Accidentally on Purpose

by Mary F. Pols

After I’d convinced Dolan to climb into his car seat and we’d belted ourselves in, she nosed the car forward. “Now which way should I go?” she asked. Wib has been to the Portland airport plenty of times, but she still approaches a trip there with a blend of urgency and fear, as though she’s been wrested out of her art studio, dropped into a Cambodian minefield, and told to leave with a piece of bamboo, three blades of grass, and a rare breed of toad.

  “Just forward,” I said. “Follow the exit sign.”

  “But if I want to go to the highway?” she said. “Is this going to take me there?”

  “Yes,” I said. “So how’s Dad doing today?”

  “Not so good. This way?” I nodded. Dolan was grumbling from the backseat. He was both bored and tired, which I was learning was a deadly combination in a toddler. “That’s why I’m late actually. Bodwell called and said he’s having some serious respiratory distress.”

  She took a deep breath. “They think he might not make it through the night.”

  WHEN I WROTE THAT MESSAGE to myself on my desk, I had been thinking, of course, of the ways I would make my own life different. By this I meant better, more sane, more directed. I hadn’t factored in all the events or circumstances that might happen and would make my life different but would not be of my own doing.

  A mere twelve days after I’d taken Magic Marker to unfinished pine in that desperate bid toward self-improvement, different had begun. That was the day an e-mail arrived from my father mentioning that some tests he’d had in advance of a minor hernia surgery showed an unusually high white blood cell count. This was the crack that by the end of the next week had become a chasm: a diagnosis of chronic leukemia. Since then he’d developed a mysterious throat condition and his weight had dropped to ninety-eight pounds. Then he’d had a heart attack. I couldn’t keep track anymore of all the times he’d had pneumonia. Wib could, though; she’d become the unofficial keeper of all information related to the tenuous medical condition of Edward Pols.

  How astonishingly naïve it was for me to feel I’d beaten the biological clock. A much bigger clock had taken over my life.

  I STOOD BEFORE a low-slung, fifties-style brick building, with long wings that poked into the woods. It looked like the junior high I’d attended, which was just a few blocks away. Dolan was safely asleep back at our house. I corrected myself. Benet’s house.

  Everything felt terribly familiar. There was the hum the street lamps let off and that dim, yellowish light they cast over the almost empty parking lot. Half the cars in the lot belonged to members of my family. As I stood looking at the bright fluorescence inside, even the smell of the thick, warm August air seemed the same. I looked at the keypad that after-hours visitors had to use to get into the building and reached my finger up to punch out the code. I needed no reminding of what it was.

  I walked past the paintings and photographs of boats and Maine seascapes. “Not unpleasant,” Mum might have said. I invoked that thought every time I walked by them last August, trying, I suppose, to hear her voice in my head, trying to make it seem like not such a bad place for her to be living. Dying, you mean. Down the hall was a print of Casco Bay, the waters of which had been rendered an unfortunate yellow. Liza and Hugh own the same print, and every time I see it in Hugh’s kitchen, I want to ask him to put it away, down in the garage, anywhere, just somewhere I won’t see it and remember her hands grasping fruitlessly at nurses, blankets, life.

  I walked past the reception area, the bathroom where I cried so much the summer before, past the lock-down hallway where my mother took her last breath, eleven months ago and, what, five days? I turned left down another hallway, and there I was, in the place where I knew my father would soon die.

  Where would I want him to die? Nowhere. Never. But failing that, in some beautiful place, I suppose, looking out over the ocean maybe. Not one of these sterile, dingy institutions with their bad lighting, plastic food, and depressing noises. Not even his still new apartment, which was just on the other side of this retirement community. This place had everything, the soup to nuts of the end of life, from independent living to the last circle of hell—the nursing home. It was all connected by covered walkways. When he first moved in, we’d joked about how he’d be walking over in his pajamas to visit my mother in the dementia wing. Now here he was himself, in the rehab wing, with me hoping for small compromises. May my father, if he must die here, at least have a single room. He dislikes roommates more than he dislikes the Yankees.

