A Good Death

by Gil Courtemanche

  “When did you stop loving your father?” There is only one step between me and the door, and I’m cold. Even if you don’t reply to a question, you formulate a response in your head. I think, or at least I have lived according to the belief, that it was when I realized he was the one who made the decisions, who organized me, who told me to smile at the camera when I was squirming to go to the bathroom, it was when I heard him shouting but didn’t understand what it was I wasn’t supposed to be doing. Did Stalin’s children love him? Probably. When he was with them he could allow himself to be generous and warm, because outside the family circle he controlled everything, bestowed the gift of life or death, because nothing was unknown to him and he could feel invincible even in the face of a thousand threats. I don’t think that was my father’s case. Every time he left the house his certainty did a flip-flop. He had to make a sale, and nothing is less certain than the kind of work that depends for its success on a curious conjunction of seduction and need. He could force me to eat my dinner, he could order me to respect him—or so he thought, his threats had an effect on my mother and on the children. He could intimidate us with his anger. He could dominate us. But outside, he always had to start at square one again being a man of his times. He had to seduce, cajole, argue, compromise. Outside, things were far less certain. This might be an interesting path to take in my exploration of my father, with less wine in me and under different circumstances. But it won’t change the fact that I’ve never loved him. To understand someone is not to love him or even accept him. I could have told all this to Sam, that the truth is I haven’t loved my father since I discovered he was my father, the boss, and that he has never loved me. But that would be wrong. The truth is I haven’t loved him since I realized I didn’t love him.

  From a distance I hear the sound of an approaching siren. At the corner of the street I see flashing lights and the cubed bulk of an Emergency-Health ambulance. The vehicle is coming down our street. The front door of the house opens. The ambulance stops in front of me. A gurney emerges through the open doors at the back and two attendants ask me if they have the right address. I say yes, assuming that the Banker wouldn’t be shouting from the front steps for no reason.

  Another sister calls out: “Dad’s dying, there’s nothing we can do.” All I can do is get out of the way of the attendants and the gurney, and pray that this time he dies. They go in. I don’t. I hear them say leave the front door open and the sidewalk clear. My father comes out on the gurney followed by the entire family, most of them supporting my mother, who is crying quietly. There is a mask over his face connected to an oxygen tank, and one of the attendants is massaging his chest above his heart. A sister asks no one in particular how it could be that he found a bag of potato chips. Another voice calls:

  “He forgot his teeth!”

  “Shut up, everyone!”

  I don’t know who said that. Sam is sitting on the frost-covered grass with his head down, muttering incomprehensibly.

  “Sam’s sick, too,” cries his mother.

  “No, sis, he’s just crying.”

  I walk over to the ambulance and tell the attendants to go. They drive off towards Santa Cabrini, the Italian hospital where my father is a regular customer. It’s three blocks away. These days my father goes to hospital as often as I go to a restaurant.

  Isabelle asks me what has happened. Nothing. Dad’s gone to the hospital. My mother climbed sti±y into the ambulance with the nurse, who practically had to elbow the Homeopath out of the way. The Homeopath apparently thought she, too, should be doing her duty as a daughter and a health professional. Abandoned on the sidewalk, she signals to her husband and he runs to their car, followed by the Banker’s partner, who starts the Mercedes and sits in it until the engine warms up (the temperature is about zero) before joining what is beginning to look like a funeral procession. Sam has stopped crying. He stood up when his mother pointedly mentioned the potato chips. His eyes are now so firmly fixed on some distant point in the star-filled sky that he clearly cannot be listening.

