This Is Running for Your Life (15 page)

*   *   *

Join your hands out in front of your chest with your arms rounded and your elbows high and you'll have the rough shape and size of the clock hanging way up on Rita's living-room wall. An hour passes broken only by one practiced soliloquy, delivered in response to a question about my love life. She listens with the same astonished expression as I tell her that New York is a place where the men either can't stop competing with you or refuse to start.

Both of her daughters divorced—a double blow to Rita, although she didn't discuss it outside of wounded asides and coded messages on ticket stubs. Nor did she finagle me with spells or curses or other inductions to marry. My grandfather might have felt differently. On his first visit with my parents after their engagement, Latham fell to his knees and crawled to my father's feet, thanking him for making his twenty-one-year-old daughter's university career worthwhile. “I thought it was a scream,” my mother recalled later that evening, as she settled into my aunt's Halifax apartment and my eyebrows explored the upper reaches of my forehead.

Throughout my disquisition on dating in New York City, Rita stole urgent glances at the clock, which is white with huge black numbers in a kind of treble-clef font. In the absence of follow-up questions we return to silence, her head swiveling back to the clock a few times a minute. She raises an index finger to her mouth and bites the tip gently, adopting an almost comical posture of contemplative worry. When I ask her what she's thinking about, she lifts her eyes and says, “Nothing in particular.” A few beats pass, then Rita slowly pivots her chair toward the wall, a silent forfeiture, and fixes her eyes on the clock for the remaining half hour.

*   *   *

The Melville dining room's massive solarium windows join the sky to a thickly wooded reservoir. As we shuffle into the seating area, a woman calls out to Rita. Outside, the sky is sullen, stung by the storm and looming close to the glass like an accusation, like an aquarium whale. Her hearing has declined somewhat, but I wonder if Rita means to dust this insuperable woman, who is already dining with two others. Seating arrangements are cliquish and hotly contested.

“Oh, Rita!
Ree-tah!
” After the third call I touch my grandma's shoulder and point in the woman's direction.

“Oh,”
Rita says.
“Hello.”

“I went to visit Marge Lowe yesterday,” the woman announces as we putter up tableside. “No one's heard from her since she left, you know, but her spirits are good.” The other women murmur. “She's in
good spirits
.”

I want us to make it through this interaction but I can feel my smile tacking, and Rita can't pretend to give a shit when there's a chair nearby that needs sitting in.

“I just thought you'd want to know,”
the woman concludes, with a bathetic moue that takes the remaining wind out of my goodwill. “She said to send her regards.”

“Oh, good,” Rita says.

The crash of a cutlery dump carries over the dining room.

“Is that your daughter?”

*   *   *

Dinner is served every evening to fifty double-tableclothed tables, and at 5:30 the room is humming with news and reviews of the night's menu. At precisely 5:25, Rita had reached to clip on the gold earrings she keeps in a dish by her chair and insisted we not be late. The waitstaff is a mix of scurrying high schoolers and brisk middle-aged women. They greet residents formally, meeting their cranky demands with Teflon manners. Mrs. Boyle's requests (no ice, dressing on the side, no dessert) are made in a low, querulous voice that startles me. I wonder what they think of her here.

As we're seated, the cafeteria crier repeats her news about Marge Lowe exactly (spirits good; sends her regards;
thought you'd want to know
) to a second arrival. I hear it twice more before the meal is over. Rita tells me she and Marge shared a table before Marge's recent transfer to the nursing home. After drizzling a perfect orange loop of dressing over a finger bowl full of salad, Rita raises her fork like someone with nasty but necessary work to do, and I decide to let the meal pass in silence. I'm supposed to make her eat but I learned a long time ago that I can't make anyone do anything.

