Love Letters of the Angels of Death (3 page)

Three

Still alive, the first of your grandfathers to die comes lurching toward the light in the doorway over his head. He bends, ducking beneath the slope of the ceiling's low overhang much too soon, climbing the stairway out of his basement, hunched low enough for his fingers to graze the tops of the grey wooden stairs. A rebuilt washing machine motor sits on a sheet of two-year-old newspaper on the cement floor below. Today, his fingers are stiff and faraway, unfit for grappling inside something as dim and close and greasy as the washing machine's innards.

In the narrow basement doorway, he slumps at the edge of your grandmother's sunlit kitchen. His left arm rises in front of his face, lifted against the hard sting of noontime glaring through the window. Beyond the bright squares of sunlight falling onto the dark yellow floor, a little woman stands slicing potatoes into a battered aluminum pot.

Sometimes, when I'd come into a room too fast at a family reunion, when I was looking at something else but I could see her in the periphery, I might think your grandmother was you – hardly five feet tall with a cranium I could palm like a softball and that skeleton built almost like a little boy's but definitely not like a little boy's. She's your grandmother, all right. Anyone could tell.

You make the same kind of mistake sometimes too. Remember the last time my family got together for a picnic – the time you came up behind my brother and clamped your arms around his waist before you realized he wasn't me? I can still see him, dark eyebrows arched high, holding your wrists at arm's length while you strained against him. You were screaming and cackling and trying to explain yourself.

But you're not quite a part of this chapter of the story yet. Right now, you're fifteen years old, sleeping through your summer holidays in a perpetually unfinished bedroom without a door, in a corner of your parents' basement. You're nowhere near the house where your grandfather starts to die over a broken washing machine. He is about to become the first dead person you've ever known – just like your mother always promised you.

Your grandfather still doesn't know for certain what's begun as he stands in the kitchen facing the back of your grandmother's blouse. It's a white field muddied with a print of large, brown flowers like no one ever sees growing anywhere in real life.

“Dinner won't be ready for a while,” she says to him without turning. Water sloshes in the pot, displaced by the backyard-grown vegetables.

He steps into the kitchen, his right leg frozen like it's asleep, still standing sheathed in polyester trousers, stretching long and distant all the way to the rubber shoe sole that grips the floor under his foot. The leg lumbers beneath him, snagging on the surface of the yellow floor.

Passing from the kitchen into the living room, he reaches out for the back of his armchair – the one he brought home strapped to the vinyl top of his Chevy Impala, the five-dollar garage-sale price tag still pinned to the cushion. The pads of his fingers are just as numb as his leg now, telling him nothing about the familiar, nubby texture of the low, nylon loops in the chair's fabric. The hand doesn't grip. It rolls against the coarse brown upholstery like a waterlogged, empty glove.

He jerks and lets his body fall sideways, into the seat of the armchair. A chord of creaks and moans sounds out from the old springs and wood inside it. Maybe he looks up at the wooden sunburst clock hanging on the wall, clicking like a metronome. Or maybe he just sees the clock in his memory.

The outline of a dull headache is reshaping itself, changing out of its fuzzy, formless mass, stiffening into something rigid – its edges becoming defined, tightening into sharper and sharper contrast. The ache hardens into a knife of stunning pain inside his head. The blade draws back, pauses, and stabs deeply into his brain. White light flashes, moving forward through his skull to the backs of his eyes. And then it's dark – like he's suddenly fallen to sleep.

His mouth opens to call for your grandmother, but the sound he makes is nothing like her name. Her paring knife clatters onto the stovetop, as if she already knows what it all means. She's moving in the dark spaces around his body, small and somewhere beyond him.

“I'm callin' the ambulance,” she says. Her feet carry her back into the kitchen with a hard, staccato sound, like a volley of darts fired into the floor. And she's out of his reach.

“Shoes,” he remembers. “Even in the house it was always shoes with us.”

