Authors: Victoria Zackheim
Years later, when my father died from cancer at the age of sixty-eight, and my mother ended her life after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease, I would get a crash course in death’s concomitant companions, grief and loss. And yet, despite the weeks I spent talking about and preparing for their dying—and, in both cases, being with them at the end—there was much that remained fundamentally unknowable and mysterious
when it finally happened. And so, the desire to understand, to
hold death in my hands
, persisted, leading me to spend several years writing a memoir about how their lives ended and what it meant to me.
As I turn my bike around and head for home, I pass yet another dead skunk. Unlike the earlier one that lay perfectly preserved on the side of the road, this one has suffered the full gory consequences of being struck by a passing car, and it’s not a pretty sight. I have no desire to get closer to it. No impulse to touch or move it. But I do take a look as I ride by.
Death. Talk about a punch line.
My father, David Barry, died at home. When good guys died in the movies, they always got in some great final lines or accomplished some final task that gave meaning to a sad moment. My dad’s death, my first experience of a real human death, wasn’t like that. There was no soft lens, no special music, no explanation of the meaning of life. Instead, we watched him slip further away into his memories. As the days and weeks passed, he spoke less and less, except to ask for chipped ice.
I remember sitting by his bedside, near the end. The Mondale/Reagan presidential debate was on TV.
“Who do you think won?” I asked him when the debate was over.
“The Cleveland Indians,” he replied. I looked into his eyes. He wasn’t joking. Dave had grown up in Cleveland, and I was pretty sure he thought he was somewhere back in the 1930s at this point. (The Cleveland Indians never won in the 1980s.)
Humor and laughter were an important part of our family life, and this held true as Dave lay dying. We laughed to relieve stress; we laughed in response to the absurdity of people offering pat answers to life’s dilemmas; we laughed to ward
off our fear; and we laughed at happy memories. Those last days were something of an extended wake, only the deceased wasn’t yet deceased.
Years later, when I was a Presbyterian minister and required to represent a coherent belief system, I officiated at many funerals and memorials. I felt honored to do this work—when you are a pastor, you are invited (or stumble) into some very intimate territory. I also discovered that it was a good idea to lay aside preconceived notions of how others would behave or what people needed. Sometimes I encountered walls of anger, and it became clear that the home life of the deceased was not all love and roses. Other times people were manic and laughing, as if a party, rather than a death, were the matter at hand. Still others revealed no emotion; I might as well have been doing their taxes. When someone is dying or has died, expect every possible emotion: depression, relief, anger, giddiness, denial, happiness, sorrow, and yes, all possible forms of humor.
I remember presiding over the funeral of a motorcycle-riding poet and English teacher who had crashed on the highway and died. There was a big crowd, and I opened up the floor for anyone to share. Big mistake. It was like the funeral of Elvis, as woman after woman came up to talk about her passionate relationship with the deceased. It took me a few hours to regain control of the event.
Important as they are for the living, in some ways funerals and burials have very little to do with death, much as wedding planning and weddings have little to do with marriage. It’s
the mystery and finality of death that we live with in the dark night. Those who are left behind do most of their grieving alone, after everyone has gone home, in the months and years that follow. The reality of death is realized over time through thoughts, feelings, memories, discoveries, found and cherished objects, and all the ways in which a person is missed (or not) and remembered (or not).
My mother, Marion Virginia McAllister Barry, was fascinated by death. I suppose we all are, but Marion made a lifetime practice of thinking, talking, reading, and joking about death. I remember her reading
Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad
, by William Craig, a classic account of one of the most important and horrific battles of World War II, and excitedly telling me the details, such as how the residents of Stalingrad ate rats, shoes, or whatever to survive. These were my teenage years, and I was often stoned when she shared this information, so it made quite an impression on me.
Marion’s interest in death and dying stretched back to her youth. She was raised in eastern Colorado and western Nebraska during the Dust Bowl era, a time and place that did not necessarily foster a cheery disposition. My grandfather was a mechanic who moved the family around, finding work in sugar beet factories and at one time trying his hand at homesteading. People often describe the great outdoors as wholesome, but a landscape littered with empty irrigation ditches ripe for a person to accidently tumble into (this happened to Marion) and an atmosphere suggestive of the Apocalypse is probably not what they have in mind.
