A Good Death

by Gil Courtemanche

  “Well, the neurologist told her that…”

  The neurologist, as his title suggests, talks a lot about neurons but rarely about my father. He measures electric impulses, notes which ones are malfunctioning, describes deficiencies, forecasts storms in my father’s brain and the destruction they will leave in their wakes. Neurons feel neither happiness nor pain. He, too, thinks that all strong emotions must be avoided—for electrical reasons, if I understand his explanations correctly. A too-strong emotional charge would overload the circuitry, possibly causing a power outage. At this he gave a small smile of satisfaction, apparently pleased with his own reductive joke. I asked about happiness. He replied that in such cases—that is, in the world of electricity—happiness and pain belong to the same family, demolishing in a few words everything previous generations have taught us when they said that happy people live better and longer lives than unhappy people. Science has progressed backwards. My father is an electrical panel.

  My mother has turned the family room into a kind of pantheon to her successes and happiness, which means to her family and her children. We are seated in a kind of shrine, surrounded by icons. Each of us is represented by at least one photograph. We are actually visiting ourselves. My mother chose each photo after patiently going through the hundreds in her albums and boxes, which she dusts off regularly. Those of our children have places of honour. Then come my mother’s favourite brothers, set beside her own mother and father. Then Richard at the piano. The biggest heartbreak of Mother’s life, the schizophrenic child who could play Bach from memory, our whipping boy, who began to die the day he was born because of a stupid hospital error. If he were still alive, I’d be eleven months older than him. We went to the same school for two or three years, and everyone kept asking me why he was so backward, why he was so bad at skating or playing baseball, why he didn’t always understand questions that were put to him, and if I couldn’t duck the question I’d pronounce the fatal sentence, that my brother was a blue baby, he had a bad heart because he’d been deprived of oxygen at birth. I didn’t want him to be my brother, just as in the supermarket, as I walked behind my father, who was dressed like a beggar, I wished he wasn’t my father. I was ashamed of being my brother’s brother and my father’s son. I look over at Richard’s photo, at the timid smile playing at the edges of his thin lips, and I am ashamed. One day my mother told me that Richard was aware of his failings and that that knowledge was the greatest of his sufferings. That was when shame and remorse overcame me. I should have been his hero, the one who protected him, tolerated him, accepted his difference with generosity. But to be that person, I would have had to know who I was and be satisfied with it. I hated being my father’s son, hated being a member of his family, since the family was something he had created. When you feel small and insignificant, it’s easy to seek refuge in spite, which is the pride of the weak.

  “Yes, but what about Mother…” someone says.

  “Yes, but Dad…”

  I don’t quite know why I’m so insistent tonight on my father’s well-being and happiness. Normally our conversations about our parents’ happiness centre on that of my mother, as though my father’s happiness vanished forever with his diagnosis. Perhaps it’s because my father hardly ever talks anymore, and when he does he seems to be giving in, almost as though he’s trying to please us after so many years of arguing, grumbling and shouting. We know nothing of his desires, of his life—nothing. We make it up. My mother never hides anything from us. When she has indigestion, when she’s constipated, when she cries or feels sad or angry. But the longer my father lives, the less we know him. We are condemned to speculate about a human being, which is a dangerous exercise.

  “You should go over and talk to your brother. He looks sad. He seems to be somewhere else.”

  I find him hiding in the kitchen.

  “Everything all right?” I ask, steering him into a corner.

  “Yes, I’ve never been better in my life.” He hesitates. “I’m having an affair, I’m crazy in love for the first time in my life. But I don’t know what it is, with Mother I feel shy, as though she knows I’ve been cheating on my wife.”

  We’ve always known that we can keep no secrets from our mother.

  “Have a glass of wine and relax, Claude. That wasn’t what she thought. She thinks you’re unhappy.” But you’ll let her in on your secret soon enough, because lacking something—I don’t know what it is, maybe Dad—we vent ourselves on Mother, confide in her about our worst secrets, our most embarrassing weaknesses, we clamour for her help and understanding, her solicitude, her money, whatever we can get. Maybe that’s why she’s shrinking. With our wives and their lovers and our children and mistresses, it’s like we’re dumping fifty lives on her.

