A Good Death

by Gil Courtemanche

  HE’S LYING ON HIS BED, MUTTERING TO HIMSELF. FROM THE KITCHEN I CAN HEAR THE SOUNDS OF CLATTERING DISHES AND HUSHED conversations. He doesn’t want to get undressed. I didn’t offer to help him, which bothers me. I just watched him lie down on the bed, normally a fairly simple procedure. What could be easier than to let yourself flop down on the bed, or rather, since he is a methodical person, to sit on the edge, take off your shoes and then, in a movement that encompasses the whole operation, let your spine arch back, head hit the pillow, and not even notice your legs as they follow the rest of the body and assume their customary position. In order for him to sit I had to hold him. Then he instinctively bent over to untie his shoes, forgetting that he can no longer do that. He can’t bend his back far enough to reach the laces. I offered to undo them for him but the sequence of grunts with which my offer was met I assumed meant no. His body is no longer a whole. Nothing seems attached to anything else, his head to his neck, his hips to his legs, his arms, which dangle at his sides, to his shoulders. He leaned on the bed on one elbow and with his left hand reached down and pulled his left leg up. The other leg followed, but not without some effort. All the motions we normally make without thinking, he has to mentally break up into their component parts, try to put them back together again, then execute them, step by step, so that moving is no longer a graceful dance but a halting, arduous process. I stand here as useless as a coat hook in a garden. His eyes light on the piano and he says the word, piano, then they turn to the Hammond organ and he says, organ. He completes the survey of his horizon by contemplating the small stereo that sits proudly atop an old cabinet that contains his turntable from the 1940s. He does not say, music. I ask him if he wants to listen to a record, or if I can play something for him on the piano or the organ.

  “Too… much…” He looks for the word. “Too… much… noise.”

  “It won’t bother anyone.”

  He shakes his head angrily. He doesn’t understand that I don’t understand.

  “Too… much… for me… noise. The others…”

  It suddenly occurs to me that I haven’t heard a single note of music in this house for two years. Whenever I’ve come on my own to visit, there has not been a sound from the piano or the organ or the stereo. It was in this very room, this living room, that I first discovered music, those mysterious sounds wafting out to me from the turntable, sending me off I have no idea why, into realms of dreaming, crying, dancing, even when I was a small child. As with all autodidacts, my father’s taste flitted about everywhere without logic or consistency: Tchaikovsky and Beethoven mostly, Chopin’s sonatas, but also Nat King Cole, Liberace, Louis Armstrong, Edith Piaf, Sinatra. And, to remind himself of I don’t know what—his worker origins, perhaps—the slushy music of polkas and accordions and military marches. His favourite records of all, however, were Bach’s toccatas and fugues as played by Albert Schweitzer, the mythical doctor and modestly talented organist who avowed great love for the African people, whom he thought were so poorly evolved intellectually and to whom he dedicated his life. Father admired Schweitzer a great deal, Africans not so much.

  IT WAS ABOUT one in the morning when I was awakened by a violent argument coming from my parents’ bedroom, which was on the second floor next to the room I shared with Richard. I could hear my father shouting and my mother crying, pleading with him, then a sudden scream of pain. It was the first time I’d heard a woman scream and it terrified me. I was seven. Then there were loud footsteps, curses ringing out down the stairs, then thunder, a hurricane of noise roaring from the Hammond organ, which, until then, I’d known only to make the light, tinkling sounds of flutes, trumpets or violins. I know now that it was the most famous of Bach’s toccatas and fugues. Father had cranked the volume up to full blast, pounding the pedals so hard that the whole house shook, even the walls and floors, under the assault from the heavy vibrations of the music. Richard woke up screaming, and my mother came into our room to tell us not to worry, that our father was just playing some music to calm himself down. Then the doorbell rang and the music stopped. I could hear the neighbour’s voice, and of course that of my father: “What? You don’t like Johann Sebastian Bach? You don’t like great music? You’re an idiot!” And the door slamming shut. I was already beginning to realize that in my father’s view, there weren’t many people in the world who weren’t idiots, and I was afraid that I was one myself. He went back to pounding out Bach until the police arrived. After a long, heated discussion, they agreed that Bach was a great musician but that he shouldn’t be played at two o’clock in the morning. My father agreed. We went to sleep to the “Moonlight Sonata,” our tears dried and our fears put off until another time.

