by Jodi Picoult
Felix is staring down at his notes. I know, for many caregivers, this blunt conversation is the first time they really, truly understand that the person they love is going to die. Not even the doctor’s diagnosis is as frank. “Do we…have to sign something?”
I wait for him to look at me. “No. But I do have a secret handshake I’m going to have to teach you.” His eyes widen and I smile. “I’m kidding. Yes, there’s paperwork. But we don’t have to worry about that yet. I’m as good as my word, and I am assuming that you are, too.”
I pull out a small notebook and write Win’s name at the top of a blank page. By the time Win dies, this book will be filled—with notes from our visits, memories, requests, medication logs. This is the paper trail she will leave behind. “If you’re feeling up to it,” I say to Win, “I’d like to ask you a few questions to start. Have you had a conversation about a DNR yet with anyone from hospice?”
She tilts her head. “DNR?”
“Do Not Resuscitate. There’s a form for the hospital and one for out-of-hospital. It’s something you sign if you don’t want anything done, should you stop breathing.”
“Like what?” Felix asks.
“Resuscitation. Calling 911.”
“So you mean…”
“Allow natural death to happen,” I say. “Yes.”
Win puts her hand on Felix’s arm. “Baby, that’s the finale here. No matter what.”
“I know. I just…I mean, what if there are other options—”
“On average, people who code and get CPR do live another eighteen months. But you’ll be doing that with cracked ribs, because once compressions are started, by law they have to continue until you’re resuscitated or you are pronounced dead. So…if you do survive, you’ll be in pain, and we also won’t know how long your brain was denied oxygen.”
“And if I don’t want that?” Win asks.
“Then you sign the DNR.”
She looks at Felix and nods sharply.
I ask her about feeding tubes, ventilators, defibrillators—all life-sustaining measures—confirming that she doesn’t want any of those. I talk about medical power of attorney, and financial power of attorney, about sedation, about antibiotics for comfort during UTIs or other infections. I talk about cultural traditions and funeral planning, whether she wants music as she’s dying, or religion, or neither. Who she’d like to be with her at the end, and who she doesn’t want to see. Just because someone is dying doesn’t mean that they can’t call the shots. As I tick off the items, Felix seems to draw further and further into himself, until finally I turn a bright smile toward him. “Do you by any chance have some coffee?” I ask.
He goes into the kitchen to brew some, and as soon as the door swings closed behind him, Win meets my eyes. “Thank you,” she says.
I nod. “He’s not the first husband to be overwhelmed by details.”
“There are times I think this is harder on him than on me. I mean, I get to leave at the end. He’s stuck here, reliving these weeks.”
“I will make sure he’s not alone. I’m here for him, too.” I can hear Felix banging around in the kitchen. “Plus, this next part would have probably put him into a fetal position. Have you thought about what you’d like to happen to your body?”
“You mean like burial or cremation?”
“Those are two options,” I tell Win. “But there are green burials. And aquamation—you put the body in a vat of alkaline solution, like lye, and all the muscles and fat and tissue dissolves, and then the bones are ground up and given back to the family.”
“That sounds like how the Joker died in Batman,” Win murmurs.
“It’s not legal in Massachusetts yet, but it is in Maine.”
“That’s okay. I’m not dying to try it.”
I raise a brow. “I see what you did there,” I say. “There’s also a living forest.”
“Where I’m buried and a tree grows over me?”
“More like the cremains are used to mulch the trees. The hot new thing is recomposition—human composting. It’s being pitched for urban centers where there isn’t space for cemeteries.”
“What about donating my body to science?” Win asks.
One of the things I notice most about talking to those who are dying is that they’re eminently practical. They know they have a checklist to tick off, and many people are ready and willing and able to discuss it with objectivity, a weird dual state where they know they are the one who will be gone, but they also want to make sure they have the agency to decide how that is going to happen. One of the other things I notice most about talking to people who are dying is that this conversation rarely happens in front of a loved one, as if one of the last acts of grace you can perform with your death is to protect your spouse from the nuts and bolts of the process.
“Donating to science is definitely an option,” I tell Win, “but you need to be aware that if you do that, a lot of stuff may happen to your body that you’re not thinking about. True, you may wind up as a med school cadaver. But you’re just as likely to become filler for lip and butt implants, or be a crash test dummy, or decompose on a farm in Virginia for students of forensics.”
She shudders. “I do not want to wind up in someone’s ass crack.”
She means it as a joke, but that’s not how I hear it. “When people say that sort of stuff,” I begin delicately, “it tips me off that they think that body and spirit are one. That a part of you is still going to be here, after you die.”
She raises her face to mine, and I see it: the awareness that the road just…ends. That there’s no promise of anything coming after, at least not as far as we have proof.
“It’s a bummer, if not,” Win says. “I’d like to go to my own funeral. Eavesdrop on who’s saying nasty shit about me.”
“I had a client who wanted to be at her funeral, so she held it before she died. People gave eulogies and she clapped along with everyone else. She danced and she drank and she had a phenomenal time.”
“You can do that?” Win says, shocked.
“We,” I correct, “can do anything. There’s no template.”
