by Debi Goodwin
But it was his face that struck me most when I sat down beside him. It had yellowed, to be sure, but there was not a single wrinkle on it. In the past months, as he’d lost weight, the heavy wrinkles of a man much older than he was had formed around his eyes and mouth. To say he finally looked at peace is a cliché, but it was a true one.
I wasn’t aware of his breathing, but when I sat beside him and held his hand, it was warm. For years, on winter nights before cancer made his body colder than mine, I would sneak my frigid feet over to his side of the bed and warm them against his calves. He would shiver in mock horror but never protest. Now I stroked his warm hand and drew strength from it. Even though I am not a religious person, I knew that, if there are souls, Peter had an old one, one that had become wise and had known much.
I sat there on automatic, trying to do what I thought I had to do without feeling anything. I spoke to Peter and told him I had to let him go, that I loved him but he should go peacefully. He was unconscious, near death, but I said the words aloud anyway. In case he could hear; in case they were words he had to hear.
At some point, perhaps about twenty minutes later, the nurse came into the room. “Is he dead?” I asked. I hadn’t noticed an end to his breathing. And his hand was still warm.
“About five minutes ago,” she said. She stopped the drip of hydromorphone and left the room again. Was his soul leaving his body? Was there a presence in the room? I said goodbye, told him it was all right, again just in case. I had been with both my parents when they’d died and had said similar words. Those words had brought me some relief then, had made some sense to me. My parents had been elderly, had gone to church, lived full lives, and I felt I was supporting them through a necessary passage. I wanted to give Peter the same support, but in my heart, I felt cold, false. I’d been cheated. He’d been cheated. We’d both been cheated. Death had come too early and too suddenly. We hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye. But I wouldn’t let the anger overwhelm me. I had to keep doing what I was supposed to do when a loved one dies.
I called Jane to let her know that Peter was dead. I assumed by then she’d be in the cocoon of a car with her cousin moving forward on a highway. But she was still waiting on a street corner for her ride, standing in the rain. Had so little time really passed?
The nurse came back into the room. I asked if she could close Peter’s mouth before Jane saw him. The nurse was young and said she didn’t think so, and I quickly said not to bother. I couldn’t stand the thought of any more of Peter being broken.
“Where do you want the body to go?” she asked. The body, the body. But, of course, that was what stretched out before me now, just a shell of the man I love.
“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought of it.”
I got up and went to speak to my town friends, A and H, who had arrived at the hospital. I told them Peter had died. They hugged me but there was no comforting me then. “Can you do something practical for me?” I asked. “Find me a funeral home where I can send Peter’s body. I don’t want him left in the morgue overnight.”
Before Jane arrived, A had an answer for me; a local funeral home would transport the body there and meet with me the next morning. I walked in and out of the room where Peter lay. I made calls to family and friends, talking while I stared at his unlined face. If I couldn’t have his voice in the room, I needed to fill it with mine. Anything but the deadly silence. Again, I wondered if he heard me speak. Again, I wondered how I managed to say the words Peter has died so calmly when they were the harshest words in the world.
When the nurse told me Jane had arrived, I walked down the narrow corridor, which seemed longer and narrower than it had before, as if it were closing in on me. Jane and I held each other tight in the waiting room, not speaking for moments, oblivious to the people waiting in chairs around us for whatever emergency had brought them there that night.
I explained to Jane how Peter looked. “Are you sure you want to see him that way?”
“Yes.” She was tougher than I thought, determined to look at the man who had been an inspirational father to her, one who had fostered her love of reading and writing, kindled her imagination. We went back to the room and looked at Peter as if we were both trying to store one more image of him. But she didn’t cry. She was in the same movie as I was.
I wanted to believe that some essence of Peter was still in the room, that he could see that Jane had come to say goodbye. He had loved her so, had wanted to be the best parent he could. One night in his first year with us, he had made her sit at the table and finish the broccoli that was growing cold on her plate. As she sat there determined not to eat the broccoli, he realized he didn’t want to be the kind of authoritarian father he’d known. Later, when we all moved in together, he’d taken a parenting course offered at the school to make sure he did the job right. He had, and Jane knew it and loved him for it.
Jane and I lingered in the hospital, waiting for the death certificate to be signed by the doctor so the funeral home could come. It was only when staff told me the process would take a lot longer and that Peter would have to go to the morgue anyway until transportation came that Jane and I decided it was time to go home.
We left with A and H and walked to the parking lot in the dark, and in the rain that had started when I’d been in the closed world of the emergency wing. I don’t remember moving my body, taking the steps to reach the car, but Jane says I muttered the word Jesus as if the shock slipped off me for a moment and I saw the horror of what had happened and what lay ahead. When we got back to the house, I didn’t want Jane and me to go in alone. My friends came in and helped me move the furniture pushed aside by the paramedics back in place. Then we sat on the deck drinking wine and Scotch. I drank from a bottle of Scotch Peter had given me. He loved to tell the story of how I came to favour the spirit. I had been writing a scene one Saturday morning in which a man was enjoying his last Scotch before going to prison, but I didn’t know what Scotch tasted like. I’d found a small bottle in our liquor collection and tasted it. Tasted it and liked it. Since then Peter had spoiled me with bottles of the finest single-malt Scotch, which I often drank while he enjoyed a grappa. We had done that the evening before on the deck to mark one month of marriage.