  I take Isabelle’s hand and say, Let’s go back inside. From the basement comes the sound of a ping-pong ball and the shouts of the players. My daughter is washing the dishes and her boyfriend is methodically drying them. I don’t know who put Santa Claus is a Louse on the VCR, but it was an unintentional stroke of genius. Sam’s mother is crying softly to herself. Through some bizarre parental transference, she now feels it’s her fault that my father got his hands on those potato chips. No, no, it’s not your fault if Sam, I mean William, secretly smuggled in chips for him. It was a conspiracy between the two of them. Dad must have insisted, you know what he can be like. He’s done the same to you a thousand times, and just because he suddenly can’t speak doesn’t mean he’s lost his powers of persuasion. Julie, however, is unwilling to relinquish her role in the drama. She says through her sobs that Dad snuck one of the bags of chips that Sam had hidden under his bed while he was playing with the children, ate the whole bag, choked on one of the chips, cried out, tried to cough it up but couldn’t breathe, and Mother said they had to call 911 and someone did because Mother was panicking.

  “He’ll only be gone a few hours, you know how crowded those emergency wards are on Christmas Eve.”

  “But I should have gone with them!” she insists. “We shouldn’t have just let them go off while we sit here. Come with me. You’re the eldest and it’ll make Mother feel more reassured.”

  “All right,” I say, although I know I’d be more useful here helping with the dishes.

  We find the tribe huddled together in the emergency waiting room. Only my mother is sitting down. The orange chair they found for her doesn’t do much for her colour. She sees me approaching. She seems to have calmed down. No hint of emotion, none of the resignation that comes before imminent death.

  “I’m worried because your father doesn’t like emergency wards. Last year he was in a corridor on a gurney for two days. He swore at the staff so much they finally found him a bed just to get rid of him. This time he can’t talk but he can be pretty unpleasant, even with us. Imagine what he can be like with the nurses. Maybe you should go in there and help calm him down.”

  I definitely have no desire to go in with my three sisters and two brothers-in-law, but my mother looks at me insistently. How stolid this fragile machine we call the “nuclear family” is. I came here to oblige my sister, and now here I am walking to the reception desk to oblige my mother. I regret it already. The tribal leaders literally have a nurse and doctor surrounded, caught in the family trap. I hang back.

  “Yes, madame, I pay taxes, too.”

  So the Banker has invoked her status as a taxpayer to obtain some service or level of care that the doctor feels is unnecessary.

  “Yes, at the time you telephoned he may have been in danger, but not now. The ambulance staff did their job well. His breathing pattern has returned to normal. He vomited a bit, but that’s normal at Christmas for a man in his condition. He probably ate too much.”

  “Have you done an electrocardiogram?”

  “No, madame, and we aren’t going to do one.”

  “Because of budget cuts! I knew it! They’re sacrificing people’s health so they can balance their budget.”

  “You’re absolutely right, madame, but not in the case of your father. There’s nothing wrong with him except that he’s eighty-six years old, has rigid Parkinson’s disease, his heart is exhausted, his arteries are blocked, he’s at death’s door and he’s about as pleasant to deal with as a pit bull. Merry Christmas.”

  So saying, the doctor exits through the swinging doors leading into the intensive care unit, leaving the exasperated nurse to deal with the tribe. What can you say to a family convinced that their father is dying, the victim of bureaucracy, scientific indifference and, in the case of the Homeopath, medical ineptitude? Nothing, of course. I stay out of it. As does the nurse, who also seeks refuge in the relative calm of the ICU. The Banker follows her into that
den of traditional medicine. A few seconds later she reappears, crimson-faced, escorted by two security guards. She splutters in protest, threatens lawsuits, pats her hair and adjusts her enormous breasts as though someone has moved them.

  The swinging doors reopen. A burly male nurse enters, pushing a wheelchair with my father in it. Mother fusses, the tribe simpers, and my father smiles like a baby, which is how the elderly smile when they don’t have their teeth in.

  “You go in the taxi with Dad. I’ll walk.”

