by Jodi Picoult
At least I remembered her birthday, I think.
“Stay with me till I fall asleep?” Meret asks.
In another universe, I wouldn’t be able to say yes.
I stroke her hair and take this as a boon—the mood swing that puts me in her favor again; the fact that I’ve been forgiven for my birthday gift; the mixture of grief and relief in Brian’s eyes for something that nearly happened but didn’t.
I think about the fact that even though I walked out of this house, I’ve somehow wound up right back where I started.
* * *
—
WHEN I WAS little, I used to read the obituaries, and one day I asked my mother why people die in alphabetical order. My mother didn’t answer. She spit on the floor, because to talk about death was to invite it into the household. She was Irish and superstitious—a double dose of stubbornness—she put safety pins in my clothing to ward off the evil eye, she taught us never to whistle indoors and if we left the house and had to come back in, we were to look in a mirror or our luck would turn. I never heard my mother talk about death, in fact, which is why it’s so ironic that she is the reason I am a death doula.
I was a graduate student on my third dig season in Egypt when I found out she was dying. She had Stage 4 ovarian cancer that she had chosen to hide from me and my brother. Kieran had only been thirteen, and she hadn’t wanted to worry him. I was pursuing my passion, and she hadn’t wanted to interrupt that. My father, a U.S. Army captain, had died in a helicopter crash when my mother was pregnant with Kieran, which meant that I suddenly had to take charge. I was furious that my mother hadn’t told me she was sick. I sat by her side in the residential hospice, leaving only to be home in time for Kieran when he returned from school. I watched her fade into the sheets, more a memory than a mother. Then one day near the end, my mother squeezed my hand. “Your father died alone,” she said. “I always wondered if he was scared. If there was something he wanted to say.” Are you scared? I wanted to ask. Is there something you want to say? But before I could, my mother smiled. “At least I have you,” she had said.
I thought about my father, halfway around the world by himself when he took his last breath. I thought of my mother, hiding an illness that had eaten away at her until she was only a shell of the woman I remembered. Death is scary and confusing and painful, and facing it alone shouldn’t be the norm.
I realized I could do something about that.
With my mother’s death, my life as I knew it was over. I couldn’t go back to Yale, since I was now Kieran’s guardian. I needed a job, and I found it working at the same hospice where my mother had been. At first, the director hired me out of pity, just so that I could pay bills. As an academic I had no practical skills, so I ran the reception desk and acted as girl Friday and visited with the patients. It was that, the visiting, that I was particularly good at. I liked collecting their stories, mining their histories, putting together the pictures of who they used to be. It was, after all, what archaeologists do. One day the hospice director suggested that I might have a future in this field. I took online classes to get my MSW and became a hospice social worker. I was responsible for getting DNRs signed, for asking about funeral home arrangements, for ascertaining if families were strapped financially. I supported both the patient and the caregiver, who were each carrying such heavy loads. I used to think of my job as taking those massive backpacks off their shoulders for an hour and giving them that time to get squared away before they had to pick them up again. But one hour was never enough, and there were elements of the job that chafed—like having too many patients and endless paperwork; or having to smile through a hospice doctor’s terrible jokes (“Rectum? I hardly knew him!”). Or the way patients had to be recertified at ninety days to make sure they still met hospice criteria…while those who didn’t make the cut were still ill enough to need care or help to process what was happening to them.
After almost a decade of hospice work, I heard about a course called Intro to Death Midwifery. It made sense to me—just as we have birth midwives for the transition from the state of being a single person to becoming a mother, why not have death midwives for the transition from the state of life to that of death? I called up, but the course was full. I told the instructor I would bring my own snacks, my own chair, if she would just let me be a fly on the wall. From the very first words of the instructor—that death doulas hearken back to a time when people didn’t die alone—I was enthralled. Doula is Greek for “woman who serves”—and just as birth doulas know that there’s discomfort and pain that can be managed during labor, death doulas do the same at the other end of the life spectrum.
I started my own business as a death doula five years ago, and it’s still something that most people have never heard of. There’s a National End-of-Life Doula Alliance, NEDA, which creates core competencies and has a proficiency assessment for doulas to pass, but it’s still pretty much the wild west of caregiving. Medicare doesn’t cover my services, and what I do means different things to different people. God knows there’s a need—the “silver tsunami” of baby boomers are aging and have busy kids who can’t be caregivers or children who don’t live nearby. Society is culturally shifting, and there’s a need for support. Plus, there’s a rise in the consciousness movement that reinforces we are only on Earth for a short time.
