All the Lives We Ever Lived

by Katharine Smyth

  “I do miss my energy,” he finally said.

  “Let’s take a break, Dad.”

  “It’s the most peculiar experience,” he said. “I’ve never in my life…it’s just not wanting to do anything.”

  So we rested instead. The reigning sounds of the living room were the heaviness of his breathing and the occasional rustle of the newspaper open on his lap. He was wearing his reading glasses and fleece robe; as at the hospital, the oxygen tube passing beneath his nose gave the only clue to his condition. It had been twenty-five years since he’d restored this room himself, and even now I was moved by its beauty. I let my eyes rest on its Victorian moldings, on its wide silver mirrors and marble mantles and walls the color of seashell. The phone rang. It was hospice, calling to ask whether his pain was under control. “It is,” he told them cheerfully. “I may be dead in a few weeks, but I’m not dead yet.” Later he closed his eyes, and eventually I drew my laptop to my knees and started to write. “What are you doing?” he murmured.

  “I’m just typing away.”

  “Oh, that’s nice, keep doing it. I find it very soothing.”

  He fell asleep; every so often I looked up to see the rise and fall of his chest. I was amazed at the calm that spread throughout the night—how different it was from the agony of the previous hours, and yet how different, too, from the ugliness of so much of our earlier lives. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a kind of happiness.

  The following morning I left for New York, where I had decided to remain a student; when I returned to Boston three days later, I found a man significantly changed. He looked at me from across the room, gave a distant wave, and scuttled to the kitchen. “How are you?” I called. “Yes, yes,” he said, and lit a cigarette. I followed him and he patted me on the head; his eyes were distant, and as he moved I noticed his curious new gait—a cross between a limp and a strut. He muttered to himself as he smoked. My mother had warned me that he was worse, that he was in pain and taking more medication than ever before, but I hadn’t understood what that meant.

  Looking after him then was exhausting. He darted through the house, crowing and babbling in response to imaginary voices; he stopped only when he became transfixed by the faces he saw in the folds of fabric. Then he would call me over and point them out, and the odd thing was that after a while I could see them too—enclosed in the creases of couch cushions were the long, thin visages of old men with drooping eyes and elongated chins. His pleasure when I finally did see the faces he saw was childlike and disarming.

  Putting him to sleep was most difficult. It took hours to convince him to go to bed and just as I was looping the oxygen tube over his head and covering him with the blanket, he would decide he needed a cup of coffee or a final cigarette. Then he threw off the covers and hobbled downstairs; by the time he reached the kitchen, he had forgotten why he was there and we would have to prepare for bed all over again. This happened three or four times a night.

  For the first time, it felt as if we were waiting for him to die.

  We had been waiting all along, of course, but now he was no longer well enough to be conscious of waiting himself. Most of my attention went to caring for him, but I also spent a great deal of time willing myself to remember what he had been like just three days earlier. It was remarkable to me that this present self could occlude the selves that came before, and I was frightened death would do the same.

  Time passed. His moments of agony became more and more frequent, and more and more severe, and one day hospice admitted his case was beyond their capabilities; he needed to return to the hospital, they said, to be treated by doctors who could monitor and respond to his pain full-time. So, less than three weeks after that lazy December morning on which my father stood for a second cup of coffee and stumbled from shortness of breath, we returned one last time to the hospital with this man too sick to die at home.

  6

  In the pages that follow Mrs. Ramsay’s death, it appears as if the spirit of the Scottish home will continue to endure without her. “Loveliness and stillness” rule within the house itself, and even the potency of nature is unable to dethrone them: “the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions—‘Will you fade? Will you perish?’—scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity.” Yes, the shawl will soon begin unraveling, and a floorboard comes untethered on the landing, but such threats cannot match the pluck of loveliness, or the fury of Mrs. McNab, the Ramsays’ indomitable housekeeper.

