Exit Laughing (8 page)

“It went on for a long time,” said the actor. “I mean, a real long time. Hours, it seemed. None of us wanted to say anything or do anything, ’cause we didn’t want to break the spell, y’know?”

“I kept peeking over at the nurse,” said another friend, “but she just shook her head. ‘Not yet,’ she was saying.”

The nurse nodded, confirming this part of the story.

“And just when I thought I would burst from all the tension and the quiet and the waiting, I saw this one big eye pop
open. Just one. You know, that hairy eyeball thing that Cleavon likes to do, all suspicious and surprised and scared, all at the same time? Like he’s saying, ‘What you doin’, boy?’ ”

“And this big old eye flicked to the right and then it flicked to the left and it took us all in, one at a time. I was the first to go. I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe, I swear to God. Then everybody went. The nurse, Cleavon, everybody. It came in waves. We couldn’t stop it for the life of us. And in between the waves, we tried to catch our breath and hold our aching sides. And then it came again. I can’t tell you how long we laughed.”

Two nights later, Cleavon passed, leaving all of us with the memory of his bringing down the house one last time.

My father died first.

When he tripped and fell in a parking lot, I figured he needed new shoes, so we got black Reeboks with extra tread. He wore them to work daily with his gray pinstriped suits, white button-down shirts, and black knit ties. “Trendsetting,” he would say, “stylish
and
comfortable.” He proceeded to buy them by the dozens to give to friends and family.

Two months later, while wearing his new black Reeboks with that extra tread, he fell again. This time, he suffered lacerations on his face, warranting dozens of stitches.

Several doctors’ appointments later, he was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. There was no cure. Victims usually die of respiratory failure within two years. Paralyzed. Unable to eat, speak, or move.

Soon after his diagnosis, he invited me to breakfast; I loved having breakfast with my father. We sat on the same metal chairs with the same lemon needlepoint pillows, at the same Formica table, in the same sunny yellow breakfast room where we had eaten my entire life. It was a Saturday morning, my mother was out playing bridge at the club, and he was wearing his navy wool robe, flannel pajamas, and leather slippers. On this day, this usually dapper man looked disheveled. As
we ate our eggs, he said, “I’ve been thinking: my work here is done.” I had to breathe and stay steady and calm, so I took his hand. Muscle spasms bumped up under his skin; tiny electric shocks signaling nothing good. His nerves were firing at random intervals, similar to the engine of a car sputtering before it wears out.

He’d made up his mind.

“Where I’m going is a happy place,” he said.

“No,” I said. “It’s not time. You’re only eighty-three!”

He assured me he was unafraid and that his mother would be waiting for him.

When he was forty-five, he was pronounced dead during surgery. He described the blinding white light and his deceased mother standing in front of it, her loving arms outstretched.

I had to believe him.

My father was the exhale to my inhale and taught me that anything,
anything
, was possible. So, before this disease stole his body and left his brilliant mind trapped in a paralyzed shell, he was going to move on. I had no say.

For weeks after our breakfast date, he’d sit in his big black leather chair, eyes closed, emptying his mind. Whenever I’d blow into the room, hoping to regale him with stories of my children, he’d respond, “Shhh, silence is okay, too.” So I’d sit next to him, holding his hand, already feeling the loss of my father.

“Tomorrow will be the big day,” he announced to me and my mother, exactly two weeks after revealing his plan.

My mother was appalled and would have “none of this ridiculousness!” She stormed out of the room and called all three of his treating physicians (who’d become personal friends), asking them to come over, which they did that afternoon. When the cardiologist, internist, and neurologist completed their batteries of tests, including a mobile EKG, their joint conclusion was, “You’re not going anywhere anytime soon.” As he left the bedroom, one doctor said, “I’m going to see my sick patients now.” My mother walked them to the door, wearing her patented “I told you so” grin.

My father winked at me.

Late that evening, he told me to go to Tower Records right away and buy a Barbra Streisand CD containing the song “Memories.” I didn’t understand his urgency, but had faith he knew what he was doing. I gathered my purse and made for the door.

“Stop! You are going nowhere of the sort!” my mother snapped. “Don’t you know the kind of people who go to Tower Records on the Sunset Strip at this hour?”

