The Truth About Death (13 page)

“And I thought I knew everything there was to know about you,” I said.

Sally sent Simon one of those drinking birds that you used to find in gas stations. The bird dips its beak in a glass of water and then swings upright. The water evaporates from the felt on the head, which lowers the temperature of the head … We never did figure out how it worked, but we enjoyed watching the bird dipping and bobbing on the top of Simon’s dresser, and Simon asked me to get more. I found them in a catalog and ordered a case, a dozen, and we set six of them up on the dresser. He had another idea for a cartoon, and I was sketching it, following his directions. Birds in a long row, stretching all the way to the horizon, were hooked up to electric power lines—the great towers that carry electricity around
the country. The whole area is surrounded by a tall chain-link fence. A pickup truck has pulled up to the gate. The driver and a man in a guard’s uniform stand facing each other. The driver of the pickup is asking the guard, “What happened to all the wind turbines?”

Simon had been pushing me to submit some of our best efforts to
The New Yorker
, but I didn’t have a very clear idea of how you submitted cartoons to
The New Yorker
, didn’t have any idea, in fact (though I’d looked through all my cartoon books and searched the Internet), so I put it off. Until it was too late.

He was lying on the bed, looking through some of my sketches, sorting them into yes, no, maybe. I was working on the last idea he’d come up with—“The Truth About Death.” I was sketching rapidly, trying not to overthink the conceit. I nailed God’s face with a few strokes of my pencil, and then with a few more strokes a dog emerged out of nothing. I’d been looking at Harry Bliss’s dogs, and Matt Diffee’s too, but this dog was my own. But when I stood up to show it to Simon, the room was quiet. Simon’s breathing had stopped. The little tremor of excitement I’d felt when the dog’s face appeared out of nowhere was Simon’s heart giving out. A last flutter. I didn’t realize it till I’d finished the drawing. It was over; he was dead. He was still sitting up in the bed, not even slumped over, my sketches scattered around him like autumnal leaves on the comforter. It wasn’t what I’d expected. Maybe it never is.

I didn’t dial 911, but I called the hospital, whose number was on the table next to the bed on top of a copy of Simon’s living will. Simon was an organ donor. You can’t donate your organs if you die at home—organs need a continuous blood supply—but you can donate corneas and tissue (including
veins and bones) within twenty-four hours of death. The hospital would notify the eye bank and
MTF
(the Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation). I told them I’d have Gilbert bring the body, and then I sat down for a few minutes on the edge of the bed and massaged Simon’s feet. Olive paced up and down the Omani rug. I called Gilbert and asked him to take the body to the hospital. In a few minutes I heard him coming up the stairs with the Med Sled. When I tried to stand up, I almost fell over. I had to push my feet down hard against the floor to hold steady.

I helped Gilbert wrap up the body. Then I lay down on the bed, and Olive jumped up and lay down next to me. After a while I called Jack and Sally in New York. They said they’d be here the next afternoon at the latest.

Gilbert brought what was left of Simon back from the hospital the next morning, which was sunny and cold. I told him I wanted to be there when he prepped the body. I wanted to get it done before Jack and Sally arrived. Gilbert had always been opposed to organ and/or tissue donation. They’re messy and make the undertaker’s job a lot harder. “His body’s been terrorized,” he said. “You know what they do … The organs are in a separate bag …”

“Is this why you let Simon do the tough jobs, even when you could see he was worn-out?”

“You really don’t want to see this.” We were standing outside the door of the prep room.

“Gilbert,” I said. “I’m the boss here. If you don’t want me here, I’ll find somebody else to do the prep.”

“I’m just saying. It won’t be pretty. The body’s a mess, like a gunnysack full of packing peanuts and plastic tubes, the eyes …”

“Gilbert,” I said. “You’re not a very kind person, and right now I need kindness, not your bad temper. I’m just going to hold his hand while you do what you need to do. You’re getting an extra hundred and fifty dollars from
MTF
for your trouble.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I loved him too.”

What was left of the body had already been washed in the hospital, but I held Simon’s hand while Gilbert washed it again and did what needed to be done.