  Here, then, is a manageable view of death, one that suggests it need not hack away at our foundations and even endows it with some poetry, as if there were something romantic, something pure even, about the void left behind by the people we love. And so it was that, still reading in my grandmother’s study, still grieving Mrs. Ramsay, I began to actually take solace in time’s passage, in the progress it enables, as spring returns to the Hebrides, laying a veil of green upon its fields, and Prue Ramsay is married in another parenthetical aside, taking her father’s arm as they walk down the aisle. It’s against this setting—“how beautiful she looked!”—that we join the solitary sleepers as they venture once more to the shore, where summer approaches, the evenings grow longer (in June it’s nearly ten before the last light leaves the basin, making it feel as if we have all the time in the world), and it becomes “impossible to resist the strange intimation…that good triumphs, happiness prevails, order rules.” It’s difficult to believe in death for more than a few minutes at a time.

  But Woolf’s ruse in “Time Passes” is to again and again give the lie to our complacency, just as life itself, that pouncing beast, always gives the lie to our complacency. In yet another parenthetical aside, we are reminded—how could we forget so soon?—that nothing is steadfast, neither good nor happiness nor order: “[Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said, everything, they said, had promised so well.]” The indifference of the announcement is horrifyingly familiar, as is the anguish it awakens (though less so the banality that replaces the peculiar, suggestive language that heralded Mrs. Ramsay’s end—the brackets I kept scouring for the warmth and wit of “The Window” tell us nothing of the true cost of death). Then, on the following page, twenty or thirty young men are blown up by an exploding shell in France, “among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.” Prue who left one breathless with her beauty; Andrew with his extraordinary gift for mathematics—just gone. I felt tempted, first reading of that blasted shell, to fault Woolf for excess, for trampling the bounds of plausibility. But then I remembered: this happened to her.

  (Oh, and that loveliness that once went hand in hand with stillness? It will fade and perish too. The Ramsays’ home, forsaken now, is as vulnerable as the family it once sheltered.)

  * * *

  MY FATHER’S NEW hospital room was large and often bright. There was a window that looked across the river to Cambridge, and as the days passed I watched this river freeze from above, waxen ice spreading over its surface. Then the river was white, covered in a thin layer of snow, but inside the room it was seventy-six degrees, sunlight spilled across the floor, and my mother’s narcissus bulbs burst and her tulips unfurled. Erika had laughed about the way this wing of the hospital looked like a hotel, and perhaps too much was made of this, for later, once my father had started to hallucinate, his most constant preoccupation was of persecution by a hotel staff. But Erika was right: as I looked around me at the turquoise lamps with their ruffled white shades, at the imitation Sargent hanging on the wall, at the faux-mahogany side tables and gray-blue foldout couch, it was hard not to imagine a Holiday Inn. As I had thought while transforming the study to a bedroom weeks before, How strange that this is where my father will die.

  When he wore the nasal cannula that loope
d over his ears and under his nose, delivering six liters of oxygen per minute, his O2 saturation hovered at around 91 percent; when he didn’t, it fell to 73 or 74. There were pills, of course: on an average day, he took 300 mg of Colace, 10 mg of Dulcolax, 17 g of MiraLAX, 20 mg of Celexa, 200 mg of Provigil, 15 mg of oxazepam, 75 mg of methadone, 10 mg of Decadron, 300 mg of Neurontin, 40 mg of Nexium, 30 mg of Compazine, and six tabs of senna; one 21 mg nicotine patch was affixed to his upper arm. These medications were intended to treat constipation, depression, anxiety, lethargy, insomnia, pain, bone pain, nerve pain, breakthrough pain, stomach acid, nausea, and nicotine withdrawal. At any given hour he was visited by an oncologist, a pain specialist, a team from palliative care, a doctor from the floor, a nurse from the floor, a chaplain, a social worker, a case manager, a nursing assistant, or Ham, the beaming Nigerian who bathed and shaved him.

