The Truth About Death (11 page)

Simon instituted most of the changes Hildi had wanted. He encouraged people to have funerals at home. And he encouraged the bereaved to help him wash the body—or at least hold the dead person’s hand, as he had held Hildi’s hand in the
obitorio
in Rome—while he did the prep. Not during embalming, of course, but he made it clear that embalming was not necessary, that you could keep the body in relatively good shape for quite a while in the refrigrator or for several days at home by placing chunks of dry ice under it at strategic
points. He encouraged cremation as an inexpensive alternative to a traditional burial. He hung paintings by local artists and people bought some of them. But the most important thing of all was the dog.

It had begun with a letter on a website. It was the end of August. We hadn’t gone to the lake that summer and were restless. Simon had read the letter aloud to me as I had been watering the plants in the front windows.

“ ‘Hi, everybody! I’m Olive! I’m three years old. I’m a big strong girl, but not
too
big, about sixty pounds with lots of love to give! I had a family a long time ago, but they weren’t very nice to me. The Guardian Angels came to my rescue and have been very kind to me, but I’ve been living here at the shelter for almost a year, and I’m starting to get sad. Just look at my picture, and you’ll see! Every time a car drives up I think maybe it’s someone who will take me to my forever home. Maybe you’ll be that person. If you think you might be that person, please call the shelter and leave a message for me. Okay?—Olive.’ ”

“Simon,” I’d said. “You sound as if you think the dog wrote that letter.”

Simon had taken off his glasses and was reading from the computer screen. “Well,” he said. “It’s a good letter. You want to hear another one?”

“No,” I’d said. “It’s shameless.”

“That’s all right,” Simon had said. “Olive’s is the best. Come and look at her picture. She’s beautiful.”

“I do not want a dog.”

Olive—sixty pounds, a black lab mix, glossy black—was wearing a blue-and-yellow bandanna.

“If she’s been at the shelter for a year,” I’d said, standing behind Simon and looking at the picture on the computer
screen, “there must be something wrong with her or someone would have taken her to her ‘forever home.’ ”

“I suppose that means till she dies.”

“What else
could
it mean?”

Well
, I thought later,
maybe a dog would be good for Simon.
We picked up Olive for a trial run. She’d already had a litter, but the puppies had been adopted early on. “Sometimes a dog gets picked up and then has to come back,” the woman at the Guardian Angels shelter said. “I guess it’s just the way things are. People don’t think it through. One lady brought her dog back because it barked at the neighbor’s dog. What was she thinking when she got a dog? It’s a terrible moment when the dog realizes it’s going to be abandoned a second time.” I took this as a warning.

The first night at the funeral home Olive checked everything out, but she wouldn’t get into the crate we’d bought at the pet store. The crate was in the laundry room.

Olive barked and barked and kept on barking till Simon let her out of the laundry room, and then she slept on a quilt on the floor at the foot of our bed.

She didn’t poop for a couple of days. But she peed a lot and ran around the enclosed parking lot. Simon got several books on dog training—books by monks and dog whisperers, books that recommended using treats as rewards for good behavior, books that recommended clicks, and books that said your dog wouldn’t be happy until you completely dominated it. Simon spent some time working on the basic commands—though Olive already knew what she needed to know about “Sit,” “Stay,” “Stand,” “Down,” “Come,” and so on—but he didn’t bother with therapy-dog certification. He wasn’t worried about her knocking people over or banging into their walkers,
and after a couple of months she started working at the funeral home. She enjoyed her “work” and wore a smart forest green uniform with a yellow bandanna around her neck. Gilbert fretted about insurance—What if she bit someone? What if she jumped up on the casket?—but Olive always paid attention and took care of the people who were grieving hardest, and after a while he stopped fretting, because even Gilbert could see that the love Olive was offering was simple and profound, kind and compassionate.