Jack and Sally arrived that afternoon, and the next day we pushed the coffin to the cremation chamber, located in what had once been the paddock for Grandpa Bart’s horses, Stormy and Salty. Sally read a poem by Emily Dickinson:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant—

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind—

I pushed a button and the cardboard coffin rolled into the fifteen-hundred-degree Matthews oven.

Two nights later—a week before Thanksgiving—we had a small reception at the funeral home. Simon’s cremains were in an urn that rested on the mantel over the fireplace, where a pyramid of oak logs was crackling. The small reception turned into a big reception. Families Simon had helped through
difficult times came to pay their respects and to see Olive too. Olive in her uniform greeted everyone, but she was bewildered. She kept looking around for Simon. And then she came to me and extended the paw of affection.

The visitation room was full of bright colors—our new gallery of local artists—and Sally read another poem. I could hear the first line—“How hard to take the trail as it comes”—and then everything shut down.

That night Olive spent more time than usual patrolling the house, like an old-fashioned cop on an old-fashioned beat, a cop who sensed that something was not quite right but couldn’t figure out what it was.

Dr. Johnson (Sam Johnson, that is) was right when he said that attempts to divert grief when it is fresh only irritate, and yet the conventional wisdom—most of the things we say to people because we don’t know what else to say—is in fact wise: time is a great healer, take it one day at a time, write in your journal, acknowledge your feelings, don’t pretend you’re just fine, eat well, get plenty of exercise, get plenty of sleep, and be kind to yourself. This is good advice. I hadn’t taken it after Hildi’s death, and I didn’t take it after Simon’s. No one does. I didn’t want people asking me
how I was doing
in the special voice that is usually used when addressing the newly bereaved—“How
are
you?”—or asking if there was anything they could do. I didn’t want any more casseroles, didn’t want any more lasagna or trays of peeled pink shrimp. I admired my good friend and colleague in the art department Alice Duncan, who had proclaimed her own grief from the rooftops and forced everyone to acknowledge that no one’s grief had ever been as profound as her grief, who went over and over the details of her husband’s death—where she’d been
sitting when she got the phone call from the hospital, how many minutes it had taken her to get to the hospital, the delay at the tracks on Seminary Street, where she had waited for an endless train to pass—as if she’d have been able to prevent the death if only she’d made it to the hospital five minutes sooner. I admired Alice, but I soon found her tiresome. I did things in my own way, defended myself in my own way. I sat up in Simon’s tower, looking at the pictures that covered the walls—Monet and Matisse and De Kooning and the rest—or looking out the windows, watching the shapes made by the clouds, watching the sun coming up in the southeast in winter, the northeast in summer. Through the sixteen windows in the octagonal belvedere I could watch it rise and set without moving my chair. Simon’s chair. I sometimes imagined it was just the two of us, and … and what?

We had few regrets. We had not embarked on great adventures. We’d had some romantic entanglements that at the time had threatened our marriage, but that was long ago, and those entanglements had become part of the fabric, part of the warp and woof of our lives, rather than stains on the carpet. We’d lived the lives we’d wanted to live, done most of the things we’d wanted to do, though I never got Simon to go to Italy with me except after Hildi’s death.

About a week after the funeral I started to think about that trip as I was sitting quietly at the library table up in the belvedere. I closed my Clairefontaine notebook and went down to the office to get a note card with a picture of the funeral home on the front. I refilled Simon’s pen and went back up to the tower and started to write a note to the
impresario
in Rome to thank him for his kindness, and for the
cacio e pepe
he fixed for us our first night in Rome. “Caro Guido …” I wrote. But then I put down the pen and just sat, listening to the familiar
sounds of our old house as it settled into a November evening, no longer thinking of myself as the protagonist of my own story but as an extra in a larger story, a part of a pattern. But what is the pattern? Could I see it myself? I thought maybe so, out of the corner of my eye. But it was only Olive flicking her tail.

PART II: OLIVE

I didn’t draw any more cartoons after Simon’s death. November tenth. Most of the leaves had already fallen and would have to be raked—by someone else. If I worked hard at other things, it was because I didn’t know what else to do. I proposed a new course (Varieties of Visual Experience) at the college; I agreed to chair a session at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo.