The four of us sat now under the canopy that sheltered the deck while a soft rain fell. The solar lights cast their small beams of light, refusing to reveal much more than the contours of the garden. The trees at the back were black skeletons in the waxing moon. Under the earth, vegetable roots were silently spreading; above ground, tomatoes and red peppers were turning minerals and water into growth. I didn’t know if I could ever look at that garden again, ever forgive it for going on after Peter’s heart had stopped.
Chapter Fourteen
IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED Peter’s death, it was not just the garden that I couldn’t forgive. I hated every nuance of change that took me farther from Peter. I hated that I kept eating meals he wasn’t there for, hated that I had conversations I couldn’t tell him about, hated that there was news in the world he wouldn’t hear. I hated the ads on Netflix that told me the new season of Longmire, a program he’d been waiting for, would start soon. Without him as a viewer. Without him in his chair and me trying not to fall asleep on the couch in the great room. I hated that my hair got dirty and was growing infinitesimally longer by the hour.
It wasn’t just that I wanted time to stop; I wanted it to go back to a moment when I could have changed something, anything that would have kept him alive. Anger was my fuel in those days. Disbelief my functioning mode.
If he couldn’t be with me, I wanted to be dead.
In a state of unawareness, I plucked tomatoes and greens from my Victory Garden, ate them without much attention. Other than collecting its harvest, I paid the garden little heed. Its abundance was a rebuke. Victory now seemed the stupidest of words. I couldn’t bear to think what a fool, what a fucking idiot I’d been to believe I could control anything.
I’
d completely ignored the most basic lessons the garden had been trying to teach me the entire season: things fail, nothing lasts forever.
In those days, Jane found some comfort in what she saw as signs. She tells me it rained the morning after Peter’s death as I sat under our canopy on the deck making more calls. I remember nothing but greyness all around me. She says Peter sent the rain for the garden and that when I stood up to walk inside the house, he stopped the rain. But I was too rational for signs. I knew only that Peter wasn’t there with me, and my head was too full of ratty thoughts to see any signs even if they were there. Regrets and recriminations took up too much room in my brain. Over and over and over and over I relived that last hour of Peter’s life. Why hadn’t I asked him what was going on? Why hadn’t I found out why he didn’t want to lie down on the stretcher? When I wasn’t reliving that hour, I was reliving that day. Had he known he was dying? Had he read something in my writing that had made him give up? Had he waited for me to come home? Oh, why had I gone away for even a few hours? I relived the weeks before his death when he was having acute troubles with his digestive system. Should I have stepped in and forced him to go to the hospital? Could he have suffered some sort of perforation that led to septic shock and his heart failure? I relived his year with cancer. What if doctors had caught it earlier? What if we’d kept the same doctor in Toronto, who knew him so well? What if the surgeon had been certain he’d got all the cancer?
On the surface, I must have sounded and looked stunned, but the people I spoke to on the phone and encountered in person seemed to believe I was coping. When I told a friend I felt empty inside, she seemed surprised. “But you’re handling things so well.”
It was at the funeral home the morning after Peter died that I first sensed how my outward manner bore no resemblance to my shattered, hollow interior. From the moment I walked in the door of the old house that was now divided into rooms for mourners and offices, I knew I wanted to spend as little time as I could there. It was a place of death, after all, and I couldn’t accept that Peter belonged there or could possibly have any connection to its fussy furniture and the finality of its cushioned silence. Yet the young woman Jane and I met seemed to think me capable of making decisions that I didn’t want to make or couldn’t accept needed making. She smiled and spoke in soothing tones, but I didn’t believe she understood what I was going through.
I had steeled myself, though, and was insistent that Peter had requested a cremation and that was all I was looking for. Eleven years earlier, when we’d stood on a ghat on the Ganges River in Varanasi, India, we had watched the smoke from the cremation pyres swirl into the air and we had both agreed it seemed an appropriate way to let a body go, so much so that each of us had put our wishes for cremation in our wills.
Death had been all around us that day by the Ganges. Peter and I had got lost finding our way to that sacred river; we had followed narrow laneway after narrow laneway until we finally came to a wide opening that led to a platform and steps to the river. Touts instantly surrounded us and we knew we had to move one way or another to try to lose them. We agreed to go to the left toward the funeral pyres, since we couldn’t see what lay ahead the other way. It was a fateful decision. If we had turned right, we would have walked into a tea cart that exploded about the time we would have passed it. The explosion killed seven people that day and wounded many more. Even turned away from the explosion, we felt heat and a movement like a shove on our backs before we heard the echoing boom.
It was as though we’d escaped death that day, and I kept a postcard of the ghat on a small bulletin board by our side door in Toronto so that each time I left the house I was reminded that we were alive. Peter had escaped death so many times, survived so many operations and illnesses, that part of me had believed he would never die.
