Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death (16 page)

before getting back into the car. And I, in turn, marveled at his

ability to walk down to the Wesleyan pool all by himself.

Perhaps it would have been better for my mother if my father

had died of his stroke, and perhaps it would have been better

for him. But it wouldn’t have been better for me. His aphasia

unlocked my tongue and my father’s heart. In an outpouring of

love and gratitude, I thanked him for all he had done for me, and

I got back nothing but love in return. Perhaps I was intuitively

preparing for his death.

I did not write about the fact that in my memory I have two

different fathers: the loving, exciting one of my early English

childhood, and the remote, overworked, irascible, intimidating

lion who dominated our dinner table in the United States. I

didn’t write about his drawing me into endless intellectual argu-

ments, or the barrage of accusations—
you drive me to drink,

you’re sick in the head
—that I heard when I fought with my

mother, stayed out too late with boys, or got bad grades in Math.

I said nothing about the day on the lake in Wellesley when he

slapped me hard in the face while trying to teach me to sail, nor

about the many mornings he yelled at me at the breakfast table

until I went off to catch the school bus late and in tears, sure

that I was no longer loved.

I wrote about him reading me
Babar the Elephant
.

In what I came to think of as “legacy letters,” I thanked him for

lending me money to buy my first San Francisco house and for:

not giving up on me through years of conflict, for opening

your heart to me now. It is wonderful to live my life know-

ing I have my father’s blessing. All of this will stay with me

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until I die. It has formed me in ways I don’t even know. You

communicated your enjoyment of this complicated and often

painful life we are given—just as I saw it when you marched

around the house conducting your invisible orchestras. These

things are in my bones, in my muscles, in my cells, and when

I think of you I know that these are among the gifts you have

given me. Thank you for my love of life.

The little girl whose father stroked her face. The little girl

standing on top of her father’s shoulders and jumping into the

sea. The years of fighting and pain and estrangement. And

through it all, a strong cord of love that connects me to you

and will never be broken.

My father wrote back. “It is difficult for me to express the love

I feel for you, but you seem to know it deeply. How can I end a

letter that expresses such joy? All I can do is say thank you.”

Urged on by Angela and encouraged by a Wesleyan student who

came every week to coach him on the computer, my father struggled

to write his autobiography. It was called “Recall,” a single-spaced

four-page recitation of his South African boyhood and his wound-

ing in Italy during the Second World War. It took him months.

“As a boy, I constantly ran into trouble, mostly of a physical

kind,” the autobiography began. “I was incapable of staying away

from danger.” Following a familiar litany of his boyhood scrapes in

the South African desert, such as burning his leg in a smoldering

garbage pit while looking for car batteries containing lead for his

father’s linotypes, he described his first serious brush with death.

When he was fifteen, he and a boarding-school friend named Jack

Osborne, a boy from Rhodesia who was staying with him over the

Christmas holidays, made plans to go joyriding with other boys by

“borrowing” one of the cars parked in the Cradock garage while

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the owners were at the movies. My father and Jack were late to

the garage because Jack spent hours at the house of a girl he was

courting, listening to her play the piano while my father waited,

agonized, on the porch. Finally Jack said his good-byes and the

two of them rushed to the garage just in time to see the two red

taillights of the fatal car, loaded with my father’s cousins and other

friends, disappear around a bend and speed toward the National

Road. It was going about seventy miles an hour across the desert

floor when it hit an unlit donkey cart and catapulted upside down

into a ditch. Two young cousins, white-faced, ran the two miles

back to the town police station. Flung out of the car into the veld

were the dying bodies of two of my father’s closest friends, one of

them the son of the garage owner. A third boy survived with brain

damage so severe that he could never return to school.

I put down the text. My father had told me this story so often

that I could see it in my mind’s eye: the girl playing piano in a pool

of light; my father pacing the porch; he and Jack Osborne racing

through the dusty streets to the garage in the desert night, running

after two red taillights—and here my father would sweep out his

hand extending two fingers—chasing death and failing to catch it.

I picked up “Recall” again. Next my father described the

turning point of his life, his near-fatal wounding in Italy. “The

war was increasing in ferocity,” the section opened:

My platoon was involved from daybreak and I was set up to

go on a patrol and to take the village of Panzano. With a Bren

gun I had to cover a small group of my comrades. Enemy infan-

try soon tackled them. Firing became general. A mortar bomb

went right into the hole I was sheltering in and exploded with

real effect. This changed the nature of the fight. My first reac-

tion was to find my gun, which I did a few yards away. Then I

became aware of blood oozing onto the ground. It took me some

time to realize that the blood was all mine.

