left her with a sprained ankle and a bruised wrist. Getting out of bed went from being an exercise she could perform unassisted, though slowly and with difficulty, to being an involved operation requiring another set of arms and legs. These extra limbs were provided by Caricia. Together they were like a team of workmen trying to maneuver a baby grand piano into a snug walk-up apartment.
Her bedroom had to be moved to the main floor, to the small den off the kitchen. The boys, with much huffing and puffing, lugged a single bed in there. Caricia, meanwhile, shuttled between the main guest room on the second floor and a bivouac in the parlor, where increasingly she spent the nights. She wanted to be close at hand if she were needed. The house began to look like a refugee camp, with blankets and pillows everywhere. Philip was anxious.
"I don't know if this is a good idea, this move," he said to Sam's mother.
"It'll be fine," Caricia assured him. "Once the ankle heals, she'll be fine." Once the ankle heals: as if there were all the time in the world for this to happen.
"Anyway there's no choice," she pointed out.
"You can handle it, though, Ma," Sam said, declaring his question and his doubt.
"If I can't, you'll be the first to know," Caricia said. "The neighbors --"
"The Knowleses?" Philip asked.
"They check up on us twice a day. She works at home, and I've got her cell number. Don't worry."
Philip couldn't ask Caricia to stay in such circumstances, and neither could Sam. But it didn't matter, because she wanted to stay. She was needed, and this gave her purpose. She was wanted, and this made her welcome. It was as if she and June had known each other all their lives instead for just a few weeks in winter at the end of one of those lives.
Caricia had known people who had died, but she'd never taken care of one. She'd never been there at the end, holding a hand. Her own parents had died years ago in hospitals. They’d been sequestered in intensive-care units and connected to various tubes and monitors. They were viewable only through plates of thick glass, as if they were bits of highly suspect debris from outer space.
She had been isolated from those deaths, but she would not be isolated from this one. It walked along beside her, slowly, a little more slowly every day; it slept now in a small room under the staircase, and she slept lightly nearby, just below the surface of wakefulness, like a fish in a pond, waiting for a lazy fly to alight on the water’s skin.
Death, in a warrior culture, had become so gaudy and theatrical that a quiet death, a slow withering, was almost unnoticeable. And then the withering turned out not to be so slow. Like a change of season that arrived on the shoulders of a single cold front, a shift achieved in just a few blustery hours, the disease announced that it was quickening the pace. Puddles would freeze, frost would glaze parklands, leaves would turn brown and be blown from tree limbs by bitter winds, and the bleak season of winter suddenly set upon them. The glories of Indian summer had gone without coming, and now the year was ebbing under raw gray skies filled with clinging mist.
In winter, it was not hard to see why so many people died in winter. Not all winters everywhere were made of snow flurries and frozen puddles, but all winters were dark and cold. All winters offered the chance to lay down one's burden, to stretch out on a log and go to sleep forever while fluffy, obliterating snow fell. In summer, one was too busy blooming to die. Winter was a cessation.
Philip's mother was ceasing. The possibility was not spoken aloud, by her or those around her, that she'd had enough. The living did not wish to hear that one of their number had wearied of life and was cashing out. No one would live forever and no one wanted to, but surely no one wanted to die, either.
The worst part of dying was waiting. Waiting was hell. June waited. Those gathered around her waited, wondering how much a person could lose of herself without actually dying. June was like a store that had held its going-out-of-business sale; the shelves were stripped bare, the check-out stands were empty, but here and there a lonely light still burned and someone had forgotten to lock the doors.
Was this still a store? What was it? Next week the bulldozers would come and knock the building down, and that would be that. There was no word for a person whose personhood had flaked and been blown away bit by bit, like old paint, leaving a shell, a familiar shape and familiar signage gone dark.
When, for the last time, June came home from the hospital, she was no longer Philip's mother. She was a simulacrum and memory of Philip's mother. Her decline was grievous, yet it was hard to grieve. She was neither living nor dead; she was un-dead. She lingered at the border.