  “DO YOU remember Bach’s ‘Toccata and Fugue’?”

  He glares at me as though I’m beginning to get on his nerves. He wants me to leave so he can enjoy the peace and quiet that comes to him only in sleep.

  “No… The walleye… I’m… going…”

  He gives up, closes his eyes. Which confession was he going to make? The walleye or Bach?

  I GO BACK to the kitchen. My mother, who has lived with my father’s stormy moods, his highs and sudden lows, for sixty years, has already forgotten his tears—fortunately, for how could she have survived so long if not by lowering the curtain after each little drama? Her days are filled with these outbursts that have us, the children, running for cover. After each holiday we go home. She stays here. And, I imagine, has to pick up the pieces the next morning, delicately but firmly putting all the dots back on all the i’s. If she had the same outraged response as we do, it would kill her. I sit down beside her. She gently pats the back of my hand and lets herself be reassured.

  “Don’t worry about him,” she tells me. “He’ll be better tomorrow. He drank a bit too much. These family holidays are always hard on him, emotionally.”

  All right, I’m a ten-year-old. My mother has patted my hand and I’m happy. Why do parents have to die in order for their children to feel grown up? She goes back to her conversation with Isabelle. They’re planning our wedding reception. Isabelle and I are getting married next month. The wedding will let my mother die happy, or nearly, knowing that all of her children are happy, or at least being looked after. I’m the last one, and it looked as though being happy and being taken care of were both going to elude me.

  “You don’t know how happy you two are making me…” She pauses. “But I’m not sure your father and I will be able to go…”

  Isabelle protests. I add my exclamations.

  “It’s too complicated,” she adds, implying that we should let her have her way in order to avoid certain problems that no one else has mentioned or even thought about. She’s afraid that my father will spill wine on the tablecloth during the speeches, or splutter incoherently in front of Isabelle’s family. Don’t misunderstand me: she’s not afraid of being humiliated herself (well, maybe a little, but only a little). She wants to protect my father from embarrassing himself, but mostly she wants to spare him the emotions that the doctor has told her will kill him. She believes she has to save him from what to us is life, so that he won’t die. She can’t let him have feelings any more than she can let him have saturated fats. She has to prevent him from being happy in order to prolong his life. She doesn’t put it that way, but that’s how I understand it.

  On this subject the family is divided. I hear one of my brothers speaking about the embarrassment my father would cause so many people he doesn’t know, especially Isabelle’s very respectable family, whom no one but me has met yet, and my actor friends, some of whom are well known and even, in some circles, very well known. Of course they would be embarrassed if the old man suddenly tumbled out of his chair, or dumped his soup on Isabelle’s wedding dress. It goes without saying, there’s no point in discussing it. We need to face up to the anxiety he could cause, the embarrassment, the mortified smiles he would bring to all our faces. Put it this way: a sick person has certain inalienable rights. He is absolute
ly free to be a sick person if he wants, as long as he doesn’t act like a sick person, like an old man who is dying. If he is to be allowed to exist, a sick person must be in perfect health. Or at least be a polite sick person, one who is capable of hiding the fact that he is dying.

  Com… pli… cated, as my father would say. I don’t think it is all that complicated, but I understand that no one wants to argue with my mother. Cats scurry off when you approach them directly, and come back only when they feel like it. Birds are worse. Mother is a catbird.

  She asks me about my conversation with my father. I try to change the subject, not wanting to upset her and have her scurry off. I tell her we talked about music, that he told me music made too much noise.

