The Truth About Death

by Robert Hellenga

  But half an hour later she returned, and she didn’t bring good news. She couldn’t do the ultrasound, she said, because there was a tumor in the way. It was probably spleen cancer. Probably not life threatening. “I take out a dozen spleens a month,” she said. Did I want to go ahead with a biopsy, which would confirm the diagnosis? Of course I did.

  In another half an hour she came back with more bad news. Liver cancer. Nothing to be done.

  I wanted to call Simon. I didn’t want to face this alone. I called Jack in New York. He wasn’t home of course, but I talked to Sally, and she stayed on the phone with me and asked a lot of questions: Can they do X? Can they do Y? I let her talk to the doctor. They couldn’t do X or Y. The doctor held me while I cried. Olive had about three months to live.

  That evening on the way back from our walk, Olive stumbled again on the stairs. Just a little stumble, as if she’d misjudged a step. It was hard to be sure, but I was sure, and it broke my heart. That night I talked to her, and we made a list of all the things we were going to do in the next couple of months. I hadn’t been planning on going to Lake Michigan again, but I changed my mind. I looked into her eyes, and she looked into mine. I thought she was trying to explain to me why things were the way they were, how they were all tied together.

  I put my face in her thick ruff and then kept my hand on her head while I made arrangements with Mrs. Burian about a four-day weekend at the cottage. There was electric baseboard heating, and a fireplace too, which we’d never used. I didn’t think Olive would be able to walk down the sixty narrow steps to the beach, but there was another easier way down to the beach from the state park—the one the paramedics had used after Simon’s heart attack.

  That was on a Monday. On Thursday, coming back from the park by the depot, she stumbled badly, but made it up the stairs. She ate her supper. Half an hour later she threw it up. I cleaned it up and sat with her in the living room.

  At about nine o’clock she got up to go to bed. Walking down the hall, she had a seizure. Frothing. Flailing around. Banging into the walls, then falling down. I called Dr. King at home. He said to meet him at the clinic right away. Olive was able to walk. I took her down in the elevator. Gilbert went with me. But then she had another seizure in the garage. When it was over we managed to get her up into the back of my Mazda hatchback.

  Dr. King and his assistant were waiting for us at the animal hospital on Fremont Street. He said that the medication to control the seizures would feed right into the tumor and kill her. We decided to put her down. I kept my hands on her head while Doctor King injected a tranquilizer into her shoulder, and then—after few minutes—three cc of ketamine. She kept her eyes open for a bit, but she didn’t look at me. She was looking past me. Then the eyes closed. The life flowed out of her, into my hands and into my body and then into the air. Olive was dead. And that was about as close to the truth about death as I ever got. Not something you can tell anyone. You have to experience it.

  This is what Olive was trying to tell me. Maybe. None of the “meanings” we assign to Death—like the meanings we assign to life, to poetry, to great art, to music—can define the experience itself.

  As I said before, I’ve never rejected the conventional wisdom about grief, but Olive’s death pushed me to the limit, brought me to my knees, not to pray, but because I couldn’t stand up. Maybe it’s that we can’t explain death to a dog. Not that we can ever “explain” death. Not any more than we can explain beauty or love or sorrow. But at least we can talk it over, the way Simon and I did. You can—I don’t know what you can do.

  I didn’t call anyone that night. I knew I wouldn’t be able to talk. But I sat in the tower. I was lonely, homesick. I was waiting for something to happen. I didn’t know what it was. I was still waiting when I drifted off to sleep in Simon’s big chair-and-a-half. When I woke up in the middle of the night, I reached down for Olive, but she wasn’t there.

