Authors: Helen Humphreys
I remember you being born. It was the end of May and there was a heat wave. I was wearing shorts because my legs were sticking to the orange plastic chair in the hospital waiting room. Also, my legs didn’t touch the floor, because I remember the feel of swinging them back and forth as Dad and I waited for Mum to come downstairs with the new baby.
I had wished and wished for a baby brother, and so it felt as though the fact of it coming true had something to do with that wish. I could hardly wait to see you for the first time. You were wrapped tightly in a blue blanket (everything was strictly gender colour-coded in those days). You didn’t cry. I was allowed to hold you all the way home in the taxi, and
I was careful not to move in case I made you upset.
I adored you as my little brother, and later Cathy adored you as her big brother. Our parents cherished you as their only son, and later they worshipped you for your musical gifts. From winning piano competitions when you were a child, to finishing your ARCT when you were thirteen, to debuting at the Royal Festival Hall in England at twenty, you were always revered for your musical ability.
You were born into this atmosphere of utter adoration, which at first you took for granted, and later craved but did not trust.
There was a period when you rebelled against the piano because you felt that everyone only liked you for your talent, not for your real self. You struggled with these feelings for years. I asked you in the fall that you were dying if you still felt conflicted.
I’ve made peace with it
, you said.
I love the piano
.
I think that you, like me, had done the same thing so intensely, and for so long, that it was impossible to know where it ended and you began. The piano, once “other,” was now you, and it could be relied upon to express your feelings rather than to simply absorb them.
I loved that you chose as your bank code the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—5552.
You can fall into music, and maybe music is better company than writing because it makes a sound, takes up human space, a dimension in the world. It releases emotion, whereas writing pins emotion down. And all writing is necessarily elegiac because it happens after the moment it seeks to capture.
There’s a frost out this morning. The first frost this fall, and the crisp of the ground and the cold of the air makes me think of you, of your dying season, and how we’ve entered it once again.
The dog’s breath came in clouds as she tore through the fields this morning. The heat of her, in the cold mouth of the day.
What I was thinking today was how when we were children there was that big climbing frame in the backyard. We spent a lot of time on it, scaling the ladders up the sides, hanging upside down from the bars at the top. It was elaborate and complicated and had taken our parents a full weekend to assemble. Each of the bars was a different colour—blue, red,
yellow, silver—although the silver ones eventually rusted out and our clothes were always smudged with that orange dust.
We were the only ones on the street who had a climbing frame and so our yard was often filled with other children. One day, we were all on the frame, about seven of us, and you fell off. Remember, Martin? Your teeth went straight through your tongue and there was a great gush of blood. Your tongue was partially severed and it took numerous stitches to close the wound, all without anesthetic. But before that—before the drive to the emergency department, before I even screamed for Mum—when you were crouched on the grass, bleeding, I chased everyone else out of the yard. I was convinced that someone had pushed you, and since I didn’t know who it was, I just got rid of them all.
What I was thinking this morning was how this wasn’t much different from the way I behaved at the hospital in Burnaby at the end of your life. I made rules of conduct for your bedside. No one was allowed to cry, or talk over your prone body as though you weren’t there. No one was allowed to tell you that you were dying, or make references to your death. All the talk had to be positive, because all you knew was that you had come to the hospital for an
emergency operation, and that you had survived the operation. You didn’t know anything beyond that. I’m still convinced this was true. You didn’t know you were dying, and when you were dead, you didn’t know that you were dead.
But I think you know now.
I wanted to protect you, as always. I wanted you to be able to have your own feelings, whatever they were, and not be burdened with the sorrows and tears of everyone else—because you were a natural empathizer and would have found it easier to take on other people’s feelings than to acknowledge or struggle with your own.
Right or wrong, I would do it all again.
I would chase everyone out of that yard.
This is what I saw when I was out with the dog: a monarch butterfly, lifting above the milkweed in the October field. Between the feet of the butterfly, its wings closed up so that it was being carried by the tips of its wings, was a dead butterfly, another monarch. My initial thought was that the first butterfly was going to eat the second, was taking it somewhere for that purpose. My next thought was that they knew each other, that the living butterfly was a familiar of the dead butterfly and could not leave it, could not abandon it to death.
The flight was difficult. The weight of the dead butterfly slowed the momentum of the living one, kept it barely airborne, but it struggled on regardless, would not relinquish its burden.
The mechanics of your death were simple. Your blood pressure dropped, and your heart raced, faster and faster, trying to pump blood through your leaking blood vessels. The flutter of your heart in your chest was exactly like the flutter of this butterfly’s wings as it tried to keep aloft.