Olive and I stayed put in our apartment—the two upper floors on the west side of the house—and Gilbert and his family moved into the apartment on the east, which had originally been Bart and Louisa’s. Jack and Sally wanted me to move to New York, but I didn’t want to give up my teaching. Not yet. Besides, I’d always thought of the funeral home as home. I didn’t want to live anywhere else. There was plenty of room, and it was convenient for everyone. I didn’t mind babysitting the phone for Gilbert every now and then or helping with a funeral.

I kept busy—teaching, securing permissions for the thousand and one images I wanted to include in
Marginalia
—and Olive kept busy too, looking after me, keeping me company, patrolling the house at bedtime, “working” visitations for Gilbert and even going along on removals. I walked her three
times a day, letting her loose in the park by the train station. I never got the hang of throwing the Frisbee, but Dr. King, our vet, said that jumping up in the air to catch the Frisbee was not good for her back. She was satisfied with a ball, which I threw underhand. We went everywhere together. To my office in the Fine Arts Center, to the grocery store, to the library, to Cornucopia, to Innkeeper’s for coffee—Guatemala Antigua coffee at the drive-up window, where there was always a treat for her. And when I walked her past Hawk’s Tattoos on Simmons Street, there was always a baby carrot for her on the window ledge.

Olive and I had a year together—not quite a year, actually—before she started to leak. I noticed damp spots on the Omani rug in the bedroom. She never squatted down to pee in the house, she just leaked a little when she was snoozing on the rug in the afternoon or sleeping in her bed at night. I didn’t notice it at first. It didn’t really smell. Dr. King said that this was because she wasn’t concentrating her urine. I started giving her Proin and bought a spray to clean the rug. The Proin worked for a while. Several months. But then the leaking started again. Dr. King examined her. She was eight years old, the healthiest dog he’d ever seen. Apart from the leaking.

But sometimes she missed her footing on the stairs. It was hardly noticeable, but I noticed, and at the end of September I took her to a specialist in Peoria. It was a beautiful day for a drive, the trees starting to turn. It took an hour to get there, then half an hour for the paperwork. The lovely doctor reminded me of Checco, Hildi’s friend and Nana’s doctor in Rome. Open, warm, friendly. Olive took to her right away. A good sign. She said the same thing as Dr. King in Galesburg.
Olive looked like the healthiest dog she’d ever seen. “She must have some English stock in her,” she said, “because you can see waves in her fur.”

But half an hour later she returned, and she didn’t bring good news. She couldn’t do the ultrasound, she said, because there was a tumor in the way. It was probably spleen cancer. Probably not life threatening. “I take out a dozen spleens a month,” she said. Did I want to go ahead with a biopsy, which would confirm the diagnosis? Of course I did.

In another half an hour she came back with more bad news. Liver cancer. Nothing to be done.

I wanted to call Simon. I didn’t want to face this alone. I called Jack in New York. He wasn’t home of course, but I talked to Sally, and she stayed on the phone with me and asked a lot of questions: Can they do X? Can they do Y? I let her talk to the doctor. They couldn’t do X or Y. The doctor held me while I cried. Olive had about three months to live.

That evening on the way back from our walk, Olive stumbled again on the stairs. Just a little stumble, as if she’d misjudged a step. It was hard to be sure, but I was sure, and it broke my heart. That night I talked to her, and we made a list of all the things we were going to do in the next couple of months. I hadn’t been planning on going to Lake Michigan again, but I changed my mind. I looked into her eyes, and she looked into mine. I thought she was trying to explain to me why things were the way they were, how they were all tied together.

I put my face in her thick ruff and then kept my hand on her head while I made arrangements with Mrs. Burian about a four-day weekend at the cottage. There was electric baseboard heating, and a fireplace too, which we’d never used. I didn’t think Olive would be able to walk down the sixty
narrow steps to the beach, but there was another easier way down to the beach from the state park—the one the paramedics had used after Simon’s heart attack.