Easter
Karen Sanderson
Her husband sat staring dead ahead through the streaked dirty windows in the old Volvo. She hadn’t had a chance nor the inclination to wash the car. She pulled up the driveway, parked the car and went around to help her husband out of the car. She opened the door to his growl that he didn’t need any help and to stop treating him like an invalid. This was not the time to remind him that he was in fact an invalid. And as of today, an invalid without hope.
It was almost funny when her young husband did the short-term memory test at the doctor’s, the point of which is to remember three simple words and supply them to the doctor after about 20 minutes. Felix got Apple, Plane and then he put forward cock. Dr. Francona’s eyebrows rose. Clearly not the correct word. But Felix insisted. It's a cock. Its cock. Its cock. Why are you fucking with my head? It’s that goddamn rooster sitting on your desk that’s the third word. You think just because I have a brain tumor, I don’t know a goddamn rooster when I see one?” he noted pointing to a ceramic rooster on the doctor’s desk.
It was almost funny. Not that there had been anything like sex or cock or even shared nakedness since his first surgery eight months ago. Glioblastoma didn’t roll off one’s tongue, not melodic at all, a highly aggressive and malignant brain tumor. Potent enough to stop doctors mid-sentence. A death sentence at forty-five. Yup that’s where we are.
Anna assisted Felix to a chair in the living room and started up the stairs.
“Wait Anna, before you go, answer me this. Why?”
This was not how their rough histories were supposed to lead. He sat with his enlarged face, the scar ripped through his forehead, half his mind mangled by voracious predatory cells, sitting at the edge of the chair as if ready to spring into action if he could only figure out what needed to be done, looking like an uncomprehending puppy kicked for the first time, looking like she knew something he didn’t.
“There has to be a reason. Is it because of my messed-up past? All the drugs and shit? Is this a form of punishment?”
“There’s no cause and effect. There’s no karma. There’s no reason.”
“Then what the hell is this?”
“What is this, Felix? What is this???”
She dug deep inside herself for a bracing sense of reality. She knew she had to give him something, some response, an answer to this, to this for which there never would be an answer. She had to say something and call on a reserve of strength she had hoped she’d retired years ago. It wasn’t a full reserve to start with. The resiliency of her strength had long ago been shredded, Yes, he was dying but why her?? Why did his illness mean that she had to suffer too? And she had overheard friends of theirs whispering that it was a shame that it was for him to go, that even Felix had expressed worry at her ability to continue and raise these boys without him. So she was a tad unreliable, disappearing now and then, whereas Felix was present, solid, consistent. Trustworthy. Consistency to Anna, felt like an unattainable virtue, like controlling a cloud. Wasn’t it enough to brush one’s teeth most nights?
But there it was.
“This is this, that’s all,” she replied.
“That’s the best you can do? This is this?”
Felix began chuckling. She turned to look at him and then the completely over the top wild humor of all of this hit her too. She walked over to where Felix sat on the chair bending over with the humor of it. Tears of laughter spilled from his eyes. She went over to him and knelt by his large laughing frame, putting her head on his shoulder. Here was her once handsome dapper man who loved to dress up as if in a B movie. Vintage suits and joys of picking through others’ cast-offs at thrift stores was an adventure they shared. Anna held his shoulders and knew her tears would not come easily as the sadness was too vast. So, they roared, bellies contracting with the deep insanity of it all, their laughter hurling them into a wild hysteria, the complete utter absurdity of living, finally and exquisitely explained.
This is this.
Finally, an answer they could both live with. This is this. This is this.
This is this.
This is this.
This was the last Easter when a lot of the eggs were easy to see. Enough were in obvious places – on the windowsill bright colored tips peeking out behind the curtain like small toes poking out from under a blanket. The boys angled to be the first down the stairs, the hunt was on. Charlie with his alert brown eyes made a dash to gather the trio of eggs surrounding the Easter lily, the eggs behind the door, the eggs on the mantel while Tommy looked vexed, paused in the middle of the dining room while his older brother proudly snatched all the easy eggs. The curl in the middle of Tommy’s high forehead forewarned of a storm of frustration. How come Charlie gets all the eggs? That’s no fair. Here, Tommy, you can have some of mine. But everyone knew that wasn’t the point. His father called the four-year-old Tommy to the kitchen and with a nod guided him to the cluttered kitchen cabinet under the sink. Tommy pulled open the door and looked behind the pipes and through the chaos of cleaning potions and rags and sprays for the bright colors, the smooth oval shapes that would fill his basket. His search was intense, focused. Gathering his stash from the complex hiding spots that his father had chosen gave Tommy a morning of victory.
She put her arm around her husband, nudging him to be silent now and let the boys find their own way. Looking up at him, she saw his complete immersion in the moment, a look of singular contentment on his handsome face. Standing tall on his long legs in his red plaid flannel pj’s, that all three boys had gotten from Santa that year, she saw a man sated by his life, his boys, this moment. All the fragments of his forty-five years had joined, crossed and thatched into what turned out have a shape, a pattern, that led to this kitchen, to a home in a suburb with a wife, two sons, a station wagon, and even a black lab: far from the boy sleeping on a couch in a crowded cold-water flat in Jersey City: far from the man who’s past hustles meant paybacks in this new life. Felix had settled his scores and for now leaned on the kitchen counter of his hard-won home. She handed him his coffee and they smiled with the happy patience of parents watching a resonant event. A brief dispute occurred over who got the blue vs. the green ribboned bunny but Charlie with his sunny generosity allowed Tommy to choose.
