Memory's Last Breath

by Gerda Saunders

  “I know,” Marissa said, her look indicating that our answers had been too elementary.

  “When we live with Tannie Lana,” Newton whooped, “she can take me to Craig’s house and I can play with him.”

  Marissa worried on. “But they don’t know where we live.”

  I reminded her that we had called her godparents some weeks earlier and that we gave them our address and phone number. Peter, reading another need in her question, wrote the information for making an international call on a card and taped it to the wall by the phone. All the while Newton steered his one-track train to the next station. “Or sometimes Craig can come to their house and we can play in the treehouse.”

  “Who will make us food and take us to school before they get here?” Marissa wanted to know.

  Finally figuring out that we had now gotten to what was probably the proximate source of her anxiety, Peter and I again rehearsed the arrangement about which we had told the children some weeks earlier: the families of their new school friends, Hilary who lived just up the road and Nathan who lived near the school, would take care of them if Peter and I were unable to do so. With a guilty glance at each other, Peter and I wordlessly acknowledged that what we had had in mind at the time we spoke to our new friends were the smaller vicissitudes of life, such as snowstorms or car breakdowns.

  We had gotten to know these couples in the quick way people sometimes bond with the parents of their children’s best friends. What loomed rather large in our new friendships was the fact that none of us belonged to the Mormon church. While Peter and I arrived in Salt Lake City knowing it was the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), we were oblivious to how much that circumstance affects ordinary life in Utah. One of the first things people ask new neighbors is what ward, or local congregation, you belong to. People are friendly enough when you confess that you’re not a member of the church. However, the chances of forming true friendships are very slim, since the lives of one’s Mormon neighbors are almost entirely consumed by their church. Even ordinary activities like pick-up basketball games or block parties are facilitated by the church. Besides, the church keeps its members extremely busy—church responsibilities eat up most of the time that people in non-Mormon environments would use to develop close friendships.

  Another obstacle toward friendships among Mormons and non-Mormons is that unless you are on the local ward’s remarkably efficient phone chain, major local events go by without you knowing about them. For example, when the adult daughter of our neighbors across the road was dying at their home, I had—like many other neighbors—often walked over with cookies or another small treat for the daughter and once or twice stayed with her when her grief-stricken and overworked mother went out for an errand, but I only heard about her death after the funeral.

  As the social sphere of our new neighborhood slowly dawned on us, Peter and I were delighted that we had met potential “real” friends in the parents of our children’s friends. We all got to know each other well in a short time. Well enough that I told both the Taylors and the Shands the tale of a traumatic event that befell us during our second week in our new house. Marissa’s asthma flared up in a severe attack, and we had had to rush her to the hospital.

  We had been aware of the seriousness of Marissa’s asthma already in South Africa, where she had more than once been hospitalized after a very sudden escalation of her illness during a cold. Though her asthma had been well controlled for the last year or two in South Africa, we were always concerned and on the alert when she contracted any upper-respiratory infection—no less so in a new country where we had not yet even found a doctor. When, on an evening two weeks into our occupation of our new house, Marissa’s chest became very tight and her breathing strained, we knew it was time to get medical help fast. We knew that we had a long night ahead. Casting myself on the mercy of the neighbors—who also happened to be non-Mormon—who had loaned us the lamp and the coffee table and with whose boys Newton had subsequently played a few times, I unceremoniously appeared at their doorstep with Newton, already in his pajamas, and asked if he could sleep over. Their immediate grasp of our situation and open-armed welcome brought tears to my eyes. At the emergency room, Marissa was found to be very ill and she was admitted to the hospital, where she stayed for three days, during which Peter or I hardly ever left her side. Watching over her pale, quiet form, I thought about death in the midst of our new life. “If she dies now,” my heart cried, “there will be no one who knows her at her funeral except us.”

  Eventually, the what-if-Mamma-and-Daddy-died cloud seemed to have cleared. We moved on to thinking about another major event that would make our house on Supernal Way an even more home-like space: the arrival of our two large, furry, black dogs that we had left in South Africa. In those days, pets could only be brought into the United States legally after a three-week quarantine in American-government-licensed kennels in their home country, at the end of which they had to pass a health test. We’d gotten word from my brother Carel that they had been declared healthy and that he would be putting them on the plane right away.

  The next day, we all went to the airport to pick up Kwaaitjie, a Standard Poodle, and Liewe Heks, a Bouvier des Flandres. The airport had a special building some distance away from the terminals where we would be reunited with our dogs. When an attendant handed them over to us, they just about flattened us in their joy to see us.

  Once we had brought the dogs home, it felt as if another layer of normal had been gentled over our alien shoulders. However, oblivious of what their quarantine and plane tickets had cost us, our dogs soon repaid our efforts to make Americans of them by acting as if they had been raised by wolves: they viciously attacked a cat that had ventured into our backyard.

