Mona in Three Acts

by Griet Op de Beeck

“Then, well, um, we’ll see each other upstairs, with Dad, then?” Alexander gets up, I follow.

  She nods without looking at us.

  Alexander points. “That must be her—young, short dark hair, not very tall, red shoes.”

  We go up to her and ask whether we can ask her something. There’s something unbelievably soft in her face, and a lot of vigor in her movements. The three of us stop at the end of the hallway, just near the elevator. We explain the course of Dad’s illness and tell her what he’s asked us. Alexander and I interrupt each other as we tell our story, as though we’re trying to get to the end of it as fast as possible, as though we can’t wait for her response, which we fear and also long for—sometimes those things go hand in hand. The doctor nods the whole time we’re talking, as though she wants to reassure us that she does actually understand. She lets a silence fall when we’re done, and then says, without the slightest hesitation, “I understand your situation. I experienced more or less the same with my grandfather.” She purses her lips briefly. “I’ll drop by and examine your father and see whether we can agree that his suffering is too great—unbearable—so that a much higher dose of pain medication would be appropriate. That’s what we can do.” She looks the way mothers look at their children when they’re about to take an exam in their weakest subject. “What do you both think? Is that all right?”

  Alexander and I both nod.

  “And then . . .”

  “And then your father will drift off very quickly, within a few minutes, and then he’ll slip away.”

  “How long will it be before he dies?” I need to call it what it is because no one else has spoken the unspeakable yet.

  “It’s hard to predict, somewhere between very quickly and around seven days. Three to four is about average.” She’s the first doctor who hasn’t given the impression that she’s needed elsewhere urgently. The silence lasts awhile.

  “OK, so when can we expect you?” Alexander asks.

  “Dad is really anxious to know,” I add.

  “I’ve got a couple of my own patients to see, but I’ll come to you after that. In about half an hour or so. Room 316, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Thank you,” I say to the woman who is going to kill my father. It’s odd that it’s been so easy. I look at Alexander, he looks at me. I check my phone, maybe there’ll be a message from Louis.

  38

  Charlie is taking Marvin to her mom’s, but she’ll be here soon. Marie is sitting bolt upright in the armchair next to Dad, plucking hairs from the coat she has laid across her knees. Anne-Sophie is leaning against the wall; she’s wearing an oversized, thick sweater. Alexander and I are standing next to Dad’s bed, explaining. He listens tensely, breathing heavily, he stretches his skinny neck. “How much longer?” He makes it sound like he’d rather the answer was two minutes instead of twenty.

  “She’s doing her rounds, so she couldn’t say exactly, but it won’t be more than an hour,” Alexander says in his softest voice. We smile until our faces hurt.

  “Are you afraid?” I ask.

  “Only healthy people are afraid of death,” he replies.

  Alexander takes a chair next to Marie. I wonder whether he’s talked some more with Dad over the past weeks, really talked. Or not. I wonder why we don’t know that about each other. I take a stool and sit at the foot of the bed.

  I look at my family. Anne-Sophie is biting her nails. She stares at a point on the wall where there’s nothing to see. She crosses her legs one way and then the other. I ask her discreetly how she is; she tells me that everything’s fine. Everything’s always fine with her, which is what worries me the most. Alexander sits there typing a message into his phone; it takes a while, he’s clumsy with those things. Marie tries to stroke my dad’s cheek, and Dad smiles but stops her hand and carefully lays it on the mattress next to him. Is it awful for him that Joanna isn’t here now?

  We can’t practice this, this waiting together for death. It’s a shame, because I’ve rarely seen so much united awkwardness, so much combined impotence, so many people who can’t just be themselves together, not even at this kind of hour of truth. When I die, I hope there’ll be a lot of people and they’ll drink and kiss and hug and tell stories and laugh at the dumb jokes they make out of awkwardness, and cry about the absence they’ll feel, about this unfair leave-taking, or from drunkenness on my behalf. Anything would be better than this, in this cool room filled with congealed silence, this tense not knowing.

