Lissa was almost always there in the evening when I arrived. She put in long days. She admitted to me what I suspected, that her husband and daughter were upset because she was spending so much time with Carol. I could see their complaints upset her, but the need to be at Carol’s side weighed on her more. And it was a need, but whose was greater, Carol’s or Lissa’s family’s? Lissa couldn’t bring herself to say out loud, “It won’t be much longer. Carol will be gone soon.”
One night it took me an hour and a half to get from my office to Bellevue. Rain pissing down. Nothing new there. Traffic a nightmare. Buses packed and steamy. I could feel rage rising in me. Walking the blue line, I noticed that giant plastic Christmas decorations had been installed halfway along the corridor, red-and-white candy canes, green and blue balls, a fake tree. When I reached Carol’s room, she was asleep. Her mouth was slightly open, her long face tilted up a bit, her expression peaceful. Her chest, bony now, moved up and down as she breathed, the oxygen tubes in her nose hissing with each breath. She looked like a Renaissance painting of a tortured saint, ecstatic, transfigured by suffering and pain.
Lissa greeted me and said, “Look at this,” then tapped and swiped at her phone. She handed it to me and smiled as I peered at a photograph. It reminded me of a 1970s record album cover. I saw a young woman in a beautiful lace-trimmed white dress. The sleeves were designed so that she seemed to be wearing a stole that had slipped off her shoulders.
“It’s Carol on the day of her first wedding.” I don’t remember what I said, something unremarkable, Huh, or maybe Wow—whatever it was, totally inadequate to express my astonishment looking at the picture. In her arms, a magnificent bunch of calla lilies. Her veil resembled a mantilla.
“Her hair. I don’t believe it,” I said to Lissa. It was long and straight under the veil, chestnut brown. What did she have to do to get it that way? Rollers the size of frozen-orange-juice cans? Her eye makeup was dramatic. Lissa said she looked like Cher. I replied, “A combination of Cher and Barbra Streisand, styled by Frida Kahlo.” I looked down at the bed. The Carol Fertig I saw there had short, gray hair, curly, springy, messy after being pressed against a hospital pillow for weeks. Her eyebrows were almost invisible, her lashes short. Where was the girlish woman in the picture? There somewhere. Carol told Lissa the bridesmaids had all worn white bonnets. I pictured the Pilgrims or The Handmaid’s Tale.
Carol was married to artist David Fertig for eight years, according to Lissa. Carol kept his name when they were divorced because she was already known professionally as Carol Fertig. Her second husband’s name was Fife. That’s all Lissa knew. She hadn’t contacted either of them. Carol’s brother had come to say goodbye and said it wasn’t necessary, that Carol wasn’t in touch with them. Lissa was skeptical. “Her brother didn’t even know Carol had a heart stent put in a few years ago. I looked him up. He’s a toy designer. His name is John Fishman.” She showed me his website. I saw wonderful, fanciful designs that made me marvel that a brother and sister could both be so talented in similar ways. “They didn’t get along,” Lissa said. I remembered that Carol did get along with his son. “They both came to see her. They were here for about a half an hour.”
Another night, Lissa and Stephen and I all visited Carol at the same time. As we left, a nurse stopped us in the hall. She gave each of us a blue booklet, called Gone from My Sight: The Dying Experience. The cover had on it a pen-and-ink drawing of an old galleon sailing away, almost to the horizon line, its topsails already above it. It was an approximate guide, a what-to-watch-for timeline. “Any one of the signs in this booklet may be present; all may be present; none may be present,” we read on page 1. “For some, it will take months to separate from their physical body, for others, only minutes. Death comes in its own time, in its own way.”
We looked at each other and again at the book. It described a gradual withdrawal from the world, a loss of interest, a loss of appetite, of thirst. On page 5, the heading read, “One to Two Weeks Prior to Death.” And then, “Disorientation.” “Sleeping is most of the time now.… They may see and converse with loved ones who have died before them. There may be picking at the bedclothes and agitated arm movements.… Focus is changing from this world to the next; they are losing their grounding to earth.” And so on. Then a list of physical changes to expect—to blood pressure, pulse rate, body temperature, breathing. What we might see days, hours, and finally minutes before death, then death itself. “Fear and unfinished business are two big factors in determining how much resistance we put into meeting death,” it said.