I wrote your obituary on the plane home from Vancouver, on the morning of December fourth. I sat with a notebook and pen, in a middle seat, on a big Airbus, and tried to reduce your spirit to a series of adjectives, your life to a list of accomplishments. I wrote and cried and no one talked to me. I think I gave off such a stench of grief that the people on either side of me just kept their heads down in their books.
It was easy to know what to say first:
concert pianist
. You had worked your whole life for that. It was pretty much your molecular structure.
The list of accomplishments came effortlessly, and even the order seemed to be the right order.
Concert pianist, teacher, composer, accompanist, Royal Conservatory examiner, son, brother, beloved friend
.
It was harder knowing what to write about your self. I wanted to be honest, not just focus on your good qualities but include some of your more difficult aspects. Because, like everyone, you were complicated, and sometimes your traits did double duty. Your stubbornness, for example, could be obstinacy or it could be determination.
Death makes a small story of life because suddenly there’s an end to it, and it can be summed up. Someone can be reduced to a handful of words. I don’t know what you would think of the words I used to describe your life, but know that I am in the business of choosing words carefully, and I never chose words more carefully than the ones I selected for your obituary.
Brilliant, talented, passionate and compassionate, kind, handsome, disciplined, elusive, and stubborn, Martin loved music, art, new places and experiences, his friends, the West Coast, connecting with life in all its forms, having a beer, and watching the Maple Leafs (even this season). He hated cruelty, intolerance, stupidity, and Toronto winters
.
He died too soon, from pancreatic cancer, and is deeply missed by his parents, Frances and Anthony; his
sisters, Helen and Cathy; his many friends in Vancouver, Toronto, England, and Paris. We are lost without his beautiful spirit
.
Most of the patients in the ICU were elderly. You shared your room with a woman in her seventies who had had a stroke. She moaned a lot and flailed around. She was on a ventilator for the first few days, but by the end she was off that and talking in a raspy voice to her family. Her bed was by the window, where I wished yours could have been because you would have been able to feel the sunlight.
I grew to resent that old woman, because of the noise she made, and because she recovered. Every day she became a little better, and every day you became a little worse. In fact, all the elderly patients on the ward were going to get better, and only you and another young man were going to die. That man,
who was around the same age as you, had had a stroke deep in the centre of his brain and he was bleeding out into his brain. The bleed was inoperable and would eventually shut down his cognitive functions. His girlfriend would have to make the decision to take him off life support, just a few days after we would make that decision for you.
We saw that family every day in the little waiting area outside the ICU where they made us come before we could be admitted to your room. The room had about ten seats in it, and a TV mounted on one wall. A couple of small side tables were piled with out-of-date magazines. The walls of the room were that institutional beige that is so unpleasant to look at if you are forced to spend large amounts of time doing just that.
On one of the side tables was a phone. When we arrived at the waiting room we were to call through to the nurses’ station, and say who we were and who we wanted to see, and then they would decide whether or not we could be admitted. This process made me nervous. I was afraid sometimes that you had disappeared in the night, or that I wouldn’t be allowed in to see you. But although I was often made to wait, it was only because your dressings were being changed, and the nurses were always apologetic about the delay.
The man with the stroke had been sent to ICU around the same time as you, so we were with his family for the duration of those ten days you were in hospital. He had a complicated family. His girlfriend was new, and young. He also had a wife, from whom he was separated but not divorced, and children. There was clearly animosity between these two groups of people, and they tried not to overlap at the hospital. If they did happen to overlap, there was often shouting and finger-pointing between the wife and the girlfriend.
But mostly this didn’t happen. Mostly they came separately, and the girlfriend was there every day, the wife less frequently.
The girlfriend came with her mother, and we all sat there—us on one side of the room, and them on the other; the space between our two families so little that if there had been a table in that space, we would all be sitting around it.
I liked seeing them every day. Sometimes we said a few words to one another. Mostly we just smiled and nodded. Often one or the other of us was crying, and we would look away in that small room, to give the crying person some privacy. When you died, and we were leaving the hospital, the mother rushed after us to say that she was sorry and to hug us goodbye.
Unexpectedly, we had a lot of company in that place of fear and grief. There were those families in the waiting room who were suffering through the same ordeal. There were the doctors and nurses, particularly the nurses, who were with you every day, sitting in the room with you, changing your dressings, monitoring your vital signs. The nurses were amazing, and you would have especially liked the nurse who had the same name as one of your old girlfriends, and who came back on her night off just to check on how you were doing after you’d had to have the second emergency bowel surgery.
You would also have liked the anesthetist, who came to talk to us when Mum and Dad were at the hospital, to say how sorry he was that you had died. I asked him if you had been afraid, and he said that you just told him to make sure you didn’t feel any pain. But clearly you had had a conversation with him, and I’m sure, knowing you, that the conversation was also about him in some way. That is why he had remembered you. He was impressed enough by that encounter to want to share with us your last fully conscious moments.