  The kind nurse comes in and tries to put on Dad’s oxygen mask.

  “No,” he says with a weak flip of the hand.

  “Rather not? As you wish.” She smiles heartily. It’s the first time one of the nursing staff has so clearly taken what he wants into account. Clemency when push comes to shove, that’s what this is. “The doctor will be here soon.” She touches his arm briefly.

  Dad stares at the clock next to the TV and we sit there in a semicircle, just sitting, without words. From time to time someone looks at someone else, from time to time someone changes their position. When Charlie comes in, I see that our silence startles her. She gives Dad a kiss. “Can I do anything for you?” she asks in a very normal manner.

  “Be here,” Dad says. “Oh yes.” He points at the cupboard next to his bed. “That box.” Charlie opens the door and takes out the wooden case.

  “This?” She slides it open. It contains chess pieces, very old ones.

  “My grandfather made them, by hand.” His voice sputters. “For Marvin.”

  Charlie looks at the box, then at us, as if she needs permission to accept it for her son, then at Dad.

  “He’ll be thrilled to have it.” She swallows. “Do you mind him not being here? I wondered whether—”

  Dad makes a dismissive gesture. “No place for children.” He tries a small smile.

  Charlie sits down close to Alexander. He takes the box on his lap and looks inside, his expression somewhere between shocked and moved, I guess. Then the room falls quiet again. I look at my father, he closes his eyes and then opens them again momentarily.

  “Maybe you’d like us to talk about something?” Marie suddenly inquires. Dad smiles weakly at her. In just a few hours, he seems to have grown weaker, as though he’s let go of everything, as though he wants to pass the test the doctor is going to put him through to see whether he’s allowed to leave. “Perhaps everyone can tell us something nice they remember about Daddy.” Marie’s voice rises to unnatural heights. Then Anne-Sophie springs to her feet and leaves the room. Should I go after her? I check to see whether anyone else is going to. Everyone stays in their seats, so I do too.

  39

  “I’ve asked the nurse to take care of it,” says the young doctor in the hallway. “Why don’t you all go in? She’ll be there in a few minutes and after that he’ll fall asleep very quickly. Are you going to sit up with him tonight?”

  Everyone looks at me automatically. True, I’m a notorious night owl, and no, I don’t have any children to look after, and no, I’m not the estranged sister who has just returned to the country, and no, I’m not the fragile wife with whiplash who needs her sleep more than ever.

  “All right, I’ll do it,” I say. I wonder whether I immediately agreed to the unvoiced request because I want to be with him or because the chance he’ll die that soon is statistically small.

  We all go in again and stand around his bed. He looks at us, one by one, there’s more sweetness in his face than I’ve ever seen there before.

  “I did fight hard,” he says then. Again that same line, as though it might bring him absolution, as though a person is allowed to just decide they’ve had enough, as though he didn’t already give up years ago.

  “Very hard,” a couple of us say in chorus.

  “You can go now, Dad,” I say, because I have a vague sense he needs to hear it spoken clearly.

  “Yes,” he says, sounding almost cheerful.

  Marie looks at me and then
at Alexander, her expression bleakly anxious. Anne-Sophie is standing right at the foot of the bed and doesn’t seem to be looking at anything at all. She looks like she hasn’t slept for a week. Alexander hangs his head between his broad shoulders, to be closer to Dad, or out of general despondency, it’s hard to say. Charlie leans against the edge of the mattress, her face a picture of charity. She looks from Dad to Alexander in turn.

  The nurse comes into the room. “Now?” Dad nods. She hangs an extra bag on the infusion stand, turns up the dripper, gives us an encouraging look, says we can always press the buzzer if we need anything, and then slips out discreetly.

  Dad looks at us all one more time, slowly and emphatically, with a combination of a strange kind of peacefulness and great attention. There’s nothing more to say, or everything, it’s almost the same thing. I look at Dad, my father, breathing, my father who was always there, who didn’t know how to live, who couldn’t cope with the arrival of fall, the fact that things pass, the fact that some things don’t pass. I see him close his eyes with a cautious smile. His left index finger jerks furiously as though someone else is controlling that one muscle, his chest rises and falls, his smile becomes a thin strip, then everything seems to fall still. It took barely two minutes and now he’s asleep. The longest and shortest two minutes ever.