It was an early spring day; all windows were open. The two-year-old lilac bush had its first fragrant, ephemeral bloom. A temporal scent that promised to be fleeting like a drug. This was the last of their free form pagan Easters full of colors, flowers, dyed eggs when the celebrations were for the warming days, daffodils, the new puppy, the crowd of the young cousins of the husband’s sisters and their husbands. The boys’ anticipation for Easter was equal to Christmas, the thrill of The Cousins commanding the street and rushing into the new season with wild expectation. Swings climbing higher, balls being thwacked and thrown, drenching each other with water balloons and mud and teasing, the boys and girls lifting their youthful, still plump cheeks like soft petals to the sun.
She always thought of their small family as a sort of Easter story. A long-awaited thaw from some difficult winter. Felix and she had met at the end of a fruitless youth, a harsh desert run in and out of drugs, darkness and near death. Felix favored coke and club drugs. He tempered his potent rage with booze and downers. A final car crash scared and scarred him to want to live. Anna had found comfort in the poppy variety; heroin being her solace. Every addict, if lucky, learns that even the innocent glass of wine can lead to a syringe full of death. So, they each had clawed their way into AA after even the threat of god seemed better than dying. It took a year before they had noticed each other. It wasn’t attraction so much as recognition of a common past that drew them into friendship and shyly with tenacious distrust into love. Making love surprised them both after fucking whores, junkies, scum. After being fucked by shadow sucking darkness in lonely, crowded crack houses, flats with slanted floors, hell’s kitchen alleys, and backdoors, anything, anyone to get that temporary respite from living. Searching for the wares gotten from skank dealers, thieves and demons. Doctors of the night. But when Felix and she had first made love, it was a moment of long guarded innocence. There had been inside each of them, hidden behind so many layers of offenses and defenses - - a small virginal experience. So, in their midlife, they found that elusive thing that was better than drugs, which was all life itself and celebrated it by living and giving birth to two beautiful boys.
A few months after all this had started; Anna moved into the guest room and brought the boys with her to sleep. The reverberation from her husband’s crashes to the floor from his seizures, the violence of his heavy dead weight hitting the floor at any time, at night, at dinner, at bath time, after school, at breakfast had caused hers and the boys’ senses to enlarge. They were in a constant state of listening and measuring the noises of their house. Was that a normal walk? Was that just the door closing? Was that the dog? Was that from outside? The terror of thrashing seizures, the friends rushing upstairs, the EMT crews, the ambulances and the sad apologies from the husband for subjecting his family to this had pushed the boys (and her) into a constant state of alert. If he had a fall in the middle of the night, two small shapes and two sets of bright frightened eyes would appear in the doorway keenly watching to see if this was just another episode or worse. That’s when she decided to move the boys into the guest room with her to sleep. It was a tiny dark room with walls that held them like a small safe cell. It reminded her of safe rooms built in case of Air Raids in the 50’s. She slept in the middle flanked by her two squiggling boys who happily and sometimes nastily quarreled across her like children in any normal home. She brought a flashlight with her to bed and began reading to the boys by the small orange glow as if they were off camping or on a ship at sea. She read adventure stories that would send them off to far lands where there was still magic. She would read until she could hear their young lungs ebb and flow into the rhythmic pulse of sleep. Then she would take a sleeping pill and pray that tonight there would be no episodes.
Of course that left her husband in their room, alone. She was sure his aloneness was magnified by her choosing to stay with the kids. Was she also in retreat? Occasionally, he would ask her to lay with him to share in his loneliness and unrelenting desires.
“Anna come lie with me just for a bit.”
Knowing he heard the silliness from the next room, how could she say no.
There had been so many times when the smells from his naked body lifting from the sparse dark curls under his arms, from the denser humid patch by the curl of his penis, when the scent of him would cause her to enter a waking sleepiness as if caught in a spell of a most powerful natural narcotic. A dreamy heat would radiate through her belly, her womb, flush blood to her cheeks, lips, and labia and would pulse her alive and wanting. She would find his sleeping cock lying like a forest creature safe in thicket and tenderly waken it from hibernation and they would fall into an abandoned rolling into each other. It had cost years of cracking back the distrust and hurt, feeding a thin artery of hope.
And for what?
Back in her husband’s bed. She lay naked next to him, a stranger now. He had gained almost 100 pounds; he didn’t smell the same. His skin was stretched and cooler to the touch. Even the color of his skin was different, it was yellower and paler the pigments stretched as well. His smell had changed, bearing an odor of sickness. Looking into his eyes she saw that these were the same eyes that had looked back at her for the past 15 years. She recognized him.
After the word cancer and dying was told to the boys, Felix’s sister and family had come to stay that last Easter. There was a small vestige of a hunt this year. Charlie now 8 and Tommy 6, played their roles now, tempered by reality. His sister and husband, Joanne and Peter, with their easy temperaments and their young teen children gave the day a playful caste. Joanne put the ham in the oven and started the broccoli casserole. Sounds and smells of cooking and kids whooping over Super Mario games rose to our room. Warmth and family and liveliness enveloped as Anna lay in bed with Felix. She wrapped her arm around his now massive body, blown up by months of unsuccessful chemo treatments. Her handsome, proud husband had become a caricature of himself, turning this self-styled man into a large lumbering Frankenstein. His face had puffed round and distorted and made him appear sometimes maniacal, sometimes like a huge monstrous baby. Watching Felix look in the mirror and take in his appearance was like witnessing some cruel medieval barbaric Dark Age torture. What do you say to someone who knows they are dying and has to see themselves be made ugly in ways unimaginable? Well, your dog still recognizes you. Your kids love you anyways even if they look at you with horror. Or well don’t worry about it, you’ll be dead soon anyways.
