All the Lives We Ever Lived

by Katharine Smyth

  The doctor didn’t acknowledge the joke. “What are your symptoms?”

  “I can’t bloody breathe.” By this time my father’s mask had been replaced by an oxygen tube. I could see from a monitor in the corner that his intake was stable at 90 percent, though his blood pressure was half what it should have been.

  “I need to ask you an important question,” the doctor said. “Should the situation become acute, which is a distinct possibility, do we have your permission to use an intubator?”

  “Christ, we’ve already been through this,” my father said. “No heroic measures.”

  Hearing the phrase for the second time that day, I started to cry. The doctor ignored me as he repeated what we had already been told: there were three possible causes for the collapse, a blood clot in the lungs, an infection like pneumonia, or the cancer itself. Eventually, he left.

  “Asshole,” my father said. “How many times do we need to go through it?”

  A group of radiologists wheeled in an X-ray machine. My mother went for a cup of coffee while I sobbed in the hallway, distressed enough that a teenage burn victim and her mother—the girl confined to a wheelchair, one side of her face red and textured, like mashed strawberries—felt the need to console me. “Is that your father in there?” the mother asked when I had pulled myself together. “Oh sweetheart, I’m so sorry.”

  When I returned to the room, my father looked up and smiled. “Hello, lovey,” he said. He was sitting up, the arms of his sweater draped over his hospital gown and a pair of glasses dangling from his neck. A sailing magazine was open on his lap. Aside from the tube running beneath his nose, he looked as he always did: relentlessly alive.

  I sat down in the chair beside his bed. “Are you scared?” I finally asked.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  By then it was well past midnight. We tried to nap, we tried to read. “You know the more I think about it,” he said at one point, “the more I think that doctor was nuts.”

  “Which doctor?” my mother asked.

  “Exactly,” he said. “Witch doctor!”

  My mother and I laughed, and I thought how difficult it was to believe in death for more than a few minutes at a time.

  Somewhere outside the sun was rising. My mother had gone to get some sleep; my father was still sitting up, his sweater tied around his shoulders. I told him how frightened I was and then I told him he was my best friend.

  “That’s a lovely thing to say,” he said. “I think I thought I was just a silly bee.”

  “No, Dad, I mean it,” I said, trying to make him understand.

  “Look, you’re making me cry.” I looked at him and saw his eyes were watering. He gave me his hand and I took it, and as we sat there holding hands against the sheet, I felt, together with my grief, a strange elation at how moved he was. “I’ve been shedding a few tears myself here and there,” he said. And then, “I think it was only this fall that I realized how sick I was.”

  “I think I only just realized,” I said.

  It was true, and later, once it became clear that everyone else had known all along, I thought how surprising it was that my father and I were the last to know.

  The next day my parents and I met with Erika and Dr. Kaufman, my father’s oncologist. His loss of breath was not caused by a blood clot, they said, nor by an infection like pneumonia. It was caused by the cancer itself, which, in the two weeks since his last scan, had colonized his body completely. As we could see from the X-rays they held up to the light, his lungs were riddled with new black shadows. He had been scheduled to begin an experimental chemotherapy treatment in just a few days, but now, said Dr. Kaufman, it was no longer a good idea. Paradoxically, Erika explained, the sicker you are, the less effective chemotherapy becomes. No one in the room said what this meant, exactly, but this is what it meant: after fourteen years, we were done trying to save my father.

  2

  Shortly before the start of “Time Passes,” Mrs. Ramsay visits her youngest children in the nursery, where, to her annoyance, she finds them sitting up in bed, quarreling over the boar’s skull that their uncle sent them from the colonies and that she foolishly allowed them to hang from the nursery wall. Although James shrieks whenever his nurse tries to remove it, Cam is terrified of the horrid shadows that it casts across the room. “Well then, we will cover it up,” says Mrs. Ramsay, who, trying and failing to find something suitable in the children’s drawers, takes off her shawl and winds it round the skull, transforming its jagged bone into a soft shape upon which to project the most enchanting fantasies. She “laid her head almost flat on the pillow beside Cam’s and said how lovely it looked now; how the fairies would love it; it was like a bird’s nest; it was like a beautiful mountain such as she had seen abroad, with valleys and flowers and bells ringing and birds singing…” When these words, echoing ever more rhythmically, finally succeed at sending her daughter to sleep, she crosses to James’s side of the room to assure him that his beloved skull remains intact. “See, she said, the boar’s skull was still there; they had not touched it; they had done just what he wanted; it was there quite unhurt.” James hops from bed to make certain and then, once he too is tucked in, Mrs. Ramsay pulls down the window, gets “a breath of the perfectly indifferent chill night air,” and steals downstairs to meet her husband.