  And yet these placatory measures—the oxygen, the medicine, and the host of parishioning specialists—were largely invisible to the onlooker. Unlike my father’s ICU bedside, which had four months before been a jungle of machinery, all beeping and flashing, this, his deathbed bedside, was vacant. A new bag of gleaming saline sat off to one side; the monitor that would once have displayed his vital signs was dark. He wore pajamas from home rather than the standard-issue paisley-print hospital gowns, and the sleeves of these pajamas slid easily down his bare forearms, unimpeded by plastic tubing or butterfly needles. Of course they did, for chemotherapy had failed. The goal had changed.

  The day my father arrived, he was given an opiate nine times stronger than morphine through an intravenous drip; within hours he was no longer lucid, and within days he was hallucinating. I liked the hospital less then—realized quickly that my previous attraction to it had been inextricably bound up in the belief my father would get well there—but I still found comfort in its repetitions: in the steady stream of doctors, in the hot meals delivered to the room, in the young blond nurses with pretty names like Ashleigh and Isabelle, and in the act of pushing again and again through the lobby’s revolving doors and ascending twenty stories to a high-shine, fake-wood-clad wing that offered sweeping, frozen river views.

  Sometimes my father saw planes exploding through the walls and sometimes he held animated conversations with friends he hadn’t seen in years. Sometimes he cowered before the nurses who tried to boost him up in bed. “Please don’t leave me, Katharine,” he begged then. He was in pain—he often clutched at his left shoulder, where a large tumor was encroaching on his spinal cord—and gradually, inexplicably, his left hand swelled so much that his fingers lost all definition and became cartoonish. He hadn’t eaten in over a week. He hadn’t had a bowel movement in over a week. Every morning he threw up yellow, sour-smelling bile; it spilled out in a rush and splashed against the sides of the pink plastic bowl we kept near the bed. Every few minutes he coughed up a lump of bloody mucus and slowly, methodically, folded it into a tissue and placed it on the table beside him. The tidiness of the gesture was his own—he folded the newspaper the same way.

  There was little sense of urgency. Days passed quickly and unproductively; I spent my time holding cups of water to his lips, talking to nurses, or climbing into the hospital bed and lying by his side. Sometimes, when I put my head on his chest, he would, even though he was barely conscious, raise his hand and stroke my hair as he had done when I was a child. At other times he grew exasperated and elbowed me out of the bed. “It’s not a bloody car park!” he exclaimed, and I laughed out loud. His mood was generally amiable and confused. He winked at me often, as if to suggest this was an inside joke we shared, and asked frequent questions, nodding his head in agreement at answers he did not understand. “I want to go home,” he said, again and again. “We’re here because they can monitor your pain better than we can at home,” I said, again and again. “So we’re better off here?” “Yes.” “Okay then.” A few minutes later: “Are we going home?” “No, we’re staying here.” Nodding, “Okay, that’s fine.” And again: “That’s it—let’s go home. Let’s go home.” “We can’t go home.” “Tomorrow? We can sail all day tomorrow?” “Yes, we can sail all day tomorrow.” And then again: “I don’t know if we’re going to London or Paris tonight.” “Not tonight.” “We’re going home instead, are we?” “No, it’s the middle of the night.” Nodding, “Oh, okay. But I’m never doing this again. Never ever.” And the next day: “I’m getting fed up with this place.” “Well, at home you were in so much pain, and here you’re better.” “I’ll say.” “But perhaps you can go home in a few days,” I said. “And then I won’t be ill,” my father said. “Right,” I said, holding back sudden tears. “And then you won’t be ill.”

  One afternoon the doctors called my mother and me at home and advised us to return as soon as possible. His breathing had slowed, they said. He was dying very quickly now. We were at his bedside in thirty minutes; his eyes were open but unseeing, and his breath, warm and sweet, smelled like burnt caramel. His chest moved up and down more slowly than it had before: he would inhale, raggedly, then hold it, waiting full minutes before exhaling. Sometimes he held his breath for so long that I forced myself to believe that it was time. Then his chest would fall again, and I would relax. I was aware of a feeling of wanting it to happen, and when I felt this I would chide myself. Stupid, stupid, I said. Don’t you understand that this—this sitting here—is all you have left? At one point I whispered in his ear that he was brave, and to this he said, “Rubbish.” I worried until he spoke again that it would be his last word. To my mother he said, “Sorry, love”—said it as plainly and easily as he had when he was well—and with it she began to glow. “Did you hear that?” she asked.

