I called Matti who said he had tried to phone me. The situation had spiraled quickly out of control. People stood out there in the cold in support of Mother. Protests were taking place all over the city center, cars were set on fire and politicians didn’t leave the house without bodyguards to protect them from the Public’s accusations of treason.
“Are all these people protesting because of me?” Mother asked, looking over my shoulder at the protest on screen. For a second I almost gave in to the truth, to tell her that Iceland had fallen, had sunk into the Atlantic. The people standing there were the people who couldn’t get a ticket out of there. People who never had private planes at their command, no condos in Bulgaria. That these were the single moms with their rolling pins and pans, the eczema-plagued children longing for zinc cream, the dogs needing flea shampoo and Pedigree, the IceTaxi people demanding justice, the street people suffering from soaring wine prices, guitar people in need of amplifiers, people who solve puzzles in Excel, people who want vitamins for their children, teenagers wanting DVDs, the elderly needing meds, and the whole nation wanting to reclaim its country after the bombardment and self-jets. All the commies, Mother, all the commies! But I didn’t want to hurt her. Why couldn’t these people just as well be protesting because of Mother?
“Well, I never thought I’d become this famous. Imagine, all these people standing there thinking of me. I feel a bit like I did in Montparnasse back in the day. I think I’ll have a glass of red and a cigarette. I feel much better now.”
I gave her a light, wiped the sweat off her forehead and the toxins oozing out through her skin producing that distinct whiff of illness, the heavy odor constantly reminding us of death. She was like a tiny chemical plant, the smoke like a tiny factory cloud over a building that was falling apart. I didn’t know what went on in there, what kind of sound travelled in a house doomed to fall, but it was more than crying. Music, long-gone parties, drives up mountainsides, and adventures, this was the hint of happiness that constantly flickered up ahead and made the point apparent, even though the hand never quite grasped what it was reaching for. Mother participated in order to collect memories, enjoyed in order to feel the loss, and even though reality tormented her and ordered her to bed, she possessed a serenity that I had a hard time defining as surrender.
And yet I could no longer ignore what was happening. I could no longer pretend not to see that which demanded my full attention; the pain that burned through Mother’s bones, the agony that made her cry and shout at me that she wanted to do it now, drink acid or anything that would make her disappear from the face off the earth. She could drink moonshine, like the stuff that killed Grímur, Great Aunt Edda’s father, first by blinding him and then by burning a hole in his stomach. She would do it. Anything but this. We knew the end was drawing near. We could not postpone this much longer. Even though the heart calmed down and the pain receded, it was always looming. Always returning, until she died. Until she faded and disappeared. She was pain. She was a distorted face and the hate for that which distorted it.
That was how the week after my return from the abyss in Amsterdam passed. All I could do was wipe away her tears and sweat, administer morphine and wait for the party to be over, for the constant rave-hopping of the mutated cells to stop. Sometimes she would ask Duncan to lie down beside her, he told such wonderful stories, possessed a kindness that was more important than muscles and chest hair, and even though it had taken cancer and old age for her to learn this lesson . . . was it maybe always meant to end like this? Until now there had been no Duncan. We knew that the time they had together was limited, full of hindrances and howling into the silences, suffering that chewed up the darkness and set the room on fire without notice. It grew colder and Mother got worse. She didn’t say much, filling her presence with something that was the negative of who she was, as if life was sucking out everything that made her herself. Duncan said that when people stopped crying over their own past it finally became the past, insignificant and useless, no longer a thing to measure life against, no longer a tool for evaluating everything you wanted back, only that which has passed. At the same time you felt the weakness that made you give up. Like Mother, he was dying. He had about three months left, maybe less.
Mother told me to keep a record. Told me that I should tear out the pages of her journal and eat them if that helped me make any sense of them. Life was one big crime novel and it had to be put into words. The bombardments of the self-jetters should be recorded. The torture of patients in modern times was a vital topic to write about, for outdated injection techniques did nothing but make you want to kill yourself as soon as possible. But there was also joy in the world that needed mentioning as well. Hotel Europa had to live on in the minds of others, the breakfasts and the shopping trips, all the museums we visited with her lifesaver in hand, that wonderful companion, and Timothy and Duncan had to be mentioned, never forget how much fun there is to be had, drink some calamus in a crazy jazz orgy and dance. In between all of this her own personality would achieve immortality, the best height of imagination when all was said and done, even though the world was too dumb to appreciate it.
November brought rain and the rotten fall engulfed everything. The smell of decomposing leaves stroked the plains, the wind picked up, and the last of the summer flowers yielded to the ground. If Mother perked up, the delight only lasted a short while. She raged at the changing of the seasons and this inexplicable life. The days with Duncan became memories, empty glasses, forgotten embraces on the lawn, and nothing could change the fact that everything was lost. I watched her face break and the corners of her mouth droop toward the trail of death. She shouted away the squirrels in the meadow and screamed the knots out of the wind so the countryside went completely still, and then she instantly fell in love with the world again. She praised my calm temperament, reached for my hand; a skeleton craving water, flesh and blood, broke down and got angry with herself. Maybe the look of hate is most potent when it is directed inwardly. Sometimes her expressions betrayed an unbearable regret of not having done things differently. She cried over the injustice she had thoughtlessly caused me, inconsolable over mistakes that threw happiness out with the trash. She mourned disposable opportunities and unrecyclable pleasures, a forgotten birthday. When she was haunted by thoughts of all the things she hadn’t done, painting lessons, suing the conservatives for treason, it was like all the days of history wouldn’t suffice to grieve over what would never be. Life was a wreck no matter how long it was. She had never enjoyed any of it. Existence was a merciless narrow path to damnation and hell. She hated it. She hated existence and all its ruined days more that her own useless bones.