  On the walls of the family shrine everyone has his or her ex-voto, except my father. In the great hall we are all heroes, except him. When I asked my mother why there was no photograph of Dad on the wall, she didn’t hear me.

  “ NOW CAN WE OPEN OUR PRESENTS? ” IT’S THE TRAGEDIENNE’S SON, THE ONE WHO EXASPERATES HIS MOTHER BECAUSE HE IS NOT doing well in school but amazes me with his gift for repartee and his sense of responsibility. When I ask him about his grades he pulls the universal adolescent face, which is a way of transforming embarrassment into a refusal to show any emotion at all. You’d think he was seeing the same doctor as my father. His name is William, in honour of Shakespeare. He’s standing in the doorway and looking at us with a sardonic, almost spiteful smirk, as though we’re all a bunch of degenerates.

  He has a point. It’ll soon be eleven o’clock and children believe there is more to life than eating, talking and drinking.

  Freed from the difficult task of organizing the lives they’ve been trying to resolve, those attending the informal family meeting at the far end of the table all shout joyfully: Yes! The presents! Come here, children! Come sit by me, my mother murmurs, but no one hears her. She smiles and places herself in the beatific circle of mothers who live only for their children’s happiness. To whom was she speaking? As has been the custom in recent years, William takes his place in front of the enormous pile of presents and begins to distribute them. He produces a red Santa Claus toque and places it proudly on his head. Ho ho ho, he says, choosing a wrapped gift at random and reading the card on it.

  “Grandpa…”

  He looks around the room. Grandpa’s asleep, someone says. We’ll give it to him tomorrow, someone else adds. I don’t think he’s sleeping.

  HE’S STARING UP at the ceiling. We can both hear the bursts of laughter and cries of happiness coming from the family room. He’s a thousand miles from the Christmas tree, listening in on pleasures he can have no part of.

  “I have a gift for you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you want me to open it?”

  “No!… Give…”

  It’s an order. He says nothing more, but I understand. I should have expected his response, which more or less says he is still capable of untying ribbons and tearing off wrapping paper, of opening a gift and finding out for himself what someone has given him. I hand him the present. It looks like a book. He rests it on his chest and inspects a different part of the ceiling. He hands the gift back to me.

  “I… don’t… hmmm… my… glass… es.”

  I show him the book.

  There’s really nothing you can give a dying man that will mean much to him, except perhaps opiates or a good death. The former you can only get illegally, and a good death is hard to arrange. You might be able to find him a friend, but a friend isn’t something you can pick up at the drugstore. This is a book, a beautiful one, about ancient Egypt, one of his great interests. It’s the gift of someone who thinks he’s still alive, a kind of acknowledgement of the militant autodidacticism of his past. A nice homage to this man with no formal education but who spent hours telling us about Ramses and Tutankhamen and the secrets of the pyramids and the riddle of the Sphinx. He opens the book, mutters somethin
g and closes it again.

  “Too small…”

  He seems so disappointed, so sad. And I don’t know what he’s trying to say.

  “The… letters… too… small…”

  “Mother says you need new glasses.”

  “No… too… ex… pensive.”

  He was never one to look after his body, as they used to say. He never played sports, always ate like a horse, and every night since 1954 he’s fallen asleep in front of the television. As a kid I thought he was immortal because he only seemed to be bothered by other people’s illnesses. Neighbours, parents. He didn’t seem to believe in sickness, which probably explains why he never showed much concern about our infections or boils or childhood diseases. I never saw him being sick or even pretending to be. One of my sisters almost died because no one called the doctor when she had a simple ear infection. She’d been screaming with pain for a week. Finally my mother quietly rebelled and picked up the phone. Pus from the infection had almost reached her brain. The doctor practically had a fit. A cold here and there, all right, but not attending to a serious infection that could leave her deaf was as inconceivable to him as snow in summer. If my father was ever sick himself, he kept it from the rest of us. He must have been sick sometime, of course, but if so, no one knew about it. He would never be publicly sick, of that I’m sure. He was the kind of man who would never allow such weakness. That was the way things were. People around him were his principal subjects for conversation. He was the only one of us who never spoke about being sick.

