by Joel Derfner
Without the kitchen, we didn’t have that time. And we didn’t realize how badly we would need it.
“Could you come downstairs to the bathroom and give us a hand, please?” said Mrs. Combs on the phone the day after they moved in. When I got there I found her and the hospice worker (there on her daily half-hour visit) standing by the sink while Mr. Combs sat naked in a plastic chair in the shower. They had managed to get him into the chair and bathe him, but Mrs. Combs, as I’ve said, was a very small person, as was the hospice worker, and even after the weight he’d lost to cancer Mr. Combs had to be heavier than the two of them put together, so once they were done they couldn’t lift him out of the chair back to his walker by themselves, and he was too weak to help them.
The moment I stepped into the room I was put in mind of the scene in Genesis—Mrs. Grossman taught a memorable Sunday school class back in 1980—when, after God finished drowning everybody who hadn’t paid enough attention to Him, and the surviving pairs of rabbits and malamutes and South American giant anacondas were frolicking around in the corpse-enriched mud, Noah planted a vineyard. “When he drank some of its wine,” according to Genesis 9:20–25, “he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father’s nakedness. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father’s nakedness.’”
I get it, the horror of seeing a parent vulnerable and helpless and impotent, the shock of that power reversal—I get it.
There I was, in the bathroom, pulling my fiancé’s naked father up from the plastic chair he was sitting in, doing everything within my power to keep my head turned away; in that position, though, I had absolutely no leverage, so finally I gave up and looked at him, a man now seemingly made entirely of gray, spotted flab, hands trembling, eyes unfocused, and hauled him up. And I can’t remember the last time I had felt so ashamed.
Oh, wait, yes I can; it was, funnily enough, when at the age of seventeen I had to help my naked mother get out of the shower.
Ha.
This is the problem when you try to be a caretaker to a dying family member: it can’t be done.
A caretaker’s job is to make a dying person comfortable as he fades. A family member’s job is to try to accept that death is on its way and prepare to welcome it as sincerely as possible. As a caretaker, you’re charged with his body; as a family member, you’re charged with his soul.
When you try to do both jobs, though, the idea of comfort is replaced perforce by the idea of survival. When your father is dying, as Mike’s was downstairs, it is out of human ken to remember, as you hold the bucket when he starts vomiting, that you’re not trying to keep him alive. Every act becomes about wringing one more second of life out of the ruin in front of you. And if that’s what you’re doing then it’s categorically impossible to prepare for death. You can either fight it or accept it. You can’t do both. This is one reason people put terminally ill family members in hospice.
Adding to the impossibility of playing both roles is the fact that it becomes ever more difficult to compass the life fading while you watch, because when he loses control of his bladder or his bowels and you have to clean up the mess you are filled with hot, savage resentment.
Also, you suck at being a caretaker. You weren’t trained for this; you’ve never done it before. Half the time all you succeed in doing is putting him in more pain than he already felt, like when you try to adjust the mystifying tubes sticking out of his nose and mouth because he’s obviously in horrible discomfort and you end up stabbing something in his nose with something on the tube and he groans in what sounds like agony and you think, great, something else I’ve made worse.
And having a health-care worker stop by once a day for a half hour doesn’t count as hospice.
I had known these things for a long, long time, having grown up with a mother who was dying before she even bore me. Mike had realized them, I think, fairly soon after his parents moved in with us. But his mother had not and did not. I brought to bear every blandishment of which I could conceive, but to no avail.
I understood the impulse; really, I did. I just worried that Mrs. Combs was robbing herself of something that would have been a great comfort to her, now and hereafter. And she was going to need all the comfort she could get. I kept hoping 28 would back me up, but the homemade Ouija board stayed out of sight.
“He should be all right,” Mrs. Combs said as Cathy opened the door for the two of them to leave. “He’s been sleeping well the last few days.”
“Okay,” I said.
“We’ll be back in a few hours.”
“Okay,” I said, and the door shut.
I turned on the television and began watching a Law & Order rerun; it was the one where the murderer’s lover says he can’t testify against the murderer because they’d gotten married in New Paltz back when the mayor of New Paltz was marrying same-sex couples (like my friends Rob and David) and therefore the spousal-privilege exception applied. So Sam Waterston gets the New York Supreme Court to declare marriages of same-sex couples invalid, a process which takes all of two minutes—would that the judicial system moved as quickly in real life—and then he comes back and puts the lover-whoops-husband on the stand and says, “What conversation did you have with the defendant on the date in question?” And the lover-whoops-husband says, “I’m not going to answer that,” and Sam Waterston’s bushy, bushy eyebrows shoot up and he asks the lover-whoops-husband what he thinks he’s doing. And the lover-whoops-husband is like, screw you for invalidating my marriage. And Sam Waterston throws him in jail for contempt of court and says he’ll keep him there as long as he wants, and then the murderer, who despite being a murderer is actually kind of a decent guy, confesses so that the lover-whoops-husband won’t have to languish in jail forever.
