Do Not Resuscitate

by Nicholas Ponticello

  I always figured the rest was implied: “But he doesn’t know, and he can’t see, because he doesn’t exist.”

  Then one day, shortly after she was diagnosed with cancer, we were waiting in the doctor’s office for yet another disheartening report from the latest round of tests, and Greta said, because I must have looked scared: “I’ll still be around, you know.”

  I blinked.

  “I’ll be hanging out with my mom and dad, and your sister, too, and we’ll keep an eye out for you and the kids.”

  “That’s very nice,” I said, “but wouldn’t you rather just be done with it all? I don’t want to think of you rattling around in the walls like a ghost, spying on me.”

  She laughed. “I won’t be rattling around, Jim. I’ll be hanging out with all our friends. Everyone we’ve known who has died. It’ll be nice.”

  “Do you really believe that?” I asked.

  “Of course I do,” she said.

  “Since when?” I protested. And why hadn’t she ever mentioned it to me before?

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess since we had the kids.”

  So she had concocted this fantasy in order to counter the ever-present fear of losing her children. And now she was dying, and the fantasy worked in reverse. The children didn’t have to worry about losing her. She’d always be there, partying it up with Grandpa Frost and Auntie Marilee and Gregor, who was the Labrador of ours that was run over by a truck, and Dr. Chow, the stray cat that hung around the house begging for milk until one day he didn’t come around anymore, and all the dozens of goldfish we had killed. They’d all be up there together having a good time. And the kids could talk to her anytime they wanted.

  Eliza latched on to the theory like it was a life raft on the sinking Titanic. Spencer didn’t buy it. He’s a lot like me. There’s more comfort in knowing a person is gone for good. Why drag this whole monkey parade out any longer than it has to be? Kendra Ann recently told me she still talks to her mother every day.

  So what if heaven really is whatever you want it to be, like Marilee used to say? Then perhaps I will get my way after all and disappear into the void of nothingness. But how, then, does Greta get her way, too? How can I be both gone for good and schmoozing with old friends at a big garden party in the sky? What then of my soul? To be or not to be? A conundrum.

  I think my mother is also expecting a visit from me when my time is up down here on Earth.

  Sounds like I have one hell of an itinerary in the afterlife.

  CHAPTER 22

  POOR ELIZA. She had already been to three funerals by the time she was eleven: her mother’s, my sister’s, and my father’s. Of the three, she says she remembers Marilee’s best. How could anyone forget it? The SF Chronicle called it an “Ecclesiastical Woodstock.” Thousands of people showed up from all over the world to pay their respects. The service was restricted to a private guest list of 1,842 intimates, of which I knew maybe a dozen. Then there were hundreds of mourners who just showed up and held their own impromptu services in the streets and parks surrounding the church. The service was also broadcast live on Fox News and streamed in several large cinema complexes around the world.

  I had almost no say in the planning of it. The Catholic Church appointed a committee to organize the whole affair. My only role was to nod yes or no when a representative of the committee approached me with details regarding the wishes of the immediate family.

  The service was held in the Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill in San Francisco. Helicopter footage of that day shows crowds of mourners clogging the streets and thoroughfares for ten blocks in every direction.

  The mayor of San Francisco spoke, as did the Archbishop Thurgood M. Dryden, and Rasima Rasima, and several celebrities, including Norma Watts, who had recently portrayed Marilee in a made-for-TV movie about the earthquake in Haiti. I spoke, but I can’t for the life of me remember what I said. I certainly couldn’t have said what I was thinking: may she be forever gone, dead, finished, kaput. My sisters couldn’t muster the nerve to address the congregation, but my mother spoke, and she said some very nice things that made sense to the contingency of bible-thumpers.

  My father did not attend. He and Marilee had not spoken for nearly a decade, not since he had disowned her for making Novocain for fools. And now he said he wasn’t going to go to any funeral that invited half the world to come and gawk at a girl who spent her whole life wiping other people’s asses.

  He was a real class act, my dad.

  My mother told the press that our father could not make the trip to San Francisco due to heart troubles. She didn’t feel like she was lying to anybody, she told me confidentially, because our father did have heart troubles; the trouble was he had no heart.

  The funeral dragged on for five hours, and then the cathedral was opened to visitors wishing to pay their respects to the inanimate remains of my sister. About twelve thousand people passed through the church in the span of six days. The church took donations, and I think something like $2 million poured in, most of which was funneled into the Sister Marilee Lorenzo Fund, now called the Saint Marilee Lorenzo Fund, and which is responsible for opening something like one hundred clinics worldwide and over two dozen orphanages, among other things.

  You’d think that would be enough to get you sainted, right? Not so, not so. As I later learned, the road to sainthood is no cakewalk. First of all, the person in consideration has to be dead. Marilee had at least that much going for her. And then said person has to perform no less than two bona fide miracles while remaining dead.

  “That’s where Rasima Rasima comes in,” wrote theological scholar Thomas A. Rhett. “There was no way Marilee Lorenzo could have fast-tracked her way to canonization from the grave. She needed an inside man.”