  Her hand, still resting on mine, trembles faintly and lifts away, joins her other hand, and together they support her delicate head. I realize how easily her head could shatter, how, like fragile porcelain balanced on a pair of alabaster hands, her tiny bird’s head could come crashing down onto the table.

  “You mustn’t talk to him about music, it’s too emotional.”

  She wants me to be grateful that she hasn’t chosen other words. Music. Emotion.

  I couldn’t live without emotions. Without the thrill of worry, or uncertainty, or surprise; without emotion, yes, of course I would die. So are we killing my father by hurling emotions at him? By letting him live? I don’t ask that because she’s gone back to talking to Isabelle about the wedding dress, which Isabelle is keeping a secret from me so that I’ll be the more moved when I see her in it, and I am looking forward to having that emotional response, that leap of eye and heart, that sudden surprise she is preparing for me without asking my advice. She won’t even tell me what colour it is.

  “My love, at least tell me the colour.”

  “If I tell you the colour, you’ll see the whole dress.”

  “No, just the colour, colour doesn’t tell me anything.”

  “Colour is everything.”

  That’s emotion, and it makes me want to live.

  Mother’s hands are still cradling her fragile head.

  “The doctor told me he’s to avoid strong emotions. They’re bad for his heart.”

  “What about his head? Are they bad for his head? And his happiness? Are they contraindicated for that, too?”

  Isabelle looks at me like a mother who wants to slap a child for behaving badly.

  AROUND THE FAMILY room the voices have become more mu±ed. I have the impression that they are calculating and consultative, as if they’re in some kind of informal family meeting called to decide the fate of our parents, either tonight or a few weeks down the road, the next time my father falls or when the majority of us, acting out of concern for my mother’s health, decide their respective futures for them. Since his stroke, some of us have already been avenging ourselves for his strictness during our childhoods, trying to take over most of the responsibility for the house. It’s not meanness or revenge in the literal sense of those words, I suppose. But I know what we are doing: unconsciously, we are reproducing the models of our respective childhoods. It seems to me that Bernard wants to re-create for our parents the constricting order they imposed on him. The Banker wants to install the logical, predictable organizational system she has at the bank, of which she is vice-president. As far as my father’s fate is concerned (and we have discussed it at great length), there are two opposing schools of thought: the Medicals and the Buddhists. The Medicals don’t drink, not really. They chart their glycemia, their blood-alcohol levels, the number of calories burned. If they smoke, it’s only with their evening coffee, preferably on Friday or Saturday. The Medicals, at least the women, weigh themselves every night. The Buddhists smoke like chimneys or not at all, drink as much as they feel like drinking and have completely contradictory opinions about everything. They’re fine with letting my father’s life take its normal course, letting him enjoy all the pleasures prohibited by hard-line doctors, but at the same time they wish that the ensuing flood of happiness, enjoyed in the teeth of the medical experts, would also lead to more happiness for my mother. But that’s the catch. If my father eats too many oysters and too much foie gras, he’ll grunt with satisfaction, but the next morning, when all the Buddhists are home meditating into the rising sun, it’s our dear, frail little mother who has to pick him up when he falls down because he blacked out from having stuffed too much fat into the old paternal metabolism. We know absolutely nothing about that. That’s where the two schools come up, however cautiously and timidly, against my mother’s concern. For us, she is the incarnation of everything we want the life awaiting us to be like. My father’s illness has given her back her soul, her voice; with her shining eyes, her arresting smile, her legendary family, the way she is with the Algerian butcher, so open-minded, she is more alive now than she ever was under my father’s thumb.