  The Omani rug in our bedroom started to smell. It had taken a while for the ammonia in Olive’s diluted urine to activate the odor-causing bacteria in the rug itself. I took the rug to have it professionally cleaned. A big job. Gilbert helped me carry it down the stairs. Afterward it still smelled. I took it back and had it professionally cleaned a second time. This time the carpet-cleaning company added a special formula. It was okay for a few days, but then the smell came back. I complained and got a refund of twenty-five dollars in the mail and a note saying not to bring the rug in again. Then one day on Simmons Street I passed a parked truck with a sign that said PROFESSIONAL RUG CLEANING and a Chicago address—more promises. It was parked in front of the radio station. Someone in the station said the rug guy was across the street in the Weinberg Arcade. I found him there. He turned out to be a former student. His business was in Chicago, but he did a lot of work in Galesburg. He thought he might be able to help, but I’d have to bring the rug to the Weinberg Arcade. I got Gilbert to help me again. We got the rug into the removal van. The rug guy cleaned it on the floor in the hallway. He gave it a special treatment with an impressive machine like a steam roller. We took it home and left it in the garage over an old bedstead. It was a lot better. But it still smelled, and I didn’t want it in the bedroom. I liked it where it was, in fact. Every time I go out I take a sniff. I can still smell Olive, and her smell still makes me tear up a little. I have to be careful, but I’m glad for this remembrance.

  What I understand now is that Olive gave a shape to all our days. First thing in the morning—walking her to the park, throwing the ball to her, fixing her breakfast, brushing her teeth, and so on, all through the day. What a good dog she was. The hardest thing was that I couldn’t talk things over with her, and she couldn’t talk things over with me. I tried to imagine what she’d say if she could write us a letter, and she did write a letter. I could read it as clearly as if it had come in the mail:

  Elizabeth, you and Simon were so good to me. You loved me from the beginning, after I’d spent a whole year at the shelter. You gave me a good home. Always kept my water bowl filled. I could have eaten more food, but I suppose you didn’t want me to get fat. I loved going to the park three times a day and chasing the Frisbee. I always stayed put for you till you said “Okay” because I knew you meant it when you said “Stay.” I tried to be a good hostess when you had dinner parties or when people gathered downstairs. I barked at the first guests, because I thought that was my job, but after more people started coming I just walked around to greet them. I liked wearing my uniform during the visitations. I liked circulating and making everyone feel at home. But the best thing of all was the time we went up to the lake, just the three of us. I loved playing with the other dogs, and I loved the lake. I loved swimming out after the Frisbee. I’m just sorry we never got to go back.

  Remember when Simon threw the Frisbee way, way out in the water and I swam right past it, and you started screaming and yelling at him because you were afraid I’d keep on going? But I knew I had to get the Frisbee. After a while my back legs started to cramp. And then the fog cleared a little bit; a bit of sun came through, and I could tell I was going in the wrong direction, heading out farther and farther into deep water. But then I could hear voices calling my name. “Olive. Olive. Olive.” I could hear a siren too. My legs were on fire. My back was hurting. My bottom half was sinking. I had to work harder with my front legs. I didn’t know how long I’d been in the water. But I wasn’t afraid. I was pretty sure I could turn around and get the Frisbee and swim back to shore. And I did. But this time I won’t be turning back. I’m not afraid, and I don’t want you to be afraid. This is just the way things are, and it’s okay.

  PART III: ME (ELIZABETH)

  Marginalia, which was published six months after Olive’s death, was an unexpected success, relatively speaking, of course, and within a year I was enjoying the kind of success every academic hopes for at the end of a long career. The book—350 pages of text and over a thousand images—had generated strong reviews in all the major art-histor
y journals, including the Oxford Art Journal, The Burlington Magazine, and Studies in Iconography; it had stirred up a lot of controversy by placing the sciapods and the grylli and the potbellied heads and all their exuberant obscenities—pissing, shitting, farting, puking, coupling—at the center of the great medieval project rather than at the periphery. It had put me on the map: I’d been invited to chair a session at the CAA Conference in Chicago and to give a talk at the Morgan Library on medieval marginalia as the first cartoons and to discuss with Cyrus Walker, one of the curators of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, the possibility of curating an exhibit. And, unfortunately, I’d been named chair of the art department because (a) it was my turn and (b) no one else wanted to do it.

