by Renee Rodin
The kids, who’ve been crashing on my apartment floor, go back to their respective jobs right after Abe’s eighty-eighth birthday celebration, a small party at Antico Martini where he has his customary large plate of cannelloni. Dahlia and the waiter yak it up in Italian about their first impressions of Montreal—que fredo qua—it was initially colder, temperature-wise and temperamentally, than they’d ever anticipated.
The next day Sandy and I take Abe back to the doctor for something stronger than the strongest Tylenol. Crankstone hastily rips off his pad a prescription for OxyContin (known on the street as “hillbilly heroin”) and within hours Abe, who’s been diamond sharp and upright as a soldier, descends into dementia. He is curled over like a question mark, tries to peel the phone as if it were a banana, dances on rubber legs with the curtains.
He comes out of this hideous high and says, “I’m going cuckoo, I need a psychiatrist, my brain’s going as well as my body.” Once we’ve convinced him it’s the side effects of the medication, he adamantly refuses to take it again saying, “I prefer the physical pain to losing my mind.”
Without the pills he’s shattered, can’t get out of bed at all, but recoils at the mention of a bedpan or diapers. His daughters become Big Nurses, order him, “Swallow your pill.” In one of his brief respites from physical agony and or insanity he says, “This only happens to other people, I never thought it would happen to me. The jig’s up, I know how this story ends. I want you to help me commit suicide.”
Never have we seen our father defeated or else we’ve never recognized it when he was. On the contrary he’s been steadfastly, supremely optimistic with his “we shall overcome” comment to every blow, every setback life has dealt him.
To have anyone admit they want to end their life is intense, but to have our own father appeal to us to help do it, this is horrifying. What is almost as awful is that we can’t muster up strong arguments to persuade him to keep living. His attitude is admirable, his approach lofty.
Once again, after all these years, I want to emulate Abe. Hope I have the courage to do exactly what he wants to do, die on his own terms. Only when it begins to dissolve do I realize how large is the stone I’ve been carrying in my heart about my father.
Sandy and I are on automatic pilot, in crisis mode, our filters gone. Unable to process the ramifications of Abe’s request. We are detached from our bodies. Walking heads. Frantically calm in our determination to act, we discuss various ways to kill our father. After Sandy tells me about a friend who’d had to resort to suffocating her mother with a pillow, I’m off to see Crankstone.
Either because I’ve offended his medical oath to keep people alive at all costs, or had the temerity to suggest he become involved in euthanasia, my request provokes the taciturn Crankstone into screeching, “Your father’s fine, he’s just depressed.” Yo, Einstein! I leave his office tremendously depressed myself.
Not knowing about my visit to Crankstone, Abe says he wants to see Magnus, his family doctor, who’d he’d gone to for the past half century. We assume he wants him to help end his life and to say goodbye.
Magnus returns from examining him, brushes the cigar ashes off his rotund belly and announces dramatically: “Your father can make more babies.” From the little Sandy and I have known about this doctor, he’s always regarded sex as an elixir, it’s been his biggest prescription. Still we’re startled to hear this pronouncement, then grimace to one another to signal our disdain. See him simply as one old man crowing about another. Do we really need to hear about our father’s potency? Even genetically this information is useless to us. As useless as we figure Magnus is by now.
But when he switches Abe’s opiates because “old people don’t do well on OxyContin” and shows us how to do acupressure on him, we’re even more surprised. Magnus has kept far more up-to-date about pain control than the much younger Crankstone.
He’s also kinder, straighter, as he says, “Abe might be better off in a hospital or a hospice, your father may have received his travelling papers.”
Abe had sat in Magnus’ office nodding off like an old junkie. But he’d heard everything we’d been discussing and once the new medicine’s kicked in he makes it clear he doesn’t want to go back to the hospital, wanting to die is no longer mentioned. Maybe Magnus’ statement about his virility gave him incentive to live.
Magnus hooks us up with the CLSC, the community-based health team of doctors, nurses, social workers, etc., run by the provincial government. It’s designed to help the infirm stay at home, charges on a sliding scale; for Abe it’s free.
