Ophelia?

In a moment of short-sightedness, I gave away my set of Shakespeare's plays.  I don't know what kind of madness or idiocy possessed me to do it.  If there is anything a literate person ought to own, it is a complete set of Shakespeare.  It's probable that there is more than one edition somewhere in the plethora of books in Dad's study, so I will bring them home with me after my next trip to the house.  The plan was to go to the house in Connecticut this Sunday and Monday, but a super-collider perfect storm of historical proportions is said to be bearing down on the entire Eastern seaboard.  Sandy, as she is called, is currently a hurricane moving north after destroying parts of Cuba and Florida.  She may be downgraded (we can only hope) to tropical storm status by the time she reaches New England.  The prospect of yet another tree limb falling on my father's car or roof is not one I care to contemplate.  My first and automatic reaction to the weather news was, What about Dad? Do I need to go and get him if the power goes out, as it always does in Mansfield/Storrs during a hurricane?  But then I remembered that Dad was no more, and instead of feeling relief, I felt pain at the loss of him.

To return to Shakespeare:  After my father's death I found myself trying to remember Ophelia's speech upon discovering that her father had been slain.  I could only remember the last few words, so I am about to look it up on Google.

He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone;
At his head a grass-green turf,
At his heels a stone.
(Act IV Sc. V, Lines 29-32)

White his shroud as the mountain snow.
Larded with sweet flowers;
which bewept to the grave did go
which true-love showers.
(Act IV Sc. V, Lines 37-39)

They bore him barefaced on the bier;
Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny;
And on his grave rains many a tear,-
Fare you well, my dove!
(Act IV Sc. V, Lines 164-166)

And will he not come again?
And will he not come again?
No, no, he is dead,
Go to thy death-bed,
He never will come again.

His beard as white as snow,
All flaxen with his poll:
He is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan:
God ha’ mercy on his soul!
(Act IV Sc. V, Lines 23-26)

As it turns out, it is not a speech, but a series of songs that the grief-maddened Ophelia sings.  Some of them are (strangely) bawdy, describing a maid who loses her virginity.  (This may be a reference to Hamlet's rejection of her love.)

But most of the songs she sings refer to the death of her father, the foolish old man Polonius,  the object of Hamlet's contempt, but whom he never intends to kill.  Believing that his uncle was concealed as he was listening behind a curtain,  Hamlet runs his sword into the interloper, only to find out that it is Polonius he has killed.

I am not going mad with grief,  but I am not in my right mind.  At times I wish I didn't have to go on living.  Teaching has become an almost impossible task, and practicing is sporadic at best.  I have the feeling that I might blow away in the breeze, similar to Holden Caulfield's fear that he would step off the curb to cross the street and disappear.  My therapist, whom I saw this morning, assured me that there is no pathology in my behavior.  It's simply normal grief.  My anxieties are not likely to convert to mania, as I have been fearing. 

My father's image (as he used to look, fortunately) repeatedly springs to mind, as does his voice, speaking remembered phrases such as, 

I am working on my Magnum Opus, which, sadly, was never completed.  He was a thinker, a talker, and a gifted teacher, but he was not a writer.  At least, not a writer of books.  He wrote extensive notes in the margins of books, on the backs of envelopes and scraps of paper, and in blue examination books--I found a foot-high stack of them under his desk, and more still thrust between books on the shelves.  I collected all of these notes in case someone wanted to put them all together in a volume called The Literary and Philosophical Genius of Jack Davis, or something of the sort.  Jerry Shaffer would be the obvious choice to put together the observations and ruminations of my father.  But he took one look at the rapidly mounting stack of my father's papers and demurred.  Still, they must be saved for posterity.  The task of editing and publishing them will not fall to me, as I have my own writing to nurture.

"The first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, the first sentence of Anna Karenina, and the first paragraphs of À la recherche du temps perdu are among the greatest in literary history." They are as follows: 

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

For a long time, I went to bed early.

My father loved to read aloud--he was a frustrated actor and would use different voices and accents, especially when reading Dickens, as he did to my brother and me as children, and to my mother, to whom he also read the complete works of Proust, Trollope, and Colette. When I was about ten years old he began to read Jane Austen, George Eliot, and other classics such as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Way of All Flesh, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Vanity Fair, and Madame Bovary in translation (I read it in French years later in college as a French major.)  He also read aloud the poetry of Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Shakespeare (sonnets and plays) Auden, Yeats, e e cummings, T.S. Eliot, and Emily Dickinson.  All of these readings were accompanied by explanations of the text, which more often than not contained concepts foreign and difficult to a child, as well as vocabulary words not found on my fifth-grade spelling tests.

Dad also insisted that I learn Latin, starting me out at twelve with Latin grammar, followed by Latin class in junior high right up to my junior year in high school, by which time I had read Cicero, Ovid, Catullus, and Virgil's Aeneid.  He also supervised my study of French and Italian, the latter language prior to our family trip to Italy in 1967.  You could say, as my brother observed at the memorial last week, that we were both home schooled.  It's true that certain subjects such as math, science, and social studies were neglected in favor of art, music, literature, foreign languages, and some history.  At the time (especially during my teen years) I was less than thrilled and grateful for this intensive education, but as an adult I realize how unusual and valuable it was.

Thank you, Dad. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Requiem for my father: Jack M. Davis, 1924-2012

Last Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2012, at the age of 88, my father expired after a brief illness.