  THE FAMILY HOME is in a rundown part of the city. Bungalows from the sixties with their pink flamingos on the lawns; rectangular red-brick apartment buildings that have seen better days, garish neon signs, strip clubs, Italian and Haitian cafés eyeing one another competitively, gas stations, dubious storefronts, gangs of stunned youths of all colours haunting the sidewalks, amusing themselves by frightening lone passers-by for a laugh, for kicks, as is the case now with three Haitian rappers blocking my way, forcing me to cross the street and walk on the other side. They laugh, call after me. A thin, cold bead of sweat is running down my back. Fear. I think of my father’s impotent rage, but mostly of the shame, that piercing wound, soft, permanent, insidious, of not being or no longer being the image you still have of yourself. Right now I’m ashamed of giving in to those three sad, lost adolescents in their baggy pants. Yes, Dad, it’s time for you to die. Not for us, really, because we can get used to your unutterable agony. In fact, by a curious paradox your decrepitude has even drawn us closer together. But it is time you died. Your pride, your dignity, your sense of superiority, your certainty as a provider, everything that has made you what you are, all of it, is being denied you by your illness. And by your family. It must be torture. Worse, it must be humiliating. Why didn’t you stuff a few more chips down your throat? “Anatole Lévesque, deceased after an ingestion of vinegar Tostitos, leaves behind his loving wife…” Did your father die after a long illness? No, madame, he ate a bag of potato chips.

  MY FATHER is in bed. He told my mother he wanted to sleep. He also wondered why we made him go to the hospital, since no tests were done on him and no medicine was prescribed for him. I’ll tell you tomorrow, my mother said, and now, in the family room, she’s explaining his reactions. The children are quiet, not out of respect but because they’re tired. Some are asleep on the sofas. Amandine is curled up on the carpet beside the Christmas tree, hugging the koala bear that Isabelle and I gave her. Perhaps she’s dreaming about having a kangaroo to go with the koala bear. It’s two thirty in the morning. The teenagers have gone back to their Donkey Kong tournament. In the family room, the confabulations continue, more serious now. There is no denying the fact that this business with the chips has raised things to a higher pitch. The discussion turns to the possibility of placing my father in a home, which my mother adamantly refuses to consider.

  I tell Isabelle that we’re leaving, but she signals no. She refuses to let me evade the issue. I do not want to watch yet another family consultation about how my father, whom I don’t love, is going to spend the rest of his life.

  I feel a hand settle gently on my shoulder. I think it’s Isabelle’s, but it’s Sam’s voice I hear.

  “Come,” he whispers.

  We go down to the basement. The chessboard is set up on the ping-pong table. The game has already started; in fact, it’s well under way.

  “I’ve been studying it,” Sam says. “Look at the positions. The black king is close to being checkmated, but the white queen is under attack. If you look closely, you’ll see that the only hope for the king, even if his pawns take the queen, is for White to make some huge gaffe, which seems unlikely. The king could end the game by resigning, accepting his defeat, but kings don’t behave that way, not even in chess. So, what’s Black’s best move?”

  All right, I may be slightly drunk but I understand the analogy. I don’t know. The options are simple: take the queen even though it’s clear that the king is going to die, or kill the king now so he’ll stop thinking he’s a pawn.

  “Grandpa should die,” Sam says so quietly I barely hear him.

  “Why?”

  “Because it would be better for him.”

  It’s not the words or their meaning that explode in my head, because they’re the same words I’ve been thinking myself. It’s the tone, the lack of emotion, the firmness, the calm. Like a secretary of state stating why the government has to suppress an innocent citizen because he knows too much, or a doctor pulling a plug without consulting the family. This is a chess player speaking.

  “Do you really want to kill my father?”

  “No, of course not, what are you, crazy? He’s not bothering me. You, maybe…”

  “Well then, you don’t believe what you just said.”

  “Yes, I do believe it. Come on, man, don’t weird out on me. Take a few deep breaths, as my mother says. I’m not saying we should put a bullet in his brain, or slit his throat, or put a pillow over his face. I don’t want to murder my own grandfather. That would change everything, especially him.”

  “Have you talked to him about it?”

  “What? Are you serious? A little twerp like me, talk to my grandfather about his own death? Have you?”