One of the few men at Melville—tall, cardiganed, aquiline nose; prime men's-club material—sits down to dine directly in my sight line. He adjusts his place setting, folds his newspaper, and fans out his napkin with transfixing deliberation before requesting a glass of beer—a Sunday treat—to go with his steak and baked potato. When all three arrive, I watch him crop dust the steak with salt so intently that he turns his heavy lids on me with a look that would freeze the warts off a witch's nose. I settle on him again, like a fly, after a desultory flitting about. I tell the waitress to bring Rita's pie anyway, and she tucks in like she was expecting it all along.

Melville residents run from retirement age to mobile nonagenarians; walkers fender-bend between the dining-room tables and line the far wall. The building is clean and modern, collegial and dignified—hardly the moaning void often associated with old-age facilities. Yet it is distinctly a world apart, a place where things begin to move so quickly it seems there's no movement at all; where there's a new Marge Lowe every hour, and you rocket from your midthirties to your midsixties in the blink of an old woman's eye.

As if to contain the secret of this sudden acceleration, a sort of narrative vacuum forms around the residents; though not the space designated for dying, it would seem to be where the story ends. Melville is for living and convening, eating and exercising, but not for the outside world, or “independence” as it's otherwise defined. It's an elegant resort with no return and no postcards. I clung to Mr. Sunday Times, whose life's attitude seemed preserved in his posture and placid self-containment, so contented with himself and his surroundings, yet so apart from them. Nearer to my right a white-haired woman sat alone, reckoning with her bacon-wrapped scallops, a human shipwreck arranged into her dinner-hour best.

Rita refuses to use the walker her daughters bought for her, and she's not interested in my arm either. She skims close to the wall on the walk back. Even a late interception by my mother and Frank, just arrived from Toronto, doesn't dissuade her. She shuffles on to her door, hunches over the lock for an extended struggle, moves into the living room, and lowers herself back into her chair. Only then and there can she mobilize the energy necessary for anything else. I get the sense that her entire day is built around pulling off that walk, a contest of weakness and will that's difficult to watch in part because it feels too familiar.

My mother responds to her mother's Prairie-flat affect by winding herself into a type A tornado. Laundry is triaged for washing or replacement (more than once I've seen Rita stripped of days-old clothes where she stood), rations are cited for replenishing (Rita has dubbed her, not incorrectly, “the food police”), and, most relentlessly, the family silver is polished before she will consider sitting down. I'm pretty sure the ideal visit would involve no sitting at all. I have watched my mother bent over the Boyle tea set, elbows wagging, for the better part of every previous visit, a scene completed by Rita's staring into space and my watching askance with a prickling neck, prepared to fire up some old coping protocol.

But we all react to the eighty-pound elephant in the room with a form of extremity. Frank, a congenial whistler whose own mother passed away in 2009, at age one hundred—still sharp as a mongoose and prone to the odd, unreconstructed racial slur—tends to glower over Rita's apparent rudeness before long, making his oppression known with passive-aggressive asides. My mother is calmer this trip. After noting, prethreshold, that the wreath hanging on Rita's door is out of season (door hangings are the Melville residents' version of a profile photo), she casts off her parka and collapses on the couch.

We don't stay long; this is a pickup mission, with a proper visit to follow. Their flight had been almost as harrowing as mine, and after trading stories—surely we had all faced death to reach this room—and condoling our mutual nausea, we leave Rita to her giant TV, deliverer of what she told me earlier, on prodding, was her one remaining pleasure: televised golf tournaments.

*   *   *

I ask if we can stop by Deadman's Island on the way to my aunt's apartment. Only a few blocks from Melville Heights, it's the burial site of nearly two hundred American soldiers who died in British captivity during the War of 1812. A poor excuse for an island at high tide, when the water's low it's more of a thinly treed mound attached to the mainland by a muddy isthmus. As we park and climb down the hundredsome stairs leading to the shore, Frank tells me that a few years ago a developer had petitioned to build luxury condos on the grounds. The men buried there had been all but forgotten, and the prison that held over eight thousand prisoners of war on Melville Island, just across Halifax Harbour, was converted into a yacht club a decade back. But committees were formed and the dead got their due; their sinking graves were declared a heritage site in 2005.