I ignored her reproach. Apparently,
I
was the kind of person who did just that. My father’s body was about to give birth to his soul.

When I returned with the CD, my mother was fuming in the other room, and my dad was still very much alive, serene and comfortable in bed, wearing his yellow flannel pajamas. Without speaking, we played and replayed the song “Memories” so many times we could hear it, whether it was playing or not.

This was his exit music.

He lay on his back with his eyes closed, me curled up next to him, hoping he’d both succeed and fail. When his breathing became almost imperceptible, after several dozen run-throughs of the song, I leaned over closer and whispered, “Are you dead yet, Daddy?” He opened one eye, looked around the room, and said, “No.”

We exploded into hysterics, our laughter cutting through all things death and dying and returning us to the simplest form of one another. We held hands and laughed off and on for hours. At two in the morning, he pressed me to go home to my sleeping children. I didn’t want to but acquiesced, only after he promised not to stop his heart until I’d finished carpool.

He started manifesting his plan the next morning, as I was dropping off my kids at school. I sensed the shift and sped to his bedside. While holding him in my arms, I felt a rush of energy sweep out of his body, and I knew we would never
ever
be separated. Death may have ended his life, but it didn’t end our relationship. For days, even weeks after his passing, I saw and felt miraculous life-affirming energy in all aspects of nature. My father had taken residency in the gentle breeze that rustled the pine trees, and in the pink and orange clouds that streaked across the sunset sky. He was nowhere and everywhere. He was home.

My therapist suggested that such experiences of mystical wonderment, even ecstasy, were nothing more than dissociative denial that my father was actually gone. He said, “You haven’t grieved his death and are trying to ignore the emptiness of your loss.” I fired him before I even had a chance to go to the cemetery and tell my dad.

I was good at this death thing and considered it my newly awakened life’s mission to shepherd dying loved ones into the light. Whether they were open to the possibility or not, I was going to help. Nancy Davenport and I became friends the day I saw her fall off the curb into the gutter. I wrapped my arms around her, lifted her back up to standing, and then introduced myself, recognizing her from my UCLA writing class. The crumpling motion her legs made when she fell reminded me of something all too familiar.

After a few weeks in class, she mentioned she’d been to a doctor because of weakness and difficulty swallowing.

Three weeks later she announced her diagnosis: “I have a disease called ALS.”

Instead of feeling averse to being around another victim of the cruelest disease I’d ever known, I drew in closer, invited her to lunches or dinners, and offered to have “writing days” outside of class. I was determined to work my way into her life and begin my tenure as fearless shepherd into the light. The essays she read in class were smart, eloquent, and insightful, a sign she might be open to the idea.

As it turned out, Nancy, a stubborn card-carrying atheist, wasn’t. Death was death was death. Death offered no white light, no angels, no waiting family members, no envelopment in universal love. No nothing. Despite or because of that complication, my resolve to help her was unwavering. She was terrified of dying, and I didn’t want to be. I mean, I didn’t want
her
to be. We spent as much time together as possible.

I gave her a picture of my dad taken a few years before, as he was skipping down a cobblestone street. He’d been waving his
arms like wings, and the photo captured the precise moment when neither of his feet touched the ground. His smile was wide and real and free. Unadulterated joy of the sort found in heaven.

Nancy loved the picture and asked me to station it on the coffee table directly in her line of vision. We included him in our conversations, and I told her about his life of abundance and hard work, how he built an empire between tennis games, and how once he was diagnosed with ALS his focus shifted upward. I explained that she was going to a happy place and that family members whom she loved would be waiting for her in heaven.

“Now you’ve gone too far. There’s no one up there.” She struggled to stand and pushed her walker out of the room.

My certainty was so “entertaining,” however, she chose to keep me around as a curiosity.

Nancy’s feeding tube days were quickly approaching, and I wanted to provide her with delicious tastes, hoping a happy stomach would lend itself to an open mind. During one of our precious surf ’n’ turf dinners at a local restaurant, I approached the concept of death from a scientific angle.

“Listen, Nancy. I want you to understand this. Energy beats our heart.”

She brought a bite of lobster dripping with butter to her mouth, “One of the foods I’ll miss most is buttery lobster.”