I knew that from then on, we would be looking for those signs. I was sorry I’d seen the book because I didn’t want to think about checking them off, counting down. The nurse told us that at some point Carol would be administered a “pain pack.” She was getting morphine, but this would be more potent. Once it was activated, she would pass a point of no return. The nurse echoed the sentence in the book: “She’ll be sleeping most of the time.”
A week or so later, when I walked into Carol’s room, Lissa was there with two more members of the mah-jongg group, Soniya and Jessica. I hadn’t met them before. Jessica stood over Carol talking about her recent trip to Peru, to Machu Picchu, and then on to Chile, and the famous restaurant where she ate in Santiago that was “unbelievably pretentious. You sit through a fifteen-course tasting menu. During one course we drank a broth that was running through rocks. For dessert, we had to lick some sort of jelly off a twig.” As everybody laughed at Jessica’s story, even Carol, sort of, I said I wondered whether a server ever asked at the beginning of the meal, “Any allergies?” and was told, “Oh, I’m allergic to rocks.”
Carol tried to form a word. She whispered, “Wa … wa…” Water. Lissa said Carol could only swallow a tiny bit of water from a cup by then. I tried to give her some. She choked on it. I rushed outside the door to ask Lissa how to do it right. She had stepped into the hallway with Jessica and Soniya to chat but was back in seconds. She raised the bed and held a cup of water to Carol’s lips with her right hand, cradling Carol’s back with her left as she sipped. I saw Lissa’s efficiency, her skill, how gentle she was, how absorbed in what she was doing. She had learned just how high the bed should be, just where to hold the cup, so that Carol could swallow. A couple of weeks before, Carol had been drinking four big pitchers of ice water a day.
By the end of Thanksgiving weekend, on Sunday, her tray table was littered with what looked like cheese cubes on toothpicks at a cocktail party, except they were little sponges attached to sticks. Lissa showed me how to soak them in water and then hold them in Carol’s mouth for her to suck but not swallow. Carol had crashed after I’d seen her the day before on my way to work. Her pain pack had been activated.
Lissa pointed to a box on Carol’s window ledge. “Those are for you.” Inside was the HARRY sign from his crate, a set of six mischievous-bull-terrier dessert plates, identical to a set someone had given me as a birthday present once, and goofy bull-terrier salt and pepper shakers. “You should take the Adirondack Days book, too.” I had told Lissa about what Carol said. “How can I? It’s so personal.” Lissa shrugged. “Who else will understand what it means?” I wrapped the book in a large plastic bag, carefully, to cushion it, so none of the twigs glued to the cover would break off. I would treasure Carol’s treasure. “Thank you.” I wanted to say something profound but couldn’t think of anything.
Another week went by before I could visit again. Work issues. On the afternoon of Sunday, December 4, when I walked into Carol’s room for my shift, a stranger was sitting next to her bed, a slim, extremely well-dressed woman in a formfitting dress, who introduced herself as Camille McDonald. She was chic. Her hair, auburn red, was styled but not too coiffed. Her makeup was perfect, understated. She and Carol had met long ago, she said, lost touch, then become friends again while Carol was doing licensing work for the designer Michael Kors. Camille was, at the time, CEO of LVMH Perfumes and Cosmetics in North America, the pare
nt company of Michael Kors fragrances. Now, she said, she was president of brand merchandising for the chain Bath & Body Works. I liked her immediately. While Carol lay sleeping, we talked about trying to manage our complicated lives, about flying too much. She said that she was going home to pack for a flight that night to Saint Petersburg, Russia. She had meetings there and then more in Paris and London, all in less than a week.
Camille McDonald, supremely successful as she was, seemed tired of the travel, of the stress, of having so little control over her time, which is why, she said, she admired Carol so much. Camille talked about how much Carol had achieved, how broad and deep her talent was, how terribly she would miss her. “Her fierce individuality, that gift of friendship, her sense of fun. The kinds of things she did … Once she came back from Paris and, just for the look of it, pretended to smoke Gauloises for a while, because they were French.” She recalled Carol’s “wonderful dinner parties, all the interesting people. Her table was always beautiful, a work of art, especially in her earlier apartments, like the one that was in Elle Decor and the other magazines, before she moved to the studio. They were bigger.” How many of Carol’s friends had said the same thing? I felt jealous because I hadn’t known her when she was having those parties.