For a time the family lived in Minatare, outside of Scotts Bluff, in the Nebraska panhandle. Not much happened in Minatare, so Marion and her best friend Elizabeth had to find ways to entertain themselves. Once, when the two girls had been acting out in class, a teacher informed them that they were to stay after school.
With a broad smile on her face, Elizabeth turned to my mother and said, “Shall we, Marion?”
Because Minatare offered so little of what we normally think of as fun, the girls made do with whatever was happening in town. Sometimes this meant stretching the definition of entertainment to include funerals. Marion and Elizabeth would get in line to view the body, whether or not they had any connection to the deceased. One afternoon, as they were leaving the house, a neighbor stopped raking in his garden and said, in a droll Western accent, “Have fun at the funeral, girls.”
Marion studied biology and English at the University of Nebraska at a time when the human race was locking onto the knowledge that germs are bad and cleanliness is good, and my mother took that message to heart. Between the dust that swirled everywhere and her newfound recognition of the omnipresence of germs, she developed an obsession with cleanliness. Her feeling was germs could kill and were going to get you eventually, but in the meantime we could stave off the Grim Reaper with copious amounts of bleach, ammonia, soap, and water, and by cooking the hell out of meat.
Marion’s dark view was reinforced by world events: the Great Depression, which had hit the farmers all around the Dust Bowl years before, overtook the world, and then World
War II. She met my father and eventually moved to a suburb outside New York City, where my father, a Presbyterian minister, found work trying to cure the ills of the inner city, while my mother worked at being the perfect housewife, the postwar ideal for women.
Life was good in many ways. Armonk, New York, where they settled, was a lovely little town; they had four healthy children, a lovely, very clean home, enough money, and many good friends.
But happiness was for Marion a more ephemeral state than for most. She became moody enough that friends remarked on it; some even suggested solutions. Marion tried to tough it out. Unfortunately, she was trying to tough out clinical depression. Darkness settled over her spirit, and suicide began to look like a logical choice. Over the years she danced with the Grim Reaper, taking a few extra pills and knocking herself out for a weekend, edging ever closer to the negation of consciousness. And then she would return from the world of the dead, funny as ever. People were always delighted to see her. Wherever she went, people would shout her name, and she would respond with some edgy wisecrack or self-deprecating remark.
But there came a time when the depression that haunted Marion began to take over entirely. Dave was struggling with his own demons—alcohol and work addiction—and he was often away, and hardly there when he was present. Alone in the suburban wilderness, Marion began to slip deeper into her own hell of despair. Eventually, she reached the point where the oblivion of death seemed to be her only option, and one weekend, when no one was around, she took enough of
those little pills to kill someone twice her size, washing them down with vodka for good measure. (Marion wasn’t much of a drinker—that was Dave’s department—so there was no question that the vodka was added for its medicinal effect.)
I was fifteen years old and a bit of a teenage hellion at the time, and was off on a weekend spree of partying that did not include checking in with my mother. However, I had a premonition that something was wrong and stopped at Hi Health, the local beer and cigarette stop, to use the pay phone and call home.
“Hi, Mom, I spent the night at Regis’s,” I said, referring to my partner in crime, Regis Goodwin. We could pretty much do whatever we wanted at the Goodwins’ house—his mother worked the graveyard shift, and his dad pretended to maintain order as he watched Yankee games and got completely snookered.
“That’s fine,” she said, her voice flat and far away.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
There’s fine, and then there’s fine. Her voice, her responses, everything was a little off. The person I spoke to on the phone was like a hologram of my mother, not really there, slipping in and out of view. I made my decision. “I’m on my way home,” I said, changing my plan, which was the standard plan for every night at that stage of my life: to find a party and meet the girl of my dreams.