June’s eyes remained open. They moved and blinked; they relayed information to a brain that could receive but not transmit. Her lips moved but said nothing. She would not be heard again. But those around her whispered to her as if she could still hear and understand them. Maybe she did. They were like people whispering into a vast, dark cave, straining to hear beyond the echoes of their own voices, wondering at the labyrinthine mystery. Where was she? Was she there? Where had she gone?
Don't cry for me! June longed to say to them, through lips that wouldn't work and breath that wouldn't rise. It wasn’t as if they seemed particularly weepy as the moment arrived. Philip had cried when he'd heard the diagnosis, but since that moment he'd been as solemn and somber as a pallbearer. It was Caricia who'd actually broken down when the broken-down body stopped breathing, after a minutes-long eternity of gasps and heaves as the organism quit its struggle to go on.
It seemed to June, in departing, that the end of such a spectacle had to be a mercy for the witnesses as well as for her. A stillness descended, and her suffering, such as it had been, came to a close. But Caricia, holding her head in her hands like a melon, sobbed. Philip and Sam, standing nearby, bowed their heads and moved their lips, as if praying, although their voices, like June’s, could not be heard.
Don't cry for me, June thought, I'm free now. She had escaped a prison, and what did it matter if there was an afterlife? She regretted only that she could not seem to make herself heard any better from this new position outside her useless, defunct body than she had been while occupying it. Also, she noted that Philip wasn't crying. He didn't have to collapse in sorrow, but a poignant tear or two running down the cheeks wouldn't have been so terrible. If it had been him laying there there, cut down before his time, she was quite sure she would have wept.
III.
At June’s funeral, Philip spoke. He wore a beautiful charcoal-check suit and a navy blue tie striped with rose and gold. He spoke of her, not of himself and certainly not of politics. Sometimes the best campaign speech made no mention of politics at all, and the campaign was still months away.
The funeral was held in the Catholic church just a few blocks down the hill. It was a small mountain of gray stone whose summit was a groined roof. Sam's mother had befriended the priest and made known to him the predicament. A spiritually homeless soul was dying. She was a neighbor, and she would need a service. The priest agreed.
The deceased had wanted to be remembered with a party, not a service. And she would get her party. It would be held at the house, after the service. But Sam's mother felt that, party or no party, a proper funeral was important, especially for a godless woman.
Funerals were really for the living anyway, Sam’s mother reminded the boys. It was the living who needed comfort and closure. The living felt the healing warmth of ritual. People needed to see the dead body to accept the death. They needed to gather and hear the old words and melodies. They needed to be told that everything would be all right. They needed to hear that death was merely in the nature of things. They craved reassurance that justice and mercy would be done and creation was not -- or was not only -- cold, indifferent, unforgiving, and meaningless.
Death had no meaning for the departed. One’s death lay beyond the boundaries of one's own life. But any death shook the lives of those who stood nea
rby. It was as if a bolt of lighting had struck and split a tree in a forest, leaving the other trees unscathed but trembling. Those left behind wondered whether their affairs were in order. They thought about their own wills and personal effects. They wondered who would come to pay their respects and see them off when they, too, died.
"I want to thank all of you for coming," Philip began. He spoke slowly and clearly. His hands grasped the edges of the pulpit. He did not gaze down at his notes (which he had scribbled on lined notecards) but out over the pews, where several hundred people sat. The assembly included family friends, college friends, childhood friends, friends of friends, friends of his, friends of Sam's, friends of his and Sam's, a girl who as a high-school sophomore used to baby-sit him and was now in her sixties and a grandmother), a contingent of doctors and nurses from the doomed struggle, a large squad of neighbors, several political types with whom he was particularly friendly and who might prove useful at some point or, in a darker scenario, become rivals. Aspiring politicos seldom missed a chance to appear in public. An event like this one was an important opportunity. The funeral oration was a recognized political form and had been so at least since the time of Pericles.
"My