Olive liked to empty every wastebasket in the house at least once a day. She liked to turn up dead pigeons by the railroad tracks or dead squirrels from Hope Cemetery and bring them to one of us. She liked it when I started yelling at Simon to take away the dead bird or the dead squirrel or whatever it was. I’d wave my arms as if I were trying to signal someone who was a long way away, and Simon would try to tug it out of her mouth till finally she’d drop it at his feet. She liked to pick up toads in the pachysandra patch around the oak tree at the back of the fenced-in area and carry them around in her mouth. She liked getting me up in the morning—Simon would already be downstairs in the kitchen and would have closed the bedroom door behind him—and in the evening she liked to drag the Scottish plaid wool blanket off the couch and make it into a bed on the floor. Sometimes she folded it over carefully, and sometimes she just wadded it up. She liked to stretch out on the couch (when I wasn’t there), or at least pull a cushion off the couch and use it as a pillow.

She liked to chase live squirrels in the little park by the depot. She liked to lie on the living room floor with Simon. She liked to smell us, and she liked it when we smelled her back, pushing our noses into her neck fur. She liked to bump
my arm when I was reading. She liked to patrol the whole house—including Nana’s apartment and the bedrooms on the third floor—just before bedtime. She liked to “vacuum” the kitchen floor for things that I had dropped or spilled. Crumbs, cereal, sometimes an olive. She’d hold the olive in her mouth for a while and then spit out the pit. She liked to do this when there were guests. She liked running in the park at night, walking too, smelling all the messages left by other dogs, putting together a kind of olfactory map of the park. She liked running through the snow with her nose down. She liked wearing her uniform where there were a lot of people in the house, either in the children’s room upstairs or in the visitation room downstairs. There was always one person who needed her most, and she liked to stand by that person.

She liked to bark when no one was around; she liked to lift her leg to pee instead of squatting; she liked to poop right in the middle of the little Girl Scout garden on Mulberry Street, at the edge of the park. She liked greeting people at the door. She liked chasing the Frisbee in the park. She liked putting on her uniform and going out with Simon in the middle of the night. Just the two of them. She liked to sit in the front seat of the van. She liked going duck hunting with Simon. Just the two of them. Simon was not a very good shot, but he usually got a couple of ducks. Olive liked to dive off the little boat into the water or burst out of the duck blind. Simon said it was something she’d always known how to do.

She liked to tease me by bringing me things and provoke me by peeing on my tomato plants. She liked to snooze in the sun on the Oriental rug up in Simon’s tower. She liked the baby carrots that I tossed up in the air for her to catch, and she liked to break all of my rules about not getting up on the couch or bed. She liked sitting quietly with Nana up in Nana’s
apartment. She liked to put her nose in Simon’s crotch when he was sitting on the edge of the bed trying to tie his shoes. She liked having her teeth brushed, which Simon did every morning. She liked sitting by my chair when I was reading. She liked Simon telling me not to baby her. She liked putting her head against Simon’s leg when he was shaving. She liked to lie down and cradle her head on her paws till someone came to talk to her.

Olive didn’t like my shooing her off the couch or off the bed or out of the kitchen. She didn’t like walking on the leash when she could be running free. She didn’t like not barking sometimes or not jumping up on me. She didn’t like being left alone with Megan Thomas, who came to babysit the phone when everyone else was gone. She didn’t like not being allowed to go into the prep room with Simon. She didn’t like taking a shower with us and getting soap in her eyes. She didn’t like it when I wiped her paws with a towel when she came in from the rain or the snow. She didn’t like it when Simon and I packed our suitcases.

Olive was a natural comforter. Her stores of friendliness and attentiveness, open affection, and loving-kindness were inexhaustible. She put people at ease—extending the paw of affection, placing her head on a lap or a leg. Word got around and more and more people requested Olive. For the children. For the elderly bereaved. For everyone. It was fun for her. It was work too, and after a visitation or a funeral she would lie down on her bed in Simon’s office or else on the quilt that she’d dragged into the back of our bedroom closet.

She comforted us too. Sometimes at a visitation she’d go to Simon as if he were the one grieving hardest. And Simon would have to shoo her away.

Simon was working too hard. “You take all the difficult cases,” I told him one evening after a difficult funeral, “the suicides, the organ donors … You’re everyone’s friend and comforter. But let’s face facts: you’re getting older; you worry about money all the time; you’re drinking too much; you have to get up three or four times in the night to pee. And you’re angry all the time. You’re turning into your father.”

I think this last remark hit home.

