We Are All Such Humans Here

I couldn't forgive my parents when they got old, and I turned my back on them when they died. They were only following the dictates of nature and age and disease, and they didn’t deserve my indifference. Or my judgment, but their various infirmities angered me. I was in my fifties, but I acted the child, and when they died, I comforted myself by whispering at odd moments, “I am now an orphan.”

And, since Ellen had left me for greener and brighter (if not happier) pastures, I also said, “I am utterly and entirely alone.”

So original, grief. Even the grief that is assumed as a role. Even the grief that is suffered in one’s late-middle age by someone lacking emotion. I had hoped to feel something, but all I had was nothingness and the clichés and platitudes soon to be on offer by others.

Their deaths were not unexpected even if their manner was. My father’s cancer, for two years in remission, had returned with a vengeance while my mother’s dementia grew more pronounced by the day. He had moved her to a board-and-care home when he could no longer care for her, but then he couldn’t stand her absence, and he had moved her back. My father was living in pain and guilt, and then he was living in pain and frustration. And the guilt from the frustration. And the frustration from the pain. Over and over the dominoes went. On the other hand, my mother was lost in another decade, and then she was lost in the maze of her own mind. Engineer that he had once been, my father solved their mutual problem with two glasses of orange juice and the Oxys he’d been hoarding over the previous two years. He was organized to the end, my father, I have to give him that. He taped a note to the kitchen table with names and phone numbers, their lawyer, accountant, and insurance agents, along with their choice of morticians. The numbers, usernames, passcodes of all the bank and brokerage accounts. He had lived his life in spreadsheet terms, and nothing says love like planning for a future you will not live to see. Then he helped my mother take her medicine before he took his own. This is what I surmise.

He addressed his note to “Dear Cyrano,” using his favorite nickname for me, most surely knowing it wasn’t a favorite of mine; he was the only one to use it, and I think he was glad for the history of my discomfort. “Dear Cyrano, here’s everything you need to know and nothing of what I’d rather keep to myself. So there.”

“Enjoy your life if that’s possible,” he added. “Enjoy your life and the means with which to do it. That’s what your mother and I have done, and if we’ve sometimes enjoyed ourselves to excess, you might learn a thing or two about pleasure from our example.”

I think he meant it without bitterness, but I can’t be sure. He was fond of saying that a parent was only as happy as his unhappiest child, by which he meant me, since I was his only child.

I think he meant that when it came to my ability for happiness, my track record was not so great. And maybe whatever money left from a lifetime of gleeful spending would help rather than hurt in that regard. And if it hurt rather than helped, that was my problem.

So, they died. And they left it to me to find the bodies. Two weeks before Christmas, a day of dry gloom. Clouds without rain or moisture. I visited with them every day at lunch and stayed with them for an hour or two, checking my watch all the while. Since my unplanned retirement from teaching the previous June, I had no obligations and nothing pressing, but the moment I opened their door, I was all too eager to be gone. The scent of the elderly and infirm is unmistakable, and even though housekeepers came twice a week to dust and vacuum, spray and scrub, nothing seemed to remove the odor of decay. My parents were oblivious to the effect of their home and selves upon others.

My father was the type to read the newspaper out loud and with volume, and although she could not carry a tune with her whole mind not to mention the half she now possessed, my mother could not be dissuaded from singing in her churchy falsetto; the songs she’d been taught in her junior high school French class sixty years earlier poured through her mouth like a fountain. I was never as good-looking as they wanted me to be, and I was never as smart as I thought I was, and I didn’t know these things until Ellen left and my parents died, two events and two realizations which left me nothing in reserve. They had once been beautiful in a way that I was not and never was, one source of their many disappointments when I was a child. But the joke was on them now, wasn’t it? Clarice, a hospice nurse, a woman not so much younger than my parents, came at four and prepared their dinner from cans and boxes; she stayed through the night, and then left them after helping them dress and eat their breakfasts, their pills laid out for them with medical precision on the dining room table. That and my noontime visit was the cycle of their days. Until my father brought out the orange juice and put an end to it.

The front door was locked, and no one answered the bell, so I went through the side gate and into the back yard, and that’s how I saw them: through the kitchen window, their heads resting on the kitchen table, their arms as pillows. They had been born in the Jazz Age, grew up in the Depression, and came of age during the War after the War to end all wars. They had seen some of the worst the twentieth century had to offer and then lived long enough to watch the televised daytime trauma of 9/11. This is not to mention their own respective years-long declines, so I can’t fault them for their decision which ended by looking like an uncomfortable midday nap. Not really. And my first reaction was relief that their earthly trials were over. But my second and third reactions were selfish: they had done this to me, I was sure, and I could only imagine the list of phone calls I’d be making for the weeks to come.

Just like them to die together and, yet again, one more time, they were leaving me to my own devices. Leaving me to make call after call.

And before you wonder: unlike the majority of my generation, I hate all forms of phones. I saw affliction and irritation ahead. That didn’t stop me from taking pictures, though. From several angles. Trying to catch them in the light, just so. Morbid, I know, but you have no idea how often I look at those images to remind myself that they hadn’t simply booked a flight and gone away on a vacation they couldn’t afford.

The first call was to the police dispatcher, who seemed mostly bored and inconvenienced, since no immediate intervention was necessary. My second call was for an ambulance, although this, too, I knew was merely for assurance and transportation to a mortuary. My third call was to Clarice to tell her that her services would not be needed that night. The check, I said, was in the mail along with a Christmas bonus, whereupon she began to weep softly since she had a soft spot for my father and an abiding empathy for my mother. Not to mention all those she’d seen pass during the years of her vocation. “You knew it was going to happen sooner or later,” I said in an attempt to put things in perspective. “There, there. Think of it this way: you have a night to yourself.”

My final call was to my cousin Francis, whose mid-Atlantic life in Maryland could not have been farther or further from mine in California. In type as well as geography.

“Frannie,” I sighed, “you’ll never believe it.”

Francis and her husband Henry are among the most charitable and fertile humans I know. They have adopted four children, all from varying ethnicities and backgrounds, along with their own biological three, and their house is a whirlwind of activities and demands for attention.

In the background I could hear the noise that seven children and assorted pets make. All of the human children were under the age of twelve, and they could make quite a noise. Yells and screams and laughter. A clatter and thud. I could only imagine property damage and injuries worthy of medical attention.

“I don’t have time, Fish,” she said. “The natives are restless, the rebellion’s about to begin. No guessing games. Out with it.”

“They’re dead,” I said. “Out like a light at the kitchen table.”

“What?” she said, and I could hear her snapping her fingers in the direction of the household ruckus, which remarkably went silent, almost in an instant. “Alan and Sylvia? Both of them?”

Then, when I didn’t answer, she whispered: “They did it together, didn’t they? That’s what you’re saying.”

“Yes,” I said. “He left me a list of the things I’ll need to know.”

“Oh, Fish,” she said. “Fish. I’m sorry. So very sorry. You’ve had a time of it, haven’t you?”

“You don’t know the half of it, Frannie,” I sniffed. “They got their wish, and I guess I got mine, too.” My father’s hand was still curled around one of the pill bottles. His nails had recently been trimmed and filed, as he liked his manicures. His cuticles were perfection. As a member of the nail-biting class, I had to admire his composure even in death. “We all get our desires in the end, and now I wish I hadn’t.”