  “Grandpa!” Santa calls from the family room.

  “No… more… presents… No… need…”

  Which is what we ourselves have been thinking, more or less privately, for two Christmases now, each of us wondering what we could give him that wouldn’t cause him pain. Some of us fell back on clothing, which he liked and accepted with big, toothless grins, the toothlessness not seeming to bother him much, as though having no teeth were the most normal thing in the world. But we noticed that he almost never wore any of the new clothes, and that my mother has stopped urging him to try them on. He seems content enough to await death with one pair of pants and one shirt, no need for more than one of each item of clothing.

  William, who is also called Sam, our Santa Claus for the evening, comes into the living-room-turned-bedroom.

  “Too… loud… they’re… talking… too… loud.”

  A checked shirt, made from soft, smooth cotton. It was both muted and quite remarkable at the same time, like the clothes he used to wear when I hung back from him for fear of being noticed. Let me explain. In his Bermuda shorts and sandals he stood out in the supermarket aisles, no question, but the colours he preferred were always beige, or light brown, or soft reds, and these were much more of a whole, more muted, as I said, than the bright red ties and yellow shirts sported by the other, normal parents, or the checked pants that came along a few years later. It wasn’t until I began hanging around with famous painters and other artistic types that I understood that my father didn’t dress the way he did to attract attention to himself—if he had, he would have worn garish colours or the latest avant-garde styles. He simply dressed to be comfortable. As I write these words I wonder if he knew that people looked at him and his outfits with such distaste. Probably not, or he would have been mortified. I also wonder what form his pride took? That of a society man who simply wanted to stand out among equals, or the other kind, an individual who craved the freedom to be unique? Or yet another kind, a megalomaniac who wished to dominate, and whose actions required no excuse or even explanation? I think his is the perfect example of the pride of a man of his generation. I am what I am. Period.

  Three Christmases ago he would have put this shirt on, its design and colours so perfectly matching his taste.

  “Don’t you want to try it on? It’s the kind you always liked to wear when we went camping.”

  I mention camping because it’s one of the few subjects that still interests him and sometimes gets him to brighten up, maybe say a few complete sentences. Mushrooms, travelling or rocks might also squeeze a few words from him when things are quiet, away from the relentless clamour of our family get-togethers. And since we’re alone in his room with the background noise not much of an obstacle to conversation, I take the chance. He doesn’t deign to respond, merely turns away and mutters to himself.

  As I hold out the shirt to him I realize I’ve never seen him kiss my mother. Ten children, and not a kiss, not even on their anniversary. Dad, when you were making babies, my brothers and sisters, did you kiss Mother?

  “Dad, the shirt is a present from… it’s the kind of shirt you’ve always liked.”

  “Three… shirts… have… three… Enough.”

  If I were speaking to a child I would tell him to stop sulking, he’s not a baby any more and he’s making everyone feel uncomfortable.

  “Stop sulking, Dad, you’re not a child, after all.”

  He doesn’t say anything. He looks off into space, or maybe at the piano. I don’t give in to him. “Dad,” I say. He mumbles something. Sam and I are dismissed.

  NOW IT’S MOSTLY THE CHILDREN WHO ARE GETTING THEIR PRESENTS. OUR YOUTHFUL SANTA HAS FIGURED OUT THAT IT’S BETTER not to pick gifts at random and run the risk of frustrating the younger ones. Around the table, which is cluttered with desserts, half-empty bottles of wine, wilted salads that no one is eating, to the great annoyance of Lise the salad expert, we are still talking about my father, even though he’s not here. Life may have totally deprived him of power, but he’s still here, dominating us as an ancient oak dominates a landscape. The children are talking about a ghost that haunts the house.