As we pick our way along the shoe-sucking shore and onto a brown hump the size of a softball diamond, the telltale plaques come into view. They describe the smallpox epidemic that ran through the prison and how its victims were quickly scraped into the earth, where their bones might mingle with those of Spanish and French prisoners from wars past. The names of the latter are long gone, but those of all 195 Americans, rescued from archival oblivion, are listed along with their rank, unit, and date of death. Seaman, soldier; private, prize master; boatswain, militiaman; Chesapeake, Rattlesnake; Eliza, Polly Ann; Vixen, Lizard; Friendship, Hope. I can't tell their ages but imagine them to be a small fraction of my grandmother's, whose life span already accommodates two world wars, the ascent of the airplane, women's much-rumored liberation, the birth and death of Rita Hayworth, and the seemingly immortal inception of the digital age. I know it's supposed to be funny, the image of an old person grappling with new technology, but whenever I watch my grandmother lift a cell phone to the vicinity of her ear as though it were an old shoe, I am filled with the queerest sadness.

My elders are anxious to leave. The sun is setting and the tide, my mother the oceanographer insists, is coming in. In three weeks, upon touching down in Honolulu for a conference, I will receive an e-mail notifying me that, after continued decline, Rita was taken to the ER and diagnosed with metastatic cancer of the liver. They don't bother to trace its source, admitting her directly to palliative care. I will snap the message off when I hit the word
cancer
; it seems impossible to receive such news while checking my BlackBerry in a moving taxi on a tropical island.

“Well,” Rita will say in the doctor's office, “that's that.”

*   *   *

Later I will listen to her breathing through that same device while facing into the Pacific. I will tell her that I love her, that I'm going to try to tell her story, and she'll say, “Okay.”

It's a futile phone call, exactly like the rest. And yet, as the days go on, I will hear of a bedside transformation. Rita will say the things we wish the dying to say, and to say I suppose when we die ourselves: she is at peace; she is going home. I will wonder if the doctor, aware of the power of diagnosis as a personal storytelling device, had decided to play editorial God. Rita had cleared several complete physicals since her depression's onset, showed no definitive symptoms, and in addition to her sudden spiritual calm reported no physical pain. Perhaps it's a more viable ending than dying of sadness; perhaps it's the first time cancer did anyone a favor. There is a script to follow now, and it is taken up with relief.

Shortly after my return from Hawaii I will meet with a friend whose grandmother, also ninety-five, had died the previous week. My friend is more shaken than she had imagined she would be, as far as she had imagined this death at all. The funeral was a shock: her father wept—unthinkable—and her grandmother's body was laid out in an open casket. My friend thought the practice macabre. “I don't want to remember her that way,” she'll say. By any standard it was an ideal death: sudden, and on the heels of a birthday celebrated by an entire community, the last pages of a small-town pastoral. But there is gothic history there—incest, abuse, suicide—and though my friend felt ascendant compassion for her grandmother, she never knew the woman well. Her peers have responded with a sympathetic shrug:
What did you expect?

“But I find myself devastated,” my friend will tell me, her eyes focused and growing full over our gin and tonics. “Just that idea, that life can be imperfect and …
over
.”

After two weeks, her daughters at her side much of the time, Rita will receive what the nurses allege to be the lowest morphine dosage they've ever used to treat a terminal cancer patient. This is the last stage, when we begin to talk about a dying person's pain with authority. In recent years I have wondered about the nature of depression, specifically Rita's depression, turning it about as a biochemical event, then as part of her biography, her response to the world and her role in it, an expression of some intimate and mysterious grief. But is there, for once, more comfort in the meaningless option? Certainly there is comfort in morphine, a drug, at last, of consequence. When I hear it named I know that she will die, and in the opiated coma that will carry most of us away.

As the days pass, I will be told that this is the most peaceful time in Rita's life. Her Melville apartment will swiftly be emptied and her furniture off-loaded to charity; even her wrinkles fall away. Some days she will eat, some she won't. Another pattern will form and we'll start to settle into it, despite everything.