But for now, on this last Easter, Anna lay next to this sweet huge man, her arm curled up around his large belly while he spoke of his boys, of his deepest sadness, that he would not be there to help lift his boys into adulthood, not be there to throw Charlie’s football with him when he joined the high school football team. Of not being there to have the standoff with Tommy, to tell him he would kick his ass if he didn’t stop acting like being ghetto was cool and that if Tommy wanted to do drugs, get suspended and fail school and think that was some kind of smart cool thing then Felix would take his smart ass troubled son and drop him in the middle of Newark for the night and let Tommy see just how goddamn bad he really was.
The final decline happened both quickly and in an unworldly time of magnified molecular slowness. Felix, weakened by the final treatments, was now almost entirely bedridden. He spent his days and nights lying in bed, his eyes staring again and again at the glow-in–the-dark stars he had pasted on the ceiling for the boys’ midnight visits. He had positioned them in the shape of an off kilter smiling face right after they had moved into this house, their first whole house. The stars in their plastic fading glow reappeared night after night, consistent in their nightly unnatural light. His mind assisted by the morphine drip and growing tumors pushed him to madness. From loudly singing songs he made up about little Tommy’s tiny puppy-cock, which Anna worried would later give Tommy serious insecurities, maybe a father penis-envy, to recitations of the Baltimore catechism and wild furious raging against nuns, pedophiles and a vicious vengeful god. And in a moment of near sanity, he would remember to leave things behind, to make sure that Charlie would get his dead father’s rosary hidden deep in his desk drawer to give Tommy his beret.
Then there was the husband’s last trip to the bathroom. His body was huge and the steroids had filled his muscles with bloated strength. To leave his bed for any reason guaranteed a grand mal seizure with the noisy collapse to the floor, the thrashing of the limbs and nerves, the open mouth groping for breath, white with dry saliva, the eyes open but blank moving back into his diseased skull, flailing, gasping, a large man beached on his floor trying to make it to the toilet, pissing on himself, his sweatpants, the hardwood floor.
“That’s it. You have to start wearing diapers.”
“NO! I will NOT. I am a man. I will die before I ever wear a diaper. I’m not going to lose my dignity. Fuck you if you think I am.”
“That’s it Felix. I can’t take this anymore.”
“Then help me die. I’m not going to be some invalided creature rolling around in a diaper.”
“Then I’m going to get Bob or a neighbor in to take you to the bathroom cuz I’m not strong enough to lift you. You weigh a ton.”
Felix looked up at the ceiling and said nothing.
Diapers appeared.
The next day after school Charlie asked if he could please move to his friend’s house for a while. She made arrangements for Tommy to stay at a friends too. For the time being.
Felix lay in the middle of the bed with his legs spread and suffered the horrific humiliation of his wife putting a diaper on him, the sound of an adult sized Velcro closure ripping through the room. He had now become the thing he briefly believed was untrue, a reality he’d thought he’d avoided, that which was what he was - a large unwanted monster.
“Anna. I want to ask you something.”
“Yes?”
“I’m serious. I want you to help me die.”
This was not the first time he asked but the tone was different. He was ready. Was she?
He was already on a morphine drip for all the good that it did. There was plenty of Oxycodone. Anna wondered if there would be an autopsy and if she would end up in prison orphaning her two boys. But the doctors had included her, not knowing, in her husband's “pain management” as they’d called it, though it would have been better if they had bothered to try “pain alleviation.” It had been a great temptation not to grind and cook the Oxycodone for herself. There were still some syringes from an earlier pain killer they’d given him which also hadn’t worked. During a period of palliative care, the doctors had given him an elastic band to do some exercises in bed which both she and Felix had noted would make a perfect band to tie- off with. Cotton swabs in the medicine cabinet, spoons and matches downstairs. They were equipped. She knew how but until that moment did not know if she could do this, though she had thought about it from time to time over the past year. It had not been imagined that she would be getting this gentle yet tough man, this little league coach, this newly suburban father and husband off and out. She knew she could do this. She could make herself cold. She'd learned that from her days on the street. She could steel herself. As for any legal repercussions, she had no worry. There had been a hint of a wink when she joked with Felix’s neurologist. Felix had been given eighteen months and here it was seventeen months of steady decline and brain failings.
Anna took three of the pills, stuck them in the fold of one of his Get-Well cards, thick paper with a shiny surface so particles would slide out and then crushed them under a jar. There was too much powder for one hit so she’d have to do it again, maybe two times more. She poured the powder from the paper into the spoon and filled the syringe with water which she expertly dropped into the cooker. When the mixture looked the right near-paste consistency, she lit a match and started cooking until a few bubbles formed. The smell of the sulfur and the long since performed operation made her shudder with desire. She dropped the pinch of cotton in the spoon, pulled the liquid through it into the needle filling it near the top. She returned to her husband’s room. He rolled his eyes toward her full of tears.
“Ok?”
“I love you, Anna. Thank you.”
“I love you too Felix.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Forget it.”
Steeled again, she took the band and wrapped it around her husband’s arm above his elbow, making his vein bulge. She pushed the liquid to the top of the needle and automatically tapped a few drops off the top.
Anna then gently with her left hand tapped his vein and pressed the needle through his stretched luminescent skin. To check if she had aimed right, she pulled back until a tincture of blood drew up into the syringe and swirled familiarly like smoke in the plastic window. She was in.
