You will make all of the mistakes you’ve read about. You can’t tell someone so they’ll know, not even yourself. You can’t know if you’ll make a mistake until you make it; and you can’t know if you’ll make it again until you make it again; then you can’t know if you’ll stop making it until you stop making it or you die before doing it again. The real problem is finding out what is and isn’t a mistake. When the scarecrow or the Cheshire cat asks you which way to go and you can’t say which is the right way, maybe one way looks hard and the other way looks easy; do you pick the hard one because you’ve heard hard work is what pays off? Do you pick the easy road because so many seem to have found their way down it? There’s no guarantee that either one of them leads anywhere. There’s nothing to tell you if you’re being weak or strong with any choice you might make. There’s nothing to guide you but odds and luck.
It’s that time of day in New York, not quite dusk, when the sky is lighter than the street because of the building shadows. The same pavement that will suck in the heat and radiate it during the summer or even under the daytime sun is huddled in on itself and unyielding, hurts your feet. The building alleys become wind downs and your ears get red and raw. There’s dry skin under your nose and your eyes are always tearing. Standing in a broad avenue the sky is more pronounced; you can see pedestrians in silhouette against it. Traffic lights are the enemy, but you can’t be seen by the cars so you wait in the crosswalks. It’s a few blocks past the low-income housing and the dollar store, not enough time to chill you inside just to flay your hands and cheeks. Ice-water stands in the gutters from early rain. The yellow-orange top-lights of the cabs are inviting: mobile warmth. People in the back of them, reclined, gaze through the pane like the glass on an aquarium. There are only two blocks left to walk.
I dropped off the rental minutes ago. It was an enormous SUV. Nobody wanted an SUV in the middle of New York City so they gave away the compact car I reserved and cheerily told me I was getting a free upgrade. The free upgrade cost me another twenty dollars in gasoline.
The weather has been unremittingly shitty. After a mild winter, March has been a continuous frigid drench. I think it’s called “pathetic fallacy” when the weather reflects what’s going on in the story. Driving back from Connecticut was like taking a submersible into the Arctic Ocean.
I spent the autumn before in the apartment of my grandparents on my father’s side in the East 70’s; multiple doormen, elevators, twenty floors up, building with a name. They were in Connecticut at their house. The building used to house mostly old people with stabilized rent, but the location attracted a high-volume of high-turnover yuppie family-people. I tried to stay invisible to them. Five months I lived there rent-free, the first time I’d had an apartment to myself since my senior year of college, and even then it was only figuratively. This was the apartment I stayed at every time I’d ever visited New York. When I was a child my grandparents had a Yorkshire terrier named Crumpet. He was small enough for the apartment. When I was 9 he had a disagreement with a Doberman and lost an eye. When I was 13 and my grandparents came upstate to my Bar Mitzvah my grandmother greeted me by saying, “Happy birthday, we had to put the dog to sleep to come up here.” The apartment was a one-bedroom with mirrors one-foot wide and twelve-feet long horizontal striping one wall, vertical on the other. Twenty floors high, above many rooftops, the vantage was excellent for window spying (Grandma once bought me a small telescope for this purpose). It needed a professional cleaning when I arrived; everything in the cupboards and medicine cabinets was covered in some indeterminate sticky schmutz. The apartment holds the New York City record for the fewest roaches attacking me: only one.
When my grandmother on my mother’s side went into the hospital fifteen years before, I went into our family’s never-used living room and cried. My sister found me and asked why I was crying. I told her it was because Grandma Omie was never coming out. Omie held on until my uncle made it in from the west coast. When we heard that she died my sister cried, and she asked me why I didn’t.
Omie died of complications caused by her emphysema, which was in turn caused by her smoking for more than 50 years. I was 11 at the time and there are few things I remember about Grandma Omie (so named because, as an infant, my sister insisted on the nonsense-title for her). I remember that when I stayed over with her I could sleep on her bed because she slept in a recliner in front of the television with the Quality Value Channel on. Her bed had a foam egg-crate under the sheets with the pointers turned up. Near the end she was on oxygen all the time, her cough sounded more and more like my father’s.