  I have to admit, on the other hand, that my father has given us the worst example we could have of growing old. Even before he reached his advanced age he never did anything to endear himself to us, or to intrigue us or give us anything to admire in him. No family stories, no memories, no projects with us. The first time he ever shared a confidence with me was this evening, when he admitted to having been lost in Mont Tremblant Park. More than fifty years had to pass before he would let his pride waver. Progress, I suppose, but I still haven’t heard about the walleye he stole from me, or about a thousand other things that I still prefer not to bring up. It’s too late to start settling such large scores, but there may still be time to discover the human being hidden behind the fearful personality, behind the seemingly unemotional man. It’s true that life didn’t make it easy for him. A large family, blue-collar job, diabetes, uneducated well into his thirties—such things don’t lead a person to happiness, or to culture or self-respect. Or any sort of delicacy of feeling. He hasn’t a single personal memory that could be the subject of an impassioned conversation. He dislikes Arabs, Blacks and Jews. Anyone, in fact, who isn’t exactly like himself. He’s not really a racist, but he doesn’t like being around Blacks; however, he’s outraged by the Holocaust, and by what’s happening between the Israelis and the Palestinians. He firmly believes that Americans are racists.

  So, when we see my mother suffering from his old age, we worry about how much time she has left, and how much of it he may be depriving her of. In short, we worry that my father’s illness is killing my mother. What a disturbing paradox, that a dying man can assassinate his perfectly healthy wife.

  Mireille the Homeopath tells my mother that my father must be made to understand that exaggerating his illness will only make it worse. He’s not stupid. Maybe there’s some kind of therapy… What doesn’t he understand? Life, his new life as a person who’s dying? Mireille, would you accept the fact of your own death, sitting like this at a table groaning with cheeses and Christmas cake and bottles of wine, none of which you are allowed to touch? But I don’t ask you the question. My mother is looking at me, knowing how much I would like to say something cruel, and nothing makes her sadder than to see her children, whom she loves equally, not loving each other the same way.

  “Some wine, Mother?”

  She perks up (amazing how she can shift from distress to obvious pleasure in a matter of seconds) and holds out her glass to let me pour her a finger of red. She looks up at me, pleadingly, it seems to me, though I’m not sure what she wants me to do. Probably not get into a discussion that she fears would end in discord. I think about the man who had to work so hard to lie down on his bed and let his eyes make their slow and painful voyage from the piano to the organ and the stereo. My father the deposed dictator, asking for a glass of wine, like Pinochet begging for mercy because he is old and senile. And so I speak up, wanting all the parallel conversations around me to stop, but of course they’ll never stop in this family, and so I find myself speaking mostly to myself.

  “Let’s be serious here. Wine, cheese, bacon, fat, steak, never mind lobster and calf’s liver—no
ne of these things are good for Dad. And since emotions are also dangerous for him, it would be best if we deprived him of the pleasure—which is an emotion—of coming to our wedding. Walking isn’t good for him, either. I know, he falls down regularly. He no longer likes to listen to music. He used to love the sound of his own voice and now he can no longer talk. We argue with him, tell him he can’t do any of the things he likes, in the hope that it will prolong his life. We let him live while we await his death.”

  “You want to kill Mother.”

  The voice is both Medical and a bit Buddhist. My mother studiously nibbles a crust of cheese, like a mouse, oblivious to everything around her. She even picks up the crumbs from the table with two trembling fingers.

  Two deaths have been announced. My father’s death will free my mother, hers would kill him. A nice problem for a family.

  I’m beginning to realize how hard it is to watch someone you’ve been living with for sixty years die, even if you don’t love him. Just as it is to watch someone who’s supposed to be dying go on living. I know how much my mother’s life has shrunk since my father’s began to end, neuron by neuron, and how, tired and defeated, she no doubt prays to God to give her back the husband she married. She has chosen to become the protector, the guardian, the nurse, but she also has to be the mistress of the house, the decision maker as well as the one who carries out the decisions. Did she choose that? No, probably not. Women of her generation have a sense of duty and long-suffering stoicism that benefit everyone around them, children, brothers, sisters, husbands. She has become both the father and the mother of the sick child that is her husband. If my mother is shrinking, it’s probably because she is neither a man nor a woman, because she has assumed the responsibilities of both sexes and none of the pleasures. She doesn’t actually live in her house, she functions. Although I understand these things, I say nothing. I keep my own counsel.