Now to push, now to push this dear man into eternity without her, leaving her, abandoning her. She hesitated--could she? The slight surge of his blood made her want to join his whole body of fluid, swim in their shared boundless liquid selves, join and blend with the gentle dying potion. She had to dig deeper. A promise had been made. She must not give into the calling to go under with Felix, free from gravity, floating in a warm body of a sensuous sea, just the two of them. No need to breathe, no need to navigate, all was decided in the last decision and now it was not the time to languish, linger, long.
She quickly pushed the mixture into his arm. It would be two more shots before she saw his body relax and the grin of drug spread on his face. She climbed up next to him and again lay by him for the last time, listening to his breathing. Waiting. She spoke to him and made promises. She forgave him for everything and promised she would be strong. No tears now or for a long while. She was cold, she was resolute, she was keeping her promise. She was for once the one who was the rock.
It took an hour for his breathing to go from deep relaxed breathing to gasping as his still youthful body rebelled against this unnatural timing. She held and stroked him while the periods between exhales grew longer and longer until there were no more. After the last exhale she waited for a long while before allowing that this part of her life was done. But with that she knew he had left her with something new. He’d left her with the knowledge that she had finally and impossibly learned to love, that she had held him when he cried and helped carry some of his pain like the last few times he stood on the porch watching his two wonderful, silly kids walking up the block to school on a leafy street shoving into each other, giggling, their backpacks bouncing, and it being spring, the tears streaming down his face seeing their backs grow smaller & smaller and further & further. And that at the final moment of his life, she had remained with him, holding him as his poor pained body heaved its last difficult gulp of air, stroking his head, telling him it was okay to let go, that she would take care of his sons, to not worry. It was time.
At the funeral a crowd of his friends from former and present lives gathered. Over 200 people--neighbors, friends and coworkers came to the bare and chilly parish hall of St. Andrew’s. Charlie’s and Tommy’s friends, coaches and teachers came, their faces stricken, the first experience of death for most of them, the parents included. A small thicket of boys flocked around Charlie and Tommy, wanting to be close but not too close, not wanting to have to know about someone losing their father. It wasn’t contagious they knew, they were sure, as they stood close to their moms and dads, but not wanting their buddies to have to go it alone; brave, loyal teammates till the end. There was a microphone and people got up to speak of Felix. Men recounted the tough talk that forced them to look deeper into their dark selves or recalled wild raucous events. Women from his past spoke of their intimate experience of Felix even as making apologies to Anna, his wife, who struggled to stay in numbness, appear contained, if not generous, against the muted fury at Felix’s having had another life, having any other love than their own. They too needed to express their grief. Where else could they go? Let them talk. Say what they need to say. These were only words. They could not steal him now. It was too late. Only she had the satisfaction of having had Felix last. Last and best. The best for last. Only she had finally and summarily won. He was hers till the end. Anna was the lucky, fortunate, blessed, lottery- ticket- billionaire-winner who got to hear his last troubled gasping of life, to change his last diaper, to jab the last attempt at peace from pain in his steroid-strong, unflinching thigh. Lucky, lucky, lucky her. Nothing that could be said would ever take that away. Yes, Anna was the winner, the champion, the one who got to take the prize home. Even the girlfriend of his childhood, the one they all thought was sure to become his wife, Jeannie, thin, tough and strung-out, was subdued when she spoke. Anna watched Jeannie twitch and hurt and dance around her past and her role in sending Felix back into living, with the living (and to Anna) and really all Anna wanted to do was to follow Jeanie to the Newark corner she was heading back to and score some momentary pain relief and score again and again and again. But instead, Anna sat and listened from some place far away from the present, as memory and loss blended in words that she could no longer hear. She did notice that Charlie’s shirt looked too big, material dangling from his thin limbs. He leaned his warm, curly head against her shoulder.
Felix’s sixteen-year-old niece, Genevieve, got up and spoke in her soft shy voice of how Felix after years of his dragging her to Salvation Army’s, rummage sales and Mission thrift stores in sketchy neighborhoods, had shown her how to recover unusual and obsolete patterns, had taught her how to find cast-off beauty in giant bins saturated in mildew smells, strewn and tossed with hideous polyester and faded stained moo-moo’s, like big ugly salads; amongst shoes of the newly-dead laid out in rows with the footbeds worn; alongside women with stubble chins, missing teeth, and wattles of arm flesh, grabbing for something pink, pretty, flowered for themselves or their children. Gen spoke of how this training had taught her to find her own way, to find treasure even in ugliness.
Recently, this same niece came to visit, now in her twenties, wondering if she would ever meet a man like Felix for herself, a man mythologized now by time and faulty memory. Could Anna tell her about the things he’d like to have forgotten, would have traded soul and home and almost firstborn to have erased forever? Would she even let herself remember the less than nostalgic truths? That even in the glow of that past healthy Easter there was the truth of Felix that sometimes simmered up and reminded them both that we were not of the sunny people, the confident people, the shining people, people whose birthright promised the lives they had been allowed to inhabit, albeit briefly. The rages, the broken wall in the bedroom from his fist, the stash of money ripped off from his boss, the cons he played on older women to squeak by law and honesty. The inability to move out of his Jersey City hatred for those who had what he had not. Cons he’d played on her.
Returning home from the funeral without the boys, Anna entered with apprehension. The house had a chill even on this warm day. What she noticed was a patchwork of furniture and a new kind of silence. Would the three of them bring familiar noises back? Was there still a smell of sickness? Would she forget the route of the body bag? The fireplace was full of ashes from a winter attempt at hearth and home. What was she to do with Felix’s ashes? Bury? An urn? Altar? Late afternoon was settling in and with it a shaft of light fell to the floor, a bright slant of a yellow rectangle. This, thought Anna, is this. This is this.