My father has a terrific cough. There was a video of an old camp performance of mine I was watching and I told my father he was in the audience that night; he said he didn’t think he was; then an enormous cough from the audience in the video made everyone onstage flinch. This is as a result of smoking for 40 years. My mother has also smoked for 40 years and counting. They claim they didn’t smoke when she was pregnant with my sister or me. I don’t believe them. I’m just surprised I never got pneumonia from inhaling snow through my cracked window in car after car filled with smoke. My sister smokes, my uncles smoke, my mother’s father who died before I was born smoked. My father’s father and I are the only members of our family that don’t smoke and it’s because we quit.
I moved back to the East Coast partly because my father’s mother had contracted her third cancer, lung this time, and it metastasized. The first two were throat cancer, the tumor was shrunk using a laser, and breast cancer, mastectomy. Grandma Sophie smoked for more than 50 years as well; she stopped after her throat cancer but it was too late.
I moved out of the UES apartment and my grandparents moved back in, except they didn’t. They were back for two weeks, then another two weeks a few months later, then it was announced they were closing up the apartment. This was a surprise, as we had been anticipating selling the Connecticut house instead. They were rent-stabilized, not rent-controlled; I can’t afford it and neither can my sister, so we close it down. It is standing alone in the middle of the empty apartment that I cry.
Before they departed for Connecticut and I moved in they tried it in the city for a while. Perhaps I should say “she” tried it, my Grandfather Saul recently told my sister and I that he does not remember years 80-84 (there is the slight possibility Grandma was poisoning him). Sophie would get radiation treatments and walk back fifteen blocks in the middle of winter. While this was certainly inadvisable, the idea of her being hit by a bus in the middle of Fifth Avenue seemed sort of like the way she might want to go; that, or freezing to death on the bench with their name-plaque on it in Central Park. She did later direct us to bury half her ashes and to scatter the rest beside her bench; the burial was September 11, 2005, we’re scattering the ashes this weekend. I’ll try not to get them on my shoes.
The house in Connecticut is in a sub-division begun for the elderly then subtly advanced upon by young professionals with families. The upstairs living room is cluttered with hundreds of small pieces of art or semi-art, most with a small scrawled appraisal attached to the bottom. She asks that we call dibs ahead of time; she’s interested to know who wants what. My parents call the Eames chair, one uncle calls the grandfather clock, I ask for a painting Sophie bought from an art student in 1968 and has displayed in the dining room since. In the same living room, when I was a child, I threw powder into the fireplace and made the fire purple, green and blue. Downstairs, there was a day-glo foam skeleton of a dinosaur, God knows why. When I was 10 and staying there after summer camp, I was in bed in the dark before sleep when my grandmother came in and told me I was the worst mistake my father ever made.
There are limits to our irreverence. For example when looking for the cremains in the Connecticut house I may have called out “Grandma! Graaandmaaa!” but when my father and grandfather tried to store the portion for the bench in a used potato-salad container I put my foot down, no matter how appropriate it may have been. Instead my mother buys bright pink boxes, with flair; Grandma loved Marimekko. One box is buried at the unveiling, at old Montefiore Cemetery in Queens. Grandpa comes all the way in for the ceremony. Later on, it is a perfect windy day autumn day inside Central Park at East 72nd Street, and my parents, sister and I casually take a seat on their bench. We silently breathe the sharp air and check for cops, then I walk to the grass demarcation, stand upwind, and sprinkle the cremains to the bottom of a pile of leaves. I stir the earth a bit so she isn’t raked away. I sing the Mourner’s Kaddish under my breath, with the orthodox s’s instead of the reformed t’s: “Yisgadal v’yisgadash shomei rabah…”
In February she is looking poorly, but her condition is much the same that it was the time before. The cancer cachexia, or malnutrition, has not yet eroded her muscles completely, but she has a deep bronchiole cough that sounds inhuman. It is yet possible that my grandfather will pass away before she does; it is also possible that her 103 year-old mother, having complications in Dallas, might go before she does, or near the same time to upstage her. The last time I saw her was when she came to take the last few things she wanted from the apartment before my uncle and I sent the contents to storage in Jersey. The cough is more pronounced, and sometimes takes nearly a minute to recover from, but she doesn’t appear to have lost any body mass. She was dressed in her smartest clothes with a sharp broad-brimmed black hat. When I kissed her then I was overwhelmed by the smell of her perfume, she was wearing more than usual. It was to mask the oversweet, putrescent smell of sickness.
