The Truth About Death (12 page)

“Try to interrogate the itch,” I said, trying to guess what Sally (who taught yoga) would say. “Follow its progress, the way you might follow an insect crawling through a patch of tall grass.”

“What about the tingling? What about the cramps?”

“Interrogate everything,” I said.

“What am I, a goddamn prosecuting attorney?”

Sally could sit through the half-hour lectures without moving. I could manage about ten minutes. Simon couldn’t last even thirty seconds. “Try to put your expectations aside,” I said. “Wanting things to be other than they are is the problem. Attachment.”

“I don’t
want
anything,” Simon insisted. “
Wanting
is not the problem. The problem is
not
wanting. I don’t
want
anything.”

He was on the phone a lot with Gilbert. The chemistry professor’s wife had refused to pay her bill and was threatening to sue the funeral home. Simon wanted to go home that afternoon. I persuaded him to stay till the next morning.

“We still have to scatter Hildi’s ashes,” I said.

“We can do it this afternoon and then take off.”

“You can leave if you want to, but I’m staying here till tomorrow.” I wanted to spend one more night in the cottage, though I’d pretty much given up on a no-holds-barred fuck.

If it hadn’t been for Olive, who was always in good spirits, I’m not sure what we would have done. It was her first time at the lake, and she loved it. Like all labs, she had webbed feet and was a strong swimmer, and she never seemed to tire of swimming out into the lake after the Frisbee.

On the last morning the lake was very calm, flat as a pancake. It was foggy. Simon threw the Frisbee farther and farther, as if he were trying to set some Olympic Frisbee record. I begged
him not to throw it so far, but he wouldn’t listen. You couldn’t see farther than fifty feet.

“Not so far, Simon. Please.”

“She loves it. You can’t throw it too far for her.”

“I don’t want to watch.”

“Go up and check the cottage to make sure we haven’t left anything. I’ll be up in a few minutes.” But I didn’t go, and after an especially long throw we watched Olive swim right past the Frisbee, saw her heading out into open water. Into the fog. We could see her, and then we couldn’t see her. I was furious. “What the hell’s the matter with you? Why did you throw it so goddamn far? What the hell were you thinking? What’s the matter with you anyway? You’re determined to spoil every fucking thing. You can’t even take a fucking vacation.”

“Everything is already spoiled,” he shouted, kicking off his sandals and running toward the water. He wasn’t a strong swimmer, but he was going to swim out after her. I ran after him and tried to hold him back, but he was in panic mode and fought me, as if he were drowning and I was trying to rescue him. There was no sign of Olive.

Simon suddenly collapsed at the edge of the water. There were not many people on the beach, but those who were there had cell phones and called 911.

By the time the ambulance arrived, Simon was unconscious. By the time Olive dragged herself up out of the water with the Frisbee, the ambulance crew had arrived, coming down the big wooden stairs at the public beach and running along the hard sand at the edge of the water.

Olive licked Simon’s face, and Simon woke up and struggled with the paramedics, who strapped him onto a stretcher and carried him across the beach to the waiting ambulance.

*    *    *

They kept Simon for two days in the small hospital in Coloma, and then we drove home in our Mazda. Olive sat in the front with me and Simon lay down in the backseat.

Simon was out of danger, but I worried about a second heart attack, a sudden hammer blow striking from behind, a dark horseman galloping toward us across a fertile valley, swinging an ax or a mace. Simon refused to have bypass surgery, refused to do anything his doctors had suggested. He refused to cut back on salt and saturated fats, refused to cut back on his drinking, refused to take his
ACE
inhibitors, refused to keep his angina diary.

And so on.

He kept a copy of his living will on the table next to the bed:
No heroic measures
.
Do not resuscitate
. He mailed fresh copies to Dr. Currie and to both of the local hospitals, and he made me promise not to call 911 till it was too late. I had mixed feelings about this.

By the time we celebrated Simon’s fifty-ninth birthday, I had signed a contract with Princeton for
Marginalia
; we had hired another embalmer, installed a new computer system, and hired a young woman to create a presence on the Internet. The website she created featured Olive in her uniform, photos of the family and staff and the home itself, and the opportunity to subscribe at no cost to a daily e-mail to help you through the grieving process. Gilbert composed the e-mails himself, and the first ones were very good—thoughtful and thought provoking—but after a while you got to number twenty and then number thirty. What more was there to say? And he started a blog. Simon wasn’t happy about the blog, though he wasn’t sure just what it was, and he was
too tired to do anything about it.