  He smiled a ghastly smile when I came into the room. Age and illness can distort even a sincere smile into something frightening. He was a skeleton, gray, sweaty with fever, sitting up and struggling to breathe. They’d given him antibiotics to fight the pneumonia, but there wasn’t much else to be done. Benet had just gone home, but Wib, Alison, and Katy were all there. It was getting close to 2 A.M., and the late hour showed on their faces. Alison got up to give me a hug. She smelled like sweet soap.

  “His fever is down a little,” she said.

  “He definitely sounds better than he did an hour ago,” Katy said as she hugged me. After all we had been through in the last year, the little college girl who had smoked me out of house and home had grown into someone calm and competent.

  I was wired from the trip and the realization that I might have come just in time, so I offered to stay with him through the night. Dolan would be fine at Benet and Beth’s house without me; in fact, he’d be thrilled to wake up to the happy clamor of his cousins.

  Dad told me he was tired.

  “I bet,” I said, smoothing his forehead. “It’s a lot of work, being so sick.” Such a nice brow, above that beaky nose and those bushy eyebrows. As a teenager I used to tease him about how long the hairs would get, until he handed me a scissors one day and asked me to trim them. I remember being taken aback, to realize he would actually listen and want to change something that, in fact, I didn’t want him to change at all. He was just as he was meant to be.

  I bent to kiss him. “You can just rest, Dad. You’ve been fighting for so long. You’ve been a phoenix already.”

  “That’s what my doctor calls me,” he said, hoarsely.

  “I know,” I said. “You surprised us all.”

  He had. On the day of my mother’s memorial service the previous fall, he’d been rushed to the hospital, and I’d stood, watching him being unloaded from the ambulance in the chill of an autumn night, thinking, He’s going, right now, he’s going. That was the night of the heart attack. He’d barely recovered from that when his doctor had said his throat condition was so poor he’d never eat normally again, and suddenly the man who could tell you, in vivid detail, about the meal we had at that corner bistro in Arles in 1973, how the lamb melted on his tongue, how the roast potatoes crunched under his teeth, how soft and sweet the accompanying garlic cloves were, was subsisting on some horrible concoction of liquid nutrition poured into a feeding tube in his stomach. Then, miraculously, he’d rallied. His throat seemed better. He’d tried eating again. Not long after his eighty-sixth birthday, they’d been able to take out the feeding tube. Alison had gone back to roasting chickens and mashing Yukon Gold potatoes for him. That’s when his doctor made her famous pronouncement about how he’d risen from the ashes.

  He’d even put on his cap and gown and marched at Katy’s Bowdoin graduation that spring. As I sank into a chair next to his bedside, I remembered pushing Dolan’s stroller through the crowds, scanning the gray heads in the faculty section for him, then the elation of finding him in the front row, looking tiny and thin, his hair nearly white, his crimson hood a stark contrast to his black robe. He had squinted against the bright day. I waved but couldn’t get his attention, so I took out my camera and got a few shots of him listening to the speaker. Once he noticed me, he took off his mortarboard and tipped it in my direction. Always the courtly gesture. My eyes filled, and as I turned my head to surreptitiously wipe the tears away, I saw Benet only a few feet away from me, with his zoom lens traine
d on Dad. If he was the phoenix, we were like feverish bird-watchers, recording every glimpse of a creature we knew to be rare, bordering even on extinction. That had been only three months ago.

  He wasn’t sleeping now, but his breathing seemed easier. He looked toward the ceiling but not actually at it. I’d spent enough time at his bedside in the past year to know he wasn’t about to launch into any big speeches.

  “You’re looking well,” he said. His voice was very hoarse.

  “Weight Watchers,” I said. “I’ve been trying to get into shape before the fellowship. I want to impress all my fancy new colleagues.”

  He smiled, then fell silent.

