Will & I (16 page)

Even in her condition, my mother did everything she could to change or postpone the appointment. People say that not knowing is the worst part, but for her, it was much better than knowing, since it at least allowed for hope. Everyone else wanted to get the results, so treatment could begin as soon as possible. It almost seemed that the progression of my mother's cancer accelerated after the initial diagnosis was made.

A long, silent walk, first along the corridor from the parking deck, then across an atrium to the elevators that went up to the oncologist's office, did nothing to help the feeling that we were en route to her execution. She was sitting in a wheelchair, and her face was expressionless.

When she said she had to go to the bathroom before we went into the office, I felt that I was going to be sick as well. I was right there with her. But the oncologist happened to meet us out in the open area by the restrooms. This seemed to be a good sign—we would get the visit over with here.

He spent some time organizing the folder that had my mother's test results in it, and asked if he could feel where the hip mass had been. I saw how scared my mother was, because although she'd always been prim and proper and harped on etiquette, she stood up and dropped her pants right there. He felt around her pelvis, saying nothing.

He asked if we had any questions. Our faces must have looked confused—he hadn't told us anything yet. We'd evidently run into him before he was prepared. “I'll get together with Dr. Jones to discuss a treatment plan,” he said.

My sister asked about chemotherapy, saying she knew it had “come a long way” (Will and I glanced at each other). What could we expect there? Would she lose her hair?

He replied that, given the wide area over which the cancer had spread, they would start with the general chemotherapy that had been around since the seventies. He let that answer the second question, about the hair. After a moment, he looked at Will and me and said, “These aren't party drugs.”

After the appointment I went back to the farm with the dogs, assuming the oncologist wouldn't be speaking with Dr. Jones until the next day at the soonest, so I was immediately put on alert when Will called me that afternoon. He said he'd just gotten off the phone with Dr. Jones, who himself had just spoken with the oncologist, and they had decided not even to start chemotherapy. The cancer was already so far gone, treating her would likely do more harm than good, especially with medicine that takes you to the brink of death anyway. I paused. I thought about my mother, and knew without asking that she must have felt relieved when they'd told her. The prospect of chemo was, for her, worse than anything. When I asked Will how long they thought she had, he said Dr. Jones hadn't given him a number. “He just said it should be quick.”

A few days later—a week?—I went in to see her. The sitter had just stepped out of the room. I couldn't believe the decline. She was sleeping most of the time and taking an oral solution of concentrated morphine, for which I had to sign two different forms to pick up from the pharmacy. Her face was withered, and she had the same “tiny” eyes that Will gets when he's drunk. She was awake, though. This time I did somewhat better on my opening comment. Taking her hand, I said, “There's nothing to be afraid of.”

She hoarsely whispered that, because of me, she wasn't. She added, “I'm gonna miss you.”

To keep from crying in her face, I blurted out, “I'm not going anywhere!” … that, instead of all the things I might have said, that I thought of later.

Her head fell back on the pillow and she closed her eyes.

I'm not sure how much time passed between that moment and the actual end, but I can't picture her alive after that. I don't think I ever talked to her again, or at least never talked to her alone again.

One other memory of that time: there was a night when Will and my sister went into the study and my mother, waking up partway, screamed at them for keeping her alive.

Then early one morning the sitter called up the stairs, “Clay, you need to come down. Your mother has passed.”

It wasn't until after I'd gone to the bathroom and begun to brush my teeth that I wondered if I should just have gone straight downstairs, if anyone was expecting me. I could hear Will climbing the stairs over the sound of the faucet. He barged into the bathroom, to see how I was taking the news. When he saw that I was fine, he almost smiled as he took in a breath, as if to say, “Well, here it is.”

What he said was “What now?”

 

28

Nothing is left to you at this moment but to burst out into a loud laugh. You have accomplished a final turning and in very truth know that when a cow in Kuai-chou grazes the herbage, a horse in I-chou finds its stomach filled.

—YUN-AN P'U-YEN, 1156–1226

In the hospital—that is, during my own stay, after they first said I would die, and then remain paralyzed from my eyes down—I had this liberating flash of vision, feeling … knowing. At first I didn't make much of it. This wasn't a near-death experience; it came from out of nowhere, when I'd slipped into thinking that none of what was happening to me was real, and since this experience had nothing to do with the external world, or even with words or images, I had lumped it in with everything else, with everything I'd imagined. But I couldn't forget it.

It happened in an instant but seemed somehow also to occur in geological time. My first impulse is to compare it to a glacier calving, a giant chunk of ice falling off, something that had been building for eons and then happened. My peripheral vision jumped out to where there was no longer anything—my skin, other surfaces, the distance between them—separating me from anything else. I'd gradually stopped being aware of my unresponsive body, but now I was at the core of an infinitely expanded being. This wasn't a thought, or even a chain of thoughts. It was too seamless to allow time for thinking. But I felt it—the biggest release of my life. Release not just from the stress of being unable to move or speak, but from myself. From my self. It felt like I'd bloomed.

Unlike with morphine, this wasn't passive; nothing from outside my body was being introduced. This was active, like an orgasm, but less concentrated, and a thousand times stronger. It was as if a tinted shade I'd never known was there had been lifted. I said before that the experience wasn't composed of words or images, but there was an underlying cerebral aspect to it, an accompanying knowledge, like knowing how to breathe. It was a culmination of everything I'd learned in my life before then and a simultaneous disregarding of it. My dramatic idea of myself still existed, and had the same setup as always: me writing a script, acting it out, and watching from the audience at the same time. But the walls that had separated them were gone. I fully became each and all of them, as well as everything else—good and bad. I had the vivid sense, too, that this had always been the case. It had never been me against anything. It dawned on me not that everything was
going to be
okay, but that everything
was
okay. The clarity I felt was like becoming decongested. It was that close to my normal perception.