Karen Sanderson
Her husband sat staring dead ahead through the streaked dirty windows in the old Volvo. She hadn’t had a chance nor the inclination to wash the car. She pulled up the driveway, parked the car and went around to help her husband out of the car. She opened the door to his growl that he didn’t need any help and to stop treating him like an invalid. This was not the time to remind him that he was in fact an invalid. And as of today, an invalid without hope.
It was almost funny when her young husband did the short-term memory test at the doctor’s, the point of which is to remember three simple words and supply them to the doctor after about 20 minutes. Felix got Apple, Plane and then he put forward cock. Dr. Francona’s eyebrows rose. Clearly not the correct word. But Felix insisted. It's a cock. Its cock. Its cock. Why are you fucking with my head? It’s that goddamn rooster sitting on your desk that’s the third word. You think just because I have a brain tumor, I don’t know a goddamn rooster when I see one?” he noted pointing to a ceramic rooster on the doctor’s desk.
It was almost funny. Not that there had been anything like sex or cock or even shared nakedness since his first surgery eight months ago. Glioblastoma didn’t roll off one’s tongue, not melodic at all, a highly aggressive and malignant brain tumor. Potent enough to stop doctors mid-sentence. A death sentence at forty-five. Yup that’s where we are.
Anna assisted Felix to a chair in the living room and started up the stairs.
“Wait Anna, before you go, answer me this. Why?”
This was not how their rough histories were supposed to lead. He sat with his enlarged face, the scar ripped through his forehead, half his mind mangled by voracious predatory cells, sitting at the edge of the chair as if ready to spring into action if he could only figure out what needed to be done, looking like an uncomprehending puppy kicked for the first time, looking like she knew something he didn’t.
“There has to be a reason. Is it because of my messed-up past? All the drugs and shit? Is this a form of punishment?”
“There’s no cause and effect. There’s no karma. There’s no reason.”
“Then what the hell is this?”
“What is this, Felix? What is this???”
She dug deep inside herself for a bracing sense of reality. She knew she had to give him something, some response, an answer to this, to this for which there never would be an answer. She had to say something and call on a reserve of strength she had hoped she’d retired years ago. It wasn’t a full reserve to start with. The resiliency of her strength had long ago been shredded, Yes, he was dying but why her?? Why did his illness mean that she had to suffer too? And she had overheard friends of theirs whispering that it was a shame that it was for him to go, that even Felix had expressed worry at her ability to continue and raise these boys without him. So she was a tad unreliable, disappearing now and then, whereas Felix was present, solid, consistent. Trustworthy. Consistency to Anna, felt like an unattainable virtue, like controlling a cloud. Wasn’t it enough to brush one’s teeth most nights?
But there it was.
“This is this, that’s all,” she replied.
“That’s the best you can do? This is this?”
Felix began chuckling. She turned to look at him and then the completely over the top wild humor of all of this hit her too. She walked over to where Felix sat on the chair bending over with the humor of it. Tears of laughter spilled from his eyes. She went over to him and knelt by his large laughing frame, putting her head on his shoulder. Here was her once handsome dapper man who loved to dress up as if in a B movie. Vintage suits and joys of picking through others’ cast-offs at thrift stores was an adventure they shared. Anna held his shoulders and knew her tears would not come easily as the sadness was too vast. So, they roared, bellies contracting with the deep insanity of it all, their laughter hurling them into a wild hysteria, the complete utter absurdity of living, finally and exquisitely explained.
This is this.
Finally, an answer they could both live with. This is this. This is this.
This is this.
This is this.
This was the last Easter when a lot of the eggs were easy to see. Enough were in obvious places – on the windowsill bright colored tips peeking out behind the curtain like small toes poking out from under a blanket. The boys angled to be the first down the stairs, the hunt was on. Charlie with his alert brown eyes made a dash to gather the trio of eggs surrounding the Easter lily, the eggs behind the door, the eggs on the mantel while Tommy looked vexed, paused in the middle of the dining room while his older brother proudly snatched all the easy eggs. The curl in the middle of Tommy’s high forehead forewarned of a storm of frustration. How come Charlie gets all the eggs? That’s no fair. Here, Tommy, you can have some of mine. But everyone knew that wasn’t the point. His father called the four-year-old Tommy to the kitchen and with a nod guided him to the cluttered kitchen cabinet under the sink. Tommy pulled open the door and looked behind the pipes and through the chaos of cleaning potions and rags and sprays for the bright colors, the smooth oval shapes that would fill his basket. His search was intense, focused. Gathering his stash from the complex hiding spots that his father had chosen gave Tommy a morning of victory.
She put her arm around her husband, nudging him to be silent now and let the boys find their own way. Looking up at him, she saw his complete immersion in the moment, a look of singular contentment on his handsome face. Standing tall on his long legs in his red plaid flannel pj’s, that all three boys had gotten from Santa that year, she saw a man sated by his life, his boys, this moment. All the fragments of his forty-five years had joined, crossed and thatched into what turned out have a shape, a pattern, that led to this kitchen, to a home in a suburb with a wife, two sons, a station wagon, and even a black lab: far from the boy sleeping on a couch in a crowded cold-water flat in Jersey City: far from the man who’s past hustles meant paybacks in this new life. Felix had settled his scores and for now leaned on the kitchen counter of his hard-won home. She handed him his coffee and they smiled with the happy patience of parents watching a resonant event. A brief dispute occurred over who got the blue vs. the green ribboned bunny but Charlie with his sunny generosity allowed Tommy to choose.