Simone is the doctor assigned to him. In her forties, petite with snapping eyes and curly hair, she radiates energy, sparks with it. When she enters his bedroom, Abe says, “Turn around please,” reaches for his teeth, which have been smiling in a glass of water on his night table, and slips them in to give her a big wolfy grin. The doctor reads his flirting like his blood pressure and heart rate, as one of his vital signs.
She teaches us how to inject Abe with Dilaudid (synthetic heroin) every twelve hours with spikes in between. Tells us, “His pain might not increase. Some people die of cancer with absolutely no pain.” Gives us her cellphone number, to “call anytime” and says she will call us at least once a day. Simone is the dream doctor, always available.
Abe’s infinitely more comfortable, lucid again, but mostly withdrawn. His portable radio, which he’d listened to faithfully for years, is no longer on, not even for his precious newscasts and weather reports, nor does he want to leave the house.
Joey calls from Toronto and knowing his love of food, she suggests Le Jardin de Chine as a way to lure him out. It takes an hour with lots of stopping to rest on bus benches to walk the four blocks to the restaurant. After he’s had a small bowl of wonton soup, he says: “Okay, I’m ready for Freddy.”
We’ve finished eating too, ask for the bill so we can leave. He waves us down with both hands. “Sit, sit. Do you know what ‘ready for Freddy’ means?”
“Sure, it’s an expression, like ‘even Steven,’ it means you’re ready for something, ready to make a move,” Sandy says.
“Well, that’s part of it. Freddy was the undertaker in a comic I read when I was a kid.” He chuckles a bit, remembering the strip. “I’ve had a great life. Now I’m ready to make a move, I’m ready for Freddy. How about some help?” All this he says with total equanimity.
Sandy and I are even more devastated than the first time he’d mentioned suicide—he’s once again relatively pain free, on good drugs, eating. We’d already geared down several notches, had begun operating on an even keel, without rushes of adrenaline, hoping this phase of Abe’s life would be a slow and gentle decline.
Comparing notes later, Sandy and I confess we had each suppressed an urge to scream at this point, not at Abe—just to let out a long, loud primal scream. Although the smallest, meanest part of me wanted to yell at Abe too, “Stop putting us through this.” Instead we quietly protest that we’re not ready. But we understand why he wants to die. This we respect. He needs to know we’ll help him die with dignity. This we promise. His spirits are visibly lifted.
When Daniel comes again he drives us all to spend the day in Sutton, in the Eastern Townships, to visit a friend who lives in an old brick farmhouse. We bring with us brie and peaches, barbecue chicken, fresh baguettes, red wine and green grapes, for a mid-afternoon meal on the verandah. The surrounding hills are covered with maples tinged with russet, the sky splashed with colour, a Rothko painting.
Dahlia rhapsodizes about the schoolgirl visit she made to Italy, how this scenery reminds her of “la maison de mon oncle dans les alpes Italien.” Abe is so invigorated, he needs only one nap. The day is poignant, bursting with emotion. I’m there and already not there, aching to stay enveloped in this idyllic tableau and at the same time wanting to remove myself, hold on to it by writing about it.
Returning along the ribbon of highway into the city that night, Dahlia begins to talk softly
to herself in the back seat. Abe is once again in pain. We can tell by how rigidly he holds himself. Our day in the country is over.
He spends his mornings and afternoons resting in bed. Sits on his tiny second-floor balcony in the warm evenings to watch the end-of-August sunsets, the patterns the car lights make on the pavement. During these interludes Sandy and I are not sure whether to join him or leave him alone deep in his thoughts. When we do go out and ask how he is, he says, “I’m sad about the fall.”
Being told he can no longer drive because of the pain-killers he’s taking has been a bigger blow to Abe than being told he has cancer. Cancer he was sure he could beat, but he can’t challenge the edict against driving under the influence of drugs.
Abe started driving when he was a kid, with the old Model Ts, when licences didn’t exist, measures his life by what vehicle he had. That he was a cabby meant he could drive a car as much as he wanted and realize his greatest ambition, to work only for himself, never for a boss.