I jogged the mile and a half home as fast as I could. The first thing I saw upon entering the house was a coffee cup on my mother’s cherished oak dining table. An earthquake followed
by a fire and a flood could have struck our town, and my mother would not have failed to put a coaster under a drink on that table. I walked in—slowing down, now, hesitating at the last moment—and there was her leg, sticking out at an odd angle on the floor. Her face was puffy. She was completely unconscious and did not respond to my calling to or shaking her. I saw the prescription bottles on the table.
I called the operator in a daze and was connected to the police; then I called my father, who was hours away in Manhattan and did not seem to fully grasp what I was saying. Then I stood outside the house and watched as the small caravan of emergency vehicles cruised down our peaceful, woodsy street. An ambulance and two police cars pulled into our driveway. One of the cops was joking about some vaguely crude matter as they entered the house. From the vantage point of decades later, I now realize that this was how he handled his job, which involved seeing much of the underbelly of humanity. I also realize now that he was a completely insensitive asshole.
The cop kept joking even after he saw the body, but it really didn’t matter; it was all part of a strange, surreal play. Meanwhile, another officer took me aside and asked about my mother’s medications. I showed him the drawer where she kept her prescriptions. Then they put my mother in the ambulance and drove away. The officer who asked about the drugs stopped and looked at me.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.” What else was I going to say? What do teenage boys always say? I sure as hell wasn’t going to talk about any real emotions.
I wish I could tell you that it all ended happily, but we all know life doesn’t end happily. The end is the end, and for the purposes of most storytelling it is quite unsatisfactory. The good news is that Marion recovered from that suicide attempt, though it was a close call, and then made great progress with a psychiatrist who treated her for depression. A year or so later, Dave came to terms with his alcoholism and never drank again. (I remained a hellion.) Dave and Marion had some good years together, but the toll of alcohol, overwork, and cigarettes eventually caught up with Dave and he died, too young.
After the funeral, Marion was walking back from Dave’s gravesite accompanied by her four children and the family minister, when she stopped to read the name on a gravestone.
“So
that’s
why I haven’t seen him around,” she said.
Marion always had her humor, but she couldn’t accept growing old without Dave. She went into a tailspin a few years later, locked herself in a motel room, and took a boatload of pills. This time she succeeded in taking her own life.
I have a lovely picture on my bookshelf of my parents, Dave and Marion. A smiling Marion is looking at the camera, her arm around Dave’s shoulder; he is laughing as hard as a person can laugh. It’s easy to guess what’s happened—Marion has made some outrageous, funny remark. She had that gift, and Dave appreciated it.
Yes, I remember them dying, but I remember them laughing, too.
After eight years in renal failure, combined with four-hour dialysis treatments three days a week, with a side of occasional Friday afternoon seizures that rendered her unconscious at the Cedars-Sinai bus stop, my mother has been deemed mentally competent by an ethics panel in a Los Angeles hospital to make the decision to refuse treatments, and therefore relinquish her life here on earth. She tells her frustrated little nephrologist that she wants one more dialysis treatment on Friday, so she’ll be sure to live through the weekend. She wants to say her goodbyes. He reluctantly agrees and prophesizes that she’ll panic and beg for dialysis on Monday.
We laugh at him.
She returns to her own room at the Garden of Palms assisted-living facility, and she is now under hospice care.
She has very little on her agenda. She needs to cancel her dental and chiropractic appointments. I sit on the bed next to her listening. They ask if she would like to reschedule. She says, “No, I’ll be dead.” There is a stunned silence on the other end. She thanks them for their time and hangs up. She then goes through her phone book calling long-distance relatives to tell them goodbye. Witnessing this is probably the most hilarious, terrible thing I’ve ever seen. Some fight with her, try
to talk her out of it. Most cry out how much they love her and how much they are going to miss her. Before she hangs up, the last words are, “Remember, I love you, goodbye.” With total consciousness, she is saying goodbye to her life here and eagerly anticipates leaping into my father’s heavenly arms. She is ecstatic at the thought of their reunion. She shaves her legs. True love waits for her. That’s heaven all right.