I was sitting at the little library table in the tower. Simon was in his big chair-and-a-half. The deceased—a chemistry professor at the college—had wanted to donate his organs. All the paperwork had been in place for weeks. At the last minute, just as the doctors were about to take him off the ventilator, his wife changed her mind, brought her lawyer to the hospital; she wanted Simon to pick up the body at the hospital before the surgeons had a chance to harvest the organs.

The organs were harvested nonetheless. First Person Consent makes your decision to be an organ/tissue donor legally binding—family consent is not necessary—but it was an ugly scene, and later the widow was unhappy with the way the body looked. There’s only so much you can do with a dead body when the corneas and the organs have been harvested—tissue too, including some major bones, which had been replaced with plastic tubes.

Louisa had died in June and we’d canceled our plans to take Olive up to the lake. I had changed some of the prints around. Simon was seriously depressed. Hard work wasn’t helping, and there was only so much Olive and I could do. I wanted something to keep his spirits up, but nothing too obvious. I didn’t want the tower to look like a dentist’s office with uplifting posters on the ceiling, but I did put up lots of Impressionists—Monet’s gardens, Renoir’s cafés, Matisse’s
dancing boys and girls—along with Giovanni di Paolo’s
Five Angels Dancing Before the Sun
(from the Musée Condé in Chantilly); a picture of a Korean bowl that charmed with its imperfections, reminding us that we don’t have to get everything perfect; and De Kooning’s
Villa Borghese
and
Woman on the Beach
, which hang side by side in the Guggenheim.

Simon poured himself a second drink from a bottle of Bushmills that was standing on a little table next to his chair-and-a-half. He put his feet up on the ottoman. I was working at my laptop at the small library table.

“Let’s go up to the cottage,” I said, “for a dirty weekend. It’s been a long time.”

“It’s October.”

“It’s still warm,” I said. “Maybe warm days will never cease. We can take Olive. She’d love the lake.”

He looked at me as if I were crazy. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t think you were interested.”

I was indignant. It wasn’t my fault that we hadn’t made love since Hildi’s death. It had been over a year now. “Not interested?” I said. “Simon, do you really believe what you just said?”

He shook his head. “Lizzy, Lizzy, Lizzy,” he said. “What’s going to become of us?”

“I like it when you call me Lizzy,” I said. “I want you to keep doing it. I want to drive up to the cottage for our dirty weekend and I want you to call me Lizzy the whole time. I want you to call me Lizzy in bed, Simon. It’s been over a year. Remember how horny you used to get after a funeral or a removal, and I did too? I could feel the heat coming off your body, both of us ready for a good no-holds-barred, sheet-ripping fuck. And then spooning afterward. We’ll take Sally’s mindful meditation
DVD
and watch it together. I’ve got the
Zafu meditation cushions she gave us for Christmas. There’s even a meditation on Tantric sex. It’s a dance. There’s no beginning, no end, no goal. Just slowing everything down.”

“You’ve been working too hard too,” he said.

I’d finished a draft of
Marginalia
and had sent off a proposal to Douglas Richardson at Princeton University Press. I was ready for a break. “By the way, there’s an e-mail from Checco. We could see if he’d like to come. We could pick him up at O’Hare. And we could scatter Hildi’s ashes in the dunes. We could do a jigsaw puzzle together,” I said. “You could throw the Frisbee out into the lake for Olive. You could read the first two chapters of
Marginalia.
”

Hearing her name, Olive, who was lying on the Omani rug, stirred and looked up at Simon as if to endorse the idea. As if she needed a break too.

“We could build a fire in the fireplace.”

I could see that Simon was on the edge of tears. I’d gotten through to him. “I’ll call Mrs. Burian,” I said, “so she can get things ready. I’ll make all the arrangements. You can just lie back and enjoy it. I’ll e-mail Checco too.”

The vacation, however, was not a success. Checco could not get away; the jigsaw puzzle—
The Vocation of Saint Matthew
—reminded Simon of his mother. “I’m no good at this,” he said. “I like the idea, but I don’t think I’ve ever, in all the years we’ve been coming up here, been able to fit a single piece in. Not once.” Simon was too restless to read my first two chapters, and Sally’s mindful meditation
DVD
made him even more nervous. The goal was to slow the mind down by focusing on your breathing, but Simon couldn’t sit still. “The minute I try to sit still,” he complained, “my body starts to talk to me: to itch, to cramp, to tingle, to twitch, to ache.”