Since I quit smoking two years ago (my grandfather quit back in 1950) my lungs have become incredibly sensitive; I have to keep myself from coughing when someone walking down the street in front of me is smoking a cigarette because otherwise they think I’m fake coughing to tell them they’re rude and they blow smoke at me. Perfumes and colognes make my eyes water and my nose stop up. I spent last weekend at the Connecticut house with my grandfather, I see him every three weeks now, and I drove him out to a restaurant for dinner. Despite his physical therapy and the constant helpful presence of his live-in nurse, he only leaves the house when one of the family takes him. I return from some errands just before we go and there is this overwhelming smell in the bathroom but I can’t place it. There is an empty bottle of Aramis on the counter of the bathroom and there are some dark syrupy amber splotches that have the smell. I can’t place the scent. Grandpa comes out of his room in his electric scooter and he reeks of the stuff. I ask him what it is. He says that he ran out of Aramis so he mixed in the only thing he could find with the last few drops: Grandma’s perfume. Again, on a cold November night, I have the window cracked open in the car so I can breathe.
It is more than six months later than the last paragraph now. Why the delay? I felt the need to convey directly, by example, an instance of Grandma being loveable. Something that would make an observer say: “I can see why it was all worth it, look at the way they laugh as they…” feed the pigeons together? Go sledding? Well, there isn’t anything. There isn’t a tidy example I can give. Maybe it was the panache with which she could deliver an underhanded compliment. Maybe it was the way she showed up to a hospice site with a bell and they kicked her out after an hour. Maybe there is no earthly justification for why I loved her in spite of her often incorrigible behavior and constant attempts to defame my mother in my and my sister’s eyes. It was these attempts that once prompted me to stop speaking to her for nearly a year: at my Great-Grandmother’s 100th birthday party we were all posing for family pictures in front of the bandstand (a 100 banjo band hired for the occasion, they performed a rather interesting version of “The Phantom of the Opera,” making it almost listenable) when my Grandmother decided to loudly blame my mother for our family showing up late to temple that morning, calling her “rude.” I always love when someone points out another’s rudeness in front of hundreds of people. They yell at each other and I tell Grandma I’ll stop speaking to her if she ever attacks my mother again. She knew it wasn’t an idle threat, because there are several non-speaking feuds in my family, some lasting more than 50 years; who knows why, the people involved probably don’t remember why.
So why love Sophie? She had charm. She was the sort of person Maitre D’s thought they should know, so we always were seated first. She was an indomitable, irascible New York two-time cancer survivor. She had a way with a turn of insult. I was related to her. And I always felt like she was just a mood swing away from admitting all the damage she’d done and attempting to repair it.
In the SUV on the way to Connecticut on March 15 we receive a call from my father telling us to expect her to be much worse when we arrive. It has only been three weeks since last I saw her, when she wore the black hat, but time has flown by for me. When we arrive I can sense in the house that something is different. Before we enter the room we hear the sound of her drawing air through the fluid in her lungs, a sound like a percolator. Grandpa is lying on the bed as usual but beside him Grandma is sitting on the bottom corner of the bed facing the wall mirror. She is hunched over, bent double, we can see as we enter that she is completely emaciated, there is nothing left on her frame and her vertebrae stick through the back of her nightgown. I look away involuntarily, then put on a fake smile, but it is unnecessary, she is on morphine and hardly aware. Her eyes narrow in concentration as she draws slow breaths through her drowning lungs. We approach her cautiously, until I sit next to her on the bench and my sister across from her on a chair. We try to slowly make our presence known. I lay a hand on her sharp shoulder. She slowly raises her head until she is looking at my sister. She blinks and her shoulders bob slowly as if to maintain her balance on a ship at sea. Suddenly, her eyes focus on my sister, then she feels my hand on her shoulder and takes it in her hands and squeezes it. She seems to want to say something but is helpless to; she can’t speak through the fluid in her lungs, breathing takes all of her concentration. Her eyes glaze over and she leans down to her knees to breathe again.