It was an early spring day; all windows were open. The two-year-old lilac bush had its first fragrant, ephemeral bloom. A temporal scent that promised to be fleeting like a drug. This was the last of their free form pagan Easters full of colors, flowers, dyed eggs when the celebrations were for the warming days, daffodils, the new puppy, the crowd of the young cousins of the husband’s sisters and their husbands. The boys’ anticipation for Easter was equal to Christmas, the thrill of The Cousins commanding the street and rushing into the new season with wild expectation. Swings climbing higher, balls being thwacked and thrown, drenching each other with water balloons and mud and teasing, the boys and girls lifting their youthful, still plump cheeks like soft petals to the sun.
She always thought of their small family as a sort of Easter story. A long-awaited thaw from some difficult winter. Felix and she had met at the end of a fruitless youth, a harsh desert run in and out of drugs, darkness and near death. Felix favored coke and club drugs. He tempered his potent rage with booze and downers. A final car crash scared and scarred him to want to live. Anna had found comfort in the poppy variety; heroin being her solace. Every addict, if lucky, learns that even the innocent glass of wine can lead to a syringe full of death. So, they each had clawed their way into AA after even the threat of god seemed better than dying. It took a year before they had noticed each other. It wasn’t attraction so much as recognition of a common past that drew them into friendship and shyly with tenacious distrust into love. Making love surprised them both after fucking whores, junkies, scum. After being fucked by shadow sucking darkness in lonely, crowded crack houses, flats with slanted floors, hell’s kitchen alleys, and backdoors, anything, anyone to get that temporary respite from living. Searching for the wares gotten from skank dealers, thieves and demons. Doctors of the night. But when Felix and she had first made love, it was a moment of long guarded innocence. There had been inside each of them, hidden behind so many layers of offenses and defenses - - a small virginal experience. So, in their midlife, they found that elusive thing that was better than drugs, which was all life itself and celebrated it by living and giving birth to two beautiful boys.
A few months after all this had started; Anna moved into the guest room and brought the boys with her to sleep. The reverberation from her husband’s crashes to the floor from his seizures, the violence of his heavy dead weight hitting the floor at any time, at night, at dinner, at bath time, after school, at breakfast had caused hers and the boys’ senses to enlarge. They were in a constant state of listening and measuring the noises of their house. Was that a normal walk? Was that just the door closing? Was that the dog? Was that from outside? The terror of thrashing seizures, the friends rushing upstairs, the EMT crews, the ambulances and the sad apologies from the husband for subjecting his family to this had pushed the boys (and her) into a constant state of alert. If he had a fall in the middle of the night, two small shapes and two sets of bright frightened eyes would appear in the doorway keenly watching to see if this was just another episode or worse. That’s when she decided to move the boys into the guest room with her to sleep. It was a tiny dark room with walls that held them like a small safe cell. It reminded her of safe rooms built in case of Air Raids in the 50’s. She slept in the middle flanked by her two squiggling boys who happily and sometimes nastily quarreled across her like children in any normal home. She brought a flashlight with her to bed and began reading to the boys by the small orange glow as if they were off camping or on a ship at sea. She read adventure stories that would send them off to far lands where there was still magic. She would read until she could hear their young lungs ebb and flow into the rhythmic pulse of sleep. Then she would take a sleeping pill and pray that tonight there would be no episodes.
Of course that left her husband in their room, alone. She was sure his aloneness was magnified by her choosing to stay with the kids. Was she also in retreat? Occasionally, he would ask her to lay with him to share in his loneliness and unrelenting desires.
“Anna come lie with me just for a bit.”
Knowing he heard the silliness from the next room, how could she say no.
There had been so many times when the smells from his naked body lifting from the sparse dark curls under his arms, from the denser humid patch by the curl of his penis, when the scent of him would cause her to enter a waking sleepiness as if caught in a spell of a most powerful natural narcotic. A dreamy heat would radiate through her belly, her womb, flush blood to her cheeks, lips, and labia and would pulse her alive and wanting. She would find his sleeping cock lying like a forest creature safe in thicket and tenderly waken it from hibernation and they would fall into an abandoned rolling into each other. It had cost years of cracking back the distrust and hurt, feeding a thin artery of hope.
And for what?
Back in her husband’s bed. She lay naked next to him, a stranger now. He had gained almost 100 pounds; he didn’t smell the same. His skin was stretched and cooler to the touch. Even the color of his skin was different, it was yellower and paler the pigments stretched as well. His smell had changed, bearing an odor of sickness. Looking into his eyes she saw that these were the same eyes that had looked back at her for the past 15 years. She recognized him.
After the word cancer and dying was told to the boys, Felix’s sister and family had come to stay that last Easter. There was a small vestige of a hunt this year. Charlie now 8 and Tommy 6, played their roles now, tempered by reality. His sister and husband, Joanne and Peter, with their easy temperaments and their young teen children gave the day a playful caste. Joanne put the ham in the oven and started the broccoli casserole. Sounds and smells of cooking and kids whooping over Super Mario games rose to our room. Warmth and family and liveliness enveloped as Anna lay in bed with Felix. She wrapped her arm around his now massive body, blown up by months of unsuccessful chemo treatments. Her handsome, proud husband had become a caricature of himself, turning this self-styled man into a large lumbering Frankenstein. His face had puffed round and distorted and made him appear sometimes maniacal, sometimes like a huge monstrous baby. Watching Felix look in the mirror and take in his appearance was like witnessing some cruel medieval barbaric Dark Age torture. What do you say to someone who knows they are dying and has to see themselves be made ugly in ways unimaginable? Well, your dog still recognizes you. Your kids love you anyways even if they look at you with horror. Or well don’t worry about it, you’ll be dead soon anyways.