He went from the nickname “Red” when he had rooster-red hair to “The Dean,” the oldest driver around. A couple of years before Expo ’67 he took a course to become an accredited tourist guide for the city, whose beauty he claimed was incomparable. Visitors and Montrealers alike hired him to see the sights, learn more about the history.
One of his regular customers was a blind man who wanted Abe to drive him around describing what he saw …
My father continued as a cabby until his seventies when he sold his permit and worked unofficially driving for friends and neighbours until he was eighty-five. Bought his silver Toyota when he was eighty-six. Since he keeps his cars an average of ten years, it was a testament to his optimism that he’d live a long time yet: “I’m determined to get a chunk of my old age pension, the letter from the Queen when I reach one hundred.”
Now he frets that his new car isn’t being used, it’s equivalent to having his wings clipped. Sandy never learned to drive, so Abe wants me to, though it’s been ages since I’ve driven, and never in Montreal.
When I took a driver’s test years ago in Vancouver, the inspector, clad in white trousers, sat down on several blueberries which had lodged in a crack and somehow began rolling around in the middle of the passenger’s seat. I blithely drove the wrong way on a one-way street.
Had the inspector been vengeful, he could have failed me just for the stains on his pants, never mind my major driving infraction. But he must have realized what it would mean for a young, single mother to have mobility, to be able to drive her kids around in her old jalopy.
In those days I was very distractible. After a series of minor accidents, I quit driving and just kept renewing my licence so I’d never have to take the test again, just in case I ever needed to drive. This went on for a good twenty years.
I ask Daniel to practise drive with me and he says, “Sure, Mom, right after I take a handful of Ativan.” Even without it, he doesn’t shriek when I almost smash into the canary-coloured van a foot from my face. Again I’m distracted. I take one more brush-up lesson with a driving instructor who says, “Everything was okay, except for going through that last stop sign.” “What stop sign?” I ask.
Abe is ecstatic to be out in his car again, even if it means sitting in the passenger seat. We’re going on errands together, picking up Dahlia to go out to Dunkin’ Donuts, its various locations chosen by him as a test for me to negotiate busy intersections.
His only criticism, “It’s dangerous to consider people trying to cross the street. No one expects it here. It’s safer to do the wrong thing. You’re too BC.”
I want to put up a big “New Driver” sign in the window so drivers will stop blasting their horns at me. I’ll write it in French, English and every other language deemed necessary. The Regie informs me it’s against the law because such a sign would cause others to treat me differently and therefore promote discrimination. So I wave, smile, shrug at the jeers, swearing, shaking of fists from drivers furious with my tortoise-like pace, my tenuous turns. Ignore the shocked stares of pedestrians as I slam on brakes for them in the middle of the road. Or watch them flutter with fear out of my path.
Though his energy is waning by the minute and it takes him an hour to get dressed, even with us helping him do up his shirt buttons, fasten his belt, slip on his jacket, tie his shoes, still Abe wants us to go out every day. My parking, more than anything else, leaves a lot to be desired and when Sandy quotes Woody Allen’s “It’s okay, we can get a cab to the curb,” he cracks up.
Within a couple of days he can barely get out of bed but insists we go out to practise four-way stops. When he says “stop” he means “go,” when he says “left” he means “right,” he repeatedly directs me to turn the wrong way onto one-way streets.
Because I can’t make even the most basic decisions we’re sure to crash. Sandy sits in the back seat whispering instructions to me. She is my navigator, our guardian angel.
But we get as lost as my mind. Circle the base of the mountain, tail-gate the car in front of us, think they’ll know the route out. End up at a big sign that says “Cul-de-sac” to discover we’re at the gates of Mount Royal Cemetery. Through the rear-view mirror, we give each other looks of horror, and hope Abe won’t notice where we are.
Everyone tumbles out of the car ahead of us dressed in dark clothing from head to toe and Abe remarks, “Poor people, to have to wear black for a funeral on such a hot day.” Sandy and I are soaked in sweat.
