The Rules of Inheritance

by Smith, Claire Bidwell

  I watch him take in a breath.

  I stand and stretch. I open the blinds on the other side of the bed and stand looking out at the sparkling California morning. There are a couple of kids playing in the pool, their shouts and splashes muffled through the glass that separates us.

  I turn back to my dad and place a hand on his cheek.

  Dad?

  Dad?

  Nothing. No twitches. No flutters. He does not respond, except to draw in another labored breath.

  In the kitchen I call the hospice number and give them an update. They tell me to expect a nurse by evening.

  Colin is readying himself to leave.

  Do you want me to come back later?

  I shrug. I am delirious. I am exhausted. All I know is that I can’t do this for much longer.

  When he is gone, I shuffle back down the hall and take up my perch in the office chair, holding my father’s hand, counting his breaths.

  Abby, Holly, and Liz all take turns coming to the condo. They sit in the living room, talking in hushed voices, jumping up the moment I enter the room, their eyes wide with concern.

  It’s almost seven in the evening when the hospice nurse finally arrives. Abby and Holly have gone. Colin has returned and is in the living room with Liz. I lead the nurse back to my dad’s room.

  I take his hand as she checks his vitals. She is quiet and kind, smiling at me with warm eyes. I don’t know how she does this day in and day out. She wants to change his diaper, and so I stand to help her. We will have to turn my father on his side to do this.

  I just want to warn you, she says, sometimes doing this—moving them when they’re like this—causes them to go.

  I stop what I’m doing and stand there, looking down at him. My entire being is flooding downward, pooling out around us on the floor.

  It feels like a choice, even though it isn’t.

  I’m ready, I say, my voice a whisper.

  Carefully we turn my father to one side and the nurse unclasps the diaper, pushing it to the side and placing a new one there. I stay on the side that my father is facing, my eyes glued to his, listening to the breath coming in and out of his mouth.

  It’s okay, Dad.

  I can’t tell if I’m saying this out loud or not.

  It’s okay, Dad.

  It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.

  We turn him and I go around to that side of the bed, taking one of his hands while the nurse finishes with the diaper. I look down at my father’s hand, at the wrinkles and the thin threads of purple veins.

  I am flooded with a thousand memories of him. In one split second I think about all the things he was in this life. The son and the brother and the father. The inventor and the pilot, the prisoner and the protector. I think about all the ways he held on to me after my mother died. The least I can do is hold on to him in return.

  The nurse finishes, and we roll him back to the center of the bed. She pulls the sheet up, tucking it around his chest, and we both watch his face, watch him take in a breath. I cannot tell if I am relieved or not.

  Then seconds go by and nothing happens.

  More seconds. Too long. His eyelids are halfway closed, his mouth all the way open.

  Dad?

  He sucks in a breath.

  The nurse’s voice startles me.

  Honey, I think this is it. Do you want me to get your friends?

  I nod at her, my eyes never leaving his face.

  I’m leaning over the bed, holding one of his hands with both of mine.

  Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad.

  My tears are dripping down onto the sheet that covers his chest.

  Colin and Liz are there then. Liz is opposite me, holding my father’s other hand. Colin is beside me, his arms tight around me.

  I am squeezing my father’s hands, still warm and pliant.

  This is the moment. All of it swirling together. Me and my mother and father. The shared afternoons of puddled golden light. The future, the past, the present. All of it, all at once.

  Right here, right now.

  My father sucks in a breath and then it whooshes out again softly.

  Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad.

  He is gone.

  Chapter Fifteen

  2011, I’M THIRTY-TWO YEARS OLD.

  I’M DRIVING IN frantic circles around Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. I’m looking for a parking spot, but because of last week’s blizzard piles of waist-deep snow obscure most of them. Story time at the zoo started ten minutes ago and my daughter, Veronica, is threatening certain death if I don’t release her from the car seat soon.

  Argh! I exclaim, finally cramming the car into a snow-filled parking space and twisting around to unbuckle Veronica’s car seat.

  Five minutes later we walk into story time, harried and frigid. As I remove our hats, scarves, and mittens I take a look around the room. A dozen moms and nannies are sitting on the floor with their toddlers, bopping their heads and clapping hands in time with the music.

  We plunk ourselves down on the carpet and Vera promptly throws her arms around me in a desperate attempt to thwart the anxiety she is feeling around so many strangers. I rub her back and begin to sing along to “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” Although she keeps her arms around me, after a few minutes I feel her loosen her grip, craning her head to look around. I can’t help but let a small smile creep across my face.