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Like an idiot—or a daughter in a state of denial—I marked

up the text, suggested improvements, and sent it back to him as

if he were still the man he’d once been. When my mother called

and gently and tenderly told me, “He needs encouragement,” I

understood how far wrong I’d gone.

And still our love went on, poured from imperfect and bro-

ken vessels. It was my parents’ custom, every September, to

exchange birthday notes to each other, and neither the stroke

nor the pacemaker nor my father’s decline changed that. On

the morning of September 16, 2003, my father left a short note

at their breakfast table commemorating my mother’s seventy-

ninth birthday, a note he’d labored over the night before:

My Dear,

It is past midnight or rather where midnight ought to be.

We are right into your birthday.

How can I give you adequate thanks for all you have done

for me?

It is not possible and I must simply say I can’t.

This note simply says you have given me all the help I need.

All my love,

Jeff

Nine days later, my mother pulled out her calligraphy pens

and made three starts at a birthday letter to him.

“My Darling,” one of them began:

Over the years you have written me beautiful letters for my

birthdays. I can’t match your elegance and tender expres-

sions. I want you to know I love you for your sweet nature and

patience with my frustrations with “life, as it is.” You rarely, if

ever, complain about your difficulties, and sometimes I wish

you would to make me feel better about my complaining!

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On another sheet, my mother copied out the final stanza of

a poem written by my father’s brother, Guy, in the summer of

1944, the year my father’s left arm was blown to tatters in Italy:

To Any Young Soldier

. . . So light a fag, knock back a glass or two

Look calmly on shell torn terraces,

All last night’s acre of especial hell;

And wonder if the years ahead of you

Will stretch like kilo-stones or cypresses

From eighteen on to eighty, or the next shell.

“Well, it was the next shell,” my mother wrote. “And here we

are together at eighty after all that you have gone through with

calm acceptance. Thank you for our life together, and for being

so patient living with a difficult woman for fifty-plus years.

Happy eighty-first—Hang in there—we’ll make it together.

Love, Val.”

If only he had died that year.

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III

Ordeal

Autumn at Pine Street, Middletown, Connecticut.

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In October of 2003, my mother went to a stationery store and

bought a blank lined book with a stiff, sea-green cloth cover. It

was Quakerish in its simplicity and would not have been out of place

in my great-grandfather James Butler’s newspaper office in turn-of-

the-twentieth-century South Africa. On its first page, in her upright

italic script, she wrote, “This is the social worker’s idea, to sort out the thoughts that keep me anxious. I am not myself. At times I am

overwhelmed by what I have to do.” She was seventy-nine.

She was suffering from worsened insomnia and sleeping two

and a half hours a night. She’d broken down in tears in the

office of a new, hastily engaged (and, it turned out, not entirely

competent) financial adviser, who’d referred her to a psychia-

trist. The psychiatrist had sent her on to a social worker and

also prescribed Remeron, an antidepressant reputed to help

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with anorexia and sleeplessness. She was desperate enough to

try it. Three years earlier she’d have refused it as a crutch for the

cowardly and the weak.

She did not write a word in her journal about my father’s con-

dition, nor did she tell me about the increasingly troubling signs

she’d seen of further decline. He was having trouble remembering

how to start the computer and open up Microsoft Word. After a

urinary tract infection and a bout of bronchitis, he’d had an epi-

sode of confusion and had fallen three times in a single day. She

drew a line down the middle of a blank page and headed it “Retire-

ment Place.” Under
Pros,
she wrote four words: “Maintenance

taken care of.”
Cons
filled the right side of the page: “
All
aged.

Conservative Republicans! Intellectual Stimulation in Question.

Communal Dining. Aesthetics! Space Limited. Even if we both

go into an apartment Jeff would need constant help of some sort

or another. It is not going to be without problems, which will show

themselves later on. Nothing is 100 percent
ever.
”

Under “Staying Home—Pros,” she listed “Less boring. More

familiar surroundings. Own doctors. Near Middlesex Hospi-

tal. More space. Convenient location. Less expensive.” Under

Cons:
“Maintenance is a big job.”

She did not have a son nearby to make minor home repairs

or change the light bulbs in her high-ceilinged vestibule, nor

did she know a nice young man from church, since she had no

church. Her own mother had lived on her own into her nine-

ties in a house two doors down from her devoted oldest son.

But neither of my brothers was any more willing than I was to

move back into a childhood bedroom and submit to her rigid

mealtimes, unasked-for advice on diet, career, and grooming,

dominion over the kitchen, and need for order and control.

The Remeron kicked in, and she started sleeping. Within a