Fear of Dying. Erica Jong
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are you thinking about?” my mother asks.
“Nothing,” I say.
“You’re thinking you never want to get as old as I am,” she says. “I know you.”
My father is sleeping through all this. His wasted body takes up remarkably little space under the blankets. With his hearing aid turned off, he cannot follow our conversation and he doesn’t want to. He prefers to spend the day sleeping. Just six months ago, before his cancer surgery, he was a different man. My sisters and I used to start the day with threatening missives from him, often in verse.
What do you do when your days open with this messily penned screed from your ninety-three-year-old father?
I feel like King Lear.I have three daughtersbeautiful and dear,clever and cute,already in dispute.Who gets more?Who gets less?What a terrible messFor an aging LearIn geriatric stress.
So much for poetry. At the bottom of the page he has scrawled in a shaky hand: “Read it again and again—no disputes!”
How did our father go from Brownsville to Shakespearean tragedy?
Here’s his version: “All my father ever said to me was ‘Get a job.’ I wanted to go to Juilliard. My father said: ‘You’re already making money playing the drums—why do you need it?’ He threw away my admission letter. That was why I was determined that the three of you should get degrees.”
My father said this in my mother’s studio overlooking the Hudson. She was lying in bed like Queen Lear, nodding. (Was there a Queen Lear?)
The sisters Lear were sitting around their mother’s bed. Their mother had just had stomach surgery and she was making the most of it. Occasionally she moaned.
“Your mother has Crohn’s disease, coronary artery disease, a fractured vertebra at the base of the spine, two hip replacements, two knee replacements. I cannot continue my job as ‘U.S. male nurse’”—my father’s pathetic phrase for his status in the family. “If you three don’t come here every day, there will be some changes made in my will.”
“Don’t you dare threaten me,” my older sister, Antonia, said. “When we were living in Belfast at the height of the Troubles”—of course Antonia had to marry a poetic Irishman—“pulling the piano in front of the door to keep the paramilitaries out, shopping for bread during the early-morning hours before the shooting started, covering the windows with furniture so that your grandchildren wouldn’t get hit by shrapnel—where were you? We were going through a genuine holocaust and nobody came to rescue us. I’ll never forgive any of you for that!”
Queen Lear suddenly revived: “What do you mean? We sent you money!”
“You sent us a measly twenty-five thousand dollars! What was I going to do with twenty-five thousand dollars with four children and a war going on?”
“Nobody ever sent me twenty-five thousand dollars,” my younger sister, Emilia, said.
“No, your husband got the whole business. That’s why you didn’t need twenty-five thousand dollars!” Toni shrieked.
“Your husband didn’t want the business! Nobody wanted it! We got stuck with it! You were both away gallivanting around the world and we were here, taking care of everybody! And Bibliomania—the shop itself. When Grandmama died, I was alone with her! The parents took off for Europe. Where were you two? I never got to go anywhere.”
“That’s not quite true,” I said.
“Girls, girls, girls,” my mother said.
“Nobody has any sympathy for me!” Emmy howled. “I felt I had to be the good daughter and stay home. I sacrificed my poor schnook of a husband on the altar of the family bookstore!”
“That poor schnook got everything! And so did you! We got nothing!” Toni wailed. “Some sacrifice!”
“I would have made that sacrifice.”
“No way! You never would have done it. Your husband never would have done it!” This is Emmy, who shouted just as loud.
“Can’t you try to see each other’s point of view?” I asked.
“Not as long as she’s a dishonest liar!” Toni yelled.
“My blood pressure’s going up—I have to get out of here!” Emmy ran to the door. I dashed to her and coaxed her not to leave.
“Why shouldn’t I leave? This is going to kill me! My heart’s pounding!”
By then my father, the old King Lear, had gone to the piano and was playing “Begin the Beguine” by Cole Porter and singing along to drown out the roar in the other room.
I was where I always was—the meat in the sandwich, the designated peacemaker, the diplomat, the clown, the middle sister.
My sisters went into the kitchen to continue their altercation without a mediator. I went into my mother’s room, where I found her leaning back on her pillows and moaning: “Why are they fighting?”
“You know perfectly well why,” I said. “Daddy set it up that way.”
“Your father would never do a thing like that,” my mother said.
“Then make him undo it.”
“I can’t make him do anything,” she said. And then she clutched her chest. “I feel faint,” she said, rolling her head to the side. She moaned loudly.
My sisters ran in.
“Call the ambulance!” Emmy ordered me.
“I don’t need an ambulance,” my mother said, wailing.
My sisters looked at each other. Who would be the irresponsible one who neglected to call the ambulance on the ultimate day? Nobody wanted that onus.
“I really think it’s unnecessary,” I said, but my sisters’ panic was beginning to stir the old anxiety in me. What if it was not a false alarm this time?
Before long there was an ambulance downstairs and we were in it, bending over Queen Lear on a stretcher in the back. Our father was in the front seat with the driver, prepared to flash his big-donor card when we arrived at the hospital. We careened around corners, screeching our way to Mount Sinai. On one abrupt turn the mattress from the gurney went slithering into the attendant sitting behind the driver.
“Oops,” he said.
“Be careful! That’s the only mother I’ve got!” I said.
“She’s my mother too!” said Emmy—always pissed off no matter what the occasion.
Our father sat by our mother’s side as long as she was hospitalized, and when she came home, he began threatening us with being disinherited unless we came to visit her every day.
Now, only months later, he is too exhausted to threaten us and I yearn for his old truculence. Ever since the surgery for the blockage in his colon, he has been a shade of his former self. I sit on the edge of the bed, watch him sleep, and remember the conversation we had in the hospital the night before the operation that saved yet also ended his life.
“Do you know Spanish?” my father asked me that night.
I nodded. “A little.”
“La vida es un sueño,” he said. “Life is a dream. I look forward to that deep sleep.” And then he went under and never quite came back. Three days after the surgery he was babbling gibberish and clawing the air. Six days after the surgery he was in the ICU with a tube down his throat. When he was diagnosed with pneumonia, I stood at his side in the ICU and sang “I gave my love a cherry” while his eyelids fluttered. We never thought that he would emerge from that hospitalization. But he did. And now he and my mother spend their days sleeping side by side in their apartment but never touching or speaking. Round-the-clock shifts