In a moment the phone rang again. “Hi, Joe.” It was his fellow Red Cross volunteer, his most faithful Holyoke friend. “My doctor was in this morning. He doesn’t come in very often. He gave me the same news he did two months ago. I said, ‘Well, I hope I go in my sleep or something.’”
When he got off the phone, Earl wet his lips. He readjusted his nose catheter on his cheeks with both hands, pulling upward on it. “Well, I don’t know which way to think. I’d like to tell it to Jean. I think she’ll be coming in after lunch.”
***
It was evening at the window of Earl’s room. He lay under the covers. Jean sat beside him, stroking his leg through the sheet. He was exhausted, clearly, after his day of bitter news and too little air. Now and then his eyes closed, then opened quickly. He said he’d like to go and see the gang at Friendly’s tomorrow. Jean laughed. “Hold your horses. You’ve to get your strength. We’ll go next week.” Earl smiled up at her.
After the incident with the TV, the social worker had invited Earl to come and talk to her about his fears. He’d told her, “I’m almost afraid of using the word ‘death.’” He said he was afraid the word would upset Jean. Earlier this afternoon, when Jean had arrived, Earl came right out with it and told her he was worried about dying. He said “dying,” not “kicking the bucket.” “As long as you’re here, I’m okay,” he added.
Jean had felt sure over these last six months that Earl was struggling only partly for his own survival. She’d sensed that he also wanted to leave her and his family with an inspiring last view of him. Now it suddenly occurred to Jean that Earl was more worried for her than for himself—whether she could withstand the blow of losing another husband—and that Earl was asking her if it was all right now if he let go. Sitting beside him, Jean said, “When the moment comes, it’s not as bad as you think. You’ve already been through so much. It’ll just come quickly and whatever adventures lie ahead you’ll just enter them.” In her mind, Jean thought, “I don’t know if I’m lying through my teeth or not.” But this was a moment to speak of these things with certainty, and this was certainly what she hoped for, for him. She leaned over Earl and said that his father and mother and brother Bill, and his brother John, who’d died in the railroad yard, would all be there. Earl reached out his arms and hugged her.
Now Earl was nodding off, his eyelids flickering open and shut as Jean stroked his leg through the covers. He asked her to stay with him a while longer. He seemed to doze. Then he opened his eyes. He smiled at her and said, “You can go home now.” He’d never said that before, in all the many long days he’d spent at Linda Manor. He had always asked her to stay longer.
17
Earl died in his room the following morning. Across from the Sunrise nurses’ station sat the usual lineup of residents in wheelchairs—the woman in the turban talking to the caged parakeet, the man who sat there playing the organ in church and competing in a turkey shoot, the several others who sat silently and seemed to gaze at nothing, and a very old woman who sometimes declaimed prayers aloud. She was chanting loudly, eerily, “The Lord Jesus Christ. We may die according to the flesh and live…” No one had told her that someone had died, but she clearly sensed something amiss. Her voice trailed off into incoherent mutterings, and rose again as she cried to her God, “Help! Me! Help! Me!” Earl’s roommate sat across the way, in his wheelchair in front of the nurses’ station counter. He was weeping. Several aides and nurses hovered around him. “At least he didn’t suffer,” said Earl’s roommate through his sobs. Behind the counter a nurse stood holding the telephone, saying to someone in the kitchen, “I want to let you know that Earl Duncan has died. Just so you won’t send us a tray for him.” It was the sort of scene Earl would have hated, the sort that had intensified his hopes of escape.
Alone in her house last night, Jean awakened nearly every hour, carrying up with her into consciousness, like a vivid dream, the thought that Earl was in trouble. When she got the call this morning, Jean felt stunned, but not surprised.