We sit with her, not too close, and try to speak to her in soothing tones, knowing she probably can’t make out the words but can feel our voices. I stroke her back. My sister Kay catches up with Georgia, their Jamaican live-in nurse; Georgia is an expert nutritionist, cook and caretaker, single-handedly responsible for Grandpa being healthy and alive today, and too good-natured to care about some old lady calling her a schvartza. Anyway it’s better than her classic, “She should get an abortion, maybe one of her friends can do it with a hanger.” She wouldn’t bat an eye if she heard Sophie’s reaction to my uncle dating a black girl a few decades ago; an offhanded, “maybe one of her friends can clean my apartment.” I look at Sophie for the things I have read that are supposed to portend death. Her nose seems sharper. Her feet are swollen. Her forehead is cold instead of hot. I close my eyes. I try to feel if death is in the room, in a shadowed corner or hovering above the bed. All I feel is a space inside me being dug out, being prepared to be left hollow. Now is the time for me to say anything to her that I need to. Grandpa is rifling the Sunday New York Times distractingly. I don’t feel I have enough time. What could I say to her? Try to take her confession as if we’re not Jews? Tell her about all of the things she has said and done and ask her if she is sorry? Of course I don’t, but might it be better if I had? I won’t know until. Instead I prattle on about my job. I prattle on about all of the completely unimportant concerns that have distracted me from coming to see her for the weeks when she could still speak.
Grandpa is restless. His casualness is irritating me. He wants me to drive him out to buy a new drying machine for the basement. This is very unusual, the first time he will leave the house in the calendar year. It doesn’t occur to me until much later that he must be, aside from emotionally worn out, bored. It really is understandable. It doesn’t mean he wanted her to die a second sooner, but I think Sophie would have appreciated the straight realness of that assessment: waiting for someone to die is boring. And perhaps she would have agreed with a slightly more Beckettian turn on that phrase: waiting for yourself to die is boring. Of course, Beckett would probably have been referring to one’s entire life.
Before we are to leave we sit down for some lunch. We’ve brought sable from Russ & Daughter’s on the Lower East Side for Grandma, but she hasn’t eaten in 36 hours. She stays in the room and we can hear her labored attempts at breath. Then we hear a scream. Georgia and Grandpa don’t move. It feels like the glasses should be shaking. It is the only noise she can make, Georgia explains. She screams again from her room, like Ivan Ilyich, through the gurgle of her lungs and the frayed vocal chords. Grandpa and I leave to find a dryer.
Where are her sons in all this: the lawyer, doctor and Indian chief-turned-executive? We can’t all be at the bedside, and they have their own peace to make. They know there is no satisfactory answer, whatever the matter, to “why did you do it?”
Grandpa and I cruise to the appliance superstore where he hops onto a scooter/wheelchair and we buzz in and out, I haven’t seen him this energetic in five years; it’s a preview of the remarkable recovery that was soon to follow. I drive to the Target and get anti-bacterial hand washes and tissues for the house. We don’t talk about anything between; I just plug in my music and play some Count Basie and Django Reinhardt. My sister stays behind to spend some time with Sophie.