Carol stirred. Camille and I took turns trying to give her water, soaking the little sponges and holding them in her mouth.
Camille looked at her watch and sighed. She gathered up her bag, put on her coat, and kissed Carol goodbye. It was a real goodbye, a last goodbye, not “Bye till I get back.”
I was alone with Carol for maybe an hour. I held her hand. Her grip was still surprisingly strong. I noticed that her skin was soft and dry, not sticky or moist anymore. I gave her water when she woke up and talked to her about the dogs. I said that in a couple of weeks I was going to be taking them with me to South Carolina for Christmas. It would be Harry’s first flight. I don’t know how much she heard. Weeks before, on one of Harry’s “dates” with Minnie, I had told her about the house I have near Charleston on a barrier island. I bought it for my mother and then kept it after she died. Harry would get to go to the beach with Minnie. I imagined them romping together in the sand, Harry chasing after Minnie as she frolicked happily in the ocean. I wondered how I’d deal with his red bootie, whether to let him get it wet or pull it off before we reached the end of the boardwalk.
Carol had said, “If he takes after me, he’ll hate the beach.” I smiled, remembering.
She was flinging her arms out away from her body, one of the signs described in the blue booklet under “One to Two Weeks Prior to Death.” Her sheet was pulled down. Her hospital gown had come undone, so her breasts were exposed. It hadn’t bothered Camille and me, but I decided to call a nurse to help straighten her bedclothes before Alan Wade showed up to take my place. One of Carol’s friends I’d met at the party on the roof of 55 Hudson Street, Alan had the next shift. We sat for a while together.
He, too, went on and on about Carol’s wonderful dinner parties, all the fun, her marvelous table decorations, her terrific eye. Then he said, “It’s too bad she never really succeeded.” After what Camille had just told me, I was stunned. “Christian Dior’s partner had a business brain. He knew how to make Dior a brand. That’s what Carol needed. She just needed someone to turn what she did into a real business.” What Camille had seen as achievement, Alan saw as not quite making it. How could two people look at a career, a life, so differently? “She got taken advantage of and actually swindled, too.” Apparently, she had allowed a lawyer, a kind of business-manager-to-the-stars type, to manage the money she made when things were going well for her. He systematically stole from his clients, including Carol, leaving her in financial difficulty. He went to prison, Alan said, but Carol didn’t get her money back. Suddenly I understood her moves to steadily smaller apartments. I said I thought she was successful. Alan replied, “But she should have been famous.” I wondered if she could hear us. She appeared to be asleep, beyond knowing, beyond caring.
It was two days before I could visit again. On Tuesday, December 6, when I saw Carol, I realized she had slipped badly since Sunday. Her breathing was labored and erratic. Her face was contorted; her fists were clenched. She was clearly in pain, but I was sure she was awake and aware. Lissa left the room for a while, so I was alone with her.
I said, “It’s all right to go. It’s okay to stop fighting. Harry is fine. He loves you, but I’ll love him, too, with all my heart, and will protect him and care for him as long as he lives, and then you’ll have him back. Go and join Violet. She’s waiting for you in the woods.”
A nurse came in and gave her an injection. Her forehead relaxed.
I got as far as the elevator before I started to cry. I cried as I walked the endless corridor out to First Avenue. I looked for my umbrella but had left it somewhere. It was raining, raining on the tears rolling down my cheeks.
nineteen
THE END
I couldn’t understand it. The next day, I was restless, uneasy. It was hard to concentrate. Why? I know this sounds kind of woo-woo, but it was as if a voice inside me were whispering, “Go, go now to Bellevue,” while the creature of habit in me said, “Oh, I’ll go after work, as usual,” and then that other voice started shouting, “No, go now!” Good thing it did.
Around four in the afternoon, Lissa sent out a text saying that Carol was in a lot of distress and “they,” I suppose the nursing staff, were advising no visitors that night. By then, I had made up my mind to go anyway. It was a little after five when I replied that it was too late. I was on the bus halfway there already.