Earl’s doctor later said he didn’t think that people get to choose their time of death. They merely receive signals from their bodies, alerting their minds to the imminence of death. But Jean believed that all of Earl, his body and his mind, had decided last night. She was glad that he had chosen his time to die and that, in the end, he had been granted a quick death. Driving out Route 9 toward Linda Manor, Jean wondered if she could have done something to prevent his dying. She wondered why, after knowing for so long that this was bound to happen soon, she still could not believe that it had.
A veteran nurse-administrator whom Jean scarcely knew hugged her, then led her to the room. Jean sat in the armchair beside Earl’s bed. He looked like himself, but waxen. Jean sat and stroked his arm. Now and then she patted the sheet that covered his leg. “I never take steps now without a lot of emotion, which is hard for an old Wasp,” she said. She cried without sound, just a steady mist of tears. “He’s the most social animal I have ever known. I got jealous of his time sometimes, because I wanted more of him. He’s a dear man, a very spiritual man, but not holier than thou. He loved going to church and he worked for the church. I don’t know what he thinks of the life to come, but he lived this life wonderfully, every minute. He was totally comfortable in the world. Feeding the pigeons in Yugoslavia, wherever. Just himself, totally himself. Everybody was delighted to see him after they knew him for about five minutes. It’s so wonderful when a person has a simple heart and has a lot of honors poured on him and remains just himself, the same with everyone.”
Jean stood up, leaned over, and kissed his cheek. She picked up her pocketbook and left. She got all the way to her car, and then decided to return. “I just like to be with him,” she explained to the social worker, who stopped by for a while.
Sitting there in the small and barren room, stroking Earl’s arm, Jean suddenly thought she felt him move. She shook herself. “I just can’t believe he isn’t going to wake up.”
Where was he now? “Certainly every good person has enriched the world,” Jean said aloud beside the corpse. “Anybody who had a family such as he has, has an immortality through them. The mysteries, the paradoxes, we have to let go of knowing the whole design. Somebody said the tapestry weaver works from the other side, not seeing the beautiful design till later. Maybe there’s more and more. Another chapter.” She lifted her chin and said in a much louder, urgent voice, “But everything he loves is here!”
Jean sat with the body until the undertakers came. Then she went home and began to make her calls.
18
Deaths were first announced on the erasable bulletin board inside the kitchen, out of the view of residents. The name would be printed with felt marker, followed by “Deceased.” The “In Loving Memory” form would be posted within a day or two on the obituary board in the main corridor. Sue, the activities director, or her aide usually wrote the brief encomiums. These included a standard line or two—“A loving woman,” “Will be missed by family, friends, and staff.” Sue and her assistant strove to convey something of the person’s individuality, but there wasn’t always much to say—“A lover of plants,” “An avid bingo player,” “Enjoyed children.” Not in all, but in many cases, the deceased had been essentially anonymous in here. Earl’s memorial was of a piece: “A kind and gracious gentleman, who loved his family, friends and the sport of golfing.”
The residents who came to the monthly memorial services, held before bingo in the activity room, sometimes knew much more. Winifred, who always attended, would have a lot to say about many of the people who died that month. But even she would come up short on one or two. “I don’t recall ever seeing him,” she’d said of one of the dead who had been honored at last month’s service. “But I miss knowing that he’s not with us anymore.”
The morning of Earl’s death, several female residents sat in the activity room, sipping coffee and munching donuts, a downstairs late-morning coffee klatch. “Too bad,” said one. “But
it’s a good thing. He had cancer.”
Earl had been proved right. No one here had really known him.
Lou had never gotten to know Earl well. Joe wasn’t sure he’d ever spoken to him. Joe read the notice on the bulletin board and said to Lou, “He was seventy-one, -two, -three, seventy-nine. If I had a heart attack at seventy-nine, I’d say all right. I feel bad about him, but Jesus Christ, his age and all.”
“Let’s get our mind off that,” said Lou.