The surgeon who performed the second emergency operation took the time to reassure me that your cancer was a complete fluke, that it wasn’t
a result of genetics or lifestyle. It had simply happened, without explanation or cause.
Now, when people are afraid of entering that death tunnel, whether it is their own impending death or that of someone close to them, I tell them that although it may be devastating, they won’t be alone. They will have good company—people who, while they may not know the individual who is dying, will fully understand the situation. This, in itself, is immensely comforting. In this place where you feel nothing but alone, you are not alone. And it makes a difference. It makes the unbearable less so.
This is a story I always wanted to tell you, to write to you, but I never did. It is a story of the last time I was in Italy, when I went to visit Keats’s apartment in Rome. It is a story about dying, one that would have appealed to your romantic imagination, and a story that might have given you a measure of comfort. So, I’ll tell it to you now.
It is a long climb up the stairs to number 26 the Piazza di Spagna, to the two small rooms and the tiny terrace let to John Keats in the summer of 1820.
This is the room where Keats died at the age of twenty-five. There is a narrow bed and a view out the window of the Spanish Steps. In the room there are white daisies embossed on the pale blue ceiling, a
marble fireplace. When Keats was in this room there would have been the easel and brushes of his friend, the artist Joseph Severn, and perhaps vases bristling with flowers, the smell of coffee, the sound of church bells.
At the bottom of the Spanish Steps is a marble fountain in the shape of a sinking boat. The middle of the boat is filled with water, the two broken ends sticking out from the pool almost at right angles as if the boat has snapped amidships. As the day begins and the people of Rome start to move the city from slumber, it seems that the men and women climbing the long flight up from the fountain to the church at the top of the steps are ascending out of the wreckage, walking up from the water and the ruined boat, towards salvation.
When Keats came to Rome in 1820 with his friend Joseph Severn, he felt he was already dead because his great love, Fanny Brawne, had refused his offer of marriage. He believed it would be too painful to continue contact with her while he lay dying, so forbade her to write or visit him. “I have already died,” he said when he left England and the love of Fanny Brawne. Those final weeks in Rome were what he called his “posthumous life.”
After Keats died, the rooms and furniture were scrubbed down to erase any lingering traces of the
TB that had killed him. Now his death mask stands by the bed, a lock of his wheaten hair under glass nearby. There’s a page in his own hand, also under glass, miraculous in its intactness because Severn destroyed a lot of Keats’s poetry and letters by cutting individual lines out to send to the women who wrote begging for something in his handwriting.
From where Keats lay in his bed he would have looked out the window and seen nothing but sky, a small, blue box of sky. The colour might have changed very slowly, as the sky held light or leaked it. The wind might sometimes have rattled the window.
The Spanish Steps were constructed by Francesco de Sanctis in 1723 to 1725. They were intended to broach the steep Pincian Hill and to connect the lower Piazza di Spagna with the upper Piazza di Trinita dei Monti. They were designed on a theatrical scale, with a straight flight of steps flanked by a pair of convex staircases. The design includes broad landings and a series of curving flights. One can climb straight up via the central staircase, or proceed in a slow, winding promenade to the top, stopping along the way to lean over the balcony railing and gaze down at the fountain below. The staircase is believed to be based on the sweeping moves of a dance—the Polonaise.
The Spanish Steps are crowded on summer nights with people moving up and down the staircase that echoes the dance. Below the human noises there is the shuffle of the fountain as the boat sinks and sinks, and the water empties from between its bones.
Keats could not bear to be read to while he was on his deathbed. He did not believe in the comfort of religion, nor did he believe in life after death. He did entertain, sometimes, the romantic fantasy that life was the dream and that death would be the awakening from that dream.
Keats knew that there is an undeniable lyric truth to life. This is to be found in nature, in gesture, in love. He knew this when he tried to match his line of poetry to the bend of the river grasses, or the song of the nightingale.
In that room where there was no writing and no reading, Severn sketched the dying man, in fact made some of the finest drawings of the poet when he was on his deathbed. Perhaps Severn’s sketching was a comforting presence to Keats. Art, although no longer of urgent relevance to his world, would have been his familiar.
Severn, afraid that he’d fall asleep one night and that Keats would wake to darkness and think
that he had died, devised a system so that the poet would have continuous light. He fastened a piece of thread from the bottom of one candle to the wick of another, and in its guttering state the dying flame would ignite the thread and travel up it to ignite the wick of the next candle.
It is said that John Keats awoke at the exact moment the flame was travelling up the thread from one candle to another, and that in his excitement at witnessing this spectacle, he woke Severn to tell him of the success of his invention.
At the end, we are all far from home. We are far from home, and what we hope for is that someone will fashion us a light, so that we too will not have to wake in darkness.