  Right this moment I’m just another young mom at a playgroup with her daughter.

  I’m not thinking about anything in the world but me and my daughter, about the feeling of her little body pressed to me, about her breath hot on my neck, about the bond between us.

  It’s only later that I am able to take note of how different I am from who I used to be.

  I have spent the majority of my adult life thinking about what I don’t have. For a long time, I could only look at my present and my future through the lens of my past. My parents’ deaths colored everything I saw.

  There’s another side to grief though, and I’m on it.

  THE NEXT MORNING my cell phone rings as I’m getting ready for work. Veronica chirps from her high chair, where she’s making messy attempts to spear a small pile of scrambled eggs with a fork. Greg sits in front of her, his hair still mussed from sleeping, and cajoles her playfully.

  Mmm, can Daddy have some?

  Veronica cackles and gleefully drops a handful of eggs onto the floor.

  I finally locate my phone at the bottom of my workbag. My supervisor, Alex, is on the other end.

  Claire, before you come in, can you to make a visit to the Hutchinsons? George is a phase 3 and his wife could really use some support.

  Sure, I say, pulling on my heels and grabbing my bag off the coat hook in the kitchen.

  I’m a bereavement counselor for a hospice, and George Hutchinson is one of the patients our team cares for. Phase 3 means he’s actively dying and will likely be gone in a matter of days. I’ve talked to his wife, Judy, a few times on the phone but I’ve never met her in person.

  When I moved to Chicago three years ago, I had just graduated from my master’s program and wasn’t sure exactly what kind of work I wanted to do. For weeks I scrolled through job listings online, going to various interviews and checking out the local mental-health clinics.

  One night I saw an ad for a hospice grief counselor and something clicked. Of all the medical approaches my parents experienced, hospice was the only one with a positive outcome. Even though that outcome had been my father’s death.

  I first heard the word “hospice” a few months before my mother died. But instead of going that route, my mom went to that hospital in DC, where she had several more operations. I’ll never stop wishing that she had chosen hospice instead.

  Hospice provides care and comfort to dying patients. Sometimes hospice takes place in a hospital or a center, but more often hospice patients are in their own homes. The basic philosophy is to ensure that a person’s d
ying experience is as peaceful as possible, for the patient as well as the family.

  A hospice team is made up of doctors, nurses, health aids who bathe and clean the patient, a social worker, a chaplain, a volunteer team, and a bereavement counselor. Everyone works together to make sure that the patient and family are well cared for, not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually as well.

  When my daughter was born, I experienced the opposite of death. I realized how much it takes to bring a person into this world and how the experience is rewarded with preparation and presence of mind.

  Dying is the same.

  My job as the bereavement counselor is to contact each family following the death of the patient. I check in to see how they’re doing and I offer counseling and guidance. I facilitate grief groups and I also run workshops and conduct one-on-one counseling. Sometimes I meet with families or patients before the death.

  Today, in George Hutchinson’s case, I’m going to do my best to offer support to his wife.

  I park in the driveway of the Hutchinsons’ simple two-story house in a suburb near O’Hare airport. The neighborhood is quiet. Garbage cans are out, and a man walks his dog down the sidewalk.

  I sit in my car for a moment and look at the house. You could drive down any neighborhood street and never know that inside one of the unassuming houses someone is taking their last breaths.

  I ring the doorbell and wait a few minutes. I glance down the street again. The man walking his dog has disappeared. Finally a tired-looking woman comes to the door.

  Judy?

  She nods at me.

  Hi, I’m Claire from hospice. We spoke on the phone a couple of times. I’m the bereavement counselor.

  Her eyes well up with tears. She nods and opens the door wider for me to come in.

  I follow her into a dimly lit living room. A man, whom I take to be Judy’s son, is in the kitchen. He gives a little wave but doesn’t introduce himself.

  George is asleep, Judy says. That’s Brian, our oldest.

  I nod, taking a seat on the couch.

  The nurse was just here, Judy says, her voice cracking. She takes a breath and continues. She said . . . She said . . . it’s probably a matter of days, possibly hours.

  I put my hand on hers. Her skin is warm.

  She weeps silently for a few minutes, and we just sit together in the quiet room.

