The Body

 Dad was always clear that he wanted to die at home, and we honored that wish. We set up round-the-clock at-home health care and hospice visits in the last weeks of dad's life. And ultimately, he died in our living room, as he intended. 

But the fact that we had kept this promise to him made it feel all the more wrong that—as soon as he had died—strangers came into our home and wheeled him out on a stretcher, to be packed away in some grim and musty Florida funeral parlor. 

He is still there now. They have to keep his body under observation in some airless, sunless morgue—I suppose as a morbid but necessary precaution against the nineteenth century nightmare of premature burial. 

Meanwhile, my mom and I have gone to New England to be with family. I suppose we have every right to do it. But somehow, still, it seems like a betrayal or an abandonment. How can we just leave him in that horrible place?

It's like we did posthumously what we swore never to do in life: pack him away in some gruesome nursing facility with a bunch of strangers. 

Harold Pinter's phrase kept coming back into my mind: the dead and abandoned body. 

And all at once the rhetorical questions in his poem seemed somehow directed at me: Did you wash the body? Did you close both its eyes? Did you leave it abandoned?

Strangely, it was only in the last week of dad's life that it even occurred to me that this would be a whole stage of the ordeal. I had so much concentrated on the prospect of looming death, that I had forgotten it would not be quite the end. 

My dad would leave. But his body would still be there. And it was mere days before he died that I started to dread this prospect. 

"If only, I thought, you would simply disappear," as David Plante writes in his memoir The Pure Lover, about the death of his partner of forty years from brain cancer. "If only you wouldn't leave your lifeless body behind. I wouldn't be able to bear that, your body behind after you died."

Of course, in the end, it happened, and I could bear it. You can bear anything, when it actually comes. Life is more a business of being frightened than hurt, as Samuel Butler said. And so it was with this. 

The body was not so terrible or disturbing as I had feared. In fact, I found I did not want to be parted from its side. I just sat there for hours, communing with Dad's corpse, telling him goodbye, wishing he could hear me. 

The thing that actually wrenched me—and my mom too—was not the body, but the fact that they came to take the body away—to take it away in their dingy white van to that horrible place. 

"I could not watch this," Plante writes (in that same book of profound wisdom for any fellow traveler through grief), "but stood by a window, looking down the street at the mortuary van, the back doors open. I saw the two undertakers, carrying a red body bag [...] heard them joke with each other as they got into the front of the van [...] I recalled the number of times I'd seen you in a taxi driven off for a trip you always hated going on, and that I hated your going on. 

"I had no idea where you were taken to, to some place too far for me to go there."

I know that if dad could speak, he would tell me he's fine. He would tell me he is past feeling such things. He would say that he never cared about what would happen to his body after he was gone; that this was the natural course. He is not offended; he is not abandoned. 

Here is no cause to mourn, as the deceased says in Wilfred Owen's "Strange Meeting."

To which the answer comes, in the poem: None, save the undone years. 

Indeed, that is why we grieve. 

My sister takes somewhat more comfort than I do in the rituals of burial and grieving. She says she will put dad's image on the ofrenda she has set up in their living room, with the photos of all our dead relatives. 

She says that in her own case, she wants to be buried with her husband and her in-laws in their funeral plot in Providence. 

But part of me has to agree with what Plante writes: "we would not be united in our deaths if buried together. Death unites no one with no one and loves no one." 

So too, I cannot really imagine it would comfort me to have dad's body in a specific place; to have his photo on an ofrenda; to scatter his ashes somewhere that held personal meaning—though I am sure we will do all these things regardless, and should do them. 

Plante devotes the last quarter or so of his book to describing his partner's agonizing death from cancer. He writes of having intrusive memories of the worst moments: the horrible things that happen to any mind under assault from a tumor pressing on its sides: the slow loss of memory, the uncharacteristic rages, the confused and obsessional behavior—

—most of all, the maddening inability to communicate with the sick sufferer about what is happening to them; the fact that they do not connect their own changes in behavior and mental state with the cancer they know is there; the fact that they keep blaming other things—including you, the caregivers. 

We saw all this with dad too, and it hurt. 

"You knew that you had tumors, spinal, lung, brain, but you saw no causal relationship between these and your memory loss and confusion," Plante writes, "or even your becoming weaker day by day, causality now for you merely an illusion."

"You said clearly, 'Obviously, my mind is not working,' and with this I thought you can be rational, you can have insights, but immediately you began to complain that no one, no one, including me, had told you what was wrong with you." 

Dad too had these lucid moments, which were so fleeting toward the end, and so much more heartbreaking—those flashes of insight when he was "Suddenly finally conscious of all he lacked" (MacNeice) and that I wanted to take from him when they came—I wanted him to go back to being oblivious of what was happening to him. 

And he always did. The delusions and the confusion came right back to paper over those vertiginous momentary patches of awareness when he saw all that he had lost. He would start saying again: "I feel better than ever"; "I feel like I have at least three years left."

But now that it's all over—now that the nightmare is past, which was both mere moments and whole lifetimes in length—at the end of That night, that year/ Of now done darkness (Hopkins)—I feel most strongly that I must not reject or disavow any of that; must not repudiate Dad even in those worst and hardest final months. 

I thought it would tempt me more to just forget about the final months, when they were over; that I would feel liberated by being able to think of Dad once again as just his pre-cancer self—to remember only that part of him. 

But I find I have no desire to do that. I want to remember the horrible parts as well as the sweet and touching parts. I find that I loved him as much as ever, if not more, when he was writing with colored sharpies in newspapers, drawing bizarre connections that made sense to no one but him; when he was mailing off letters to invisible recipients; when he was sending me grandiose emails about reshaping the world.  

I find I cannot reject those memories; I cannot reject him in his sickness without rejecting him as a whole. 

There's a trace of self-congratulation in this, of course. "There's vanity in proclaiming: I accepted, stoically [...] as if all that I endured, he didn't," Plante reminds us. (As Anne Sexton wrote of one character: she "wore her martyrdom like a string of pearls.")

In the end, Dad, not us, was the one who was dying, has died. He had more and worse to go through than any of us. We have the privilege of remembering, reflecting, of telling the story the way we want it told—privileges denied to him in death. 

So I feel like the best I can do is try to remember him as a whole; utterly; to remember everything that happened. "I'll get it all down, mate," as B.S. Johnson said to his friend Tony, dying of cancer. I must treasure it all. 

I must learn to hold these

nights of anguish dear! as Rilke wrote (Tenth Duino Elegy, Hunter trans.)

We are wastrels of our sorrows,

gazing beyond them into the

desolate reaches of endurance

where we seek to know their ends.