***
Evenings had lengthened. Twilight was still lingering at the windows when Lou came out to the nurses’ station to turn on the night lights. Fleur and her roommate had gotten their false teeth mixed up and had been bickering all day. Fleur stood at the nurses’ station counter. Phil sat nearby in his wheelchair. Tonight Fleur thought Phil was a policeman. She was ordering him to arrest her roommate. From the east corridor came the cries of another demented resident: “I want my washing! Now!” A special restlessness came over the demented in the hours just before and after nightfall, or so the evening staff believed. “Sundowner’s syndrome” was the name for this phenomenon. But didn’t it apply to other worlds outside, to everyone who hoists a cocktail during so-called happy hour? The windows blackened. Art and Ted didn’t have a lot to say to each other lately. Inside their room on the west corridor, each man sat in his electric recliner, each watching the TV on his bureau, each TV tuned to the same show. Zita paced the halls. She paced by a white-haired woman who sat beside the water fountain, holding a damp washcloth to her forehead. She was trying to ease the vertigo she’d suffered ever since a car accident many years ago. This woman’s roommate was stone deaf. She got lonely in her room. She’d sit out here by the water fountain until she thought that she could sleep.
In Lou and Joe’s room, the curtains were drawn across the picture window, and the light brown shroud of the privacy curtain now fully separated the two men’s beds. The night light, situated low down on a wall, cast a thin, yellowish glow across the floor. Joe lay on his back, illuminated by his TV. The nurse brought Joe his last pills of the day, then fetched Lou’s and carried them around the privacy curtain. Lou lay on his back with his bed covers drawn up to his chin. They were drawn so tightly over Lou that they held the outline of his body, like the cover of a sarcophagus. There was something exotic about Lou’s face. Perhaps it was his very full lower lip. In the eerie light, with his glasses off, his chin lifted, his face composed for receiving eyedrops, Lou might have been a pharaoh laid out in state.
The night shift took over. They turned out the lights, and the corridors lay in that dim, cherry-colored glow of the exit signs, the corners in shadow. Around midnight, an aide thought she heard a noise from the northern hallway. She thought that one of the demented residents, Norman, must have slipped out again somehow, past the barricade of laundry hampers that they’d placed in front of his door. Thinking it was only Norman, the aide went off to investigate. Finding no one there in that darkened corner, she hurried back to the well-lighted nurses’ station and laughed about her little fright.
Forest View slept fitfully. Around 2 A.M., the woman with the washcloth and Eleanor appeared from different doorways, dressed in bathrobes. They sat down side by side at the water fountain, and the night nurse, as was her custom, fixed them snacks of milk and toast. Then they went back to bed. Every two hours the sweet-tempered night aide, a hefty woman, went down the halls from room to room and crept to each bedside, listening for breathing. She was older than the other aides, and, for all her bulk, as stealthy as a cat burglar. She did not awaken Lou or Joe. The aide’s wide shadow, cast by the night light, lengthened as it crossed their floor, then shrank and disappeared.
Lou awoke all on his own. He awoke three times a night. He could set a clock by these middle-of-the-night awakenings, he often said. The TV, his sleeping pill, was silent. Some nights Lou dreamed that he was back at work, sometimes that he could see clearly again. In the dim light he could almost make out the numerals on the clock on his bedside dresser. Lou ran his hand along his headboard for the plastic urinal bottle that he’d left hanging there before turning in. Lou didn’t grope his way into the bathroom at this hour anymore. He didn’t want to wake up Joe. Joe needed his rest. Afterward, Lou drifted easily back to sleep.
Joe had a recurring dream. Several times in the past year he awakened in the dark and said to himself, “No, I passed the bar exam.” Once he dreamed that he was in a factory and couldn’t find his way out. He awakened with relief that time, and, on another night, with relief that he didn’t have to worry about not being able to remember where he’d parked his car. Sometimes in the small, dark hours before dawn, Joe woke up to re-encounter worries, remembering that his beloved granddaughter had a cold. “Oh, dear God, the baby’s sick.” Or he awoke remembering with a jolt that his daughter was planning to drive all by herself to New York City, or that in a day or two he had to go to the VA hospital for a routine check of his cholesterol. Joe hated to go back to that hospital.