Doulas don’t perform medical tasks—I’m not covered by liability malpractice insurance. I work in homes, nursing homes, inpatient hospices, assisted living facilities. Whereas the hospice model is a team, the doula works solo, doing all but the medical care. I can be with a client round the clock, but I don’t have to be. It’s really up to the individual, and it may change as the illness progresses. I listen. I keep caregivers calm. I make sure someone isn’t alone if they don’t want to be. I gather information and share it—about funerals, or what to expect during the dying process. I anticipate what is going to be needed and create a plan for it—such as a vigil, or a church memorial service. I provide referrals to chaplains or doctors. I’ll give physical and emotional comfort through foot massage, chakra cleansing, visualization, meditation, guided breathing. I may help a caregiver with a basic daily task—brushing teeth, showering—but that’s an individual preference, too. I’ll get dry cleaning, groceries, or take a client to a doctor’s appointment.
Although I work in tandem with hospice professionals, I also know that some care isn’t medical—it’s holistic, and spiritual—and I provide it. Maybe that’s creating a home funeral, or assisting the families in washing and laying out the body. Maybe it’s arranging for acupuncture for pain relief, or giving business advice on selling a car that’s sitting in the garage and hasn’t been driven since 1970. Sometimes I help families wrap up the affairs of the deceased, taking social security cards and bank information and encrypting and destroying them when I’m finished. A death doula is one-stop shopping; I am a general contractor of death. The way I describe it is like this: if you want butter pecan ice cream at 3:00 A.M. and you’re on hospice, you might be able to ask a volunteer to get you some when he or she next visits. If you hire a death doula, and you want that ice cream at 3:00 A.M., she’ll get it for you. And if you hire me, I will already have it waiting in the freezer.
After nearly thirteen years of end-of-life work, I know that we do a shitty job of intellectually and emotionally preparing for death. How can you enjoy life if you spend every minute fearing the end of it? I know that most people—like my mother was—are afraid to talk about death, as if it’s contagious. I know that you are the same person when you die that you were when you were alive—if you are feisty in life, you’ll be feisty at the end of life. If you are nervous when you’re healthy, you’ll be nervous on your deathbed. I know that people who are going to die need me to be a mirror—to look in my eyes and know I see who they used to be, not who they are right now.
After thirteen years of this work, I thought I knew
a lot about death.
I was wrong.
* * *
—
I FALL ASLEEP in Meret’s room and stay there all night. In the morning, Brian and I move in a careful ballet. We speak only when necessary, and even then it’s in details rather than emotions. He is leaving today to give a keynote at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, on his work in quantum mechanics, and it is a Big Deal. Fifteen years ago, a theoretical physicist who believed in parallel universes was considered fringe, and now less than half of the scientists in his field cling to those older beliefs.
I’m grateful that he’s taking a business trip, because it prolongs the inevitable. I do not go into the shower until Brian is downstairs making coffee; in the kitchen, we try not to look each other in the eye, saying all the right things so that Meret will not think that there is anything strained between us. He doesn’t want to push me, because he is afraid of the outcome; I don’t want to be pushed for the very same reason. So I pour Brian a to-go cup; he kisses Meret on the top of the head and grabs his overnight bag; he leaves for the airport just before Meret does to catch the bus that will take her to STEM camp.
For the first time since I’ve come back home, I am alone in the house. With a deep breath, I let go of all the studied pretense, bury my face in my hands, and wonder how to go back to normal.
Suddenly, the front door opens again. I call out, “What did you forget?”
But it isn’t Meret, like I expect. Brian is standing at the threshold of the kitchen, holding his keys like an afterthought. “You,” he says. “I forgot you.” He walks in and sits down across from me at the table. “I can’t do this, Dawn. We have to talk.”
We already did, and look at where that got me.
“I don’t know what you expect me to say,” I tell him.
Brian looks down at the table. “You don’t have to say anything. You just have to listen to me.”
I know her name: Gita. I know that she went to Cambridge before coming to Harvard as a postdoc. I even remember when Brian took her out to dinner with other colleagues to try to convince her to come to their physics program. Is she a good fit? I had asked. Do you think you can work with her?
The next time I heard of her was when Brian told me he had taken her out to lunch, because she didn’t seem to blend in with the other postdoc students. I thought it sounded exactly like Brian: kind to a fault, trying to circumvent a problem before it really started. Often, he was so wrapped up in his work he forgot to study interpersonal cues, and I thought that it was a positive step to care about a new recruit’s happiness. Then, a week later, Gita asked him to help her with car shopping. She had heard that it was easier for dealers to fleece a woman if she didn’t have a man there with her to kick the tires or ask about fuel efficiency. Brian had complained about it to me—I’m not here to babysit—but he had gone with her, and she rolled off the lot in a Toyota RAV4. A few weeks later he brought home a basket of Cadbury Flakes and Crunchies and Twirls and Rolos, a gift that made Meret burst into tears because she thought there was a subtext to receiving a bucket of candy. Gita brought it from England, he had said, truly bewildered. It was supposed to be a present.
But then he had agreed to go to Gita’s apartment after work to help her set up an air-conditioning unit. He did not remember that it was his daughter’s birthday, and that we were supposed to be having a celebratory dinner. Instead he followed Gita like a puppy to her place. He had stripped down to his undershirt and hauled the unit upstairs and settled it in the bedroom window as directed and, with characteristic thoroughness, had sealed it into place with plastic and duct tape so no bugs could come in through the cracks.
