’m like you? Like father, like son. I’m terrified of becoming my father. Isabelle is chatting with the teenagers over by the Christmas tree. I drink to steady my nerves.

  “That walleye…”

  My father has difficulty breathing.

  “The… wall… eye… It’s… com… pli… cated.”

  He picks up his plate. It seems he wants to stand up. I hear someone speaking. It’s all right, Pops, we’ll get it. Don’t get up. Someone is being thoughtful. I was going to say “like all girls,” but his illness shakes up the categories. We all react the same when he takes his plate and starts to get up. We know him, we know what will happen. He’ll probably fall and the plate will break and the cheese will land on the rug. We want to prevent that from happening. My father has always carried his own plate into the kitchen, never anyone else’s. He never helped my mother except for that one plate, which is his and therefore his responsibility. All his life he has put his own plate in the sink, turned on the tap, carefully washed it and set it on the counter. He never dried it. Drying dishes was a woman’s job. Or a child’s. But he always washed his plate. Now we take the plate from him. He doesn’t say thank you because we are not doing him a favour. He sighs and looks at me. I look down at my plate and forget about the walleye. Why is he asking me to bear witness to the theft of his plate? It’s not as though I’ve ever even tried to pretend that I harbour any sympathy for him.

  What does an old man do who, as death approaches, has it explained to him in incontrovertible, scientific terms that if he wants to live for another few years he has to stop living, move as little as possible, eat things he doesn’t like and avoid having strong emotions? How does he react to being told that if he wants to go on living he has to cease being alive? He thumbs his nose at the few extra days such a diet would procure for him. He knows better than anyone that he’s going to die anyway.

  He lives with his death. He feels it in his limbs, which no longer follow him around; he senses it in his sleep, which refuses to come as he lies on his back staring at shadows he doesn’t recognize on the ceiling. How does anyone as proud as him react? Does he bow down and die politely according to the rules, as his doctors and everyone else around him advise him to do? Does he suddenly become compliant, obedient? Sometimes I think that’s exactly what we’re asking him to do. My father is neither obedient nor polite; he rages against the death that wants to rob him of life. But he knows…

  Stubborn as ever, he insists on washing his plate as though his entire life depends on it. But tonight, in the great irritation that is Christmas, such a thing is not permitted. We spare him the gesture. We protect him. Is it really because we want to keep him among us? It’s the first time I’ve asked myself that question. An unfamiliar shame creeps over me. A shame composed of a hundred little lies, a thousand meaningless hellos, the shame of looking at him without actually meeting his eyes; worse, the shame of not saying outright: die, Dad, die if you want to. Do it for us if not for yourself. Give us this one last gift. Die.

  I look around for Isabelle. With her I have come to understand what tenderness, respect and, most of all, letting go mean. In a way she’s my redemption. The oldest rock of my life.

  I don’t see her anywhere. She must be in the kitchen, talking to my mother, who will be describing the confusion my father’s unpredictability is causing her. Or the exhaustion. Someone at the table explains that my father exaggerates everything, probably just to get on my mother’s nerves. Not only does she organize his life as husband, father, provider, but also she has to look after the finances and the upkeep of the house, and prepare all the meals. It’s the Homeopath, overflowing with generosity. She doesn’t accuse, she merely states, nonjudgemental to the core. She says what she knows she will see. The Geographer agrees and goes a step or two further. Not my brother. He’s having none of it. “You’d think he does it on purpose just to piss people off...” My brother has had enough of this life of my father’s that won’t stop ending. It makes him uneasy. He’s not happy with anything that doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. Anything that goes unsaid upsets him. He’s a technician, he believes in science. Life to him is a machine, complex but decipherable to those in the know. Life shouldn’t rebel against the expertise of mechanics, i.e., doctors. And every doctor that my father has seen, without exception, has told him that if he wants to stay alive he must stop eating the way he has always eaten. And so now my father’s other son is looking at me, whether scornfully or defiantly I can’t tell. “You obviously don’t agree,” he says. “You never take anything seriously.” I never discuss things with him, if that’s what he means, or hardly ever. We travel in different galaxies, occasionally, as in Star Wars, sharing the same planet when we must. But we come here for different reasons, he and I. How could I explain to him in a way he would understand that I take everything seriously, and that what shocks him also moves and saddens me?

