Close to Home

Today is a good day to die. The neighbor’s mother is dying next door, fifty feet from us. She has been dying for some days. The son arrived yesterday, though, from Ohio, all red-eyed, sleep deprived, and unshaven, and I happened to be collecting the mail.

“Hi, how are you?” I stopped him on his way into the house.

“Ok.”

“I… I’m… I’m afraid to ask… how’s your mom?…is she…is she still…”

“Hospice says it’s imminent.” His mother is 93.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. Please let us know if there’s anything we can do.”And then he went his stricken way. And I knew there was nothing we could do.

The sky is white-gray and foggy, and the crows are cawing and cackling across the street in the dead trees. It rains intermittently, like tears gently falling, which all conspires for a good death day. The family would remember this day, the blackbirds, the sadness of the rain echoing their sorrow. (Or not, for those who are not close to their mothers)

*****

There is something about the natural world meeting death where it’s at. My brother died on the first day of spring thirty-three years ago. The first day of spring gave us comfort. It helped my family believe that there was a promise of a new life somewhere, just beyond this one, on the other side of life’s curtain, where my brother sprung up, a new shoot, strong and angelic, his legs and arms striking a sharp, hot pose, like Bob Fosse. And who wouldn’t want to believe that? Who wouldn’t want to hope that for him? In all his young magnificence? Jazz hands for eternity.

I remember a single bird in the tree when my brother died. It was a bluebird. It came back several times while he was dying, appearing in different windows all around the house as if it wanted to come in and mourn with us at the foot of the bed, or maybe it was hungry. The bird sat in a Jacaranda tree, staring at us, until we left, after the memorial service, to travel back home.

Just now, as I write this (and I mean just now), my wife interrupts, looking into her phone with: “Oh my god, my sister just sent a video of a bluebird in distress or something…”

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” I say this to remind myself when I believe I know everything, that I know nothing, and that if one is paying attention and prone to such things, the mystical happens.

*****

The visiting brother seems no longer here. I awoke this morning to see his car gone very early. I wonder if the mother did die yesterday or if it was just too much for him to handle. Anyway, it is quiet. (I’ll admit, I am behaving like Gladys Cravitz, and I am a bit obsessed with this mother dying next door)

One daughter, our neighbor, lives with the mother, and I feel for her. I see her on occasion when we both take the trash out together on Mondays. The daughter leaves her barrels out all day on Tuesday, so I don’t see her taking them in. But I always notice she seems heavy inside. And why not? I don’t envy what she carries, eclipsed by a cloud that will never lift, day after day, year after year, the sucking of life from your very own marrow, having to care for someone terminal, or old, or both, as you shrug off your old life like a jacket, deny yourself things, shutting down every valve of your own heart to function. And you wonder if it is love or obligation.

The daughter once adopted a dog from a shelter, a black shepherd mix named Suzie, hoping it would lift her spirits, and it did. She was noticeably different, lighter, and happier because of it (if someone innately dour can appear happy). Still, the dog had separation anxieties every time the daughter left the house, which frightened the old mother, and she had to return the dog three months later, which was horrible. The daughter couldn’t look up to say hello after that for a long time.

When I lost my Golden Retriever, Otis, a few years back, one March, one of the coldest days on record, below zero, I remember, which is rare for Cape Cod, it had snowed, then a vibrant sun and the tops of the mounds shimmered like glass. I lay with him all night on the floor, knowing it was to be our last night together. Every time he stirred, I sprung up and told him I loved him. He had collapsed the day before and could no longer walk. I knew it was the end. The vet believed he was internally hemorrhaging somewhere, and it was just a matter of time. She offered to come and help us ease Otis’s suffering right then, but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t. So, my wife and I made an appointment for the next day at noon. It was bitter cold. Enough to freeze you from the inside out so you were numb to what was about to happen.