But for now, on this last Easter, Anna lay next to this sweet huge man, her arm curled up around his large belly while he spoke of his boys, of his deepest sadness, that he would not be there to help lift his boys into adulthood, not be there to throw Charlie’s football with him when he joined the high school football team. Of not being there to have the standoff with Tommy, to tell him he would kick his ass if he didn’t stop acting like being ghetto was cool and that if Tommy wanted to do drugs, get suspended and fail school and think that was some kind of smart cool thing then Felix would take his smart ass troubled son and drop him in the middle of Newark for the night and let Tommy see just how goddamn bad he really was.
The final decline happened both quickly and in an unworldly time of magnified molecular slowness. Felix, weakened by the final treatments, was now almost entirely bedridden. He spent his days and nights lying in bed, his eyes staring again and again at the glow-in–the-dark stars he had pasted on the ceiling for the boys’ midnight visits. He had positioned them in the shape of an off kilter smiling face right after they had moved into this house, their first whole house. The stars in their plastic fading glow reappeared night after night, consistent in their nightly unnatural light. His mind assisted by the morphine drip and growing tumors pushed him to madness. From loudly singing songs he made up about little Tommy’s tiny puppy-cock, which Anna worried would later give Tommy serious insecurities, maybe a father penis-envy, to recitations of the Baltimore catechism and wild furious raging against nuns, pedophiles and a vicious vengeful god. And in a moment of near sanity, he would remember to leave things behind, to make sure that Charlie would get his dead father’s rosary hidden deep in his desk drawer to give Tommy his beret.
Then there was the husband’s last trip to the bathroom. His body was huge and the steroids had filled his muscles with bloated strength. To leave his bed for any reason guaranteed a grand mal seizure with the noisy collapse to the floor, the thrashing of the limbs and nerves, the open mouth groping for breath, white with dry saliva, the eyes open but blank moving back into his diseased skull, flailing, gasping, a large man beached on his floor trying to make it to the toilet, pissing on himself, his sweatpants, the hardwood floor.
“That’s it. You have to start wearing diapers.”
“NO! I will NOT. I am a man. I will die before I ever wear a diaper. I’m not going to lose my dignity. Fuck you if you think I am.”
“That’s it Felix. I can’t take this anymore.”
“Then help me die. I’m not going to be some invalided creature rolling around in a diaper.”
“Then I’m going to get Bob or a neighbor in to take you to the bathroom cuz I’m not strong enough to lift you. You weigh a ton.”
Felix looked up at the ceiling and said nothing.
Diapers appeared.
The next day after school Charlie asked if he could please move to his friend’s house for a while. She made arrangements for Tommy to stay at a friends too. For the time being.
Felix lay in the middle of the bed with his legs spread and suffered the horrific humiliation of his wife putting a diaper on him, the sound of an adult sized Velcro closure ripping through the room. He had now become the thing he briefly believed was untrue, a reality he’d thought he’d avoided, that which was what he was - a large unwanted monster.
“Anna. I want to ask you something.”
“Yes?”
“I’m serious. I want you to help me die.”
This was not the first time he asked but the tone was different. He was ready. Was she?
He was already on a morphine drip for all the good that it did. There was plenty of Oxycodone. Anna wondered if there would be an autopsy and if she would end up in prison orphaning her two boys. But the doctors had included her, not knowing, in her husband's “pain management” as they’d called it, though it would have been better if they had bothered to try “pain alleviation.” It had been a great temptation not to grind and cook the Oxycodone for herself. There were still some syringes from an earlier pain killer they’d given him which also hadn’t worked. During a period of palliative care, the doctors had given him an elastic band to do some exercises in bed which both she and Felix had noted would make a perfect band to tie- off with. Cotton swabs in the medicine cabinet, spoons and matches downstairs. They were equipped. She knew how but until that moment did not know if she could do this, though she had thought about it from time to time over the past year. It had not been imagined that she would be getting this gentle yet tough man, this little league coach, this newly suburban father and husband off and out. She knew she could do this. She could make herself cold. She'd learned that from her days on the street. She could steel herself. As for any legal repercussions, she had no worry. There had been a hint of a wink when she joked with Felix’s neurologist. Felix had been given eighteen months and here it was seventeen months of steady decline and brain failings.
Anna took three of the pills, stuck them in the fold of one of his Get-Well cards, thick paper with a shiny surface so particles would slide out and then crushed them under a jar. There was too much powder for one hit so she’d have to do it again, maybe two times more. She poured the powder from the paper into the spoon and filled the syringe with water which she expertly dropped into the cooker. When the mixture looked the right near-paste consistency, she lit a match and started cooking until a few bubbles formed. The smell of the sulfur and the long since performed operation made her shudder with desire. She dropped the pinch of cotton in the spoon, pulled the liquid through it into the needle filling it near the top. She returned to her husband’s room. He rolled his eyes toward her full of tears.
“Ok?”
“I love you, Anna. Thank you.”
“I love you too Felix.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Forget it.”
Steeled again, she took the band and wrapped it around her husband’s arm above his elbow, making his vein bulge. She pushed the liquid to the top of the needle and automatically tapped a few drops off the top.
Anna then gently with her left hand tapped his vein and pressed the needle through his stretched luminescent skin. To check if she had aimed right, she pulled back until a tincture of blood drew up into the syringe and swirled familiarly like smoke in the plastic window. She was in.