  40

  I’m against it. I’m against death as a concept, but no one’s asking my opinion. I’m sitting here at Dad’s bedside, all alone. Outside, the night is dark and starless; inside, I’m keeping the lights down, Dad didn’t like too much brightness. A strip of light shines through a gap around the door to the small bathroom, the only warm light I could find in all the white fluorescent of this room, as though illness and death were things that had to remain clearly visible. Outside, the sputtering sound of car tires on wet roads, and somewhere behind the poplars, a dog barks incessantly as though it’s been locked up or out. Inside, there is only Dad, he’s never sounded this loud before. The friendly nurse had warned about the death rattle that could come. She looked at us sympathetically and called it “pulmonary secretions,” as though the name might make it less unpleasant. A long time ago, when death was something I’d only read about in books, something for other people, I’d wanted to know what that would sound like. I find that perverse now. It’s a sound that’s like nothing else: somewhere between shaking an empty spray can with tiny bullets in it and wet heavy breathing. The nurse said it wouldn’t bother him at all. Comfort can sometimes be found in the strangest places. I try to see safety in it: as long as the machine is making a racket, it’s still working, that idea. I’ve always been good at making a virtue of necessity, I’ve been wondering recently whether that’s actually a quality or not.

  I look at his left hand, his blue-tinged nails. There are reddish-purple blotches on his arms that remind me of rotten fruit; I don’t want to look at them. The shorter of breath Dad becomes, the closer he is to death, the nurse explained, so I count to get an idea. One as he starts to breathe in, and then continuing until he has fully exhaled: one, two, three, four.

  “It won’t be before tonight.” I say it out loud and am startled by the sound of my voice. I look at him and then away again, as though too much reality will break me up in bits.

  I feel a little sorry I volunteered; it’s not the only thing I regret, but it’s one of them. I’ve heard horrible stories about the way people die. I don’t know how to do this, I don’t know whether I can.

  I study his face, narrower than it has ever been, the skin between two shades of gray, cheekbones pronounced, lips dark and cracked, silver-and-white hair messy and combed back, cheeks and neck neatly shaven, as though he had to look nice for his death. Dad sleeps and his chest rises and falls. He’s still alive, that much is sure. I think of the expression: to slip away peacefully. Is this the kind of scenario they mean? I’d never choose those words for it. How are kicking the bucket and slipping away peacefully related?

  I want to moisten his cracked lips. They’ve given me a kind of giant cotton ball on a stick to use for this. Moistening the lips apparently brings relief, and a bone-dry mouth is typical of the dying. Charlie had read somewhere that champagne was even better than water because the sugar makes the effect last longer, so Alexander got some. I dip the tip in the glass of champagne and rub it along his lips. They spontaneously begin to suck, so I push it deeper into his mouth. Suddenly he tugs the whole thing into his mouth like it’s a lollipop. I’m scared, worried he’ll choke because of something I did wrong. At the same time, it’s the most ridiculous sight, a father on his deathbed with a stick coming out of his mouth. I laugh out loud, from the stress maybe, and carefully tug at the stick. He doesn’t let go. I’ll have to call the nurse in a minute, and what will she think? It’s nice, though, that he’s able to enjoy something at a time like this, or is it just like a mindless reflex? I carry on tugging and finally he lets go.

  If I live to be his age, I’m already more than halfway there, I suddenly realize. I pour myself some champagne in a water glass. “What shall I toast to, Dad?” He seems to rattle even louder when I say that, as though he wants to answer. He’ll never answer anyone again, I think, and then the tears come. “I’ll drink to you, to the man you turned out to be.”

  I look at the clock that he’d lain staring at so often, counting his own hours when there was nothing better to do. Only fifty minutes have passed since the nurse left again. Tomorrow night, Alexander will keep watch, he’d promised quietly. In the early evening, I tried to reach Louis, but he didn’t pick up. Ten minutes later, he sent me a text message: I’m tied up at the moment, will call you ASAP, stay strong.