When Joe awoke, the room was quiet except for the windy sound of the ventilator outside the door. Joe lay still and listened. He couldn’t hear a thing. This silence contained Joe’s greatest fear, the one that seemed most pressing at this hour of the night. Joe pulled back his covers and swung his legs over the side of his bed. He pulled back the privacy curtain and leaned toward Lou, cocking an ear. Joe listened. Lou was still breathing after all. Joe lay back in bed. Usually now he’d sleep straight through to seven.
Bob, on his way to prepare the dining room for breakfast, would wake Joe up. There’d be a rapping at the door, and then Lou, already awake, and Joe, still half asleep, would hear Bob’s abrupt, loud voice calling in to them, “All right?”
Spring
1
In the attempt to understand and control the biology of aging, medical science has long drawn a distinction between the “pathological” and the “normal.” The term “normal aging” still survives in the medical literature, in spite of many ambiguities, in spite of the fact that an old age free of pathology isn’t really normal, but ideal.
The term “normal aging” arose in the nineteenth century, along with a morality that celebrated individual success and individual control of health. According to a cultural historian named Thomas R. Cole, this new morality stripped away the spiritual solace that former conceptions of aging had offered every elderly person, and replaced it with a dual view, glorifying the healthy old age and denigrating the unhealthy. Cole writes: “Middle-class American culture since the 1830s has responded to the anxieties of growing old with a psychologically primitive strategy of splitting images of a ‘good’ old age of health, virtue, self-reliance, and salvation from a ‘bad’ old age of sickness, sin, dependency, premature death, and damnation.” Over the last century and a half, American culture has swung between those two poles, emphasizing the positive in some eras, the negative in others. This tendency, Cole argues, even infected the recent, well-publicized campaign against “ageism.” “The fashionable positive stereotype of old age showed no more tolerance or respect for the intractable vicissitudes of aging than the old negative stereotypes.”
By insisting on the difference between the normal and the pathological, modern medicine has tried to avoid old erroneous notions that would stifle research and encourage wrong diagnoses—about dementia, for example. A lot of symptoms that used to make doctors throw up their hands and declare, “It’s a case of senile dementia,” turn out not to be signs of true dementing illnesses but of reversible, treatable afflictions. And the notion that a person can carry good physical health late into life, through the cultivation of good habits, undoubtedly promises benefits for the general public health and Treasury. But there’s a problem. Ideal aging—these days also known as “successful aging,” often depicted in photographs of old folks wearing tennis clothes—leaves out a lot of people. It is estimated that nearly half of all the Americans who make it past sixty-five will spend some time in a nursing home. More than a m
illion live in nursing homes now. The celebration of successful aging leaves out all of them. Ultimately, of course, it leaves out everyone.
***
Spring weather first comes to Linda Manor in Dora’s diary. On March 22, as hailstones clatter against the windowpane beside her, Dora sits in her rocking chair and writes, “Beautiful morning here.”
Dora says she met her husband on the telephone—she was an operator in the early days of telephones. “He put a diamond on my finger in September 1916. And he had to go to the First World War, and he went to sunny France and he was there three years in France, and he came back without a scratch.” Her husband died young, over forty years ago. “He passed away on the twenty-fourth of February, 1951, and I’ve been a merry widow ever since,” says Dora. “He died with a smile on his face.”
She says, “I never had an unhappy day. I had a wonderful mother. She brought us up in a very rigid way. We had to be good girls. We had to clean our plate every meal. I didn’t cut up any capers. I was just a good girl.” Dora admits that she feels sad sometimes, here at Linda Manor. But when sadness comes, she keeps it to herself. “Because I don’t think anybody else is interested,” she explains. Dora adds—and it is easy to imagine her mother’s voice echoing down across the century—“Why should anybody else have to worry about Dora?”