When I Was Young and In My Prime (26 page)

You don't have to do much to speak volumes in your last days. He'd make a batch of muffins and a pot of coffee and invite a nursing home volunteer up to his apartment to share them, and it was a grand gesture, containing a lifetime. Each day, on his way to visit her in Extended Care, he walked around the atrium of the old age apartments bearing the cockatiel on his shoulder, and it was an act stunning in its generosity.
 

Terrible to say, in a way, but there's a glamour in decay. All the sugars rising to the surface. Even the making of wine is a kind of controlled decomposition.

The last days have an atmosphere in which everything stands out, backlit, finite. Photographers call it magic hour. As if death, closer now, closer every day, radiates a kind of pre-storm light.
 

And then that pre-storm light lasts for a spell after death—for the living. Basic things take on new definition, demand attention but resist naming. The world flares and rears under me these days in areas I always thought of
as solid ground (or, more precisely, didn't think of at all). I slide off the slippery fact of things existing. I say to myself, you could spend your whole life saying to yourself, this could be the last time I ride a ferry, see a black and white movie, taste brandy, stand on tiptoe, roll out pie dough, write a letter, stamp it and drop it in the mailbox, see a fox up close.
 

I want to count each time in my life James brushes an eyelash from my cheek, want to tell each recurring dream—the one with the violin, the one with the teeth. Each grudge is a tightly sewn parcel safely storing a wound. Each brick was laid by a human hand: evidence.
 

That very soon Peter Friesen will never again have an itch he can't reach or the tang of vinegar on the sides of his tongue makes me feel each itch and tang as a responsibility.
 

There is a last time we each will swallow water.

They've not told me, no not in so many words, but I know. It's not likely I'll be going home. That's fine and dandy, I want to tell them—it's not home anyway, that apartment. Sold the house when was it, last spring? And twenty years or more before that we sold the farm. And it was long before that when I last saw the land where I was born. Don't talk to me about home, I want to say.
Dad, they say, you sold the farm twenty years ago.
To rub my face in it. Then they tell me all about some other room they've set up for me in the nursing home,
a nice tree outside the window,
they keep saying. You're all goddamn fools I want to say. They're the ones who're confused.
We told you Dad,
they say, patient voices like a slap-dash whitewash job.
We have to be realistic,
they say.
You can't go back to the apartment. It's a beautiful room, and you'll be taken care of there.
I lose track of which story I'm supposed to be going along with. Pretending I have a home, pretending I'll walk again, pretending I care. Pretending we don't all know the only way I'm getting out of this place is in a box. They can't even draw blood anymore. Three different nurses tried yesterday. Sticking me again and again. Veins drying up like a creek in drought.
 

Oh they skirt around it so carefully that I know it better than if they just came right out with it. And I hear them when they're talking to each other and I've got my eyes closed because I can't manage to even lift my lids let alone say something in response to all their questions. Sometimes after I've sat up the whole morning and lifted the fork to my mouth so many times in a row I want to holler or throw something or even weep but I wouldn't have the energy, even if I had it in me to let myself go like that, and then the lunch tray arrives and after all that lifting I've barely even made a dent in breakfast, and I tell you I get to a place where the air itself is so heavy the smallest fraction of a nod feels as if I'm heaving myself up out of bed to stand at the window. Then one of them will show up like they think they're the second coming and say,
Look Dad, your lunch,
and I just want to close my eyes and be gone.
 

The funny part is how fast it happens when you can't bring yourself to make a sign you hear them, how fast they begin to assume you're not there. They think I'm asleep and I can't tell them there is a difference between this place and sleep.

I want to tell them there was a time when I threw a football, perfect spiral, over the barn. There was a time when I pitched a shovelful of soil over my shoulder to another place with less effort than it takes now to lift a tissue and receive the bit of gristle I've finally worked from the back of my mouth to my lips. There was a time when my legs held me upright all day long and on into the twilight and when I sat down to the evening meal those legs waited, buzzing and bent and ready for anything. I close my eyes and remind myself there was a time when I moved easily. Effortlessly. It's a kind of torture to think of it, but I tell you it's the only direction in my mind left to go that isn't closing up like my veins. I think of that easiness as a kind of country now. A place. One I'll never see again. But when I close my eyes sometimes I can get a glimpse of it. Even straining under the weight of a sack of grain or struggling with a plough had an ease about it and I wonder now whether it was the hope or the muscle that made it easy. Not that I can remember the feeling of it. Limbs closing up shop. No feeling. So it's just the picture in my head. Like a photograph of the Old Country. Same way that after Mother died I could look at a photograph of her till kingdom come, but it never gave me back what it was to sit across the kitchen table from her flesh and bones, never gave me back the feeling, you know. The inside of the feeling. The feeling that even if you knew exactly what she would do or say next, even if you knew her that well, as I knew Mother, well, she could still surprise you. Even if she didn't.
 

I lift my eyelids and it's like rolling away a stone heavier than myself. Just in time to see the nurse leaving the room, tucking her hair behind her ear without the slightest thought, as if she were a chosen one. As if she'd never die.

Last night I gave a woman the last bath of her life. Ginny. Her legs have grown too weak to get in and out of the tub. It's too dangerous to try to lift her. From now on she'll have to be taken to the shower room down the hall. Ginny loved her baths.
Oh well,
she sighed when I had her out and powdered and pyjama'd and sitting on the side of her bed, frail as a girl. She folded her hands and looked up at me, finding the shaky footing of a smile,
You can't have everything.
 

The perennial order goes something
 

like this: crocus, tulip, lilac, lily
 

of the valley, iris,
 

poppy, peony, and he
 

slips into the earth somewhere
 

between the lily of the valley
 

and the iris. Late
 

May. An early spring.
 

A week later, the stripped stamens
 

of the irises, the poppies with their red
 

cups empty, each peony balled up
 

like a kid glove waiting for a
 

hand and I'm thinking,
how well

the poppies know their part,
 

thinking,
how strange
 

the colour red,
thinking,
 

too late
—over and over the fact
 

of it fills
 

the glove.
 

fancy meeting

you here

We force Grandma's stiff arms into the dress she wore on their fiftieth wedding anniversary, manoeuvre her into a wheelchair and then, because it's a nice day and easier than getting her into a car, we push her along the sidewalk, past their old house, to the funeral home. She blinks in the midday, late-May light. She blinks at the traffic lights. She blinks at the bed of irises I point out to her, and then she looks up at me and blinks again.
 

I smile. She smiles back.
 

When we get to the funeral home, we push her right up to the side of the coffin. Mom kneels beside her and explains, as if to a child, “It's Peter. Your Peter. Dad. He's died, Mom. We brought you so you could say goodbye.”
 

And she blinks and blinks as if at a light too bright.

There isn't much crying; it seems time. After the funeral, we manoeuvre Grandma out of the wheelchair and into the car. The procession winds slowly from the funeral home through town toward the cemetery. The undertaker drives the lead car at the pace of a walk. We creep down the hill, ease onto Main Street. Cars stop. People stop. I'm dry-eyed until I realize they're stopping for us.
 

Then I cry, and honestly I couldn't tell you why I'm crying. Perhaps because people in small towns still know to stop when a funeral passes. Or because people in cities don't. Or for the life that begs this pause. Or maybe I'm crying for us all. For us all walking unaccountably dry-eyed over the earth.