  So by the time Checco and Enzo came from Rome for the Stearman Fly-In, in September, I had a lot on my plate. I wanted to see Checco again, of course, but Checco had married the woman who ran the mask shop, Maddelena, and they had a son, Giorgio, who was three years old now. I was unnerved by the prospect of embracing someone who, in an alternate universe, might have been my son-in-law and whose son might have been my grandson. If only Hildi had crossed the Tiber on Ponte Palatino instead of Ponte Garibaldi …

  We embraced nonetheless by the Lincoln statue in front of the train station. They’d flown to O’Hare, spent the night at the Congress, near Union Station, and taken the Carl Sandburg to Galesburg. The Fly-In didn’t officially begin till the next day, but the sky was already full of blue and yellow biplanes, and we watched a four-ship squadron flying in formation—the planes peeling off one at a time, breaking and rejoining—before loading the suitcases into the back of the little yellow Mazda, which I was still driving.

  Enzo rented a car at the station and he and Checco spent most of their time out at the airport. They hitched airplane rides to Kewanee—Hog Capital of the World—for the annual Fly-In Breakfast; they flew back and admired the planes (over a hundred of them) in the little airport in Galesburg; they drank coffee and swapped stories in the pilots’ tent; they partied at night.

  I joined them at the airport on the second afternoon, and Checco persuaded a local Stearman owner—George Young, who serviced the funeral home vehicles, including the Mazda—to let Checco take me up for a quick flight. I wasn’t keen to go, but Checco was very persuasive and I couldn’t figure out how to say no. Fifteen minutes after I said yes I was strapped into the rear cockpit of a Boeing Stearman E75—powder blue with bright yellow wings—and then we were describing a big sky circle around Galesburg: the Sandburg Mall, St. Mary’s Hospital, the old Maytag plant, Oldfield and Daughter, Seminary Street, Knox College, Hope Cemetery. Checco talked to me through the headsets, which were incorporated into our leather helmets, explaining everything he was doing—leveling the wings, throttling down to minimum speed, putting the plane in a sideslip by putting the control stick to one side and kicking the opposite rudder, adding power when we were too low. (There were no loops or rolls, thank goodness.) When we flew over the cemetery where Hildi’s ashes were buried next to Simon’s, he told me that on their first flight together he and Hildi had flown over the ancient Necropoli di Porto on the Isola Sacra near the airport in Rome, an artificial island created by Emperor Trajan—a cemetery I had once visited with a group of students, a cemetery where you can trace the shift from pagan cremation to Christian burial, just as you can now trace a shift in the opposite direction in the cemetery below us.

  * * *

  We would have to talk about Hildi—I saw that—and that afternoon after the Accuracy Landing Contest and the Four-Ship Formation Competition, Checco and I drove back into town and walked around the Knox campus. We took a peek at my office in the Fine Arts Center, stopped at Cottage Hospital so Checco could see an American hospital, went back home, and took a bottle of wine up to Simon’s tower. Checco had brought another mask of Hildi, made from the original mold. When he took the protective Bubble Wrap off, Hildi’s face emerged from a red-gold autumn leaf on a long stem. “You don’t wear it,” Checco explained. “The stem is a handle. You hold the mask in front of your face.” He held it in front of his face, and there was Hildi looking back at me.

  “I’m going to put it up right away,” I said. I took down Matisse’s Danse (II) and put up the leaf—which had a hook on the back—on the west wall, below a still life by Chardin and Giovanni di Paolo’s Five Angels Dancing Before the Sun. It was almost six o’clock. The sun itself, which had moved to the south, was pouring in the windows, and I had to shade my eyes to look closely at the leaf. I couldn’t tell if it was an oak or a maple. The lower lobes dropped down over the stem like a maple, but the top was pointed like the leaves on the red oak in our front yard, though it had too many lobes for a red oak.

  “Non è una vera e propria foglia,” Checco said. It’s not a real leaf. “Maddalena crea le foglie d’autunno nella sua immaginazione.”