When she came to, she remembered where she was and that most of this was over and done with, long forgotten and that everything else was more important—to rest her feet for half an hour in Duncan’s lap and sleep—and at such moments joy settled over everything around Highland. The grass was glad to die underneath the frost. The cattle happily chewed on the wire fences. Fantasy and wonder skated hand in hand over her features, like a drunken couple that has always loved each other, but never fully understood the other. In her blood was a tremor she considered a betrayal of happiness, and it was that very tremor that called the whole world to its service and attracted people who gave her their love. I read to her and she fell asleep listening, woke up wanting cotton candy, maybe a Liebe Sunde, some Icelandic flatbread with onion pâté. She babbled on and on, salivating at the mouth, her voice rattling, black, white, black, white, black: her consciousness flickered, moving in and out of existence without any discernable rhythm. Events swirled out of control in her mind, constantly on repeat. Everything was new, even things that had happened before, so the reverberation of progress didn’t intensify the monotony but rather hampered it. Each hour was the last, but also the first, a constant recurrence of the eccentricity of the disease. Sometimes she would recognize the beauty by cursing the lack of jenever, but I knew she didn’t have th
e stomach for it anymore, and that was all I knew. Her mortality was beyond everything that my mind could perceive, but each time it hit me I was overwhelmed by sorrow and obsessed with a need to be especially kind to her. I craved confirmation of this one thing more than anything else: that I’d done everything in my power. No matter how deep the sorrows, there had been someone ready to appease them. And that she would say it: You did good, Trooper. Better than anyone else.
My worst fear was to live with the possibility of having failed her. I convinced myself that death justified everything, framed everything, and if we did it right the doubts would never haunt me again. Helena was in the same situation. She led Duncan through the days, tried to support him, tried not to break under the pressure from unfair feelings belting drinking songs from the deepest corners of her soul, convincing her that she had failed. Because there is only so much you can do. The roads that people traveled were many, long, and different. Not everyone came to the same crossroads at the end of the road.
“Don’t think you failed, Trooper, just because other people think differently.”
But it didn’t change anything. I was pulled north and south by delusions cooked up by a cocktail of medications and temperament—if I showed signs of weariness it hurt and sometimes I would cry in the woods, feeling the cold of the last, falling leaves up against my face. I smelled the earth and the cold fall dissolving the ice and threading the wetness underneath me while Mother shrank and withered away. She disappeared like the breeze into silence. For the first time in my life I heard her say things only old people say. Last spring felt like the next World War, so far away that you could reminisce about it in a meaningless void. I tried to leave the house as little as possible, sitting in the windowsills looking out at the grass and the animals. Golden thorns grew in sinewy wisps of cloud. Inside of me was a sadness I had never experienced before.
Chapter 19
“We need to start taking measures,” the doctor said. “Nothing but the equalizer will do from now on.”
He handed me an IV bag with a long tube to attach to a catheter. People couldn’t handle the drip for long, he said, the side effects would start kicking in after a couple of weeks, but for a short while it was a wonder drug. Frederik had developed the concoction after decades of research, calculating the right value of the phenethylamines in proportion to the opiates.
“And people seem to hang on to their personality pretty well,” he said. “Thanks to those like Tim Wallace; there would be no equalizer without them. Some professionals insist that it disorients that patient, but that’s not my experience. Your mother is in severe pain and it’s only going to get worse. When the sarcoma gains the upper hand it tends to be more painful than other forms of cancer. We’ll need to play it by ear. It’s just a question of time now.”
“I’ll see if I can’t convince her,” I said. “I won’t run away again, Frederik. Promise.”
“Good. Good.”
We said good-bye and I headed back to Highland, past a crowd of people with loudspeakers and signs. Arthur van Österich was going to die tonight and there were some protests to be expected. Most of the commotion was thought to be around Lowland so the grounds had been closed off. Dozens of people stood out by the road shouting slogans, life above all, no one shall decide another person’s death.
“I understand it’s like this around all the hospices in the country,” Helena said when I met her in the lobby. “These people actually make the special trip up here to cause a racket, as if there isn’t enough shit going on to scream about. We go to war, spend our tax money on warfare, the oldest pact in the world that it’s okay to take a human life when that’s the way the wind blows. And still those bastards show up here and shout at us as if we’re criminals.” This was not the first time I’d heard her rant about the opponents of euthanasia, and she hadn’t finished: “People think it’s fine to watch others disintegrate. They don’t do anything about people dying like dogs in the street. But if those same people decide to throw themselves off a bridge they’re accused of taking into their hands a power that’s not theirs. People don’t stand out there in the cold protesting because they care, but because we take away their illusions. We take away the optimism and abundance by acknowledging death.”