  I first learned of her death exactly five years before my father’s collapse. It was the night after Christmas, and I was curled up on a cot in my grandmother’s study. The others had gone to bed long before, and, rather like the novel’s poet, Mr. Carmichael—who stays up late reading Virgil but eventually blows out his candle, as if to say that unlike Dante we must navigate this hell without assistance—I was reading well into the early hours. I can still remember my grief and indignation at the revelation; what shocked me most, at least at first, was its detached and oddly graceless language, trapped between the bars of a parenthetical aside: “[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]” These words were appalling. I loved Mrs. Ramsay deeply, already, and I saw her death—not only bracketed, but the subject of a subordinate clause!—as a cruel trick; it made me want to toss the book aside, in anger and sadness, yes, but also because the prospect of confronting the next ninety pages without her seemed intolerably dull. I understood even then that it was life’s cruel trick and not Woolf’s own—that, as the premature deaths of Stella Duckworth and Julia and Thoby Stephen attest, the universe is eminently capable of dealing out the “holocaust on such a scale” that Mrs. Ramsay thinks improbable in “The Window.” But it is only now I realize just how accurately “Time Passes”—in the indifference that it flaunts, in the desperation it arouses, even in the boredom that it promises—replicates the experience of severing from the person we love.

  Shortly after Mrs. Ramsay’s death, the shawl she wrapped around the skull begins to slacken, a tiny movement that is nevertheless likened in its violence to the fracturing of a mountain: “in the middle of the night with a roar, with a rupture, as after centuries of quiescence, a rock rends itself from the mountain and hurtles crashing into the valley, one fold of the shawl loosened and swung to and fro.” This is the fairy-tale world that Mrs. Ramsay created for Cam, with its beautiful mountains and valleys, but now on the brink of collapse; and, with it, the collapse of Cam and her siblings’ childhood illusions. For as the wrap that has been an emblem of Mrs. Ramsay’s protection continues to unwind—a few pages later, “the rock was rent asunder; another fold of the shawl loosened; there it hung, and swayed”—it becomes clear that there is no escaping the horrors it once veiled. The unraveling shawl: I can think of no better metaphor, not just for Mrs. Ramsay’s vanishing but also for the stretch of days, concentrated and raw, that followed my father’s fall, with their gradual baring of the bone benea
th his skin, and of those savage truths from which, up until then, he had largely succeeded at protecting me.

  3

  At home, we made up a room for him to die in. The study where I had been staying seemed the most sensible. I cleared a space for the oxygen machine and organized stray books into piles. I vacuumed the rug and dusted the gray-veined marble mantelpiece. I moved my things to the living room, putting down sheets for myself on the couch, and when I’d finished, I felt better than I had in days.

  A hospice nurse arrived soon afterward. She described the symptoms my father could expect in the coming weeks; she listed the medications he would take and the numbers he could call in case of emergency. To my mother she handed a bottle of liquid morphine to store in the fridge, and to me, a little blue book called Gone from My Sight: The Dying Experience. She said, when he asked, that she expected my father to live for another three to six months. “Six months!” he exclaimed. “What a bore.”

  The days following her visit blur together now, and perhaps this is odd but I remember them fondly. I spent New Year’s with friends who were visiting Boston; we watched fireworks from their waterfront hotel and drank too much of the unlimited champagne included in our prix fixe dinner. My father was still well enough to pick me up the next morning, and I made him pull over so I could throw up in the street. “Poor Poppet,” he said and then, “What a neat little thrower-upper you are!” But the temperature was falling, and that was the last time we went outside; instead we stayed indoors and watched movies. He wore the black fleece pants and red fleece bathrobe my mother had given him for Christmas along with a fleece hat, fleece mittens, black silk long underwear, and a fleece electric blanket for the car.

  This new wardrobe, which made my father satisfying to hug, disguised his thinning, disappearing body. He didn’t speak often of the fact he was dying—death appeared in wry asides, and in conversations with friends overseas. Nor did he begin to speak emotionally. And yet he did become more physically affectionate, and it was rare that he would pass my mother or me without folding us into his arms.

  He spent a lot of time in the kitchen, standing next to the exhaust fan with a newspaper spread open on the counter and a cup of coffee at his hand. This was the only place in the house where my mother permitted smoking, though by then she would have let him smoke wherever he wanted. I sat on the counter next to him, or on the floor with my cats, in whom he took a lot of pleasure. It no longer bothered me when he smoked, except when he grew careless and walked too near the oxygen tube with a lit cigarette. And I did think about how absurd it was that the prospect of my father lighting himself on fire could inspire such conventional fear, the kind of fear that should have belonged properly to the past. It all comes to the same thing, I reminded myself. Death is death. Yet we retained the instinct for preservation; my father winced when, on New Year’s Day, he swerved to avoid a car accident, even though the night before he had spoken of suicide. We have little capacity, it seems, for drawing connections.

  I spent the days making my father cups of coffee, watching television, deciding whether or not to take a term off school. It was only at night, when I woke with a start to the vast, tenebrous living room, that I had a sense of the wildness that encroached. I lay awake remembering what it was to sit on the deck in Rhode Island; I thought about the ways in which the world had darkened and enlarged, how being a human being had suddenly become a more serious occupation than it once seemed. I thought of strangers I had seen on the street, of how many of them had endured this and worse. How could people be asked to endure this?

