The Violet Hour (3 page)

But still I have the sense that before the night of his heart attack, death had begun to appear to him privately as a subject. He had, increasingly, moments of retreat, of withdrawal into himself. He would be absent suddenly, in the middle of a dinner or a walk. He was distracted; he was being taken slowly out of life.

In the weeks before my father died, he had, by chance, a thorough cardiological workup. His doctor told him that he had the heart of a man thirty years younger. And yet, at around that same time, in late November, he suddenly decided to sit down and write the names of all the artists of the paintings and drawings he had collected over sixty years. He didn't think my mother and my sisters and I would otherwise know what they were. Why in the sixty years that he had owned and collected those pictures did he choose that particular moment? He did not consciously know he was about to die, but was he operating out of some deeper, almost cellular imperative? Does the body have some foreshadowing, some knowledge of its own decline, before the mind does? Did he somehow know?

In the emergency room at St. Luke's Hospital, a doctor asks if we want to see the body. I do not want to see the body. I am somehow by this time outside, just through the electric door, in the cold air, the lights of the hospital in my eyes, and my older sister, a psychoanalyst, catches up with me. She tells me it is important to see the body, because if you don't see the body there is no body. I am not able to take this in, and so I don't see the body and there is no body.

When I come home from the hospital, my two-and-a-half-year-old is awake, sitting bolt upright, waiting for me, in order to express her outrage that I have left in the middle of the night without telling her.

I tell her that my father has died. I tell her what it means.

I hear myself saying the words, “Sometimes when people get old, their bodies stop working.”

“Sometimes?”

I pause. “Well, always.”

It is a brutal thing to say to a two-year-old; it doesn't even sound true.

In the weeks after my father's death, I'm not functioning at a very high level. I am not, for instance, eating. My father was
the one who cooked for our family. He baked bread; caught and cooked bass, trout, salmon, bluefish; picked blackberries and made them into jam, pies; cooked giant turkeys and cranberry breads on Thanksgiving; copied out recipes on yellow legal paper in his terrible scrawling handwriting. The morning I came home from the emergency room after a fall, he brought me homemade biscuits, and the day I brought the baby home from the hospital, he brought me servings of boeuf bourguignon and lamb moussaka to put in the freezer; I seem, in this particular crisis, to be waiting for him to bring me something to eat.

The baby, meanwhile, is going ahead full throttle with the questions. I would like someone to give me a pamphlet on “What to Tell the Baby,” but nobody has given me that pamphlet. “Did Pompa have Band-Aids when he dived?” the baby asks. “What was on his Band-Aids when he dived?” She wants, of course, to hear that he had furry, consoling creatures on his Band-Aids. I think of how Freud once referred to “the painful riddle of death.” A riddle because there remains some question to be answered, some confusion to be cleared up.

When I was a child I had a turtle called Herman. I named the turtle Herman after my father, in that brief blissful period when my father was the only man on earth. And then the turtle died. I don't know when I was aware that it died, but at a certain point I knew with horror that it was dead. I kept feeding it, changing its cage, and pretending that it was not, in fact, dead. There was very little the turtle did or loved or cared about, after all; there was not a huge gap between the turtle
dead and the turtle alive. In the end I took the turtle out to a grassy place and set him free. I told everyone that. That I set him free.

My father stopped smoking when everyone else stopped smoking, when it became clear that smoking was terrible for you, but unlike everyone else, he didn't stop. He would sneak out and smoke. I remember the smell of smoke in his hair, the heavy glass ashtrays in his office. He was not the type for secret vices, even small ones, but he kept his smoking secret. This scared me. I had pumped goldfish full of smoke in science class and watched them float to the surface of the water.

If I am honest, I remember that he was often out of breath at the end of his life; I remember the alarming sound of his ragged breathing, after a couple of blocks, the air running out; I remember how upsetting it was, how I didn't allow myself to hear it. So why did he secretly smoke for decades and destroy his lungs, after he knew they were being destroyed? Why did Freud, one of my father's great heroes along with Trollope, continue to smoke against the explicit urging of his physicians? I have a feeling that my father would have smiled if he came across Freud quoting George Bernard Shaw: “Don't try to live forever, you will not succeed.”

Is there a last conversation I wish I could have had with my father? I did not have a complicated relationship with him; there were no tangled conflicts to resolve; he knew how much I loved
him. What was there to say? But there is something. When he died he was worried about my marriage. He had seen things that made him think my husband would not be around for me and my daughter in the ways he would have hoped. I wish I had told him that I was in the middle of leaving. He would have been relieved. He would have stopped worrying. Why does this matter, as dirt is falling on a coffin? It does though. It matters.

I found in the research for this book that while nearly everyone has a fantasy of a “last conversation,” very few people actually have it. It is the fantasy of resolution, of a final cathartic communication that rarely materializes, because the prickliness or reserve or anger that was there all along is still there, because the urgency of death does not clarify muddiness, or lift obstacles, or defuse conflicts, or force us to talk about what matters, however much we wish it would.

Mostly, the last conversation doesn't exist or exists only in parody, in its refusal of meaning, in its Beckett-like embrace of the absurd. Take Philip Roth's mother's last words, “I do not want this soup.” We are, most of the time, left with this wild irresolution, this lack of an ending, which may be part of our investment in this mythical conversation, as if things ever end and are not simply cut off.

I would not have bought the
New York Post
with the dead baby on the cover, but since it is lying on the table at the coffee shop,
I am reading the story and continuing on page four. The family had driven in from New Jersey. The father was taking a picture on the promenade outside the sea lion exhibit at the Central Park Zoo, and the mother was holding their six-month-old, Gianna, when a branch fell and killed the baby. When I come to the end of the story I feel like I haven't gotten enough detail, but what other detail was I looking for? What more detail could I possibly need?

I had taken my own baby to the Central Park Zoo a few weeks before. I had shown him that giant cuckoo clock with animals and their instruments, the same clock I used to see as a child, on the promenade outside the sea lion exhibit. There is an incantatory quality to reading the
Post
article. Am I telling myself that in a world full of rotting branches on glorious days, my own baby is safely sleeping in a green-painted crib on the bottom floor of my house? Am I trying to prove that this specific tragedy happened to this specific baby and in fact has nothing at all to do with anything that could in any way happen to my baby? As Freud put it, “Our habit is to lay stress on the fortuitous causation of the death—accident, disease, infection, advanced age; in this way we betray an effort to reduce death from a necessity to a chance event.”

There is, of course, in all of this fascination with death, with extremities, a primitive, ritualistic dividing of the well from the sick, the alive from the dead, the lucky from the unlucky. Susan Sontag wrote about visiting the very sick in a draft for a short story: “making time to drop by the hospital every day,
is a way of our trying to put ourselves more firmly + irrevocably in the situation of the well, those who aren't sick, who aren't going to get sick, as if what happened to him couldn't happen to one of us.”