  In the year of things becoming different, this was the only thing I could claim responsibility for. The previous winter, I’d applied for a competitive fellowship for mid-career journalists at Stanford—something I’d been fantasizing about for ten years at least. On the spring day I’d learned I’d be spending a whole academic year there, studying film and whatever else I pleased, and getting paid for it, I don’t know who was happier, my father or me. I think that having spent his whole working life living fairly comfortably within academia, he saw it as the perfect refuge for a single mother with a baby still in diapers. In classic father-knows-best fashion, he’d told me he hoped I’d use the year to “get your head out of the movies.” All these years of my being a movie critic, and he still regarded my profession as somewhat lamentable. I remember his tone when I called him once between my second and third movies in a single day: “Another movie?” he’d said. You’d think I’d just announced I’d escaped Dunkirk but thought I might head off to Paris to see what the Germans were up to there.

  “I just got the course catalog,” I told him. “I’m thinking about taking Italian. It’s about time I actually learned how to speak another language.”

  Even as I said it, I realized how ridiculous it was to be trying to please him with hints that I’d be getting my head out of the movies. He was way past that. I reached out for his hand on the bedcovers. “Is there anything I can do for you, Babbo?” I said. “Anything you need at all?”

  “I should sleep, I suppose,” he said, looking at me anxiously, as if sleep were a dangerous thing he might not emerge from.

  “That’s a good idea,” I said. I got up to look for a cloth to wipe his forehead with. There was a black tube of Chap Stick standing on the bedside table. I held it up. “Shall I put a little of this on your lips? You seem parched.”

  He blinked his assent. I smoothed it on, and as I did so, remembered doing the same to my mother’s dry lips the summer before and having the desperate sensation that I was not doing it right, that what I was doing was too little, that there was really nothing I could do except sit there and tell her that I loved her.

  THE TIMING HAD BEEN BIZARRE. I’d brought Dolan, an infant almost six months old, home to meet the family. We’d stayed a week, and then we’d gone back to California. Two days later, my mother had had a stroke. Everyone assumed it was another minor setback, but then the doctors realized she couldn’t swallow anymore, not food, not water. She had a living will, so there would be no intervention. “The nurses are of the opinion that the end will come in a week or so,” my father’s e-mail had said. I was on a plane with Dolan the next afternoon.

  My mother’s room had been in the Alzheimer’s/dementia wing adjacent to the rehab center. The layout was essentially identical to my father’s, the view into the leafy woods, mostly birch, about the same. I’d watched him sitting next to her bed in the same sort of chair I was sitting in now. During those long days and nights at her side, my siblings and I had either been overwhelmed with emotion or cracking jokes with each other, trying to lighten the weight of a situation we’d never been in before. My father had just been getting ill then, and when he’d come to visit her, he sat silently at her bedside, but very alert, as if he were waiting for her to speak to him. When I looked into my mother’s eyes, I saw only dark confusion and beseeching, as if she wondered whether we might show her the way out. He looked as though he understood exactly what she was asking, and it seemed he could answer her without words.

  They’d told us it would take five to seven days for an old woman consuming nothing to die. After five, she seemed no closer to death. The seventh was her eighty-fourth birthday. We told ourselves she’d go then; the nurses had all talked about those mysterious tricks of the internal clock, how people hang on until they reach the signpost they’ve been waiting for, be it a special day or the arrival of a longed-for visitor. But the next morning, her vitals were still strong. We’d basically taken up residence in the room. There were copies of the New Yorker everywhere, packages of half-eaten Oreos, reading glasses, bottles of Coke with one tepid flat inch in the bottom, sweaters tossed over the backs of chairs. It was hot and muggy outside, but in my mother’s room, the air conditioning droned on perpetually. Dolan slept in his stroller or in my arms. Alison held his head to my mother’s face and let her smell his milky baby smell. We took turns in groups of two. We didn’t want her to be alone at the end. We didn’t want her to be afraid.

  Her physical endurance seemed to baffle the hospice workers, who had started to ask if there might be some unfinished business she needed to settle. But I knew she wanted to go, had been ready for years. Three years before, as she was being driven to the hospital after she’d broken her hip, she’d asked Adrian to hit her over the head.

  “I can’t do that, Mum,” he’d said to her.

  “Just put me out of my misery,” she had pleaded.