Simon’s health had not improved. When he read in the paper about new drugs that would enable people to live into their hundreds he became agitated. He wasn’t interested in living that long. He didn’t seem to be very interested in living at all. He was short of breath and couldn’t handle the stairs up to the tower. I thought of moving Rembrandt and Caravaggio and the Impressionists and the Korean bowl and De Kooning down to our bedroom on the second floor. But I no longer maintained my unquestioning faith in the healing power of great art. Maybe Hegel had been right: Art has lost its genuine truth and life, and has been reduced to a mode of recreation or entertainment, decorative rather than necessary and essential. Or maybe I just had to accept the fact that Simon was never going to see what I saw.

It just wasn’t going to happen. And then something else happened.

Instead of looking at great art, we started looking at
New Yorker
cartoons while Olive snoozed on the Omani rug, which we’d brought down from the tower to our bedroom. We’d always looked at
New Yorker
cartoons, of course, and the attic was full of old
New Yorker
s, stacked in no particular order in bankers boxes, many of them folded open in the middle of an article or story that one of us hadn’t quite finished, or a cartoon that we’d wanted to look at one more time. You could fit over a hundred
New Yorker
s into a Fellowes Bankers Box if you made one flat pile and then filled the remaining space by standing another forty copies or so up on edge. We went through hundreds of old
New Yorker
s, cutting out one or two cartoons, sometimes more, from each issue and taping them up on the walls, not caring if the tape would pull the paint off later. We weren’t thinking about “later.” We were thinking
about “now.” About Charles Addams and George Booth and Roz Chast and Sam Gross (
My son stepped on a crack and broke my back
) and Charles Barsotti (
Fusilli, you crazy bastard! How are you?
). And the younger generation too—Marisa Acocella’s sexy fashionistas, Drew Dernavich’s woodcuts, C. Covert Darbyshire’s stressed-out children, Eric Lewis’s absurd captions, Matt Diffee’s hapless losers.

When we ran out of wall space, we made space by taking down the old cartoons and pasting them in scrapbooks, till we ran out of old
New Yorker
s. When a new one came in the mail, usually on Tuesday, we’d go through it quickly, looking at the cartoons; then we’d read some of the articles, and then a few days later we’d go through it again, cutting out the cartoons we liked. Maybe it wasn’t the happiest time of our life together, but it was the funniest.

For years we’d been unable to keep up with
The New Yorker
, but now
The New Yorker
couldn’t keep up with us, and Simon begged me to draw our own
New Yorker
cartoons. He was enthusiastic, full of ideas. “How about this?” he said one afternoon, lying in bed with his laptop propped up on a pillow. (I’d just come back from lecturing on Rembrandt’s self-portraits.) “Two explorers wearing those jungle helmets—pith helmets, I think they’re called—come to a clearing in the jungle. What do they see? The lost—”

“The lost graveyard of the elephants,” I said. “Like the explorers in those old Tarzan movies.”

“No, no. Not the lost
graveyard
of the elephants, the lost
funeral home.
Not the graveyard but the funeral home. Get it? Why not the lost funeral home? Picture a funeral home in the jungle. You could draw some elephant pallbearers loading a casket into a hearse. The driver of the hearse is an elephant,
of course, wearing a sharp uniform. What do you think? A sign in front that says
JUMBO AND SONS, FUNERAL DIRECTORS
.”

“I like it,” I said. “But I haven’t done any drawing for years.”

“It’ll be a good exercise.” Simon was so enthusiastic I thought I’d better seize the moment.

I hadn’t done any serious drawing since the early days of our marriage when I’d thought I might switch horses and become an artist instead of an art historian. That night Gilbert helped me bring my old four-post drawing table down from the attic. We carried the storage drawers down separately, then the frame, then the top. I set it up next to the bed and pulled up a chair. Olive parked herself on the Omani rug and Simon sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed her with his feet.

I went out to Dick Blick on Saturday morning and came back with pencils, erasers, rulers, stumps, torchons, a pencil box, small sketch pads, large drawing pads, a pencil sharpener, a sandpaper pad, a glue stick, masking tape, a light box, a fixative spray, double-ended Prismacolor markers in every shade of gray, which I distributed among the six storage drawers. And half a dozen books on cartooning. Mort Gerberg, Bob Mankoff, Polly Keener, Steve Whitaker, and others.

