Nocturne (12 page)

The worst day was the last day. This was the day when you died, but it was also the day when you opened your eyes. The night before, the doctor had talked to us about taking you off life support because you weren’t going to recover. Your liver, already compromised by the cancer, couldn’t handle the drugs being pumped into your body to keep you alive, and it had begun to shut down. One of the side effects of a malfunctioning liver is brain damage, and we were told that you were probably already suffering impairment.

When you gave me power of attorney, I asked you what measures you wanted me to take in case you couldn’t make a decision for yourself.
Never say
die
, you said, which at the time made us laugh, but at the end was a hard wish to interpret. I knew you would not want to give up if there was the faintest hope that something could be done. But in this case, when you were being kept alive by machines, and when this would go on for a few days more, a week perhaps, what did you want me to do? Was the fact of being alive, even with the needles in your body, and the tube down your throat, and the miasma of drugs swimming through your veins, worth it? Were we being gently persuaded by the medical personnel to end your life because they saw no future to it, and because they needed the ICU bed? Was the hope they offered at the beginning and the defeatism they conceded to at the end simply part of a script they used with terminal ICU patients?

In the early days of your hospital stay, after the first operation, when the spirit was one of optimism and the doctors were talking of your being able to recover from the surgery and return home for your last few months, there was discussion of your permanently wearing a colostomy bag, having limited mobility, needing a hospital bed in the apartment, and needing care. None of these things would have broken you. I know you would have been depressed by the physical limitations, but you
would have continued to live your life because you were a fighter, and because you loved being alive. You were inherently optimistic, and that optimism would have resurfaced after a brief period where you adapted to your new and challenging circumstances.

But now we feared you had suffered brain damage. If you were yourself and dealing with infirmity, that was one thing, but if your brain was impaired, you wouldn’t be yourself, and this, I’m sure, would have caused you extreme distress and would have been impossible to reconcile.

When your eyes were closed, as they had been since the second operation, and the machines confirmed the drop in your blood pressure and the acceleration of your heart rate, and I could smell the drugs leaking from your skin, it was not hard to believe that your brain function was affected.

But that last day, you opened your eyes and you looked around. Your face remained impassive, as impassive as it could remain with the ventilator taped across your mouth, forcing it into an unnatural and open position.

When I sat beside your bed, you looked at me, and we stared into each other’s eyes. You rarely broke the contact, but if a nurse came into the room, you followed
her with your eyes until she left again, and then you returned your gaze to me. The entire time I was looking at you, I was willing you to communicate what you wanted me to do for you. Were you ready to die, or did you want to live another day, another handful of days? Was there any pleasure to be had from the sun at the window, or from our faces, or from your own thoughts?

Once, long ago, we were in our parents’ house and you were talking about an experience you’d had. It was dinner and we were all sitting around the kitchen table as you recounted this event that, halfway through your telling of it, I realized was actually something that had happened to me.

“Hey,” I said, “that’s my memory. Not yours.”

I went on to fill in the details, but it took some convincing before you would give up ownership of the memory, and even then, you did so reluctantly.

Because what happened to me could just as easily have happened to you. At one time in our lives, perhaps all through our lives, our experiences and our reactions to them could have been interchangeable. Love and shared interests, time spent together, these were things that were layered on top of our fundamental sameness, a similarity that was bred in the bone. Undeniable, and unshakeable.

I should have known what you wanted—you of all people—because we’d been children together, and adults together, because in some inescapable way we knew each other better than anyone else. I still keep your secrets, for God’s sake, even now, when there’s no real need to keep them.

But I didn’t know what you wanted me to do for you. Marty, I didn’t have a fucking clue.

Your eyes were such a beautiful dark brown, the same shade as your hair. I could tell that you were looking to me for information, but I wasn’t sure what information you needed. I don’t know if you wanted me to tell you that you were minutes away from dying, but, rightly or wrongly, I didn’t do this.

Mostly I just held your gaze, without tears or words. I held your gaze, and then we shut you down.

On one of the days shortly after you were diagnosed, when I came to the house to take you to chemo, you were playing the piano. I walked up the stairs from the front door and into the living room. You were sitting at the piano, your piano, which Mum and Dad had moved into their house. The living room was nothing but baby grand pianos, yours blocking off the entrance to the dining room and Mum’s by the window. Between the pianos was a small oasis of chairs and a coffee table on a patch of carpet.