From later reading, I learned that people of all backgrounds, cultures, and religions, throughout history, have had versions, in varying degrees, of the same experience, of what I'd taken to calling my “willing elimination of options.” In his essay “This Is It” the philosopher Alan Watts says, “the experience has a tendency to arise in situations of total extremity or despair, when the individual finds himself without any alternative but to surrender himself entirely.” I smiled when I read that. This
was
it. I knew I wasn't crazy.

I had already surrendered my body soon after I got to the hospital, but only by letting go of my desire to live or to die—to control my existence—could I surrender entirely. Doing so was not conscious. The experience felt both like I'd willed it and like it had come out of nowhere. I became my will—there was nothing holding me back anymore—but
my will
was more than me. As an identical twin, I'd always thought along these lines, but now it was made certain. It didn't seem strange how refreshed and unafraid I felt, just inevitable.

 

29

It took longer than Dewin thought it would before I could actually sing a song—and certainly my voice has a ways to go—but over the years of weekly lessons, it has noticeably improved. The first song we attempted was “Happy Birthday,” which was challenging enough at first. It felt different than just doing the exercises. The song imparted rhythm, and that was useful—people talk in rhythm.

A few months ago, we started going through the aria “Ah! Tu Non Sai” from Handel's
Ottone
. Just writing the title makes the whole thing sound suspect. Who was I kidding? But as opera songs go, it's fairly straightforward. It follows a pattern, and it flows.

The song is in Italian, too, which Dewin had mentioned is more conducive to singing than English. Not as many rough transitions. Dewin let me see an English translation of the words. A woman, Matilda, is pleading with the emperor to release her lover from prison.

Ah! you know not how my heart is rent,

Nor the pity I feel, nor the pain.

After all the sorrowful hours we've spent

I would still see him free again!

In 1723 Handel wrote Matilda's aria specially for the English contralto Anastasia Robinson, who hadn't liked the role when first presented with it. She asked for something more subdued, more suited to her gifts. Handel agreed, a sign of the esteem in which he held her voice, and wrote “Ah! Tu Non Sai” for her. A curious thing about Anastasia Robinson is that she started her career as an alto, but contracted smallpox, evidently around 1719. The disease damaged her voice in a way that limited its range, and when she reemerged, it was different, lower. Handel wrote “Ah! Tu Non Sai” for her second, damaged voice. I don't know if Dewin knew this when he decided to have me sing it.

A benefit born of necessity, in working with Dewin, is that I've picked up a rudimentary knowledge of reading music. Still, I have trouble with the actual singing, particularly when there's an abrupt shift in registers. But now there are moments when I find myself experiencing the song as an organic unit, one composed of separate parts, and not as a series of parts lined up in a row. That subtle shift in feeling has marked a huge step for me. There's a letter John Irving sent to Kurt Vonnegut in 1982. “Your books always create the perfect illusion,” Irving wrote, “that you know exactly all those parts of the story as you are telling us just one of the parts, and that simply makes everything sound true. You have to be a writer to feel that.” I think the same is true of singing.

At first, when I couldn't get all the way through a certain section, when I didn't think I had the breath, Dewin would play a kind of trick on me: he would have me silently mouth the words, proceeding note by note, “just to get the coordination down.” It was clever, on his part—by forcing me to keep moving my mouth, beyond what I'd assumed was the limit of my breath, he showed me that in fact I had more air than I knew.

“Notice how many times we come back to E,” Dewin said, when we got to the song's middle section. “Let that be your base.”

Something was wrong. I was reaching the notes in time, but the sound wasn't right. I would open my mouth, and the notes … it wasn't that they would get cut off, so much as that they would never start, while the background music kept running.

“What am I doing?” I asked in frustration.

“Your voice is wanting to shut down when you close around the consonants,” Dewin answered. “It's saying, ‘That's it, we're done.' But you've got to keep the sound open, to keep the flow going.”

We tried just those words a few more times.

“It's still not sounding right,” I told him. “When I try to imitate you, it doesn't even sound like the same song.”

Dewin smiled. “You're not being vulnerable,” he said. “This person's heart is broken … You've heard your dogs whine? That ‘mmh, mmh, mmh.' That's…”

“Yeah, like when they dream?”

“Yeah, that's sincere vulnerability. That's how you sing. If you sing properly, the acoustics … it's so natural you're only involved in letting it take your body. People associate the emotional impact of singing because they hear that connectivity.”

A few years earlier, I might have pointed out to him that this was an example of faith, but not of the sort we usually mean by that word. It was the kind of faith that is so basic, life isn't possible without it. I almost said that. But it's like the Zen master Chokei once told a monk, outside their temple. The monk had said, “Right here is the peak of the mystic mountain. Is not this Reality?”

“So it is,” Chokei replied, “but what a pity to say so.”

I knew afterward, driving home, that this had been one of my better lessons. My voice felt strong and full of potential—I was learning to count on it when I opened my mouth, and no longer had to use all my strength just to make it heard. I felt a pleasant surprise when speaking to a cashier, in feeling the words come out with effort to spare, even if I was winded.

When I got home, the phone was ringing. I had to walk all the way across the “barn” room to get it. It was my sister, and I could tell by the way she said “Hey!”—vaguely caught off guard but not enough to pursue the matter—that she'd assumed, from how I'd answered, that I was Will. She started talking about Betsy and the girls, saying something about their school, which her daughter also attended at the time. She asked a few simple questions that didn't require more than a yes or a no, or if one did, I would carefully say, “I don't know,” and she would go on. I was only half-listening at that point. I wondered how long it would be before she figured out who I really was.