“I used to joke around and tell Felix I wanted Snow White’s hermetically sealed glass case, until I went to the British Museum and saw the mummies. I don’t think I’m enough of an exhibitionist for that, even if I looked good for being four thousand years old.”
The last mummy I had seen was in the Egyptian necropolis of Tuna el-Gebel; the body of a wealthy girl named Isadora, who lived during the Roman reign of Egypt in the second century C.E. She fell in love with a soldier from Antinopolis on the east bank of the Nile, but her father didn’t approve. She wanted to elope, but the boat overturned while she was going to meet her soldier, and she drowned. According to Ancient Egyptians, anyone who drowned in the Nile was automatically made hesy, or the blessed dead. Her devastated father built an elaborate tomb for her in the desert, a small stone building with crumbling steps. Inside the tomb were ten lines of Greek elegiac couplets: To tell the truth, they are the nymphs, the water nymphs, who raised you, O Isidora.
Isadora was preserved at the site in a glass case. I remember the smooth, resined bulb of her skull; the gap of her open mouth and the glint of her teeth, the pinch of a nose. The narrow neck, rising from the modest white sheet that covered her from collarbone to ankle. Her toes peeping out.
When I visited her tomb, Wyatt was with me.
I shake my head, dislodging his name, and force my attention back to Win. “Egyptians didn’t get mummified just to look good,” I say. “It was a way to control decomposition of the khat, the corpse. In order for an Egyptian to reach eternal life, the body had to last forever and house the soul. It mirrored the path of the sun god Re, who became one with the corpse of the Osiris every night before he was reborn the next morning.”
“How did they do it?�
�� Win asks.
“Priests would remove the organs—and put them in canopic jars that got buried with the body. There were gods who watched over them—Qebehsenuf, the falcon, guarded the intestines; Hapy, the baboon, had the lungs; Imsety, a person, protected the liver; and Duamutef, the jackal, had the stomach. The brain was taken out through the nose. The heart was left in place, because to the Ancient Egyptians, it was the seat of all personality and intelligence. Then the body was packed with natron, a kind of salt, and padded with linen, before getting wrapped in hundreds of yards of the stuff. Sometimes amulets and prayers and spells were tucked inside or written on the bandages. The wrappings were coated with resin, and wrapped again, and the last layer was a shroud. The whole thing took seventy days.”
“To dry out?”
“Yeah, but also because of a star, Sothis, which disappeared from the sky for that amount of time before coming back during the annual flooding of the Nile. Death, rebirth, you get it. Then a sem priest—usually the eldest son—performed the Opening of the Mouth ceremony, which let the deceased eat and drink and speak and have sex in the afterlife. The mummy was put in a coffin or coffins, and the burial chamber was sealed shut. That is, until some archaeologist decided thousands of years later to move it to a museum.”
The mummy room in the Cairo Museum is always the most crowded. There are tons of pharaohs there—from Ramesses II, to Hatshepsut, to Seti I, whose body is in such good shape that he looks like he’s taking a nap. There’s a mummified king who died in battle, who has a hole above his eye that matches a foreign ax blade. The whole thing always felt creepy to me—a stream of tourists who were basically Peeping Toms. “So much about Egyptian tombs was meant for people to explore and to celebrate their lives—but they never intended for us to see their mummified bodies,” I say. “That was private.”
When I finish, I realize that Win’s been listening to my diatribe with increasing wonder. “What came first? Death or Egypt?”
I blink. “What?”
“That’s your thing,” she says softly.
“My what?”
“Your thing. Egypt. That’s what made your heart beat. Mine was art.” She leans back against the couch. “Do you know who Marina Abramović is?”
I shake my head.
“She’s a performance artist. She and her partner, a man named Ulay, worked together. For one installation, they crashed into each other over and over again for an entire hour. They braided their hair together and faced away from each other for seventeen hours. In 1977 they inhaled and exhaled the same square of air until they passed out. In the 1980s, when I was an art history student, they did a piece where they sat across from each other and stared in silence for seven hours.”
“I’ve never understood why that’s considered art.”
Win looks surprised. “What’s love, if not art?” she asks. “In 1988, Abramović and Ulay came up with the performance to end all performances. They were going to start walking from opposite sides of the Great Wall of China and meet in the middle, and get married. They called the piece The Lovers. But while they were planning it, Ulay told her that he was having an affair with another woman. They broke up, but they decided to still do the Great Wall walk. Their relationship hadn’t turned out the way they expected, and what was more real than that? So they started, almost six thousand kilometers apart from each other, with Abramović still holding out hope they might get back together. Three months later, they met up. But he wasn’t walking toward her the way they had planned. He’d stopped and waited at a spot between two temples, because it was a perfect photo opportunity for when they reunited. That’s when she realized she didn’t want him back.” Win shook her head. “Relationships aren’t about photo ops. They’re about scaling mountains and crossing deserts, about getting to where you think you belong, about having your partner’s arms around you, and realizing that you don’t fit into them. That’s why it was art.”
“Wow,” I say, breathless. “You’ve convinced me.”
