“I didn’t expect you to be there.”
I can hear the amusement in his voice. “Sorry to disappoint you. I just got out of surgery. What’s up? Wait, let me guess. You have a weird rash.”
Granted, I tend to call him when I have a medical question, like if the flu has hit Boston yet, or what to do for plantar fasciitis, or any of a dozen other things that he tells me he can’t answer because they’re not his specialty. “I’m not sick. I just really wanted to hear your voice. I…missed you.”
“Shit, forget the rash, you’re sicker than I thought. Maybe you should come straight to the ER.”
“Shut up,” I reply, but I’m smiling.
“So what’s really going on?” my brother asks.
I hesitate. “I was trying to remember if Mom and Dad ever fought.”
“Can’t help you. On account of I was only a zygote when Dad was still alive.”
“I know,” I say.
“Is this about you and Brian?” Kieran asks. “You never fight.”
“There’s a first time for everything, I guess.”
He waits, expecting me to expound, but I am reluctant to say more.
“Look, Dawn, you have nothing to worry about. You and Brian, you’re like therule. The standard. You’re the marital equivalent of the sun coming up every morning and the sky being blue when you open your eyes. You’ll be together until the end of time. That’s what you want, right?”
“Yes,” I say. “Of course.”
—
AT THE HOSPICE,we used to have a cat that predicted death. It was a tabby that never had a name other than Cat, as far as I know, but she lived in the building and there was a line item in the budget for her food. We had two therapy dogs that came in to see patients, but the cat was quintessentially standoffish and wouldn’t suffer being petted. Her only use, as far as I could see, was to let us know when someone had less than twenty-four hours to live.
Without fail, if I went into a room and found the cat curled up at the bottom of someone’s bed, they died shortly after. I don’t know if it was a sixth sense, or some kind of olfactory cue—I know dogs have been trained to sniff out some cancers—but that damn cat had a hundred percent success rate.
After I became a hospice social worker, it was nearly a full year before someone died in front of me. (Even now, many of my clients die when everyone leaves the room, as if they have been hanging on by sheer force of will to the people who will miss them.) One morning, I walked into Judith’s room at the hospice facility and Cat was staring at me, flicking her tail.
Without alarming her daughter, Alanna, who was the primary caregiver, I did a quick survey of Judith. She was unresponsive, her breathing thick. I looked at the cat, nodded, and she jumped off the bed and slunk from the room.
“Alanna,” I said, “if there’s anything else you need to say to your mother, I’d say it soon.”
Immediately tears sprang to the woman’s eyes. “It’s already her time?”
If there is one thing I’ve learned while doing the business of death, it’s that it comes as a surprise, even in hospice.
I pulled up a chair beside her. Alanna leaned forward, unconsciously holding her breath every time her mother inhaled. Cheyne-Stokes breathing—which sometimes happens when a person is dying—is a cycle, slowed inhalations followed by faster pants, and then no respiration at all, before it starts up all over again. The pattern repeats every few minutes. Even though it is a normal occurrence as the respiratory system shuts down, it sounds agonizing, and it is hard to listen to, especially for family members who know that this is the beginning of the end.
My job is to support not just my patients but also their caregivers. So I tried to distract Alanna, asking how the night had been, and when her mother had last opened her eyes. Finally, when I realized that Alanna was coiling tighter and tighter, I asked her how her parents got engaged.
I once read that every story is a love story. Love of a person, a country, a way of life. Which means, of course, that all tragedies are about losing what you love.
When someone with a terminal disease can’t stop fearing the future, it’s comforting to look to the past. We tend to forget that we were all young, once. And that there was a time when we had beginnings, instead of endings.
Alanna looked up at me. “My mom and dad came from really different backgrounds. Dad had family money, but my mom had next to nothing. They decided to take a trip to the national parks, and my mom showed up with a cooler full of sandwiches, because every time she’d gone somewhere as a girl her mom packed all their meals. It was like she never even considered restaurants as a possibility.”
I imagined Judith, wherever she was at that moment, listening to her own history and smiling on the inside. We know that of all the senses, hearing is the last to go.
“They went to Old Faithful,” Alanna said. “My dad had been planning to propose. But there was some random guy who kept asking questions, and my mom—who had read everything she could about the geyser before the trip—kept answering him. How often does it erupt? About twenty-two times a day. How high does it reach? Around 130 feet. How hot is the water? Over 200 degrees Fahrenheit.” She smiled faintly. “My dad was losing it. So finally he tapped my mom on the arm and said, ‘I have a question.’ He got down on one knee, and asked, ‘Where does all the water go?’ ”
I laughed. “What’s the answer?”