  Marilee was interred at Mission Dolores Church on Sixteenth and Dolores. The dust had barely settled on her tomb when Rasima Rasima showed up in Rome requesting an audience with the Pope. She wanted the Vatican to start right away on its consideration of Marilee Lorenzo for the distinction of sainthood.

  Traditionally such a process could not commence until at least five years had passed and the lasting impacts of the candidate on the mortal world were more readily understood. But such conventions had been waived before, Rasima Rasima pointed out, when the candidate was of particular renown.

  The Vatican was unmoved.

  But Rasima Rasima was not deterred. She took up residence in Rome, within a few blocks of Vatican City, and spent her days campaigning for my sister. There were others, too, who joined the cause, many of them women who had worked closely with Marilee in Haiti or Japan. They were called the Nuns of Borgo Vittorio, because of the little cloister they kept on the avenue Borgo Vittorio. Every day they wrote letters, held vigils, organized prayers, all in the name of Sister Marilee Lorenzo.

  Three years later the Pope consented. His decision made headlines in the United States: “Sister Marilee Lorenzo to be Considered for Sainthood Only Three Years after Tragic Death.” Imagine having a sister recently laid to rest whose name suddenly pops up again on every news crawl, blogger site, Twitter post, and Facebook thread from here to Timbuktu. There is such a thing as ghosts.

  The Vatican assigned Bishop Carlo Devicchio to the case. He spent two years studying every detail of Marilee’s life, from her childhood to her art to her charity work to her relationship with God and the church, even to her disease. When the investigation finally came round to me, I declined an interview but issued a written statement to the bishop stating that I wished to be exempt from the inquiry as I did not share the same beliefs as my sister. I did, however, add a postscript in which I expressed my deepest respect and admiration for my sister’s unwavering devotion to whatever cockamamie improbability it was that resulted in the universe.

  My older sisters were more obliging. They still considered themselves Catholics, even though they had given up going to church long ago. They told the bishop everything they thought he wanted to hear, and probabl
y more, and I’m sure he immediately dismissed their testimonies as frivolous and insincere since, as far as I knew, none of them had kept in touch with Marilee since she left for Haiti.

  However, my mother proved to be a more worthy informant. She and Marilee had long shared in the churchgoing experience, and it was my mother’s faith, albeit more traditional than it was philosophical, that had turned Marilee on to God so many years ago. My mother referred the bishop to Father Joseph Fitzpatrick, who had baptized Marilee and seen her through her first Communion and reconciliation and confirmation as a young girl.

  And as it turned out, my mother came from a long line of devotees. Her mother’s father, my great-grandfather, had been the vicar-general for the Bishop of Monte Mario, just outside Vatican City. In fact, he was still remembered well by several of the elder clergymen for his incredible kindness and charity.

  Of course, Rasima Rasima was thrilled.

  In her book, she writes, “When I learned of Marilee’s relation to the good vicar-general of Monte Mario, I had no doubt the Vatican would take my request more seriously. After all, the vicar-general had been considered briefly for sainthood himself some years ago.”

  And what did my dear old father have to say about Marilee? What could he say? By the time the bishop got around to interviewing him, he was dead from cardiac arrest.

  Maybe there is a God.

  Upon the conclusion of the investigation in 2022, about the same time Greta was giving it to Norman McCredie in the bedrooms of some of the best real estate in San Francisco, Bishop Carlo Devicchio submitted his report to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, and Sister Marilee Lorenzo of San Francisco was deemed “Venerable,” the first major step to sainthood.

  “A huge victory for the Nuns of Borgo Vittorio,” Thomas A. Rhett writes.

  Now all Rasima Rasima had to do was drum up a couple of miracles.

  CHAPTER 23

  I HAVE JUST HEARD from Duncan. He writes:

  Dear Jim,

  I am pleased to hear you are enjoying your holiday in Paris. I have only been once, to visit my sister at university. Paris is too big and too noisy for me. Nevertheless, I imagine a worldly traveler such as yourself will find the city agreeable, particularly this time of year, when the weather is so warm.

  In answer to your question regarding Dr. Elijah Mitzner: yes, Greta and I knew him growing up in Antwerp. He was a close friend of the family, and our childhood doctor. His family came to work on our farm at the end of the Second World War in 1944. He was only two years old.

  The Mitzners originated in Poland. After Germany invaded in 1939, they were transferred to a ghetto in Lodz where they lived until 1941. During a raid in 1941, the family was separated, and Freda Mitzner, Dr. Mitzner’s mother, was taken to Dachau. Her husband, Isaac Mitzner, was taken to Auschwitz and killed.

  Dr. Mitzner was born in the Dachau concentration camp in 1942. His mother managed to hide him from the Nazis with the help of the other women in her barracks until their release in 1944.

  After the war, the surviving Mitzners, who were numbered at about five or six, emigrated to Belgium, where my grandfather gave them work as farmhands. They lived out of a small house in the east orchard, and they earned their keep as fruit pickers and sheepherders.

  Dr. Mitzner went on to study medicine, and he later worked at the hospital in Antwerp. Our mother sent us over to the Mitzner place whenever either of us had a runny nose or a scraped knee.