“I know, but listen. Since energy beats our heart and since it’s a scientific fact that energy never dies—”

“Did your father like lobster, Barbara?”

“Stop interrupting me! No, he didn’t. Energy beats our heart and energy never dies. Are you with me?”

My words were rapid-fire urgent. “It logically follows, then, that when our bodies die, the stuff that beats our heart, our energy, our soul, our consciousness, our spirit, lives on in a different form. This is important, Nancy. Death is not the end. Energy never dies. Do you understand?”

I ordered myself a cosmopolitan martini, briefly questioning which one of us I was trying to convince.

“You’re wrong,” she said, sipping her Grey Goose on the rocks. “No one listens to our prayers. All that’s ‘out there’ is empty darkness.”

“Make it a double,” I told the waiter.

When she became homebound, feeding-tubed, and unable to care for herself or pay for help, her doctor called the Servants of Mary, nuns from a local convent who ministered to the sick and dying.

My people, I thought.

The first time I met Sister Alicia, her physical appearance stunned me. I’d never met a real nun before, no less one who was over six feet tall and covered head to toe in a bright white habit and coronet. When Sister Alicia’s looming presence entered the room, I swear to God, the entire space was bathed in a warm golden light. Sunbeams surrounded her, even at night. Sister Alicia radiated love.

Nancy had lost the ability to speak, swallow, and walk on her own, and her descent into hopelessness matched my own descent into helplessness. Sister Alicia’s presence was, indeed, a gift to both of us.

When she arrived every evening, Sister Alicia immediately
cradled Nancy’s hands in her own and said a silent prayer, which Nancy admitted was comforting. She would then routinely remove Nancy’s slippers, retrieve a bottle of lotion from her traveling bag, and massage her feet with such tender reverence that awe replaced whatever sadness had wrapped around my heart.

One evening, Nancy’s computer’s new top-of-the-line voice-assistive technology software malfunctioned, and her computer couldn’t speak the words she painstakingly typed. Nancy’s only hope of communicating was by pen and paper. Her hands failed her, and I couldn’t decipher what she needed. The confident swoops and curls of her once perfect penmanship had devolved into thin, shaky chicken-scratch. Our mounting frustration gave way to her angry tears and impossible-to-understand moaning and grunting, and such a scene was definitely not alright with me. Emboldened by the memory of my father and our purifying laughter the night before he died, I tried to lighten things up.

Nothing caused a rise, not even a reenactment of the time her wheelchair caught air bumping down Westwood Boulevard. Next, I opened a book of her original essays and the more I read aloud, the more captivated she became. My confidence grew.

“Yes,” I thought, “I
am
good at this.”

Sister Alicia was in the kitchen, and I had an idea. I tiptoed into Nancy’s bedroom, opened her filing cabinet, and took out the bottle of Grey Goose Vodka we’d hidden months before. In the living room, I pulled it out from under my shirt whispering “Taa daa!”

I didn’t have time to ponder exactly what kind of sin I was about to commit, because in my mind I was simply doing my job. Sneaking vodka into a dying woman’s feeding tube, with a nun doing dishes in the next room, was bound to lighten things up. I snuggled close to Nancy on the couch and held the open bottle under her nose. Like two Catholic schoolgirls, we got the giggles. Sister Alicia, humming a church hymn, was preoccupied and I had to act fast.

I uncorked Nancy’s feeding tube. My hands trembled.

Noticing a sterilized urine testing cup on the coffee table, I grabbed it, opened it, and poured in the equivalent of three shots of holy water. When I saw Sister Alicia emerge from the kitchen, I sloshed the urine collection cup behind my back. Nancy and I tried to stifle our laughter. Instead, we became hysterical, rolling on the couch and gasping for air so desperately that Nancy really did begin to struggle and we had to turn up her oxygen. As I leaned over to reach the machine, clear liquid delight dripping from my hand, a half-full bottle of Grey Goose was revealed behind me. I closed my eyes, hoping that whatever I couldn’t see Sister Alicia couldn’t see either. Nancy snorted, and Sister Alicia laughed so hard that the wings of her coronet jiggled. In plain sight of God, this loving nun, and our ancestors watching from heaven, I pulled a generous gulp of Grey Goose into the syringe and shot it directly into the feeding tube. Probably a little too fast. But still.