The next day he is no longer able to leave his bed and the nurses put him into diapers. We’ve never seen our father naked before and the first time we have to change him ourselves, we’re terrified of our feelings of shame and transgression. That he too will see us seeing him as an affront to his dignity.
We dread crossing a line we never imagined coming anywhere near, to have to see our father’s penis, this source of us. Try to rationalize—it’s only his “body,” that it’s similar to half of the world’s, that he took care of us in this way and it’s our turn to take care of him. Still we dread. Until Abe instinctively does something to make it bearable. He closes his eyes, acts oblivious to what’s happening. Changing him becomes just something that has to be done. Nothing more, nothing less.
But it’s becoming more and more difficult to catch his pain with the right amount of medication, before either it or the medication engulfs him. He is spiralling in and out of consciousness. I remind Sandy of our promise to help him die. Somehow we should get him into his car, turn on the ignition, leave him in the enclosed garage. Late at night when none of the other tenants parked there are liable to find him. Or we can use the pillow. Sandy says, “Not yet, not yet.”
One morning Abe tells us in a voice that echoes from whatever place he’s been, he’s dreamed about his parents, his sister and brother, all dead. “We’ve had a family reunion and I want to be buried by my father.” His father, Isaac, is in the oldest part of the Jewish cemetery, in the Workman’s Circle section, a labour and cultural association he helped found.
“Dad, that part’s been all filled up for years,” Sandy says. No response. Our parents owned one piece of real estate, their small gravesite bought long ago in a newer part of the Jewish cemetery. Last year after he’d been diagnosed with cancer, Abe said, “There’s no refund on my part of the plot but I’ve changed my mind. I want to be cremated, my ashes placed in the mausoleum on the slopes of the mountain. It’s got loads of parking and it’s on two bus routes. And it’s got one helluva view.”
What was left unspoken was that he didn’t want to end up next to Florence, with whom he’d had a marriage he referred to as the “forty-year war.” With his new request the closest we can get him to his father is to bury him beside his wife. A judgement call for Sandy and me to make. Because we can’t bring ourselves to ask him if he is willing to lie beside our mother.
He’s no longer eating, asks only for coffee which Sandy gives him in a glass, “à la russe” she says. After a few sips through a straw, h
e hands the glass back, reaches out to her, she holds him clasped in her arms and they both weep. I watch this scene from the frame of the doorway. Soon he stops eating and drinking altogether. We let him be.
The amount of support we’re receiving is phenomenal, the nurses are dropping by every few hours, Simone daily. We have meetings about how to keep Abe comfortable, how to keep Sandy and me from cracking from the escalating pressure. They all say this part will last weeks, they’ve seen it so often. I can’t believe it.
Sandy and I have been alternating between one of us staying with Abe, the other snatching sleep upstairs. A nursing supervisor insists we spend the night upstairs so we both have a proper night’s sleep. The voluptuous fifty-something sitter arrives, immediately lifts up her sweater, whips off her bra exposing her full breasts. I think, “Wow, a wet nurse, these people think of everything.” She says, “I just bought a new bra and it’s really pinching me,” and pulls her sweater down again. Abe might have been in heaven to be able to cuddle with her—Dahlia is no longer visiting. Her family thinks she’d be too upset to see him so sick. When we return after six hours the sitter says, “Abe didn’t sleep a wink because he’s been too excited.” Had she climbed into bed with him after all?
In amazement he exclaims: “The writing’s on the wall.” We assume he’s speaking metaphorically, until he points to the wall saying, “You see? You see?” We don’t see, but focus instead on his excitement, ask him to read the words out loud. He’s frustrated. “I keep erasing them, I blink and they’re gone.” I give him a pen and paper in case he sees them again.
Then, “Get me a bag, I need a bag for my trip, I’m going away.”
“It’ll be beautiful where you’re going, quiet and peaceful,” I suggest.
He pauses for a moment, his brow wrinkling as he considers his destination, contemplates it as if he were still a tourist guide, before he answers, “Yes, but it’s still more lovely here.” Never have we known Abe to express anything spiritual, he’s describing his experience as actually going somewhere.