He sits. He knows the upholstery on the chair's back is still sagging against his weight. He can feel it through the darkness and the numbness. And he still knows the smell on his skin is the washing machine's white grease. There is still clarity in the sound and meaning of your grandmother's words as she speaks into the enormous green rotary telephone hung on the kitchen wall.

“He's tryin' to talk, and I can't understand him at all. I think he's in real trouble.”

The heavy telephone receiver lands in its metal hook. There's a grind and click as your grandmother twists a dial on the stove and abandons her cooking. And that's when he knows he won't ever eat again. What comes next is – nothing. He loses the sonic tie that links him to his wife's voice and feet. In the quiet, he's set adrift, dark and silent.

Bracing himself against the horror of the language-less sound, he tries to call to her again.

There's another flurry of darts on the floor before they're muffled on the shabby carpet in front of him. She's standing over his armchair. “They say they're coming quick as they can. I'm just in the bedroom packing a few things in case it turns out…”

As she speaks, he sweeps his last strong arm like a scythe out into the darkness where he knows she hovers. He reaps her off her feet and into the armchair, on top of his body. She falls, tangling with him.

“Settle down. There's nothing we can do but wait. They're coming...”

She's sitting up, getting away, but he finds her waist before she can properly rise, and gathers her, folded at her middle, into his lap. His live hand gropes for her head, combing through the wiry grey hair at the nape of her neck, closing around the narrow base of her skull. He pulls her head under his chin. She gives in, gets quiet, and he breathes in the scent of her crown – all deep and greedy – like it's forgiveness itself.

And then the metallic clasps and hinges are rattling like bear claws scraping at the front door. She's gone, quick as Goldilocks. He feels other hands on him now, deftly pulling his body out of its armchair and down onto a carpeted floor. It's clean but at close range the carpet smells grey – like dust and melted snow. There are paws and growls all around him now. And there's a new draft wafting in like the Spirit World through the open screen door.

The dying drags on for days and days. Again, everything is just like your Mom promised you it would be. It lasts long enough for everyone in your family to fall all the way down into the very lowest hollows of what I guess we could call the valley of the shadow of death, or whatever.

For your mother, the fall to the lowest point in her grief happens in the grocery store in your grandmother's small town. The store manager hasn't heard that your grandfather is still animated by the ventilator tube in his throat. Maybe that's why he walks right up to your mother in the dairy department and offers to start the cold cut order for the funeral lunch.

Your Dad's low point is that fight he has with your Uncle Terry in the waiting room of the intensive care unit in the city hospital. It happens right out in the open – by the vending machines, next to the elevators – where anybody could see and hear them. Even though your Dad swears he never said anything to get him started, your Uncle Terry points his finger right under your Dad's collar bone and starts to whisper-yell, all heady with grief.

“You think I did this. You think this is a chiropractic-induced stroke. You always loved a good witch hunt, didn't you, Frank?”

But your Dad just opens his hands and raises them both in front of himself, like an unarmed cowboy in a dusty brown movie with a soundtrack that's nothing but whistling and reverb.

Your other uncle – Ned – he lunges between them with the barrier of his rumpled pinstriped business suit and his special status as their baby brother. He's on his feet for the first time since he arrived here from the Calgary office tower where he works seventy hours a week doing – no one's completely sure what. Until now, he's been slumped in a yellow vinyl waiting room chair, quietly tearing an empty Styrofoam cup into a long, curled ribbon, almost as if he's peeling a Christmas orange. It's like a game he used to play when he was a kid. When the game went well, he would come running to his mother brandishing a long, pungent strand of thin orange peel in his sticky white hands.

He'd wave the rind right in her face. “I peeled the whole thing without breaking it!”

“Did ya? Now throw the peel over your shoulder,” his mother would answer. “The letter it makes when it hits the ground is the first letter in the name of the girl you're gonna marry someday.”