  I first learned about our animals’ transgression one morning when Newton shouted, in Afrikaans, from the back lawn, “Ek het ’n halwe dooie kat gekry,” which translates to “I found half a dead cat.” As in English, the sentence has a sibling that is very similar in grammar but has a very different meaning: “I found a half-dead cat.” Given my five-year-old’s grasp of his mother tongue, which he now heard only in his home, I could not be sure which of these meanings he’d had in mind. “Not half a dead cat, Newton!” I shouted as I sprinted down the stairs to see the extent of the injuries for myself. However, what Newton carried toward me by its tail confirmed that there had been nothing amiss with my son’s grammar.

  That evening when Peter got home, he and I scoured the backyard for other parts of the cat, but found none. Our whole family then walked door to door along our street, Peter and I hoping that our prepared apology and pleas for the lives of our children’s furry, black canine security blankets would sway the bereaved pet owner to resist calling whatever animal police force Utah might have. Despite our broadcasting of the horrible news around the neighborhood, no one claimed the remains of the cat. Our stations of the cross completed, we locked the dogs up in the house and buried the unfortunate animal’s remains in the large unlandscaped hillside portion of our backyard. We stood around the grave talking about how the cat’s molecules would mix with the soil and feed the trees and shrubs we were going to plant and that its atoms might become part of a tree trunk or a leaf or a flower. After the funeral, the children collected rocks and built a marker of stones that, in addition to its function as a memorial, would prevent the perpetrators’ return to the scene for the commission of even more unspeakable acts on the victim’s remains.

  That night, after Peter and I had read the kids their bedtime story and just as I was ready to kick back in my easy chair, Newton padded into the room clad in his pajamas. Not wanting to miss out should her brother’s extension of his bedtime reap any privileges, Marissa slunk into the living room as well. Newton, however, was not trying to weasel a sip of juice or a piece of cheese out of us. Instead, he had an urgent question. “Can someone be dead if they’re not ripped in half?”

  While it did not take parent
al genius to figure out that our son’s question had been triggered by the day’s grisly event, it took Newton’s next question for us to realize that we had arrived back at the what-if-Mamma-and-Daddy-die conundrum: “Who will help us dig the holes when you and Daddy are dead?” After another round of assurances that plenty of adults would be available to help them in the very, very, very unlikely event of our simultaneous deaths, Peter and I went back to Newton’s earlier question about how one knows someone is dead. Since I had read in a magazine that one should not compare death to sleep when discussing it with young children since that might make them afraid of bedtime, I launched into an explanation of how your heart stops beating when you die. We then felt each other’s pulses at the wrist and neck, after which Peter worked every ticklish spot he could think of on each of our offspring. Soon we were all laughing and wrestling on the carpet. In the end Newton’s question got him and Marissa not only a full-family snuggle fest, but also a glass of milk and a cookie to take away the taste of unpalatable information from their parents’ mouths.

  Once the kids were back in bed, Peter poured us each a glass of wine. We sank into our couch holding hands and asking ourselves whether our quest for better opportunities balanced out our children’s loss of innocence.

  Like all what-ifs, this one has no answer.

  At the close of 2010, while I was absorbing the implications of my dementia prognosis, a conceptual art piece by Damien Hirst was completing its three-year residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. It consisted of a tiger shark floating in twenty-three tons of formaldehyde contained in a steel-and-glass vitrine. On sunny days, light from the bank of windows behind it brought out the sky-blue cast of the embalming fluid. Daylight brought out the dark stripes down the shark’s body that resemble a tiger’s pattern. At the head end of the rectangular tank, the animal’s wide open mouth drew your eye through a fortress of jagged teeth into the black hole of its gullet. After dusk, the window reflected the tank back at you, doubling the shark into parentheses that seemed to embrace life and death simultaneously.

  Hirst titled the work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, “a statement that [he] had used to describe the idea of death to [himself]” while writing his student thesis on hyperreality during the late 1980s. He “liked its poetic clumsiness because of the way it expressed, ‘something that wasn’t there, or was there.’”

  Hirst’s opportunity to transform the idea in his thesis into a sculpture came in 1989 when British advertising magnate and contemporary art collector Charles Saatchi commissioned him to create a conceptual piece of his choice for the businessman’s eponymous gallery. The artist engaged an Australian fisherman to capture a tiger shark “big enough to eat you.” The fisherman obliged with a fish of which the length, in today’s conceptual currency, would add up to the tallest and shortest NBA players of 2014, Hasheem Thabeet at 7′3″ and Isaiah Thomas at 5′9″, laid head to foot.

  Acquiring the shark alone cost almost $10,000. The entire sculpture cost Saatchi $80,000 in 1990 currency, or $149,000 in today’s money, a sum so surprising for a work by an artist then hardly known outside a small circle of young British conceptual artists that the British tabloid The Sun ran a story titled “£50,000 for fish without chips.”

  The shark sculpture is the first of a series of dead and sometimes dissected animals preserved in tanks of formaldehyde that Hirst created over the years. Mother and Child (Divided), for example, consists of a cow and a calf each cut in half and displayed in four glass tanks, the two halves of the calf side by side in front of the similarly placed two halves of the mother. The tanks of each pair have been installed far enough apart for a visitor to walk between them and view the animals’ insides. Individually, and even more so collectively, these pieces yank dead animals from behind the walls of factory farms or commercial fisheries in order to force the viewers’ acknowledgment that the disembodied, plastic-wrapped animal proteins so ubiquitously consumed by most members of Western societies—including me—actually come from once-living animals.