  “What am I going to do about Louis, Dad?” Does a dying person find the drone of a human voice pleasant or annoying? Would he sense that there was another person with him if that other person sat motionless in a chair? I get up, briefly touch his cheek. “You’re not alone. I’m here with you.” I say this in a quiet, hoarse voice, then sit down again.

  Charlie had brought a few magazines and newspapers for me, but I can’t even look at the pictures. I can’t do anything other than be here, experiencing every minute, hyperconscious. I wish I knew what exactly was happening. I wish I knew which dreams were taking place behind his eyelids; I wish I could be certain he wasn’t feeling any pain, that nothing was irritating him: an itch or a pillow that was too hot, or the chemical smell of the hospital sheets. One, two, three, four, he’s still breathing in the same rhythm, that’s good. The door opens. This nurse is wearing clogs, white, like the ones I had when I was a child. Her nails are painted orange and her hair is an unnatural yellow. She takes a few steps toward us. The hall light spills into the room.

  “Well?”

  “He’s still alive,” I say.

  She looks as though I’ve said something shocking, then merely nods, turns around, and closes the door. What else is there to say to a nurse wearing clogs? Except: Will you stay, please, so that I don’t have to be alone, so that I don’t have to be so restless and scared, will you promise me that he won’t die now but tomorrow, during the day with the blinds down, when there are a few of us gathered around his bed? And would you also guarantee that this won’t have to take too much longer, for his sake, and perhaps also for my own? To her, my father is simply another dying man. She works on a ward where more people might die than get better, that’s why they invented the word geriatrics, a word that sounds like an illness you never recover from, which old age is, of course. And Dad, he’s not even old.

  My phone beeps, a family member probably. I look and it’s a message from Nathan: I heard your father wasn’t doing so well? Thinking of you. Should I answer? Then Dad begins to cough. I jump to my feet, but it stops immediately. He lies there, motionless as stagnant water, arms beside his body, eyes closed, less and less of a person, a father who is evaporating.

  I picture Dad, his nose pressed against the steamed-up window, like a child. Looking out of his office window into the garden, where Alexander
and I are building a snowman. He holds up his thumb, I can still remember that, and he’s smiling, I think. I wave to him, then he steps away from the window and I can’t see him anymore. So thin is the boundary between being there and not being there.

  Once, when I was little, Dad told me about an animal that made the same sound as a dentist’s drill, but I’ve forgotten the name of it. He also told me that crickets chirp by rubbing their wings together and that seahorses don’t whinny and that frogs in England don’t say “quack” like here in Belgium, but “ribbit.” I didn’t know whether to believe him, I didn’t know how he knew such things. I’ve forgotten the name of the creature that sounds like a dentist’s drill and I can no longer ask him.

  I think back to the time I asked Dad to put my hair in a ponytail, like Ellen’s. Mommy had always done that, but then she died. At first I didn’t dare ask him but in the third week, there was a morning when his face seemed slightly less stormy, so I asked then. He took a long time with a brush and barrettes and a hair tie, and he pulled my hair, which hurt, but I didn’t mind, I believe. “There you go,” he said when he’d finished; he smiled proudly. I took my coat from the hall and looked in the mirror. The ponytail was ridiculously high on my head and too far to the left. I thanked my father and left for school, but once I’d turned the corner, I pulled out the tie and the barrettes and decided never to ask him again. Remaining silent is also a way of taking care of a person sometimes. As I think this, I wonder whether it’s actually true or not.

  I hear Dad shouting, that too, shouting at Marie, shouting at Mom. I can’t help thinking that powerlessness can sound very loud. Maybe I’m being too charitable, looking at it like that.

  I picture Mom. “I’ve never missed her.” I say it out loud as though I want someone to hear me, for Dad to hear me. I never ended up telling him this in so many words. I think about Joanna. I wonder whether she was the last person he thought about, just now, or not.