The Unspeakable (5 page)

“Do you know why you're here?” the hospice nurse asked her gently one day (unlike me, she knew not to shout). This was turning out to be a day of particularly acute agitation. There was a lot of picking at the sheets and furious murmuring. I'd long given up my philosophical lectures. My new best friend was Haldol, which was supposed to keep her calm and which I administered under her tongue through a syringe. There was a perverse and momentary pleasure in this act; it made me feel like I was a stern, efficient nurse, like someone who knew what she was doing.

Her words, barely intelligible, were like soft formations carved from her teeth and lips. Her breath could scarcely carry them an inch.

“Because,” she said, “my mother was here.”

*   *   *

Ten months after my mother died, twenty months after my grandmother died, I nearly died myself. Oddly enough, this was a scenario that had crossed my mind a time or two over the preceding year. Talk about a morbid trifecta: three generations of women in one family, each of them almost physically repelled by the one before, wiped out in less than two years' time. This wasn't a recurring thought, more like the kind of thing that crosses your mind two or three times and then convinces you that the sheer act of thinking about it at all converts it from a mere implausibility to an almost total impossibility. This is what doomsday scenarios are for. They protect us from disaster by playing out the disaster ahead of time. They're the reason the plane doesn't crash and the bomb doesn't drop. They're the reason we will almost certainly not die in childbirth. The fact that I almost died despite having entertained the thought of dying, the fact that my organs began to fail despite my having walked down the snowy sidewalks in the days after my mother's death, thinking,
Maybe you're next, maybe there are no coincidences, maybe you were right about it being presumptuous not to believe in an afterlife and maybe the afterlife of this matriarchal line is a group-entry kind of deal
, still feels at once too overwhelming and too silly to fully contemplate. And yet it became relevant to the story of my mother's death and my grandmother's death before that. In fact it's part of the same story, a third act that got rewritten at the last minute, a narrowly dodged bullet from the gun that went off in the first.

It started with a fever. Actually it started before that. Of course it did. Nothing ever begins when you think it does. You think you can trace something back to its roots but roots by definition never end. There's always something that came before: soil and water and seeds that were born of trees that were born of yet more seeds. The fever may have been the first thing I bothered to pay attention to but there was so much before that. It's possible I'd been getting sick all along, that my immunity had begun slowly eroding from the week my grandmother died and my mother became a cancer patient. Throughout it all, I hadn't so much as gotten a cold. But in October 2010, right around the one-year mark of the wedding and the screaming at Thanksgiving and the buying of Depends and the administering of the morphine and then the Haldol and then the methadone, I returned to New York for a visit. I wanted to attend a friend's wedding, see the leaves, escape the taunting, pitiless heat of autumn in Southern California. It was my first time back in New York since my mother had died and I thought it might be possible to claim the streets as my own again, to seal the preceding eighteen months in plastic and toss them in a trash can where they could await collection alongside the Greek paper coffee cups and the dog shit.

The fever was perplexing, as I am rarely sick, so rarely in fact that I didn't have a primary care doctor at home in Los Angeles, much less in New York, where I'd lived during my entire twenties without health insurance. Not that there seemed any need for one. It was the flu, obviously. The only cure was time and fluids. For three days I staved off the fever with aspirin, huddling under blankets in a friend's Brooklyn apartment and canceling one plan after another. But time was curing nothing. Each day I woke up to more weakness and more fever, body aches that felt like I'd been thrown down the stairs the day before, thirst that no amount of orange juice could quench.