By the time I got back Simon had located images on the Internet—images for me to imitate—drawing prompts, suggestions, jungle cartoons, trees, explorers with pith helmets, photos of funeral homes. I printed them out in Simon’s office.

How hard could it be to draw cartoons?
I thought.

Harder than I thought. I started with some warm-up exercises—scribbles and gesture drawings. In two minutes I
could turn out a gesture sketch of a young girl reading or an old woman leaning on a cane or an old man trying to tie his shoe. But “the lost funeral home of the elephants”?

“By crikey, Wilson, it’s the lost funeral home of the elephants.” That was Simon’s caption.

It took me two days just to get the perspective right. I went through dozens of sheets of paper and used up two of the Prismacolor markers shading in the jungle trees. I went across the street and studied our own Italianate funeral home with its five square bays, its wide overhanging eaves, its octagonal belvedere (from which, once upon a time, the farmer had been able to observe his workers in the fields), its open verandas and the guest rooms over the elaborate porte cochere on the west side. But it was too complicated, and in the end I decided on a more urban model, like the old Foley Mortuary over on Broad Street, which had been turned into apartments. We both liked the idea of an urban street running through the middle of the jungle.

I drew sketch after sketch till I got something workable. After a while it became easier, though never easy.

Simon liked heroes. “How about Beowulf picking up his steel grip,” he said, “at an airport carousel?”

I had a lot of trouble getting the carousel right and finally worked from an image Simon had downloaded from the web.

“How about the
wind
shield of Achilles?”

I drew Achilles getting the windshield of a little sports car repaired at the Hephaestus Glass Company. We didn’t caption either of these cartoons, but we added banners:
BEOWULF’S GRIP OF STEEL
and
THE WINDSHIELD OF ACHILLES
.

“How about hell freezing over?”

I drew Satan out ice fishing with one of his devils. Ice shacks all over with more devils. The devil fishing with Satan
said, “Well, I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later.” A lot of people didn’t get this one; Gilbert didn’t get it; neither did Marge, but I guess that’s the way it goes with
New Yorker
cartoons.

“How about an old-fashioned carnival midway? But instead of the world’s fattest woman and a two-headed baby and the incredible five-legged calf, the barkers tout ‘Plato’s Cave’ (‘Experience the thrill of a lifetime’); ‘The
Ding an Sich
’ (‘See things as they really are’); and ‘The Veil of Maya’ (‘See Swami Krishna lift the Veil of Maya’). A little boy standing with his father says, ‘Daddy, You promised we could see the
Ding an sich
.’ ”

I thought I did a pretty good job with that one.

Simon liked elephants. “How about an elephant artist at an exhibit of his works. Draw a couple of women drinking white wine. One of the women says, ‘They say he studied with De Kooning.’ ”

I liked the idea but never got the drawing right.

Simon didn’t have many friends in the ordinary sense, except Paul Childs, our lawyer, who’d gone to school with him. “Keep your chin up,” Paul would say. “You’ll beat this thing.” And he was full of stories about people who’d made miraculous recoveries, had “beaten” angina, survived double and triple bypasses. No comfort there. But comfort came from an unexpected place: families Simon had helped, families whose kith and kin he’d buried. They read about Simon on Gilbert’s blog—which had become locally famous (or infamous)—and sent cards, notes, e-mails. Some of them even stopped by to thank Simon and to see how he was doing. Simon pretended not to be affected, but in fact he could remember all the details of every funeral, all the particulars, and he was deeply moved. And he
was looking better. He was in good spirits and had dropped his opposition to bypass surgery. At the same time, we grew closer, more trusting; we opened our hearts to each other, and our arms too, as if we were young lovers. We paid attention to each other the way some artists pay attention to the leaves on a tree, noting their individual characteristics. And Simon started to take more of an interest in my work. He asked me to bring down a Rembrandt self-portrait from the tower—Rembrandt as a young man, from Schloss Wilhelmshöhe in Kassel, which I’ve never seen—and he read the first two chapters of
Marginalia
and offered some sensible suggestions. And one night he told me—it was a kind of confession, really—that actually he’d been happy in Vietnam in the morgue at Da Nang, though he hadn’t realized it at the time. Not exactly “happy,” but happy that he’d confronted his worst fears and had mastered them, that he’d made the mythical journey to the underworld and made it back safely.