I never tell anyone this, but I’ve had a dream about Grandpa and I can’t tell if it presages his recovery or death. In the dream my family was with me at a graduation and it seemed to be mine. Our folding chairs are on a blanket-like lawn beside the sea and the ceremony has just wrapped up. We walk to a set of stairs descending to a boardwalk that runs along the shore and even out into the water like a dock. The sea and wind are so calm it feels as though we are still inside, the stairs are slate, the boardwalk dark wood and the sea is tinged with the green you find in the waters of Costa Rica and Venezuela, but the real surreality is supplied by a sky the color of an orange dreamsicle and a far off sunset the color of grenadine. Multitudes are streaming by in either direction and from the crowd I see advancing towards me my grandfather. He was walking without assistance, dressed in a gray cardigan, dark khakis and a walking cap; he approaches and congratulates me not on a graduation, but on my very existence and my survival. We put our arms around one another and I bury my face in his scratchy sweater. Then it begins to happen, as we embrace I feel the years begin to leave us and I grow smaller and smaller until I am only a newborn in my Grandpa’s proud and strong arms. I feel the enormity of his hopes for me at that time and now. The crowds continue to flow around us like believers on the way to the water. We age once more and stand unselfconsciously in the tide, and I cry in my dream and I cried in my sleep and I cried when I awoke and I cried when I wrote this and I cried when I read it. When we released one another he was magically dressed in a style out of 1920’s finery, all in white with a suit, spats, cravat and a fedora with a white feather and wing tip shoes. The last of the believers disappear around a rise in the hill and we turned to follow, reaching another slate staircase leading down to the beach. We see my parents up ahead and set out for them. With a skip and a hop in his step Grandpa dances down the stairs. I say to him, from “Miss Julie,” “Très gentil, Monsieur Saul, très gentil.” He tips his fedora and we walk on to the edge of the sea together.
Part of the reason for my move back to the East Coast was so I could be near my grandmother at the end, as I’ve said. I planned carefully, because I didn’t want to let her down and also so I couldn’t make myself guilty over it for the rest of my life, but I stopped paying attention at the wrong time and now it was too late. No profound talks, no getting to the bottom of anything, no resolution or comfort, just an unfinished conversation with someone I don’t really know, who didn’t really know me; and for us to get to any of that, if it were possible at all, may have taken 500 years.
When we lie we are unconvincing because we can’t remember the natural things we do when we’re telling the truth. Try to remember what it is like to be sick. If you are sick, try to remember what it is like to be perfectly healthy. We shut ourselves off to these now alternate realities. I knew a boy in college that died on Christmas Day. I remembered the way I rebuffed his efforts to befriend me. At his memorial I said that there was no excuse; I should have become closer with him, and I didn’t and now it is too late. I told myself I would know people while there is still time. But here it is again and I’ve failed again.
We come back to the house and my sister is in the room with Grandma. Sophie is in delirium from the morphine and keeps removing her nightgown. Kay has worked in hospitals, and has developed a casual but comforting bedside manner; she helps Sophie back into the gown again and again. There is a stuffed doll of Shrek on a chair across the room. It used to make Grandma laugh; it talks when you squeeze the hand. I bring it over to her to see if she might take it for comfort. I make it talk. She doesn’t show any signs of recognition and I feel foolish again. Georgia has been conversing with Kay, who motions for me to step away from the bed.
“Tonight. Georgia says she’ll go tonight.”
It is time to leave and I come back to the bedside. I am standing over Sophie as she takes her hunched, labored breaths. Suddenly she becomes aware of me. She attempts to stand, but can’t. I lean down and help her get up, I think she might be trying to walk to the bathroom, I’m confused, I barely realize she has put her arms around my neck to hug me. I am stooped at half-height to awkwardly return the embrace. She turns and hugs Kay. Then, exhausted, she slumps back to the bed to breathe. We slowly walk to the door. We turn around before exiting.
“Bye Sophie,” my sister says, with a studied and impressive lightness I try to duplicate.
“Gramma, love you love you love you,” I say.
She turns her head slightly toward us but we can’t tell if she’s still with us or not. We shut the door. The percolator sound of her breathing is slow but steady behind us. And that is how we leave her. Georgia has years of experience with hundreds of patients, hundreds of deaths. She is undoubtedly right; yet I hold out hope of some later day when I might make contact again, leave things correctly: “This weekend,” I think. “She’ll pull through and I’ll come back this weekend”; or maybe some improbable afterlife where all is revealed and accounted for and finally understood.
I receive the call late that night, when I am in bed with the lights out. Eventually the fatigue overtook her and she could no longer draw breath. I look around my room for some spirit, hers or Death; I try to remember what was her deathbed and if I saw Death in the room then.