But there I was arranging his cremation as though I were someone else, with my broken self floating above me. In a firm voice, I told the young woman I’d handle the memorial service and the death notice myself. She then outlined the package I’d have to buy to get the cremation, and although she said, with a smile that looked coy to me, that she didn’t want to push anything more on me, she kept suggesting ways the funeral home could help: with the catering, with a guest book, or with the thank-you cards they sold, for example. Then she took Jane and me to the showroom to look at their selection of coffins and urns, even though I’d already told her I wanted the simplest of both. In the showroom, there was a necklace on display and when I asked why there was jewellery there, she said it could be filled with the ashes of a loved one, an idea that was both repugnant and ghoulish to me. I wanted to share that detail with Peter, to have him say how ridiculous it was. I wanted more than anything to hear his laugh. Every oddity, every new bit of information on cremations, every cost, I wanted to tell Peter about. Why were they making me decide all these things when every single decision was another step taking him away from me? I hated that he wasn’t there to make these decisions with me.
As we sat across from the young woman, Jane sensed that I was growing more and more infuriated. As the woman spoke about all the forms and all the official letters they would take care of and those I’d have to handle myself, Jane pulled out a notebook and proceeded to make lists. She wrote so furiously I think she intimidated the woman and I loved her a little more for that.
When it came time to sign the form for the cremation, the woman showed us where we could check a box if we wanted to keep any metal parts from Peter’s body.
“Some people make art from them,” she told us.
We all found that a peculiar thing to do, but I did remember that, when he’d had his orthopedic surgery four years earlier, Peter had wanted to retrieve the silver plate that had held his leg to his pelvis for most of his life. The surgeon hadn’t been able to remove the plate because bone had grown over it, and he had built the new hip around the plate before adding three inches of titanium to Peter’s femur to make his left leg even with the right. Jane recalled that she found some comfort looking at the titanium screw from her paternal grandmother’s hip after she had died and thought she’d like to look at all the parts that had held Peter together and made him straight. If we didn’t check the box, the crematorium would take all the metal and apparently sell it for charity, something Jane thought we could do ourselves after we’d seen it. So, I checked the box.
The next day — I think it was the next day, but it might have been that afternoon — we were called back to the funeral home for a “private viewing.” I’d had to take their simplest package to get the cremation that was all I really wanted. The package included a service of preparing the body for the showing before the cremation. The memory of Peter’s face yellowed and smoothed in the emergency room was the only one I wanted of his body. But Jane and I went into a small room where his body lay in the box; his face, with his jaw now closed, looked otherwise as it had the night of his death. I noticed the summer shirt he’d been wearing was not bunched up around his neck anymore and I pulled down the thin blanket they had covering him. I gasped when I saw they had dressed his body in a hospital gown. How he would have hated that. He hated everything about hospitals and the many times he’d been in them. He once described how just lying on a bed in an examining room staring at the ubiquitous white ceiling tiles brought back memories of counting the holes in each tile in each hospital room he’d been in. I didn’t look at the ceiling in that room and knew, at least, that he wouldn’t either. I was angry at myself that I had not thought to offer fresh clothes, angry at the funeral home for not asking me for some, and I wanted to leave that room as soon as I could. But for the first time I was grateful that Peter couldn’t witness any of this. Such a puny mercy.
Just when I thought I had everything arranged, the woman from the funeral home called on the day Peter was to be cremated to tell us the crematorium didn’t return metal parts anymore. Jane was furious. It was the same woman, after all, who’d offered us the choice of checking off the box
and had put the idea into our heads, and now that she’d discovered the rules had changed and the funeral home’s form was out of date, she acted as though it didn’t matter.
I watched Jane as she angrily phoned the funeral home back, phoned the crematorium, then phoned the funeral home director. Her rage grew with each call as she was stonewalled with the reply that returning the metal parts couldn’t be done anymore. When the receptionist at the crematorium finally told her that no exceptions could be made without the manager and he wouldn’t be back before the scheduled time for the cremation, Jane swore and the receptionist hung up.
“Jane,” I said to her, “you can’t swear at people. You won’t get anything done that way. Sometimes we have to let things go. Maybe you should let this go.” I had no energy for the argument but I recognized that Jane was channelling her anger over Peter’s death onto a series of bureaucrats. A few bureaucrats at utilities and banks had already met my wrath.
She accepted that she shouldn’t have spoken the way she did but wouldn’t accept the outcome. Once again, she took to the phone to call all the same people, this time with a polite voice, and, in the end, got confirmation that any metals that didn’t melt in the fire would be returned to us. We wondered if the silver would melt, but agreed we had to let that question go.
A week or so later, when I picked up the urn of Peter’s ashes, there was a box that I was told contained the metal parts. As the young woman at the funeral home handed them to me, she raised her eyebrows in a complicit way at how insistent Jane had been. I just stared at her. The woman may have been trained in the ways of handling arrangements, but she appeared to have no understanding of what grief can do to a person. After all that, though, the urn of ashes and the box of metal parts remained in a cupboard; we were incapable of making any decisions on what to do with the ashes and had no heart to open the box yet.