I sent him two texts: Where are you? and: Meret’s birthday??? He read them but responded to neither.
He came back into the living room to find Gita wrapped in his discarded dress shirt, sitting on the couch with a bottle of chilled champagne and two glasses. As a thank-you, she said.
Brian said he left immediately.
I believed him as he choked through this confession. I believed him, because had he actually taken Gita up on her offer, the guilt would have rolled off him in waves instead of just roses.
“Why didn’t you answer my texts?” I demanded.
“I was in the middle of putting in an air conditioner,” Brian said.
“Then why didn’t you answer them when you finished?”
He spread his hands, because he knew whatever he said was not going to come out right. “I’m sorry, Dawn. I’m so sorry. This is all my fault.”
“I have to go,” I muttered.
“Go? Where?”
I rounded on him. “I don’t think you get to ask me that right now.” Even as I ran out the door, I could feel him tethering me, solid and immobile, like the weights that secure balloons at party stores, when all they want to do is rise.
* * *
—
THAT WAS THEN; this is now. We cannot go on coexisting in this house without negotiating a treaty of some kind. “I’m listening,” I say.
He threads his fingers through his thick hair. “I don’t know how to erase what happened.”
That passive construction. As if he was a bystander; as if he had no complicit role.
“I didn’t do anything with her,” Brian says. “I swear it.”
“If you didn’t do anything,” I repeat, “then why didn’t you tell me you were going to her apartment that day? Why ignore my texts?” I swallow. “Why act like you had something to hide?”
“Because I felt like an idiot when I realized I had forgotten Meret’s birthday.”
I stare at him. “Do you really think that’s why I left?”
He winces. “I thought…I thought I could be helpful. I didn’t know she wanted more than that. And I…I realize now that I should have.”
I believe this, too. Sometimes Brian is so literal that you have to hit him over the head to get him to understand a subtlety. But I also believe that he has a secret, one maybe that he hasn’t admitted to himself—that, faced with a beautiful girl and champagne and possibility, for one second, he had wished he was in a different timeline.
He may not have acted on it, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a betrayal.
Brian’s shoulders are hunched; he bends closer to the table. It takes me a moment to understand that he is doing something I have never seen him do during the long tenure of our marriage.
He’s crying.
Brian has always been so steady and thoughtful and capable, the spool to my kite, the grounding to my electricity. When I literally had nowhere else to go in the world, he offered me his home. After I watch a patient die in front of me, I embrace him and remember how it feels to be alive. He’s consistently been able to save me. Until now.
To see him shaken and unsteady feels like the world is a little off-kilter, familiar but somehow wrong, like parting your hair on the opposite side. Something vibrates deep inside me, a note I recognize as pain. This is marriage, I realize. A tuning fork of emotion.
The muscle memory of our relationship has me moving out of my seat before my mind catches up. I stand in front of Brian and stroke his hair, because I can’t stand to see him hurting, even if the reason is because he hurt me.
He is out of his seat like a shot, grabbing on to the lifeline I am offering. And honestly, it is one. Life, as we know it for the past fifteen years, has been irrevocably altered by a young physicist’s attentions, and this is a hint of how to turn back time. It’s a trail of breadcrumbs, made from a thousand embraces just like this one. This is familiar ground.
There is a sense of completion in coming into the arms of the person who has held you for fifteen years, like rolling into the softest spot of the mattress or answering the last clue of the Sunday crossword. It’s heat from the fireplace filling the room. It’s the homing pigeon, spying its roo
st.
But there is also selective amnesia, a whitewashing, and even as my skin soothes to Brian’s touch, my mind is grasping at the smoke of the old argument that drove us apart.
I cannot help myself—I bury my face in the collar of his shirt and breathe in deeply. Soap. Starch. No roses. My eyes drift shut.
Then suddenly I snap upright. “Your speech.”
“Fuck the speech,” Brian says. “There’ll be another opportunity.”
I smile a little. “In another universe, you already gave it, and received thunderous applause.”
“In another universe, I got booed off the stage.”
I look at Brian’s eyes, spruce green darkening to black as he stares at me. As a scientist, he has never been good with words; but even in his silence I can map the trajectory of his thoughts. Brian’s mind works in kets, the little boxes that physicists use to talk about the quantum state of whatever is inside the brackets. Or in lay terms: the way a thing truly is—in this case, our marriage. “In another universe, we’re already naked,” I say.
Weeks later I will take this moment in time and I will turn it over in my mind like a snow globe. I will wonder why I said that, when guilt was still thick between us. Maybe I wanted to see if we could get close enough for there to be no room for blame. Or maybe, after all that has happened, instead of arguing over the past it was just easier to be flagrantly, viscerally in the now.
He stares at me, waiting—hoping—for absolution. For the knowledge that even though the last time we were together I couldn’t get away from him fast enough, I am back now.