I turned the TV off and called my father, who is a lawyer. “Dad,” I said, “I think Law & Order just cheated,” and explained the setup. “But once a jury is empanelled,” I said, “doesn’t Sam Waterston have to keep the trial going, and if a witness doesn’t give him what he wants then it’s just too bad? He can’t put the trial on hold indefinitely, can he? And just make the jury sit there for months and months?”
“Joel,” said my father after a long silence, “I’m sorry to say this, and I hope you don’t take it the wrong way, but you have a fine legal mind.”
“How could you say such a horrible thing?” I said, and then Mr. Combs started making choking noises and I said “I have to call you back” and hung up and went over and tried to figure out what was going on, but of course I had no idea what was going on since I'M NOT A DOCTOR and I thought, well, okay, he’s choking on something, maybe I should turn his head, so I did and he started vomiting so I grabbed a nearby bedpan and held it under his mouth while he vomited into it and kept vomiting, there wasn’t even that much of it, it just seemed so vivid, and I wanted to call Mrs. Combs but my cell phone was on the table and I stretched as far as I could but I wasn’t able to reach it without pulling the bedpan away from Mr. Combs’s head, which would mean that he would be vomiting on the rug, and I loved that rug, but he just kept right on vomiting, so finally in between bouts of vomit I leapt for the phone, grabbed it, leapt right back to hold the bedpan under his mouth, and called her.
“Um,” I said when I got her voice mail, “could you please come home? Because Mr. Combs is vomiting and I’m not quite sure what I ought to do.” Shortly after that he stopped vomiting and went back to sleep and I turned the TV back on and watched another episode of Law & Order. When Mrs. Combs called back she was deeply apologetic; she said from what I described it sounded as if he had been vomiting not food but bile, which was something he’d been doing a few days earlier and which, while not pleasant, at least meant there wasn’t now yet another food he would refuse to eat anymore. Then sh
e hung up and came back home, which I appreciated but which was also hideously, hideously unfair, because you never think that “for better or for worse” means “even if you’re going to be trapped in your son’s house taking care of a stinking puking mass of insensate flesh that used to be a person who cared about you.”
Then I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out exactly what part of this situation it was that the Defenders of Traditional Marriage found so threatening.
Meanwhile, Mike and I began, hearthless, to ignore each other. Only a little at first, but then more and more, rejecting each other in turn—well, if he’s not going to pay attention to me then I’m certainly not going to pay attention to him—until we might as well have been just two roommates in one apartment. (Well, two of four roommates in three-quarters of an apartment, really, but you get the idea.) He would come home from the hospital and we would say hi and then I would go back to working on my computer in the living room (where, if you’ll remember, we had relocated my office) and he would sit down in the TV room and we would spend the evening as isolated from each other, he in front of the television, I at my desk, as if we were lab rats in cages.
Oh, how I came to loathe that television. It was a sixty-inch flat-screen high-definition TV that took up the whole wall. The room we had installed it in was actually full of things we’d bought even though we knew they were too big for it. Sometimes this turned out to be a boon, like when we were draped over the vast decadently burgundy sectional sofa watching Law & Order: SVU and Chris Meloni took his shirt off, but even gazing in wonderment at Detective Stabler’s larger-than-life abs couldn’t make me forget that the television was my rival for Mike’s affections. I would come into the TV room after a while, hoping to talk about Mike’s day or my day or, you know, the old person dying below us, and he would just continue to stare blankly at the TV watching his goddamn home and garden shows, House Hunters and House Hunters International and Flip This House and Flip That House (I’m not making that up, those really are two different shows) and the rest of them. And I felt that I’d never understood true loneliness before.
I assumed my experience dealing with terminal illness would come in handy as Mr. Combs deteriorated. When his blood relatives found themselves emotionally unmoored, I thought, I would be able to help them find ways to handle what was happening.
I thought wrong.
Apparently, Protestants don’t deal with death by continually making morbid jokes about it.
Jews are not like this. The closer somebody is to death, the funnier Jews are about it. People have been killing us for millennia, so we’re used to the idea; it’s a well-known joke that the answer to “What’s the meaning of [any given Jewish holiday]?” is “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.”
(I must point out that I do not speak for the entire Jewish people. I’m sure there are hundreds of thousands of Jews, millions of Jews, who don’t react this way. I just don’t know them.)
My mother was Episcopalian, but she’d been married to a Jew for decades, so her pseudo-Anglican sensibilities had been blunted beyond repair. And when she was dying, our house might as well have been the set of a really good Lisa Kudrow picture. It was unthinkable that any of us should ask whether anybody wanted anything from the drugstore and not be answered with, “Some morphine or a casket, whichever’s cheaper.” My favorite moment came a few days after she died. My father was talking about the snazzy new car phone he’d bought a few months before (this was in 1992, before cell phones). Our exchange went something like this:
MY DAD: I was just so glad to have that phone, because it meant that your mom could reach me no matter where I was—at the office, on the way home, wherever. It really was a lifesaver.
ME: Well, not quite.
