I don’t think she has to suffer.
We can arrange it, I say.
The doctor said so too. A moment will come when we all feel something has to be done.
You can’t determine that moment in advance, there’s no point.
But it will come, and everyone will realize: it’s time.
The most probable outcome? That she’ll become increasingly bedridden and one morning won’t get up. That she’ll sink into a coma. That she will lose still more weight, until she is all skin and bone. That her brain function will decline still further, that constant light tremors will pass through her limbs.
That her immune system will decline and she will eventually be given mush containing antibiotics. That she will lie there with the corners of her mouth twitching, that her eyeballs will tremble, that her whole body will be on the rocks.
Hopeful complications: that one day she may no longer feel any hunger. That we keep her fluid levels up, but decide no longer to feed her.
That her heart may give out, before the decline is total.
Mum, I remember I rang you the evening before you had to go in for surgery, years ago. Five top-heavy children and one miscarriage had played havoc with your body. At fifty-five you were threatening to become completely incontinent. The doctors had just come up with an ingenious system, a kind of artificial sphincter that you could operate with a button in your groin. It was to be a long procedure. Physicians from other hospitals would come and look on with fascination while you were splayed on the tilted operating table and that revolutionary technology was implanted in you.
I still wonder: is that when it began? The long period under anaesthesia? In a journal from Harvard I read, as the article puts it in clinical terms, “the formation of beta-amyloids was observed in brain cells in petri dishes to which components of the major anaesthetics were added”.
I keep the article, but don’t read any further.
I rang you that evening. The nurses had given you an enema, but had taken no account of the fact that you couldn’t possibly retain any liquid. There was a commotion, swearing, the clatter of buckets. Everything’s filthy, the floor, the sheets, you said. Call me back in a little while.
I remember thinking: if she is to be old, Death, grant her dignity. It was all so far off, I thought.
Less than ten years later there’s no point any more. You’ve long since forgotten how to use that button. You’ve long since forgotten that you’re a mother and I’m your son.
To the hospital with a woman who has to undergo an operation but no longer knows who she is, where she is or what will happen.
She cries like a schoolgirl on the trolley taking her to the operating theatre, calls with arms outstretched “Come, come, Dad” to my father, who watches her go with his heart breaking.
No learned spectators this time. Just the surgeon who has to undo his own work.
She comes back with a belly with rubber pipes sticking out of it and above her hip a hole from which a plastic bag hangs, which must be replaced twice a day, incorporating a pink rubber ring, which must be cleaned carefully.
In the future will I think, whenever I see an elderly lady with your posture, or with features that more or less resemble yours: you could have been like that, if you’d reached eighty-five?
How would you have grown old if the illness hadn’t been there? On your side of the family there was nothing straightforward, rough or easy-going about old age. It was tough and bony. It bit on crumbling teeth, like your father and grandfather.
On father’s side dying was welcomed fatalistically. To which side will I incline in old age, dying? Rather the rounded, gentle stoicism of my father, if I were to have a say in it. But do we have the choice? How great is the play between the dictates of the organism that is ours but there again not ours? How many of our decisions are conclusions based on the body, or attempts to avoid those conclusions?
I’m frightened of getting old, you said quite often, I remember, when you were in your forties. And also frightened of death, dying. Around your washbasin there was always a regiment of anti-wrinkle creams and breast-firming ointments. I should have liked to see you grow old the way your great-aunt grew old, ninety-six when she died. Smoked a fat cigar every evening and poured a stiff whisky into her body, which was the shape of a carpenter’s square. At family gatherings she preferred to sit at the young people’s table. Making quips and meanwhile observing all that young life with her one eye, whose vision had still not grown hazy. One evening she said that the whisky was upsetting her stomach. Before the GP could be called she was dead. Sitting up in bed, hands on her belly.
Dad felt that we should honour the dead. He took us with him to the neighbour who had been ill for so long that we thought he was showing off, but who did finally breathe his last one Saturday afternoon. We still thought he was a show-off, laid out jauntily in his Sunday suit, with his yellow-blue fingers round a rosary. He who never set foot in the church acted posthumously as a model of piety, an apparently respectable and pious gentleman, who while he was alive preferred to spend much of the day shuffling round in a grubby dressing gown, in his underwear and stocking feet. He regularly beat his four daughters black and blue until they followed his dictates, but my father said that it takes all sorts to make a world, so we went to pay our respects to the body.
He took us with him to the old man, a little way down the street, who couldn’t get to the oxygen in time when he had an asthma attack. I recall — I remember — that he became a widower early, far too early, and that he always cried when Dad visited him. I had never seen an old man cry; I thought that tears dried up as you got older.
I saw Dad crying the day his mother died and all the family were called to the home and he arrived too late to say goodbye. The day after he took us to see her. In my memory he carries the three of us, my sisters and me, my brothers are too small, in his arms — but that’s not possible, as I was already eleven.
You always stayed at home when we went with him to pay our respects to the dead, even then. He took my sisters and me to an outhouse behind the home, close to the laundry, where clouds of steam and the smell of soap were wafting out of the open windows. We had to wait, said a nurse, until Granny was ready, and when they brought her they had spread a purple cloth over her dress and put her glasses on.
The dead have a busy time no longer being there.
I remember being sad but not being able to cry, fascinated as I was by the phenomenal stillness of death, which I could not stand, and which had declared her body a playground for its inertia. As the years went on the fear I felt at the time cut a deep furrow in me. Mostly it stays closed, sometimes it springs open, usually at night or at sleepless moments when half-waking dreams appear and I see her lying on that bier, under that coarse purple sheet, and the razor-sharp realization hits me: she’s dead. It hit me last February. Alone at home, too restless to write and not knowing where to crawl and hide, I ran the bath and it didn’t help when fear kicked in with the force of a birth pang or a cramp.
I did not see your father in his coffin, or your mother. I didn’t want to. I saw her a few days before her death, and we had said our goodbyes. I held his hand the evening before. The night before his death none of the three of us could get to sleep. Without knowing what the others were doing, we each got up. I sat on the sofa for hours in our dark apartment. Veerle started cleaning the kitchen cupboards, my other sister cleared out the fridge, as if we felt that “something” was about to happen. I didn’t go to the laying-out. There are still dreams in which I see him on his deathbed. I bend over and have the fright of my life when he suddenly grins and waves.