I stare at her, thinking that there is so much more of this woman I need to know, and so little time in which to do it. I wonder what will happen, when we meet in the middle.
“Some pair we are,” Win muses. “Love and death.”
Felix walks in at that moment, holding the cup of coffee I hadn’t really wanted. “What did I miss?” he asks.
* * *
—
WHEN YOU ARE waiting for someone to die, time is unrecognizable. Hours bleed into days; days are suddenly weeks. You might go several days without realizing you have not showered; you forget to eat. You sleep and worry and sit vigil in a world with no circadian rhythm.
After my mother died, I was so sick that I could not keep food down and couldn’t sleep. I thought that I had grieved myself into some kind of autoimmune disease until I had blood drawn and a doctor told me I was pregnant. That’s when I realized that while my mother was in hospice, when I had given myself permission to find mindless peace with Brian, I had not been using birth control with any regularity.
I thought about how to tell Brian I was pregnant, until I was knotted up so tight I could barely function. Every time I practiced what I would say, I could see my mother crossing herself superstitiously. Go to a funeral pregnant, she warned me, and you’ll raise sadness right inside of you.
In the end, when I told Brian I had something important to talk to him about, I took him out to Boston Harbor, and we sat side by side throwing bits of Italian cookies we’d bought from Mike’s Pastry to the seagulls. I said I was pregnant.
I didn’t know, back then, how he would react. It’s one thing to find comfort in someone else’s body when you are both grieving. It’s another thing to have a baby.
But Brian was incandescent. I watched the knowledge settle in him, the wheels turning in his mind.
For one awful, terrifying moment, I thought he was going to ask me to marry him.
I still thought about Wyatt, of course. And I had betrayed him, for sure, no matter that he didn’t know it; no matter that I could justify my behavior as physical release and escape and a Band-Aid slapped over a deep sorrow. Yet with Brian, there was respect. And like, if not love.
But when I thought about Wyatt, he was further and further away, like an island with no bridges leading to it. Even if I’d entertained the thought of reaching out to him, finding out I was pregnant decimated that intention. I honestly had no words to describe what I had done. Why I had needed to do it.
“Dawn,” Brian said soberly. “We’re good together, don’t you think? If anything positive could come out of losing your mother and my grandmother…maybe it’s this.” He reached for my hands. “Move in with me.”
I let out the breath I had been holding. Brian was providing me with a way out. Blinders, so that I could see only forward, and not back.
“I already have a place you can stay. And I can help you take care of Kieran.”
A practical arrangement, then. This would start slow. There were eight more months, after all, to figure this out.
I did not realize at that time that when you plant seeds, you also get roots.
He looked down at my abdomen with wonder. “Are you sure? Are we really going to…”
I had entertained the thought of going back to finish my Ph.D. Maybe not right away—maybe not for years—but in the back of my mind, it was still how I defined myself: as an Egyptologist, albeit on hiatus.
But Brian said we.
He was offering me a lifeline before I even realized I was in way over my head. So I grabbed on with both hands. I wrote Yale and officially withdrew from the Egyptology program.
I had not written Wyatt. He would have been back on campus by then. I needed you, I imagined saying, but you were not here. Never mind the detail that he might have wanted to be; that I hadn’t asked. There was no way to explain my actions without hating myself;
there was no way the consequences would not involve Wyatt hating me. So every day, I put off composing that letter. And every day, it got easier to do just that, until I stopped thinking about composing it at all.
I moved Kieran and me into Brian’s house. I bought a bassinet at a garage sale.
The next day I saw blood in my underwear when I went to the bathroom.
Not even a week had passed, and I was stunned at how fast an unsurmountable problem had transformed into something I wanted viscerally. When the radiologist at Brigham and Women’s shrugged and told me that spotting was normal, I stacked the odds. I told myself my good fortune would not come at the expense of any bad fortune. I apologized to my baby for equivocating, even for a hot second. I slipped a newly minted penny in each shoe. I slept with a knife under my mattress, to keep away evil spirits.
I went into labor two weeks early, but all my superstitious behavior paid off. Meret was born plump and perfect. Her lungs were fully developed, and even when I stayed awake for hours to watch the rise and fall of the tiny cage of her chest, it was steady and infallible. You see, Brian told me, already in love with his daughter. You had nothing to worry about.
* * *
—
MERET IS IN her bedroom, bent over some kind of science experiment with swabs and vials, when I return from Win’s house. “Do you want to take a walk? The humidity finally broke.”
It’s funny, you think as a mother that the very act of giving someone life should be enough to bind you to them. But just because you love someone unconditionally doesn’t mean you don’t have to work at it. I remember how, when Meret was first born, she would turn to the sound of my voice as if it were a lodestone. Since every conversation I had while I was pregnant was a soundtrack to her, that instant recognition was guaranteed. On the other hand, Brian started at a disadvantage. He had to spend hours talking to her, not like she was a baby, but like she was a very tiny adult. He carried her around in a backpack as he mowed the lawn; he fed her strained peaches as he described what he was doing in his lab. He saw the distance between them and he coaxed and beckoned and engaged until she came closer.