  When she awoke from that hip replacement surgery, she seemed disappointed to still be alive. The anger I saw in her eyes then was the most cogent emotion I’d seen from her in years. She never walked again. We were almost grateful; at least then we were finally able to persuade my father it was time for a nursing home.

  IT WAS DIFFERENT WITH MY FATHER. He never wanted to die. Alison had told us that his doctor had given him two choices the week before. Either he could work harder at his physical therapy, since the rehab center was for people who were supposed to be getting better, or he could be discharged and go home to his apartment, where he could have hospice. Those were his choices. He told the doctor he’d take hospice and get better.

  He had things he wanted to do. The previous fall he’d finished a poetry manuscript, elegant, formal poems that knitted across the breadth of his life, from his days as a young man in World War II to his years as a caregiver to my mother. He’d enlisted Wib as his literary agent, and he’d been pestering her to track down editors at the few publishing houses that still bothered with poetry. She’d walk into his room and he’d ask if any mail had come from the editor of the Sewanee Review, or from an obscure contest out in Michigan that sounded promising. He’d also finished a new philosophy manuscript, and he wanted her to do something with that too. He was a man who was not yet done with life, even if, it seemed, life was done with him.

  My fierce father. He’d finally fallen asleep. By dawn I could tell the antibiotics had staved off death, at least for another day. I kissed him as he lay sleeping and then drove home to Benet’s and climbed the steps to the Barn Chamber. When we were young, this had been our playroom, a big old barn with walls blackened from some long-ago fire. My father had had it redone in unstained pine planks and turned it into his lair, the room we were supposed to stay out of, where he did his thinking and writing. He’d built himself a platform bed out there. Now this was where Dolan and I slept when we were visiting.

  Dolan was sprawled in the portable crib. Last August he’d looked so small in it; now he had to lie diagonally across it to be comfortable. I took him into the bed with me and tried not to look up. There was a series of knots in the pine on the vaulted ceiling that had caught my eye last summer. A nose, two eyes, a mouth open in anguish, a face that looked like my dying mother’s, some silently howling Irish banshee. I knew I was supposed to be brave, but it was too much that it was August again and someone else was dying.
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br />   TWO DAYS LATER, when I brought Dolan by to see him, my father was in the hallway. The fever had broken and his physical therapist reported that he’d been up and down the corridor twice. She seemed pleased. Worn out from the exertion, he sat there in his gown, scrawny legs stretched out in front of him, and smiled at Dolan. As his grandson played at his feet, he reached out his hand, slowly, carefully, to touch that flaxen head. Dolan stole a glance up at him and smiled back. He was young enough to not be afraid of an old, sick man.

  My father was Elizabeth Dolan Pols’s firstborn. When he was about Dolan’s age, she had dressed him in velvet and ruffles, like Little Lord Fauntleroy, and taken him to get his portrait made. He posed for the camera with chin in hand, looking languid and pretty. I used to pore over that photo when I was little, amazed at how girlish my father had been. His hair was as golden as Dolan’s. I wondered if my father thought of that when he touched Dolan’s hair.

  At least they knew each other a little, these two. Admittedly most of their time together had been at bedsides, but I felt grateful for even that. My mother and Dolan had barely passed each other in the world, meeting each other just a week before her stroke. Wib and I had gone over to the nursing home together. We’d found my mother hunched over in her wheelchair in the television room. She wasn’t watching the screen; such things didn’t seem to interest her anymore. Nothing really seemed to interest her. I held Dolan in my arms, like a present I was proud of, the best present I would ever give my mother. We’d pulled up chairs and sat down in front of her.

  “Hi, Mum,” I’d said, feeling weepy already. “How are you?”

  She’d looked at me consideringly. No matter how long it had been since we’d seen each other, she usually reacted as though I’d just been there a few minutes before and what was I making such a fuss about? She was often confused about how old I was, but she always seemed to know me. The same was true for my siblings. My father was the only one she really brightened up for, and she’d hold his hand while he visited. In my whole life I never remembered seeing them hold hands. “I don’t believe she said ‘I love you’ as much in our whole marriage as she has in the last couple of years,” he had told me once.