  Buddhist or Medical, we all want the same thing. We want to think that our parents are facing their deaths comfortably and peacefully. A simple enough desire, you’d think, one capable of inciting a groundswell of support, as the progressives would say, of uniting us at least as much as it divides us. William is getting impatient. We’re not joining in the Christmas spirit. One of the sisters makes an effort, tearing herself away from the conversation and making oohing and aahing sounds over an ugly doll.

  The Medicals are addicted to crisp, cutting-edge science. They have their detailed reports, their lab tests, their cookbooks specifically designed for people with weak hearts and rigid Parkinson’s, their neurologists, whose Mercedes-Benzes proudly proclaim their medical prowess. The Buddhists, of whom I am one (but only in this case), are not impressed with science, though they have nothing with which to match it from some other, equally solid and seated body of knowledge. We search the Net desperately, but come up empty-handed. We have no argument to make except that of the heart, or perhaps that of sentiment. Neither our affection nor our compassion makes us more human or more generous. We ask ourselves if the happiness of one parent is not the happiness of both. We quite simply refuse to believe that the beginning of death is the end of life. The Medicals, who have just as much heart as the Buddhists, oppose our position with a thousand little tangible tragedies, each of which is perceived as a tragedy for our mother. They are not afraid of choosing between dead and living futures. At the same time, they do not hesitate to impose life on those who are already well on their way to death.

  The Medicals have opted for our mother. They’ve decided to save her life because of our two parents, she is the furthest from death. Our father must therefore die politely and quietly, so as not to cause our mother further pain.

  Yes, I understand my mother’s anguish, when she sees her husband, headstrong and arrogant as an adolescent who has just smoked a joint, leave the house to go for a walk, step onto an icy sidewalk and fall flat on his back after two seconds. Watching in desperation from the window, she sees the various parts of his anatomy trying to re-form themselves into a body. She sees that body lying on the icy sidewalk, not moving. That’s what she sees from the window. I’m not making this up. She is the one who told me about it. She couldn’t get him up by herself, so she rubbed his
back, keeping him warm, encouraging him. She had to wait for someone to come along, or ring a neighbour’s doorbell, in order to get this shell of her former husband back on his feet. I also understand her weariness, her fedupness, when she saw him knocking himself out, shouting, getting more and more discouraged when he could no longer decipher bank statements or bills that made less and less sense to him, but which he nevertheless insisted on trying to take care of. For my birthday this past summer he sent me a cheque for twenty-five dollars, which I didn’t get around to cashing. He had written down all of his expenses, all the electricity bills, the gas bills, the telephone and cable bills, and when he added everything up there was an extra twenty-five dollars in his account. He recalculated, reverified, went over everything again a dozen times, and ended up pounding his forehead with his fists. The next morning, my mother quietly went to the bank and withdrew twenty-five dollars from his account. They later agreed that banks were becoming more and more dismissive of their clients’ needs.

  What goes through his mind when he’s told that washing dishes is too dangerous for him?

  My mother smiles every time someone opens a gift and lets out a cry of joy. Calmly, I try to explain to her that she must give up her struggle to keep Dad alive as long as possible, but she keeps looking away, trying to see the gifts that are evoking such happiness. Actually, I don’t say it in so many words. I don’t actually say he’s going to die anyway so we might as well let him die in peace, which is a ridiculous phrase, a falsely charitable cliché. I don’t talk about death, I don’t even use the word. I talk about pleasure. Westerners hardly ever speak of death, even when they’re standing in the middle of a cemetery, and even less when it’s the death of a close relative. I mention bacon and cheese, sausages and calf’s liver. Surely once in a while it wouldn’t hurt him. Another present is opened and she smiles automatically. The child shrieks with joy. All the wine bottles are empty. I get up, go into the kitchen for another bottle, and see my father standing in the doorway with exactly the same ecstatic smile on his face as is on the face of the ten-year-old who received the electronic robot he’s been begging for for months. He has put the checked shirt on over the thick green sweater he was wearing. He’s proud of himself. Beaming. Delighted with his little triumph and with the surprise he is going to give us.