The day after returning to Los Angeles I went to a walk-in clinic, where I was put on an IV for rehydration, told I had a nasty virus, and sent home. The next day I couldn't stand up and my eyes were yellow. I returned to the clinic and was put on another IV and then in an ambulance to the nearest hospital, where I was asked what year it was and couldn't think of the answer. Formless, meaningless words rolled out of my mouth like worms. There was no grabbing on to them. They had no edges, no consonants, no meaning. A doctor came and held his fingers up and asked me to follow them. He furrowed his brow as he wrote notes in his chart. When my husband showed up from work I was suddenly compelled to express grave concern for a friend back in New York. She was the last person I'd seen before I got the fever. We'd had dinner in Carroll Gardens and then I'd stopped at a drugstore for vitamin C pills. Now, after closing my eyes in a hospital bed and then waking from a half-sleep involving some half-dream in which this friend was being held against her will (metaphorically speaking, that is; it was as if I were witnessing her life from afar and seeing all the ways in which she was an indentured servant—to her husband, to the publishing business, to New York City itself), the words fell from my mouth like food dribbling down a baby's chin. Somewhere in my mind there was a concept, an urgent, hulking, planetlike idea that I had to get out. But it seemed composed of invisible gases. It was an abstraction within an abstraction and now it was sliding out of my line of vision the way the landmarks drift past the windows of an airborne plane. Still, I had something to say.

“Listen to me,” I slurred. “I need to tell you something. We have to help Sara.”

The words came out as
lishen to me
and
we hava help Shara.

I do not recall being in any pain or even being terribly anxious. Instead, I was mortified. I sounded exactly like my mother. The voice coming from my parched mouth might as well have been a recording of her voice on the day she rubbed her cane in my hair. Even in my delirium, I cringed the way adult children cringe when they look down and realize the hands sticking out of their arms are actually their parents' hands. I remember thinking that everyone was onto me now. My husband, the doctor, whoever else was there: they all knew not only that I was my mother's daughter but also that I was no different from her. Just as she had outlived her own mother by less than a year, I, too, would be denied a life outside of her shadow. The message was so obvious it might as well have been preordained: no woman in this matriarchal line would escape punishment for not loving her mother enough, for not mourning her mother enough, for not missing her enough, for refusing to touch her. None of us would be allowed out in the world on our own.

Apparently this had all happened on a Wednesday. It's the last thing I remember before waking up on what I was told was Sunday. It would be several more days before I understood that they'd put me in a medically induced coma and I'd almost taken things a step further by dying.

People who'd been milling around the hospital, bringing my husband food he couldn't eat and asking questions no one could answer, would later want me to tell them what had happened during the four days I was out. Had there been a white light? Had I encountered any dead relatives? Had I experienced anything that would move me to radically change my life? When I couldn't come up with anything interesting I started to wonder if the random thoughts I'd had in the half-awake state of the postcatatonic, prelucid days that followed my transfer out of the ICU were actually remnants of a near-death narrative. In those days I'd started to think, for instance, that if I survived whatever had happened (and we didn't know what had happened until my ninth day in the hospital) I'd get my act together and behave like an adult. I would, for instance, stop being so bratty about finding the perfect piece of real estate. (My last conversation with my husband, before I grew too sick to converse, had been yet another argument over how much we were willing to overpay to remain living in the inflated, rapidly gentrifying neighborhood where we'd recently sold my tiny, rather ramshackle single-girl house and which I believed to be the only neighborhood in the continental United States where I could be happy.) I'd forgive my father (who'd gotten on a plane for L.A. around the time I'd been put in the coma) for complaining about his foot. I'd make an effort to be closer to my in-laws, who I'd heretofore never thought to call on my own volition. (My father, for his part, had managed to go his entire married life without ever initiating a conversation with my mother's mother or even addressing her by name.)