  When my father died in 2000, my mother sold off most of the land, keeping only our small cottage and a few surrounding acres, which you have seen for yourself. Elijah moved his family to California, where he opened a private practice in Palo Alto, and from there I think you know the rest.

  I have not thought about Dr. Mitzner in a very long time. I recall his mother telling us how she very nearly strangled him to keep him from crying at night in the death camp. And sometimes she had to go days without food so he could eat. Some of the other women in the camp put aside bits of bread for the child, and they took turns caring for him. And sometimes he had to be left alone for many hours, tucked neatly away between two mattresses. It is a wonder he survived at all.

  When Dr. Mitzner passed away in 2030, his family wrote to ask if he could be buried here on the farm, where he grew up. Forty-three members of the Mitzner clan showed up for the ceremony; they came from all over the world. When the ceremony was over, every single one of them shook my hand and thanked me graciously for what my grandfather had done. He had given the Mitzners refuge and a livelihood. He had given them posterity.

  I am sorry I never got out to California. I would like to have seen Greta and Dr. Mitzner again before they died. I like to think sometimes of Greta, whose ashes have melted into the soil, and of Dr. Mitzner, who rests under the big chestnut tree, and I like to imagine them as they were when I was a child: Greta with a skinned knee and Dr. Mitzner holding her hand as he examines the scrape through his big browline glasses.

  That’s how they will always be to me. That’s how they will stay.

  Very much your dear old friend.

  Duncan

  CHAPTER 24

  FIRST IT WAS THE SCHOOLTEACHER in Buenos Aires who claimed Sister Marilee Lorenzo appeared to her in a dream. Then it was the girl in South Africa with stigmata. And then there was the blind beggar in Taipei who prayed to Sister Marilee Lorenzo and subsequently regained his sight.

  Rasima Rasima submitted each of these claims to the Vatican committee appointed to review Marilee’s case and was met each time with skepticism and a subsequent rejection.

  The schoolteacher in Buenos Aires had a history of drug abuse. The girl in South Africa was a cutter. The blind beggar in Taipei was a scam artist.

  Then a letter came from a poor fisherman in Nova Scotia. He claimed that whenever he tied a small strand of white ribbon to the bow of his little dinghy, mackerels and trout started jumping out of the sea and into the boat. The ribbon, he claimed, came from the funeral wreath that had adorned Marilee’s casket at her memorial service in 2017.

  Rasima Rasima writes in her book:

  When I arrived in the village of Sambro, Nova Scotia, Mr. Puttner invited me into his kitchen and showed me a freezer full of fish. He laid the ribbon out on the table. It was no more than ten inches long, and frayed at the ends. I examined the artifact closely. All the flower arrangements for the memorial service had come from the Flower Emporium on Eighteenth Street in San Francisco. Sister Ellen Roderick had chosen the ribbon herself from a catalogue. This was indeed the same ribbon.

  Then Mr. Puttner took me out on his little dinghy. He tied the ribbon to the tow ring at the bow. No more than five minutes had passed before dozens of fish began leaping out of the water and into the keel.

  I called Bishop Carlo Devicchio directly, and he came out at once to investigate the claim. On our first trip out to sea with the bishop, only two fish jumped into the keel. “Surely this cannot be the miracle you speak of,” said the bishop. But the next morning, Mr. Puttner took us out again. This time we counted 148 fish in the keel. At the end of four days’ time, we had amassed a total of 753 fish. However, on the fifth day, there were only eight fish. And on the sixth day, there were none.

  The vicar-general, who was also there, caught the whole episode on his camera phone. The footage made headlines, and Rasima Rasima was hopeful. She writes:

  This time we had our miracle. John 6:10 tells how Jesus fed the five thousand with fish. This had to be a sign from God.

  But then all sorts of similar YouTube videos began circulating on the Internet. Apparently fish all around the world were known to leap into boats from time to time when their waters were disturbed. The Bureau of Fishing and Game called the phenomenon “fish bombing.”

  The Vatican promptly dismissed the case.

  They issued a statement:

  When Jesus fed the five thousand, he did so with only five loaves of bread and two fish. Food was scarce, and the people were starving. What g
ood is it if fish leap into a boat in a part of the world where fish are plentiful and hunger is nonexistent? We recognize the good fortune of the fisherman of Sambro, but we cannot justly call it a miracle when so many others are starving the world over.

  Thomas A. Rhett writes, “Following this disappointment, Rasima Rasima disappeared from the public eye for several years. Her followers claim she spent her days absorbed in heavenly contemplation.”

  Then in 2030, a young girl in Somalia, no more than ten years old, claimed a woman had appeared to her in a copse on the outskirts of her village. The apparition had pointed to the roots of a tree and said, “Drink.” The girl, frightened, ran all the way home and told her mother. The next day, the village priest was summoned, and together they went to the place where the girl had seen the apparition.

  The girl pointed to the spot on the ground where the woman had said to drink. There was nothing more than sunbaked earth. The priest began to dig. Suddenly water began to bubble up from the ground.