  Checco and I had been speaking in English ever since he arrived, but up in the tower we started speaking Italian. Were there things we wanted to say in Italian that we couldn’t say in English? I remembered Checco weeping in the camera ardente in Rome, standing next to Simon in front of Hildi’s cardboard cremation coffin, his face in his hands; I remembered his sister’s Seeing Eye dog trying to comfort him. And I think Checco was a little embarrassed to reveal that now, in spite of his grief, he was happy—that he and Maddelena had been living together for three years and had finally gotten married and that their son, Giorgio, had already been up in the plane with him three times despite Maddelena’s objections. And maybe I was a little embarrassed to admit that I was happy too. Not as happy as I’d been when I first married Simon; not as happy as I’d been when Jack and Hildi were young and our family was all together and I hadn’t even been aware that I was happy; not as happy as I’d been when Jack and Sally got married or when Hildi and Nana came back from Rome the first time; not as happy as I’d been when I signed the contract for Marginalia. But happy enough. And maybe it was easier for both of us to share our thoughts about happiness in Italian.

  “Enzo said he won’t be home till late,” I said. “We could go out, or I could fix some pasta here.”

  “Let’s stay here,” he said. “But why don’t you fix an American dinner?”

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll go to Hy-Vee. I think they still have some local sweet corn.”

  “Corn?” he said. “Mais? Granturco? You mean like we feed to pigs in Italy?”

  “That’s more or less what I mean,” I said. “We’ll open a bottle of California wine and cook some big hamburgers on the grill and have some granturco on the cob.”

  “And maybe an insalata too,” he said. “With tomatoes from your garden.”

  And that’s what we did, and then we looked through Marginalia and talked about the past and about the future while we waited for Enzo to come home.

  * * *

  Museum time moves slowly. I pitched the exhibit at the December meeting of the director and the curatorial staff at the Morgan Library and spent Christmas with Jack and Sally. The exhibit—“Medieval Marginalia”—was green-lighted by the planning committee the following June, and I flew to New York in July to meet with the new director and with Cyrus Walker, who would be overseeing the exhibit, and to help Jack and Sally celebrate their fourteenth wedding anniversary. I couldn’t have been more excited about what was the culmination of my life’s work as an academic, but I had another agenda too, which I kept to myself: I wanted to show some of my cartoons to Bob Mankoff at The New Yorker. I told myself I would be carrying out Simon’s dying wish. And I would be.

  I’d called Mankoff as soon as I’d known I was coming to New York. I hadn’t been able to find his number—or any number—on the New Yorker website, but I was able to get it from my editor at Princeton. I talked to Mankoff’s assistant, Colin, and told him I was going to be curating an exhibit at the Morgan Library and wanted to talk to Bob Mankoff about medieval marginalia as the first cartoons. He said he’d tell Mankoff. Five minutes later I got a
call: I outlined my plan for the exhibit at the Morgan, and I offered to send him a copy of the talk I’d given there in October, and he was interested. We set up an appointment.

  I could have taken the cartoons to the “open call” on Tuesday, when anyone can bring in his or her cartoons, but I thought I’d have a better chance if I had a private audience, like a private audience with the pope. I wasn’t sure how I’d introduce the subject of my cartoons. I’d just have to see how it played out. Maybe I could just say, “By the way, take a look at these.” I was confident that he’d take one look at my batch of cartoons and bless them on the spot.

  I arrived in New York on Monday night, spent Tuesday and Wednesday with Cyrus at the Morgan, laying out a four-year timeline for mounting the exhibit and going over what we’d need to borrow, if anything, from the Met—limiting ourselves to items that Morgan himself had donated to the Met. At breakfast on Thursday Jack and Sally were annoyed at a cartoon in the latest New Yorker: a couple lying in bed on their backs, staring up at the ceiling. “Hey,” the woman says. “You’re the one who wanted a three-way.”

  Jack and Sally couldn’t get it. They passed the magazine back and forth.

  “What’s that thing on her glasses?” Jack asked. “Take a look.” He passed the open magazine back to Sally.

  “Maybe she’s wearing Google Glasses,” Sally said. She handed it to me.

  “I’m not sure what Google Glasses are,” I said.

  “It’s like a little computer screen attached to your glasses.”

  “I’ve got to run,” I said. “Let me take it with me so I’ll have something to read on the train.”

  “It just got here,” Sally said.

  “I’ll bring it back—don’t worry.” I told Jack and Sally I was going back to the Morgan, but I took the C train downtown toward Forty-Second Street.