I even, to my great shock, entertained the thought of having a baby. I'd never really wanted one. For about a million reasons, it had barely scraped the bottom of my to-do list since approximately the seventh grade. My husband knew this, but I'd always suspected that one of the pacts of our marriage was an unspoken belief that I might change my mind. And the more I learned about how sick I'd been—it seemed I'd had swelling of the brain, multiple organ failure, and a severe platelet disorder that required several transfusions; it seemed my wrists were bruised not because of medication, as I'd suspected, but because I'd been placed in restraints after trying to pull out my breathing and feeding tubes; it seemed there'd been a very real possibility that I'd die and an even greater possibility that if I didn't die, I'd have brain trauma that would require long-term rehabilitation; it seemed that throughout all this my husband had left my side only to use the bathroom and to phone anyone he could think of who might know who the best brain trauma specialists were—the more I thought that refusing to have a child was fatuous at best and gratuitously defiant at worst. After all, who says I'd be as negative and judgmental a parent as I'd always assumed I'd be? Who says I'd shudder at the sight of toys in my quiet, uncluttered, grown-up rooms? Who says I'd be as nervous and angry as my own mother had been, that the damage incurred by her own mother would trickle down and sting my eyes just enough to blind me to the damage I myself was inflicting? Who says my old maxim on this subject would turn out to be right, that if I had a child I would certainly love it but not necessarily love my life. Who was saying this but me? No one, of course. And who was I to be trusted?

Miraculously (this was the word they used), I got better fast enough to leave the hospital after eleven days. The diagnosis, in a nutshell, was freak illness. A bacterial infection gone terribly awry. I went home and slept for two weeks. Two months later my husband and I bought a house in a neighborhood other than the one I'd insisted on living in. It had twice as many bedrooms as we had people in our household; it was owned by the bank and we got it for cheap. Within a month of moving in, a few weeks after my forty-first birthday, I was pregnant.

I was neither excited nor dismayed. I told myself that now that my mother wasn't around to make me feel guilty for not being sufficiently impressed with her, I could find it within myself to be impressed with a child. I told myself there was plenty of room in the house, that I wouldn't have to give up my study if we could combine the den and the guest room, that it was perfectly acceptable to be sixty years old by the time your kid graduated high school. I told myself I'd raise the kid to be strong and independent and to not need me. I'd send it to summer camp and maybe to boarding school. I'd encourage it to make the kind of friends who stick around, to find a community and stay there, maybe even to marry young. I'd ensure that if I died at sixty-seven the kid would be able to pack up those George Kovacs lamps around my decaying body and not feel too bad about it. I thought of it as “it” even though I was sure it was a boy. I was also sure all these provisions were unnecessary because the thing itself wasn't going to stick around.

It didn't. It was gone after eight weeks. I was neither relieved nor devastated. There'd been an element of impostordom to the whole thing, as though I'd spent two months wearing the wrong outfit. The lab results came back the way they usually do for forty-one-year-olds who miscarry: chromosomal abnormalities, totally nonsurvivable, nothing that could have been done. When I asked the doctor if it was possible to know what sex it would have been, she told me that it would have been a girl. I was shocked for a moment but then not. Of course it was a girl. It was a girl and of course it was dead, another casualty of our fragile maternal line, another pair of small hands that would surely have formed furious fists in the presence of her mother. Except this one was gone before she even got here. Maybe she'd joined the others somewhere. Maybe she'd already become a bird. Maybe she'd circle back to me someday and reattempt her landing. Or maybe, better yet, she was the quick, quiet epilogue at the end of our story. Not that I'll ever know what this story is about. I know only that I'll probably never finish telling it and it most certainly will never be whole.

 

THE BEST POSSIBLE EXPERIENCE

I once dated a man who read astrology books, believed in chakras, and worked regularly with a spirit guide, a communion that involved visiting a “spirit guide counselor” at her modest townhouse near San Diego and paying her to chant and beat drums while he lay on a massage table wearing flashing LED sunglasses. This man was very spiritual. He spoke often of his “teachers,” by which he meant not high school or college teachers who had exerted particular influence but various yoga and meditation instructors who I now suspect he'd had sex with. He went to the Burning Man festival every year in a giant RV. He had a “home yoga practice” that chiefly involved lying on the floor of his bedroom and “centering his energy.” He was a student of erotic massage. He was into “breath work.”