“Maybe some people just have stronger beliefs than others,” I said, not understanding why I felt the need to defend them.
“I think you’re just saying that because you’re scared now. I sometimes think the same way, that maybe Duncan will live long enough to survive this, if he decides not to take his own life. That he could die in slow motion so I can lie to myself, tell myself that death is not horrible, that it is something completely different, but I know that he’s had enough. People don’t think about that when they show up here with their signs. Their opposition doesn’t come from compassion, but out of rage. They think those who commit suicide are committing a crime against everyone they leave behind, but then they don’t care about people dying because of poverty. People don’t care about the next guy as long as he doesn’t kill himself.”
I wanted to agree with her, give some philosophical input on our situation, this world that championed the freedom of the individual to such an extent that he could ruin a whole nation by photocopying documents, but then object to Mother getting help in dying. However, I had not grown up with this idea like Helena had. She saw that and asked me to excuse her lecturing, she just couldn’t contain her indignation sometimes.
“No worries,” I said. “I understand you too. People sometimes think it’s easier to correct other people’s lives instead of their own.”
“Which is why they go into psychology,” she replied. “Or take short cuts by shouting and waving signs. But in the end we all have to face ourselves.”
“I suppose so. I think it’s best that I go see what she wants to do about the drip.”
I walked into the room and sat on the bed. It didn’t take much to convince Mother to agree to the equalizer. Each drip counted down the days we had left. The mornings imported sense to remember all our victories in Amsterdam in the beginning of summer, when all days were special drinks and delight. That was life, that was the memory. We moved furniture around to make better use of the living room and made Highland a theatrical stage for the past. Ramji got movers to bring in a hospital bed on wheels. I got out the photographs we’d taken with us from home, scanned them into the computer and held slideshows in the dining room. Duncan slept a lot; Mother and I were mostly alone with the hundreds of photos, each telling a story. Reykjavik. Berlin. Montparnasse. When Willy Nellyson lit up the wall she said: “He had his good points, your dad.” The balcony of Hotel Europa got a more enthusiastic reaction. The Amstel river and everything we’d done: Trooper in de Dam in Rembrandtplein, Trooper sleepy after the single glass of wine.
“Lord, we’ve had fun,” she said, flipping through a series of cousin Matti having a banana smoothie that was so well documented it looked like a moving picture. “Do you remember, Trooper? When all days were drinking days, and the weekends too?”
I could recall being confined to the attic with a pound of chocolate and E.T. on full blast to drown the revelry downstairs.
“There was singing and laughing back then. Do you remember Brownie? Completely bonkers, but the funniest person I’ve ever met. She passed out on our Moscow trip and never woke up again. But she lived while she lived.”
I was transported back in time and was once again hit hard by the inevitability of the end. Each passing moment is the last, each day goes by for the last time. And the days were becoming fewer. The moment had come for her to decide how she wanted to die. Did she want to breathe in nitrogen? Helium or argon? Or did she want to drink barbital, which was what Arthur van Österich chose to do in the end? His death was described as peaceful and painless in all of the major papers. I cut out his last statement from one of them and translated for Mother:
Nothing can prepare you for the fear that grips you at death’s door. M
y life’s work has been to convince people to have the courage to accept their fate without fear or falsehood. I’ve maintained that with the right preparations each and everyone can choose their final hour and live it without faltering, close their eyes for the last time without regret. These past few days I’ve been both restless and scared. I judge no one for their choice of path, whatever it is and whatever it entails, as long as it causes no harm to others. Respectfully yours, Arthur van Österich.
The fear set on Mother like a storm from within her bones. After a couple of days on the equalizer the world became such a pleasure dome that it was inconceivable that the darkness would ever return. Free of the constant invasions of the physical world, the Sphinx in her rose again and she became more prophetic than any tarot card, righteous, lucid, undaunted, noble and celestial in spirit, as if the pillars of the earth had merged with her feet. With faith in this equanimity she pulled out the drip and was almost instantly overcome with blinding angst. In the half hour this hurricane swept over her she hated death more than all the disappointments life had brought her. She felt it in the pain that ripped her humanity away, turning her into a reptile and a harpy, and yet she would not let go, didn’t want to die. No matter how death tried to seduce her with promises of rest, peace, eternal sleep in the embrace of the stars where her light shone on the world and the sky is the reflection of Eva Briem, she would not go. Anything was better than to disappear and become nothing but this deafening, terrible silence, this gaping void around a body that is doomed to rot, become a skeleton, dirt, and dust. The ache dug into her marrow and rammed a hot poker into her spine for the eleven thousand hours that half hour without the equalizer seemed to last. To live and then suddenly no longer exist: this journey from one level of existence to another brought a crazed dimension of fear. The reverse side of sixty years of experience flickered on in a second, but what did it contain?
The Last Days of My Mother Page 17