Now, given that Mike’s parents had a spirit guide named 28, one could argue that they ought not in fact to have been classified as Protestants, but Mike says that people in the Midwest are Protestant no matter what religion they are, so within a few hours of their arrival, I learned that the way I could best help would be to keep my mouth shut. I don’t recall the attempts at humor I made—doubtless the Combses’ appalled reactions have led me to repress the memories—but I do remember that when Mr. Combs said he’d spent his whole life working and being busy and now what was he good for, I bit my tongue before the word “fertilizer” rolled off it, and realized I had a difficult time ahead of me.
“So how should we do this?” I said, looking at Mr. Combs. “Should I take his left side and you take his right side?” Mr. Combs was uncomfortable in the bed the hospice had given us, so we had decided to try to move him back to his own bed. “Then his weight would be divided evenly between us.”
“No,” said Mike, “because he’d just fold up at the middle and we’d drop him.”
“That would be bad.”
“Here, you take his feet and I’ll take his shoulders.”
“Won’t he still just fold up at the middle and we’ll drop him?”
“No, because if we carry him with our arms out we can keep him straight.”
Thank God Mr. Combs was asleep during this conversation, because in his position if I’d heard two people talking about me like this I might have died of powerlessness and shame.
I went to the foot of the bed and Mike to the head. I put Mr. Combs’s feet on my shoulders and stretched out my arms underneath his legs, while Mike burrowed his arms underneath his father’s back. “One,” Mike counted, “two, three!” and we lifted and moved as fast as we could, and we had enough momentum to get him over the metal rail of the hospice bed and we were going to be okay and then I tripped on the leg of an armchair and lost my grip and Mr. Combs folded at the waist just like we’d been trying to avoid and there he was hanging from us, his ass on the floor, my face growing red with the effort not to drop him, even though I’d already dropped him, and Mike said “Step back!” and he stepped forward and we were able to maneuver into a position from which we could deposit him in the armchair.
“I know we’ve had other things on our minds lately,” I said to Mike as we caught our breath in the kitchen, preparing to move Mr. Combs from the armchair to the bed, “but do you want to get married in Connecticut on Tuesday?” By now Connecticut had joined Massachusetts as a marriage-equality state. “Because then your dad could be there.”
“That’s sweet, but he can’t take a train.”
“No, I looked it up, it’s only an hour-long drive, and if you apply for a marriage license you get it the next business day, so we’d only have to be there for two weekdays. We could do the legal stuff there and then have a ceremony later on here, when things have calmed down and we have time to plan.”
“Could you get the license and then my folks and I come up after work the next day and get married?”
“No, we both have to be there to apply for it.”
“Joel, I can’t miss two days of work right now. The Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations is coming to the hospital at the end of the week, and I’m the only one on my unit who knows how everything is organized. If I skipped two days, we could lose our accreditation.”
“Fine,” I said huffily. “How about the next Tuesday?”
“That’s Christmas week. Look, tell you what: what if we go on”—he looked at the calendar on his iPhone—“Monday the fourth of January and get married on Tuesday?” He didn’t have to say, “if my dad is still alive.”
“Okay. That sounds good.” I didn’t have to say it either.
Mr. Combs died on the morning of December 26, protected to the last by the Defenders of Traditional Marriage from the horror of attending his son’s wedding.
“What happens when he dies?” my friend Sarah had asked. “What’s Mike’s mother going to do?”
“She’ll stay with us for a few months, on the top floor, and then she’ll find her own place.”
“Really?”
“Well, that’s what Mike says.”
“A
nd has Mike told her this?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I guess I should check with him.”
When I checked with him, he said, “Well, we haven’t discussed it explicitly, but I’m sure that’s her plan.”
Then Mr. Combs died, and Mike and his mother began discussing her move upstairs. “I’d like to wall this doorway up,” she said when they were checking out the space as Cathy and her husband prepared to move to their new place a few blocks away, “and I want to extend the bathroom by moving that wall further out.”
“Those are not the words,” I said to Mike when he reported this conversation to me, “of someone who is planning to stay with us for a few months.”
“Hmm,” he said.
We hired somebody to do the work on the upstairs apartment; in the meantime Mrs. Combs stayed in the suite she’d been sharing with her husband. She stayed in the suite she’d been sharing with her husband for half a year.
And by the time she had been living in her suite on her own for a month or two I realized that, when I’d thought before that I’d never understood true loneliness, that was when I hadn’t understood true loneliness, because now I would have welcomed seeing Mike and myself as two lab rats in cages, because at least lab rats can look at each other through the bars but by now I was virtually invisible to him, and he to me. The reason you get into a relationship, ultimately, is to create a space on earth in which you’re accepted and celebrated for being yourself, but to do that you have to allow your partner to see you being yourself, and eventually we were showing each other virtually nothing. Each tiny rejection, unacknowledged, forced a tiny retreat—oh, okay, I guess I can’t show him that part of me either—and eventually I felt I was living in an opaque shell I had constructed of myself, full of emotion, of anger, sorrow, and longing on the inside, but unable to let any of it out, because he wasn’t letting any out either, and so the only result of expressing these feelings would be the discovery that, though I was physically only a few feet from my TV-watching fiancé, I was in fact, in the vast emptiness of the world, alone.