It was a sunny afternoon in early fall. I remember the sun coming through the window and falling on the objects in the room, how strong the light was, and how I turned to it as you were playing because I
thought I might cry. You were playing so confidently, as confidently as you’d always played. Your playing is the most familiar sound of my life. I thought, standing there in the living room of the house we grew up in, that this sound, your sound, would be finite, that there wouldn’t be many more times I would hear you play.

So, I desperately tried to hang onto that moment. I tried to absorb your playing into my consciousness, into my body, but your notes disappeared the instant they hit the air.

Music comes undone. It unravels into silence.

You were playing the Debussy, the
Suite bergamasque
.

It’s beautiful, isn’t it
, you said, looking up from the piano.

“It’s really beautiful,” I said.

What I remember now from that day is not the music, but the silence that followed the music, the slant of light at the window, the rustle of paper when I said, “We have to go now,” and you closed your music decisively and stood up from the bench and put on your jacket and we walked out into the sunshine.

I would like to thank my agent, Clare Alexander, for her care and guidance during the writing of this book.

I would like to thank my editor, Phyllis Bruce, for her invaluable support and wise counsel.

Sections from this book have been previously published in the
Queen’s Quarterly, The Walrus
, and
The Independent
newspaper in the UK.

The score of John Cage’s
4’ 33
” is copyright © 1960 by Henmar Press, Inc. Used by permission of C.F. Peters Corporation. All rights reserved.

The quotes from John Cage are from
No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’ 33
” by Kyle Gann, published by Yale University Press.

Grief is a solitary experience, but I was not alone on my journey, and I would like to thank my family and friends, who accompanied me, supported me, and made life possible during my brother’s illness and death: Mary Louise Adams, Tama Baldwin, Andrea Bergamini, Elizabeth Christie, Nancy Jo Cullen, Sue Goyette, Cathy Humphreys, Frances Humphreys, Anthony Humphreys, Michelle Jaffe, Walter Lloyd, Eleanor MacDonald, Daintry Norman, Joanne Page, Anne Peters, Su Rynard. Not to mention the Vizsla sisters, Charlotte and Violet.

Thanks as well to Mary Ordanis and Sue Worrall for their assistance to Martin during his move.

I would also like to thank my brother’s friends for their compassion, kindness, and support during his last months. Martin once said,
I have the best friends
. And he did: Peter Canakis, Cheryl Carruthers, Jessica Chang, Alan Crane, Melissa Duchak, Bernie Duerksen, Holly Duff, Phil Duncan, Isaac Juarez Flores, James Langevin, Charlie Ringus, Tom Saunders, Ward and Jill Smith, Sherman Stave, Cam Walker, Tanis Wilkie.

HELEN HUMPHREYS
is an award-winning author whose work has been published around the world. Her most recent novel,
The Reinvention of Love
, was a national bestseller.
Coventry
was a
New York Times
Editors’ Choice, a
Globe and Mail
Best Book of the Year and a finalist for the Trillium Book Award. Humphreys won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for
Afterimage
and the Toronto Book Award for
Leaving Earth
; her much-loved novel
The Lost Garden
was a Canada Reads selection. The recipient of the Harbourfront Festival Prize for literary excellence, Humphreys lives in Kingston, Ontario. Visit her online at www.hhumphreys.com or on Facebook.

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

“A haunting, moving and stylish study of hearts laid bare….
A compelling exploration of desire and its tentacular costs.”
—
The Times Literary Supplement
on
The Reinvention of Love

“She captures, most alluringly, the joyful and solitary
nature of the human heart.”
—
The Globe and Mail
on
Coventry

“Delicate and incandescent.”
—
San Francisco Chronicle
on
Afterimage

“A finely wrought novel…. Meticulous, lucid prose.”
—
The New York Times Book Review
on
The Lost Garden

J
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I
MAGES
: B
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L. M
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R
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M
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/M
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, UK

H
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J
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B
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/G
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I
MAGES

J
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D
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: L
ISA
B
ETTENCOURT

Nocturne
Copyright © 2013 by Helen Humphreys.

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EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN: 978-1-443-41547-7

A Phyllis Bruce Book, published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

FIRST EDITION

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Humphreys, Helen, 1961– Nocturne : on the life and death of my brother / Helen Humphreys.

ISBN 978-1-44341-545-3

1. Humphreys, Helen, 1961–. 2. Humphreys, Helen, 1961– —Family. 3. Authors, Canadian (English)—20th century—Biography. 4. Brothers and sisters—Canada—Biography. 5. Humphreys, Martin James, 1964–2009. 6. Humphreys, Martin James, 1964–2009—Death. 7. Brothers—Death. 8. Grief. I. Title.
PS8565.U558Z85 2013      C813’.54      C2012-905906-4

RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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