  There is no solution for what Judy is going through. There is nothing I can say or do that will change anything. My presence is the only thing I can offer. But it’s worth more than it may seem.

  In all my years of grief, and in my years as a bereavement counselor, the single most powerful healing mechanism I’ve found is simple presence. The opportunity for a person to feel seen and heard in the middle of one of the loneliest experiences in their life can have a profound effect.

  Next month we’ll have been married for thirty-two years, she says. Judy exhales her sentences in halting breaths.

  I always thought we had more time.

  All of this happened so fast.

  He was just diagnosed six months ago.

  George was so full of life before he got sick.

  Over the next hour she tells me about their life together. How she and George met, about their children and the places they traveled. She cries on and off and gets up twice to check on him while he sleeps. I never once see him.

  When it’s time for me to go, Judy stammers an apology.

  I’m sorry I talked the whole time. I didn’t mean to do that.

  Please don’t apologize, I say. That’s what I came here for.

  I know I’ll see Judy again, likely as a member of my Saturday grief support group.

  We embrace at the door, and then I get in my car, back out of the driveway, and drive away from the Hutchinson house.

  A few hours later I hear from one of the nurses that George passed away.

  AFTER I LEAVE the Hutchinsons I drive to a nursing home in Arlington Heights to visit another patient.

  Her name is Ethel James. Her son won’t be there until three, but she is actively dying and he has requested that someone sit with her until he can get there.

  I find her room at the end of a long hallway, on the second floor of the nursing home. I’ve never met Ethel and I’ve never spoken to her son. The lights are off and Ethel is lying in bed, under a blanket. Her eyes are closed. She is unconscious.

  Her breaths come in rasps and they are few and far between. She seems peaceful though.

  I pull a chair up to the bedside and carefully take one of Ethel’s hands in mine. Her skin is warm but there is no response when I squeeze her fingers.

  It’s a strange thing to hold the hand of someone you’ve never met. I watch her chest rise and fall, and then my eyes travel up to her face, to the wrinkles around her mouth and the creases next to her eyes.

  I wonder what she did in her life. Who she loved, who she lost. What her biggest dreams were. If they came true. I can’t help feeling how connected we all are in life’s simplest pursuits.

  I settle back in the chair and close my eyes, Ethel’s warm hand in mine.

  A FEW DAYS LATER I park my car in the underground garage at the hospital and grab my bag and a box of tissues from the backseat. It’s Saturday morning, just after 10:00 a.m., and I’m about to lead my weekly grief support group. The click of my high heels echoes down the hallway as I walk toward the elevators, and I reflexively check to make sure that my short-sleeved shirt is covering the tattoo on my shoulder.

  It’s a dumb tattoo—it kind of looks like a Chinese throwing star—and it’s right on the ball of my shoulder. I got it when I was eighteen, barely a week after my mother died. At first it was just a circle but a few months later, in Europe with Liz, I had the star tattooed over it. At the time the tattoo served no other purpose than to mark the occasion of the worst thing that had ever happened to me, but now the only thing it serves to do is ensure that I never wear sleeveless shirts.

  The elevator dings and I step off and into a hallway on the tenth floor. I’m early—the group won’t begin for another half hour—but I want to get set up before everyone arrives. I toss my bag in a corner, turn off my cell phone, and stand for a moment at the windows that look out over the flat, snowy Illinois landscape. I think for a moment about my intentions for the group, about what I hope to accomplish by being here today, and then I turn and place a sign-in sheet on the table, as well as two boxes of tissues.

  Finally I take a seat at the head of the table and cross my hands in front of me, smiling as each member of the group enters the room. Marcy arrives first. She’s in her early fifties, with short, stylish hair and a collection of fantastically chunky and eclectic jewelry. Her husband died six months ago and not one session has gone by when she hasn’t hung her head and wept.

  Sarah takes a seat next to Marcy. Sarah lost her father just two months ago. She cared for him at home, and now that he is gone she feels incredibly alone and directionless. James arrives after that. His elderly mother died in this very hospital, and he’s confessed that he still finds himself wanting to walk through the familiar hallways to her room, hoping that she’ll somehow still be there. Katie comes in right on time. Her husband died in a terrible car accident five years ago, leaving her to raise their children on her own. Katie has only now found herself able to face her grief. She revealed to me early on that she still pays the bill on her husband’s cell phone so that she can call and listen to his voice on the outgoing message.