I looked at my watch as I walked into Carol’s room: 6:05 P.M. It was obvious she was dying. Her breathing was shallow, the intervals between breaths getting longer and longer as the minutes went by. Her life was leaking away.
Four of us were at her side: Lissa, of course; Chuck Sklar, Carol’s friend who is a pediatric endocrinologist at Sloan Kettering; Kate, another of the Three Graces; and me. We sat in the pool of light from the lamp that still wore Carol’s gilded laurel wreath, surrounded by darkness. Each of us, in turn, told her we loved her. I added, “Don’t worry about Harry. I promise I’ll take good care of him.” Lissa and Chuck stroked her hands, Kate and I the lumpy white bedspread covering her legs.
By six-thirty, it was over, but we didn’t stop. When she had been dead long enough for all of us to understand that she was truly gone, that another breath would not come in a second or a minute, Chuck stood up to leave, kissed her on the forehead, and said to the rest of us, “To be with someone at the moment of death is a privilege.” Yes. I’d never thought about it that way, but yes.
Lissa, Kate, and I sat in silence, until suddenly we were startled by a disturbance at the door. Stephen, with his dog, Teddy. Lissa had called him when it was clear that Carol was dying. His entrance felt like an explosion. He stopped a few feet from Carol’s bed, saw us, saw Carol, and took in that she was dead. We retreated, so he could have his time with her. I took Teddy’s leash.
Stephen held her hand and kissed her. He bowed his head. After about a minute, he sighed. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t do this.” His chair scraped on the floor as he lurched to his feet and backed away.
Carol’s stillness had cast a spell over us, just long enough, maybe, for her soul to wisp away, and now the spell was broken.
Stephen explained he had been caught in traffic. “It’s raining,” he said. Lissa and Kate switched into task mode, Three Graces mode, and began pacing the hallway phoning Carol’s friends and her brother, delivering the message that she had died, one short, matter-of-fact conversation after another. They spoke quietly, calmly, their pain hidden. Lissa set in motion having Carol’s body collected by the funeral home.
I watched this and remembered a story I did years ago, while I was based in South Africa. I was sent with a crew and a producer to a tiny village near Durban to cover a massacre. Thirteen people dead, seven of them children, the victims
collateral damage in tribal fighting between Zulus and Xhosas. The man the killers were after wasn’t even there. They had gone to the wrong house. When we arrived, the bodies had been taken away. A few gawkers stood around still, but mainly to see us. One of them said, “Hey, you’re too late. Nothing left but women’s work.” He pointed to the whitewashed concrete building behind him. There was blood everywhere, running down the walls, smeared on the threshold, in pools on the ground outside the door. A half dozen or so older black women, heavyset, in loose dresses, their heads wrapped in scarves, grandmothers, were washing it away. They sang as they bent to wring out rags in buckets, over and over, the water running pink. Their harmonies were beautiful and sad.
My producer and crew said to one another, “Okay, okay, no story, let’s get going.” I turned to them. “This is the story.” I nodded toward the women. With dignity and true grace, they did their “women’s work,” as women always have in the aftermath of death, trying to bring order to what they cannot make right. And so it was with Lissa and Kate.
The nurses said they would wash Carol’s body and brush her hair before she was taken away, but she would have to lie in place for four hours before anything could happen. Regulations. Had some patients started breathing again, come back to life?
“Go home,” we were told, but Lissa refused. She sat down next to Carol’s bed and began sobbing, her composure at last spent. She kept repeating, her voice a strangled whisper, “Where will I go tomorrow? Where will I go tomorrow?”
Stephen said, “It’s time. I’ll drive everybody home.” Lissa covered her face with her hands and shook her head.
Kate peeled off the pictures of Harry and Minnie taped to the walls, lifted the laurel wreath from the lamp, and was gathering up the rest of Carol’s belongings when she spotted the wheelchair in the corner. “That’s the one hospice delivered to her apartment, right? The one you brought her to NYU Hospital in?” She looked to Stephen and then to Lissa. They nodded. “I’m sure we can just leave it here,” Stephen reasoned. “This is hospice, too.”
When Harry Met Minnie Page 16