  At midnight he requested a pencil and a piece of paper. The pencil kept slipping from his hand, but eventually he grasped it and began to sketch, rapidly, as though he had something of utmost importance to chronicle. He drew a grid-like pattern that looked at first like a tic-tac-toe board and next like a ladder. Every so often he stopped and stared upward, searchingly, before returning to the page. He added a rectangle, a circle, another rectangle, and finally a wide U-shape across the entire design, and as he drew he continued to look upward at something neither my mother nor I could see. I began to feel nervous. Then my mother thought to follow his gaze, and when she did she exclaimed, “Look, he’s drawing the ceiling!” I turned my face up, and immediately recognized the white acoustic tiles, the rectangular air-conditioning vents, the round light fixtures and U-shaped metal rack from which hung the bed curtain. He looked at us, when my mother said this, and rolled his eyes. Obviously, he seemed to say.

  He continued for nearly an hour; he wrote the words “glass or plastic?” along the top, next to an arrow pointing at the lights. When he finally grew tired and dropped the pencil in his lap, my mother quickly took the pad and put it in her bag. I could tell it pleased her to think that the person he had once been—an architect—was still somewhere inside. It pleased me too, even as I sensed we were applying rules of sanity to madness: that my father was sketching the ceiling, as opposed to some dreamscape, did not make his performance any less alien. In time I began to scrawl every phrase he uttered, no matter how nonsensical, into the pages of the book I was reading. “This hospital, they control the clamshell,” he said, and “Let’s have a beer!” and to an imaginary friend in the corner, “I’m sorry, Jack, I’m a bit…” I thought he would never speak to us as himself again, and grasping at fragments and hallucinations seemed the only way to glimpse the contents of his mind.

  We slept at the hospital that night—my mother on the couch and I beside him in the bed—and again the following night; over twenty-four hours had passed since the doctors had said he would die in minutes. Sitting in that room came to feel like traveling across an enormous ocean in an airplane. The air was hot and dry; the bottled oxygen hissed loudly in our ears. The intercom blared, its words coated in static, and fluorescent light from the hall crept beneath the d
oor, preventing the room from ever becoming fully dark. It gets to the point, my mother said, where one feels one has never done anything else, and will never do anything else again. Against this arid backdrop were the images, crowding and repeating: light dappling the green and lilac of our porcelain vine; my father pickling lemons in oil and salt. Draped across his shoulders, my cat; and the deep red of the sail cover against the sky. The impressions were so remote, their scope so narrow, and I wondered whether remembering would be easier when I was no longer faced with his body on the bed before me. I looked forward to when I could gather every last piece of him into a pile: photographs, letters, scraps of paper. I was convinced that the hoarding of these artifacts would be almost as good as having him back.

  On the second night I woke to the sound of his breathing. He had asked us not to draw the curtains, and the lights across the river floated up and in, bathing the bed and the floor in a pale, watery glow. My mother was asleep, her face to the wall, but my father was awake and staring out the window. I sat on the edge of the bed; he did not look at me, but past me, and his breathing was even slower than before. A breath and a silence. A breath and a silence. He jerked his head toward the door, then back toward to the window; he saw me, and, recognizing me, gave a quick, troubled smile. He seemed frightened, and I became frightened myself, sitting with him, waiting, beneath the bluish light. An hour passed, maybe two hours, until, suddenly—he had been searching for something out the window—he sat upright in bed, clutched at my hand, and stared straight at me with wide open eyes. “We’re floating!” he shouted. “Grab the line! We’re floating free!” His voice was full of horror. He pulled at my arm, begging me to understand, and I was shocked by his strength. “We’re floating free,” he shouted again. “For god’s sake, Katharine, you and I are finished!” I tried to speak, but he stopped me. “No, listen to me,” he cried. “We’ve broken away from the pylons and we’re floating free. We’re finished, you and I. We’re finished!”