Now to push, now to push this dear man into eternity without her, leaving her, abandoning her. She hesitated--could she? The slight surge of his blood made her want to join his whole body of fluid, swim in their shared boundless liquid selves, join and blend with the gentle dying potion. She had to dig deeper. A promise had been made. She must not give into the calling to go under with Felix, free from gravity, floating in a warm body of a sensuous sea, just the two of them. No need to breathe, no need to navigate, all was decided in the last decision and now it was not the time to languish, linger, long.
She quickly pushed the mixture into his arm. It would be two more shots before she saw his body relax and the grin of drug spread on his face. She climbed up next to him and again lay by him for the last time, listening to his breathing. Waiting. She spoke to him and made promises. She forgave him for everything and promised she would be strong. No tears now or for a long while. She was cold, she was resolute, she was keeping her promise. She was for once the one who was the rock.
It took an hour for his breathing to go from deep relaxed breathing to gasping as his still youthful body rebelled against this unnatural timing. She held and stroked him while the periods between exhales grew longer and longer until there were no more. After the last exhale she waited for a long while before allowing that this part of her life was done. But with that she knew he had left her with something new. He’d left her with the knowledge that she had finally and impossibly learned to love, that she had held him when he cried and helped carry some of his pain like the last few times he stood on the porch watching his two wonderful, silly kids walking up the block to school on a leafy street shoving into each other, giggling, their backpacks bouncing, and it being spring, the tears streaming down his face seeing their backs grow smaller & smaller and further & further. And that at the final moment of his life, she had remained with him, holding him as his poor pained body heaved its last difficult gulp of air, stroking his head, telling him it was okay to let go, that she would take care of his sons, to not worry. It was time.
At the funeral a crowd of his friends from former and present lives gathered. Over 200 people--neighbors, friends and coworkers came to the bare and chilly parish hall of St. Andrew’s. Charlie’s and Tommy’s friends, coaches and teachers came, their faces stricken, the first experience of death for most of them, the parents included. A small thicket of boys flocked around Charlie and Tommy, wanting to be close but not too close, not wanting to have to know about someone losing their father. It wasn’t contagious they knew, they were sure, as they stood close to their moms and dads, but not wanting their buddies to have to go it alone; brave, loyal teammates till the end. There was a microphone and people got up to speak of Felix. Men recounted the tough talk that forced them to look deeper into their dark selves or recalled wild raucous events. Women from his past spoke of their intimate experience of Felix even as making apologies to Anna, his wife, who struggled to stay in numbness, appear contained, if not generous, against the muted fury at Felix’s having had another life, having any other love than their own. They too needed to express their grief. Where else could they go? Let them talk. Say what they need to say. These were only words. They could not steal him now. It was too late. Only she had the satisfaction of having had Felix last. Last and best. The best for last. Only she had finally and summarily won. He was hers till the end. Anna was the lucky, fortunate, blessed, lottery- ticket- billionaire-winner who got to hear his last troubled gasping of life, to change his last diaper, to jab the last attempt at peace from pain in his steroid-strong, unflinching thigh. Lucky, lucky, lucky her. Nothing that could be said would ever take that away. Yes, Anna was the winner, the champion, the one who got to take the prize home. Even the girlfriend of his childhood, the one they all thought was sure to become his wife, Jeannie, thin, tough and strung-out, was subdued when she spoke. Anna watched Jeannie twitch and hurt and dance around her past and her role in sending Felix back into living, with the living (and to Anna) and really all Anna wanted to do was to follow Jeanie to the Newark corner she was heading back to and score some momentary pain relief and score again and again and again. But instead, Anna sat and listened from some place far away from the present, as memory and loss blended in words that she could no longer hear. She did notice that Charlie’s shirt looked too big, material dangling from his thin limbs. He leaned his warm, curly head against her shoulder.
Felix’s sixteen-year-old niece, Genevieve, got up and spoke in her soft shy voice of how Felix after years of his dragging her to Salvation Army’s, rummage sales and Mission thrift stores in sketchy neighborhoods, had shown her how to recover unusual and obsolete patterns, had taught her how to find cast-off beauty in giant bins saturated in mildew smells, strewn and tossed with hideous polyester and faded stained moo-moo’s, like big ugly salads; amongst shoes of the newly-dead laid out in rows with the footbeds worn; alongside women with stubble chins, missing teeth, and wattles of arm flesh, grabbing for something pink, pretty, flowered for themselves or their children. Gen spoke of how this training had taught her to find her own way, to find treasure even in ugliness.
Recently, this same niece came to visit, now in her twenties, wondering if she would ever meet a man like Felix for herself, a man mythologized now by time and faulty memory. Could Anna tell her about the things he’d like to have forgotten, would have traded soul and home and almost firstborn to have erased forever? Would she even let herself remember the less than nostalgic truths? That even in the glow of that past healthy Easter there was the truth of Felix that sometimes simmered up and reminded them both that we were not of the sunny people, the confident people, the shining people, people whose birthright promised the lives they had been allowed to inhabit, albeit briefly. The rages, the broken wall in the bedroom from his fist, the stash of money ripped off from his boss, the cons he played on older women to squeak by law and honesty. The inability to move out of his Jersey City hatred for those who had what he had not. Cons he’d played on her.
Returning home from the funeral without the boys, Anna entered with apprehension. The house had a chill even on this warm day. What she noticed was a patchwork of furniture and a new kind of silence. Would the three of them bring familiar noises back? Was there still a smell of sickness? Would she forget the route of the body bag? The fireplace was full of ashes from a winter attempt at hearth and home. What was she to do with Felix’s ashes? Bury? An urn? Altar? Late afternoon was settling in and with it a shaft of light fell to the floor, a bright slant of a yellow rectangle. This, thought Anna, is this. This is this.