“Hey guys, I've been thinking,” is what grownup Ned says to interrupt the tension between his brothers. “Maybe we just need to work with Dad some more.” He's talking fast, bobbing his head to break up the dangerous line of sight strung between your Uncle Terry and your Dad. “You know what I mean: play some Mozart CDs in his room, or bring in that nice tame cat they have at home for some – what would you call it – tactile therapy, or read him some really good poetry.”

Your Dad steps back, happy to be dropping his surrendering cowboy pose. “The old man's having a stroke, Ned, not giving us the silent treatment. I don't think all that ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light' stuff is going to help us much anymore.”

But Uncle Terry isn't finished with your Dad yet. He raises his hand to Ned's chest and presses against his sternum until Ned moves out of his view of your father's face. “Not that it has
anything
to do with this, Frank,” Uncle Terry says, “but I never, ever laid a hand on the old man's neck – never.”

It's late in the evening when Uncle Terry stands outside the hospital waiting area, right in front of the open door of your grandfather's room. He's talking with a doctor who has never introduced himself to any of them, which is just about proof positive that this doctor must be the person in charge here. The folded ribbon of paper marked with flat-lines drawn by the stylus of the hospital's EEG machine is clipped to the board the doctor holds in his hand.

In the domain of his own hospital ward, the doctor seldom whispers anything, not even when it comes to death. “It's not that the manual tests for assessing what you'd call brain death aren't perfectly humane,” he's telling your Uncle Terry. “They certainly are. However, the tests tend to elicit quite a bit of – anxiety in family members who see them applied.”

Uncle Terry hisses something in return.

The doctor makes one clipped nod over the stiff collar of his shirt. He isn't dressed in the same wrinkly green pyjama-scrubs as the rest of the hospital people. Instead, he's dressed like a lawyer, only with a white lab coat over his shirt and tie – like the kind of doctor who looks right into the camera and recommends a cough medicine in a television commercial.

“Of course,” he answers Uncle Terry. “Of course, there's nothing the hospital can do to prevent you from being present when we run through the tests but –. In order to properly establish what you'd call brain death, we need to push the nervous system toward certain limits. And since the nervous system is really just an incredibly intricate bio-electrical machine, it is possible for it to – misfire. The body can mimic signs of life even though it's no longer alive in a meaningful way.”

“You're saying he might twitch or something when you go and scrub the Q-tip over his corneas? Because I read about that and I think I'm–”

The doctor is finally whispering as he interrupts Uncle Terry now. “There's a neurological phenomenon called the Lazarus Sign Reflex. Have you read about that?”

“No.”

“Well, sometimes bodies of people in what you'd call brain death can momentarily lift their own arms and drop them onto their chests.” The doctor bends his arms at the elbows and crosses his wrists over his chest. He holds the pose for a moment, as if he's pretending to be a cartoon Egyptian mummy folded up in its sarcophagus – a mummy buried holding a clipboard. He lets his arms fall to his sides as he begins to speak again. “Naturally, the Lazarus Sign is very striking. When it happens, it can truly appear as if the body is reanimating, and it can be – confusing for the family. But, of course, it's just a simple reflex arc in the spine at work, nothing more.”

The spine – all this time, it really was all about the spine.

The doctor closes a hand around your Uncle Terry's shoulder and shakes him gently. Terry's arm rolls in its socket as the doctor speaks. “Listen, no matter what anyone sees hereafter, your father's death is imminent. It's like I told your mother just now. We see from the EEG that his brain no longer functions at all. And his heart and lungs are only continuing to work because of the hospital's life support equipment.”

Uncle Terry's eyes glaze over a little bit, remembering a zoology laboratory in his first year of university where he and the other undergraduate science students skinned the legs of frogs who'd been freshly killed (“sacrificed” – in science we say “sacrificed”). The students jabbed tiny electrodes into the large nerves in the thigh muscles and then stood at their lab benches taking turns connecting the electrodes to battery packs, watching the wet, pink flexion of the muscles in the flayed legs. Maybe it's just this memory that makes him feel like he can smell formalin fumes blowing over his face through the hospital's ventilation ducts.