  Of course he hasn’t talked to my father about it, I tell him, feeling like an idiot. Don’t worry about it, he says. We’re all idiots when death comes knocking. That’s not what he said, but his look pardons my lack of judgement and my confusion. In the ensuing silence neither of us feels uncomfortable because we know we’re both thinking the same thing. What do you say to a teenager who asks if you want to kill your father? You have to take him seriously, of course, for his sake, but also for your own. I play through the various options in the chess scenario, but they all come back to the same conclusion. Sam’s right. One clear and self-evident thought now paralyzes me and liberates me at the same time. It drowns me like the raging seas that erode the peaceful countryside above the calm beaches and the bay at Paimpol. Sam is right, we have to kill my father. I’ve known it all along. Ever since I was a child. This death that I’ve been hoping for since before I even knew that death was a veritable end, before I knew that death was death, this idea of killing my father, was born in the eternal and mediocre tooth-for-a-tooth. It’s the ordinary, pathetic wish of the assassin, to kill something he doesn’t understand, as a kind of reflex, the need to eliminate the unknown in his life. Which is why when we are young we kill our fathers, because they punish us, order us about and do not come to our hockey games.

  I WAS SEVEN or eight. I remember the details as clearly as though I were watching them on film. I’m wearing a black suit, white shirt and green tie. It’s Sunday and we’re coming home from Mass. Mother set the table before we left and put the ham-and-pineapple roast in the oven. As soon as we open the door, the children cry out and Mother says, “Good Lord!” Smoke is pouring out of the kitchen, along with a burnt, acrid smell. When my father comes in he starts swearing, something he rarely does. The house is filled with his shouting and cursing. You stupid woman! There is a loud slap and Mother is knocked to the black-and-white tiled floor. One of the white tiles turns red with blood from her nose. And I try to kill my father. I pick up a butter knife from the table and throw myself at him. Now that I think of it, he probably didn’t see the knife or understand the significance of my act, the hatred and rage that were so foreign to me but now explode like an atomic mushroom cloud that destroys everything in its path. He slaps me, too, and I find myself on the floor beside my mother. Then, saying he’s hungry and he isn’t going to settle for just any old thing, he calmly sits down at the piano. My mother gets up and scolds me. A child should never, never hit his father.

  She improvised: rice, tomato juice, ground beef and fried onions. It was the kind of meal we usually ate, no one made a fuss about it or even thought about the incinerated ham. Except my father, who took one bite and got up from the table, saying this wasn’t a Sunday dinner, he was going to the tavern at the corner whe
re he could get something decent to eat. I squeezed my butter knife. For the second time in an hour I wanted to murder my father.

  “NO, I’M NOT like you when you were a kid. I truly want him to die, the sooner the better. I don’t want to watch him bawling when I try to tell him about my life. I don’t tell him much, just about chess, my teachers, girls, little things. I just want to help him end it. We owe him that.”

  One thing I can say for certain is that I owe nothing to my father, and Sam owes him even less. We are what we are, especially in this family, with this father who made us parade around like Stalin, keep in step, straight line, forced smiles on our lips, chins high, backs straight, while he made his family propaganda films with his old Kodak movie camera. Neoliberalism has taught us that we don’t owe anything to anyone. There, that’s me pretending to be an intellectual. The individual creates himself. If he’s defective, he’ll fail. If nature has made him a genius, he’ll rule the world. It was two pure individuals, no one’s children, sons of no society, who invented the Mac in a garage that reeked of oil. The celebrities of the week that the tabloids feed on so unimaginatively have faced hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes; they have defied prejudice and overcome hurdles beyond belief, and they have done it alone, because they are head and shoulders above everyone else, have thrust their noses above the sea of mediocrity and triumphed over the ordinary. They can go forward, solitary conquerors (because success condemns one to solitude), who make a better future from which we all benefit. That was what I’ve been trying to explain to this thoughtful teenager. In other words, we owe nothing to the bird whose chirping distracts us from being shot on the field of battle, nor to the wind that refreshes us, nor to the shower that clears our heads after a night of drinking beer. But what a load of crap I’m talking! The very stones owe their existence to the glaciers. I don’t know what I owe my father, but it just might be that I owe him his existence. And even if I am nothing but the negative sum of everything he was, it’s because of him that I met my mother and my brothers and sisters, because of him I set out on the path that led me to Isabelle. I owe him everything.