  Hirst’s intention in the shark sculpture was to freeze “life and death incarnate” in time by soaking the shark in formaldehyde and injecting it with the preservative liquid until all its natural fluids would be replaced. However, the ancient mummifying technology of exchanging body fluids with a preservative was not successful when applied to an animal as large as Hirst’s shark—and some parts were not adequately penetrated. Even as the sculpture’s notoriety was building, the shark began to deteriorate, turning the surrounding liquid murky. In an attempt to prolong the work’s longevity, the Saatchi gallery added bleach to the formaldehyde solution, which in hindsight was revealed to have sped up the deterioration. In 1993, the decay had become so evident that “the gallery gutted the shark and stretched its skin over a fiberglass mold.” Hirst complained that “you could tell it wasn’t real.”

  Despite knowing about the sculpture’s lamentable state, in 2004 American hedge fund manager Steven Cohen and his wife Alexandra bought the piece from Saatchi for $8 million. According to the New York Times, “what was floating in the tank was a fiberglass shadow of its former self.” Oddly, the shark’s tilt from undead to dead appealed to Cohen. “I liked the whole fear factor,” he said.

  Hirst, however, was not prepared to let go of his original idea. By then he knew that the formaldehyde had not been properly injected and wanted the chance at a do-over. Cohen somewhat reluctantly agreed to trade the “fear factor” for lastingness and even sprung for the replacement of the shark. The process of thoroughly injecting the new carcass alone cost about $100,000. Cohen called the expense “inconsequential.” When the operation had been completed, the shark once again cast its Schrödinger’s cat smile onto the museum visitors.

  However, just as £50,000 failed to permanently incarnate life and death simultaneously in the first “fish without chips,” so did $8 million and an inconsequential $100,000 fall short of fixing the second “famous dead shark” in an undead state. In 2006, before commencing a three-year residence in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the entire sculpture was refurbished: a new tank and a third new shark were obtained.

  Hirst: I would like [Impossibility] to always look as fresh as the day I made it, so part of the contract is: if the glass breaks, we mend it; if the tank gets dirty, we clean it; if the shark rots, we find you a new shark. I guarantee my formaldehyde work for 200 years.

  Voltaire Cousteau, 200 years ago, “How to Swim with Sharks”: DO NOT BLEED. Those who cannot learn to control their bleeding should not attempt to swim with sharks.

  Brad Pitt: My theory is, be the shark. You’ve just got to keep moving.

  Hirst: I mean, every day you have to deal with your own mortality, so a good way of doing that without too much fear is to deal with the mortality of an object.

  Schrödinger’s shark: Being simultaneously dead and alive in the box gave me an incredible perspective over life, the universe, and everything. And I’m here to tell it to the world!

  Roberta Smith, New York Times: The shark is simultaneously life and death incarnate in a way you don’t quite grasp until you see it, suspended and silent, in its tank. It gives the innately demonic urge to live a demonic, deathlike form… It’s a reasonable visual metaphor for the crossing-over that we think will never happen.

  The crossing-over that we think will never happen. That is, until you have received an approximate expiration date for your own life: terminal cancer, terminal mental decline. From then on, you live every day in the glare of a crossing-over that will happen in a designated time frame. If your diagnosis stems from a physically morbid disease, your focus will likely be on how best to control your pain and other aspects of your journey to death. If your fate is dementia, you focus on the fact by the time the disease has taken you to a “natural” death, your mind will have died long ago. You will have become “simultaneously life and death incarnate.” After my dementia diagnosis, I took Hirst�
��s shark very personally: not only something, but also someone could be there and not there at the same time. And that someone: me.

  During my research of Hirst’s endless grappling with death in his art—an ongoing project he is still exploring today, long after what he refers to as his “glory days”—I learned that he has for a long time resisted writing an autobiography because it was “an end-of-life activity.” By 2015—he is now fifty-one years old—he had started one. Since Hirst is too busy to write his autobiography himself, he has engaged James Fox, who helped Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones with his memoir, as his co-writer.

  Hirst himself gives a reason for why he needs a co-writer other than because he is so busy: he can’t remember his own past. A large part of Fox’s role is to “pluck” anecdotes from interviews with Hirst, together with other sources, to jog the artist’s memory. Like Keith Richards, Hirst has “obliterated whole segments of his life.” Damien Hirst, too, has entered a state of being there and not there at the same time. “You lose your grip before you die,” he said in a recent interview. “I think that’s the problem. So I guess [writing a memoir is] how to embrace it in some way.”

  Dementia Field Notes

  8-24-2011

  Tonight I accidentally took my own and then Peter’s medication. His Simvastatin is twice my dose, so in effect I had taken three doses. Peter and I were supposed to go for fasting blood tests tomorrow, in my case to check my response to the Simvastatin and Lisinopril Dr. Eborn had prescribed to slow down the clogging of the microvessels in my brain. We had to postpone the tests to Friday morning.