Friends helped us lift his 97 pounds wrapped in a rug to the backseat of our car. It was a thirty-minute drive. When we were almost there, Otis suddenly sat up in the rear-view mirror and looked out the window, like he knew it was his last ride, and then down again. He was so close to death when they brought him in and lowered the stretcher on the linoleum floor on top of one of his rear paws he didn’t even wince. I gently lifted the paw myself. We unbuckled the harness that helped him walk on his old legs, and we removed his collar. The kind old vet rushed to another room when he saw how far-gone Otis was and returned with a syringe to help him the rest of the way.

I have not been able to walk on the bay for five years.

*****
First, it was the grape hyacinth, then the scilla, then the daffodils. Now the forsythia is starting to come in, and magnolias.

Everything has its season. There is a natural order except for people. People do not bloom, nor die, in order. Children die in their classrooms by deranged gunmen before their 6th birthday or OD’ing on fentanyl. Parents die on an Ipad during a pandemic, giant swaths of friends and brothers and lovers die from a plague, busboys leap to their death in orange t-shirts from twin-towers into the bluest of blue skies, Black men die with knees on their necks in the gutter surrounded by onlookers, families die in basement apartments in floodwaters, elderly couples incinerate in fires in their cars on the side of the road. There is no order to death.

I have seen friends and family die of diabetes, AIDS, cancer (and sometimes shame) but dying of old age is rare.

We have signed a condolence card, “Melissa,” on the envelope. It sits on the counter by the door. When the right moment presents itself for delivery, I will walk the few steps over to the dark house in disrepair where the mother died next door, fifty feet from us. I will deposit the card in the rusty metal mailbox hoping the hinges don’t squeak and I will pray the daughter does not hear me, for I do not know what I will say or do. I could easily burst into tears and run screaming out of the yard, like the grackles and the red-wing blackbirds and the crows, “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!”

Yes. The mother did die two days ago in the middle of the night. I happened to see Melissa standing in her carport this afternoon. As I looked at her after I asked if I could give her a condolence hug, I noticed something monumental. She seemed years and pounds lighter, chattier, brighter—almost (dare I say) happy. It was as if she was another person altogether. She announced she was exhausted and sad. She told me that she and her mother were close, that she had moved here six years ago to take care of her, and that she had left her life and friends and given up her apartment. She told me that she and her sister and brother would be selling the house immediately, and she would be moving back to Maine. She invited my wife and me to the burial and memorial after and, not being terribly close, which is to say not at all, not having spoken more than five words with her in two years, I told her we would make a visit next door after the service and bring something sweet.

What I did not say, emphatically, was that I understood, that I had lost my own mother in 2004. After my mother died, well-wishers would come up to me and offer, “I know exactly what you’re feeling. I lost my mother, too”. I bristled every time someone said that because they certainly did not lose my mother. It was my mother, my mother, my singular and only mother.

Today, the brother who left so abruptly and disheveled has returned, along with their other sister and her kind husband, from Maryland. Late in the afternoon, on my way back from a walk, I saw the brother get out of his car, and I was just close enough to home that I could hear him singing. Singing. It had the lilt of a show tune. And he had a nice voice.

I heard laughter from the house around dinner time, and I was glad. Even the old dark ramshackle place itself seems a bit lighter.

******
Our cat is stunned by something out the back window. She is possessed. She is making that clipped whispery sound that cats make. We get up to look. There is a turkey the size of a Mini Cooper balancing on the fence in our back yard between the neighbor’s house and our house, like Philippe Petit, and I intuit to ask myself: I wonder if it is a visit from their mother or mine?

The chorus of crows has flown off somewhere else in town, perhaps where they’re needed, for another somber departure. Soon we will see lilacs, and I will bury my face in them, followed by the pale pink roses up and down the lane. Spiritus Pizza and the Portuguese Bakery reopen this month, and all will be right with the world.

When I die, I would like to die in spring, like my brother, with a pair of mourning doves echoing back and forth to one another in that sweet mellow five-syllable refrain, “Oo-i-oo-hoo-hoo.” But I imagine they don’t take requests.

Photo by Skyler Ewing on Unsplash