  I see my mother talking to Isabelle, bending her ear, as the saying goes, an ear that rarely reveals what is going on in the head to which it is attached, but into which you can launch yourself as you would down a slide into a deep chasm. My father has finally risen, having shaken off all remonstrations, and is washing his plate at the sink, moving as methodically as a deep-sea diver. I go over to him.

  He puts the plate on the rack and I pick it up and start to dry it. He turns and looks at me as though I were the detective who has been tailing him all his life and now has him cornered, and it’s confession time. Okay, copper, he says, the jig’s up.

  “The walleye… you… can’t…”

  He looks down. Why does he always assume the contrite expression of someone who is constantly being accused of something? I could kick myself for having brought up that old memory. It was only because we were talking about the trout we didn’t catch. Memory functions like a kind of search engine, and it associated trout with walleye. My mouth, which doesn’t always stop to consider what it’s saying, did the rest. I certainly don’t want him to think I’m hunting him down, harassing him, or that I have some old accounts to settle. That may once have been the case. Today, though, I’m simply motivated by an almost infantile curiosity. “What’s your secret, Daddy?” asks the amazed child. “How did you always manage to come out on top?” It amuses me to bring up the past. I’m happy. At last, after so many simulacra of happiness, so many brilliantly or poorly disguised black holes. Those who are happy have no accounts to settle with those who are not. They go back to square one. Their happiness wipes their slates clean.

  My mother’s face freezes like that of a terrified child. Whatever she was about to say dies on her parted lips. Her eyelids, creased by so many tiny wrinkles, c
lose slowly over eyes filling with tears. It pains her to be seeing what she is seeing. My father turns his back to the sink and looks off into space as Bernard, Lise and Claude come into the kitchen carrying plates and platters. They stop in their tracks and look at one another, wonderingly. My father is crying, and it’s not a pretty sight. His whole face has dissolved into tears—eyes, nose, mouth. He sniffs and runs the back of his hand across his nose, which is dripping, and then runs the other hand over his wet mouth. I don’t know who it is who says, You’re not well, or which one of the sisters, speaking softly, says, He’s obviously had too much to drink and eat and he should have listened to the doctors, but of course he never does what anyone tells him to do. Dad, you’re being unreasonable! So what? I know he hasn’t heard a word anyone has spoken, but it’s as though they have been directed at me. I have become my father, I hear what they are saying about my tears, my weakness, no doubt even about these dishes I must have only half-washed. But I tried so hard. I take him firmly by the arm, hold him tightly at the top of his elbow as he held me so often when I was a child, and I draw him towards me.

  “Come on, Dad, you should lie down.”

  “No… the walleye… the presents…”

  “We can talk about the walleye tomorrow… Rest for a while, and you can come back later for the presents.”

  He lets me lead him towards his bed, no longer crying. My mother has opened her eyes again and is trying to recover her party face, while the children (as I call my brothers and sisters, because I’m the eldest) go back to stacking plates and bowls on the round kitchen table. I think it’s Claude who makes a joke, wanting to defuse the drama of the situation, and then installs himself at the sink in my father’s place to finish the dishes. My father shu±es slowly across the kitchen tiles. I don’t like this physical contact I have with him. He’s not aware of this. It’s far too late to explain to him how distasteful it is for me to be holding him up, walking beside him. And useless. I know what I’m doing, I’m helping an old man to bed, an old man who is dying, and it doesn’t matter which old man, or that he reminds me of a dying father. I can live with that.