  And yet all the while I had the sense that I was perceiving only the shadow of the thing and not the thing itself—that I had as yet no idea what enduring was. Because before I’d gone to sleep I had sat with my father in the study, listening to him talk; soon it would grow light and I would hear him creep downstairs and retrieve the paper from the front steps. I would open the door to the family room and find him bent over the news, and at the moment I saw him, my body would loosen and relax, and the terror of the night become unreal. As long as this continued, as long as he was here, it was impossible to fathom what it meant that one day soon he wouldn’t be.

  4

  “But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows…” We may easily survive one night, Woolf assures us; the trouble is that night follows night follows night, that “the winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers.” They were simply biding their time, those forces that gave me the gift of a morning that was so soothing in its sameness, those forces that seemed to respect human life sufficiently as to leave the Ramsays sleeping undisturbed. (“Whatever else may perish and disappear,” says the speaker of those dormant bodies in their beds, “what lies here is steadfast.”)

  For it’s only a matter of days before the outside world that during Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner party had seemed so safely banished begins its full assault. The succeeding nights are rife with “wind and destruction,” the trees “plunge and bend,” the sea “tosses itself and breaks itself.” Mrs. Ramsay dies abruptly in the middle of the night, and her husband, arms outstretched, lurches down the hall without her. And if, in the midst of this tumult, a solitary sleeper wakes in the small hours, throws off his covers, and descends to the beach to seek “an answer to his doubts,” he will be bitterly disappointed, for he will find there nothing that can “bring the night to order” and make “the world reflect the compass of the soul.”

  I used not to know what to make of this sleeper or those nameless others who haunt the pages of “Time Passes.” I believed I grasped their formal function, but—and this is the heart of it—I could not bring myself to care about them; and so too the section as a whole, in fact, which was dizzying in its ambition (“this impersonal thing, which I’m dared to do by my friends, the flight of time, & the consequent break of unity in my design,” Woolf called her radical experiment), but which also left me cold and longing for the pathos of the Ramsays’ private lives. But I see now that this longing is the point; that these sleepers are not mere bloodless wraiths; that they are you and they are me; that catastrophe transforms us in that way; that it momentarily connects us, ordinary people, to the bones beneath the shawl and sends us on a search for answers in the dead of night that is archetypal and inexorable but that if we try to talk about it sounds at best symbolic or overwrought at worst. And that the answers prove elusive is a lonely, frightening thing. But the search itself? “Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.” Almost.

  5

  Hospice had been under way for nearly a week when we remembered Gone from My Sight. The book was still sitting on the table where the nurse had left it. “One to Three Months Prior to Death” sounded almost pleasant—it was a time of sleepiness, of diminished interest in food and the newspaper, of “withdrawing from everything outside of one’s self and going inside.” But we did not like the sound of “One to Two Weeks Prior to Death,” which described disorientation, plucking at sheets, conversations with ghosts, a body temperature that oscillates between chill and fever, and a blue pallor to the nail beds, hands, and feet. We liked “One to Two Days to Hours Prior to Death” even less; it was a time of restiveness, erratic breathing, glazed, unseeing eyes, magenta limbs, mottled buttocks, and, finally, unresponsiveness. “What appears to be the last breath,” the book said, “is often followed by one or two long spaced breaths and then the physical body is empty.”

  For the first time, it occurred to me to dread the stretch of hours between my father’s death and his cremation, that weird limbo in which his body would persist without him in it. I struggled to picture how blank and baggy his skin would seem, how empty I too might then become.

  One day I woke hi
m from a nap, helped him sit up, and heard him cry out in pain more loudly and desperately than ever before. We had been introduced years ago to the oncologist’s pain scale, a scale on which “one” signifies no pain and “ten” signifies the worst pain one can imagine. My father had always scoffed at the subjectivity of the pain scale, had always assigned his pain a modest four, but now, and on the nights that followed, he screamed and howled and pushed my hand away when I tried to touch him. “Ten!” he wailed. “Ten, ten, oh god, ten!” He was taking 160 mg of OxyContin a day then, but he might as well have been taking nothing. I sat with him on the bed while he cried, and I looked at the bookshelves that lined the walls. Sometimes I thought how strange it was that I could neither see nor feel the violence that was wracking his body, and sometimes I thought, in spite of myself, that this was the way that dying should be. How grim and gruesome and apt, I thought, that leaving life should look like this.

  After some hours, the pain had passed. It had taken a frantic phone call to hospice and a trip to a twenty-four-hour pharmacy, but now we were sitting calmly on the living room couch. At my father’s request, we were trying to write a prospectus of the boat for the broker who would sell it after his death. In the past week he had developed an obsession with organizing his affairs; he’d even expressed feelings of inadequacy for not yet building the bookshelves my mother had requested in the fall. (I’m reminded of “The Window” and its sense of thwarted action—of Mrs. Ramsay’s half-knit stocking, of Lily’s unfinished painting, of James’s aborted journey to the lighthouse.) But my father’s desire to leave things in order was greater than his ability, and as we sat there—I with a pen in hand, waiting for him to dictate; he staring blankly at the measurements of the engine he had installed the summer before—I could see how tired he was, how hard he was working just to wrap his head around ideas that a week ago would have been simple. I could see his mind failing.