I use the word "expired" because I hate the expressions "passed away" or "passed on," and I cannot bring myself to say "died."  I don't know what it is about that four-letter word that sounds so rude and abrupt.  "Expired," however, cannot be used in everyday conversation without the speaker sounding hopelessly pretentious.

I sat beside my father's sickbed for five days as the life gradually withdrew from his poor wasted body, fragile and small like a baby bird.  Stage four lung cancer ravages the body.  Only two weeks before, he had been walking around, thin, gray, but communicative and alert.  Then, two weeks ago, he couldn't breathe one morning and called 911.  He was kept in the hospital for a couple of days after they drained the fluid from his lung.  Then he was released to come home to hospice care and a 24/7 nurse's aide whose job it was to turn him, deal with his incontinence, feed him, and administer morphine, sedatives, and oxygen.  Thanks to this care, he was comfortable, not in pain or suffering from fear and anxiety.

Dad's doctor, who is also head of the hospice in his area, assured me that he would suffer no pain.  She advocated for him to be released to hospice instead of a nursing home, for which we were all grateful.  A hospital bed was moved into the front room, a cheerful, sunny room with a picture window framing the bright autumn leaves on the trees outside.
He lay there surrounded by his books and music, in his sanctuary, as his visiting nurse put it, where he felt safe and comforted by the familiar.

Once I became used to Dad's dramatically changed appearance, I was able to read to him and listen to music with him.  I also spoke to him with the assumption that he heard and understood.  I was determined that there would be no further assaults on his dignity--having to rely on Depends was bad enough--and as long as he was still alive I was going to speak to him as if he was a human being.  I read Wordsworth and Blake to him, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, one of the first poems he read to me as a child.  Not only did he read it (he always said that poetry was meant to be read aloud) but he also explained why the language was so great.  I read Jabberwocky and the chapter in Alice in which Humpty Dumpty declares that words mean what he wants them to mean, and goes on to define the silly words in Jabberwocky with even more ridiculous definitions.  Dad loved this chapter.  He also loved Pride and Prejudice and Emma (the latter, he said, was Jane Austen's greatest work, containing the deepest moral profundity, but I could never choose between P & P and Emma.)  He read all of Jane Austen to me and all of Dickens.  And lying in a morphine-induced haze, he was still able to move his lips along with poems by Delmore Schwartz as my brother recited them.

I read the first chapter of P &P to him, then closed the book. "The Bingleys move in next door," I heard him mumble.  This, in fact, is the next occurrence in the book.  When his friend Jerry came to visit one day and asked, Jack, do you know who I am? he answered, "An eminent philosopher."  Close enough.  At another time, he had a hallucination of "a woman's leg coming out of Jerry's mouth."

I had wanted to read Proust to him in French and English, but there wasn't time.
Company tired him out quickly.  I had the sense that he was waiting for his son to arrive, and sure enough, he was much more aware after Joe arrived.  He asked for ice cream twice and fed it to himself.  I have no doubt that he knew who we both were.

Yesterday (Sat.) and today (Sun.) my father appeared energized.  I believe that it was the anticipation of seeing my brother Joe that caused my father to gather his faltering life energy and begin to talk and eat again.  He even fed himself.  He talked to his visiting friends.

Today he was not as talkative and was confused at times, asking me if he was in his own bed, saying he wanted to go home, hallucinating ("There is a woman's limb coming out of Jerry's mouth") and attempting to get out of bed.  He said he was "going upstairs" to find a poetry book.  We searched in vain for a book of poems by Thomas Moore because he wanted to hear me read a certain poem.  I ended up reading him some other poems, asking if he remembered reading them to me when I was very young.  He seemed pleased by my reading of "I wandered lonely as a cloud" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."  We also listened to Tristan und Isolde.  I'm not sure how much of his mind is still operating.  I suspect that it comes and goes like the sun appearing and then disappearing behind the clouds, as it was doing all day today.

Amazingly, he is still sharp as a tack at identifying poets.  Joe was testing him by reading poems at random from the Norton Anthology.  He got it right every time.  His love and vast knowledge of poetry still shines through the increasing fogginess of his other mental capacities.

I am going to stay another day and will revisit him tomorrow.  I am afraid to leave lest he die after I go.  Joe will stay with him indefinitely, which may keep him going for a while.
Meanwhile, my aunt Joan has a fever of 102 and won't go to the hospital.  Uncle Buddy is also unwell and I worry that no one is caring for them.  They are in Florida and I can't intervene.

Getting old, ill, and dying are inevitable and part of life, but I can't get used to it.
The one exception to the law of the excluded middle in logic is that we are all simultaneously living and dying.  My father is still living, although he is also dying.  Even people on the brink of sixty like myself and my brother are heading slowly toward death, though no one would describe us as dying.  It's not meant to be understood.  It just is.

It's October and the year is slowly dying.  So is my father, the victim of lung cancer at 88 after a lifetime of smoking. He is at home, visited by hospice nurses, with a 24/7 home health care aide named Ted who is from Poland and has a nearly unintelligible accent.  He seems to be a nice enough fellow.

The day began with a sun shower, with light raindrops like tears falling from a blue sky with absurdly puffy white clouds.  Orange and yellow leaves were falling everywhere.
The rain stopped, and the weather became extremely cold.  Curtiss and I arrived at Dad's house a little before 4 pm.

The sofa had been moved to the opposite side of the room and in its place was a hospital bed in which my father lay like a fragile broken doll.  He had shrunk to half the size he'd been only two weeks ago.  Lying on his back, he had a tube running from his nose to an oxygen tank which quietly whooshed, the only sound in a dark and silent room.  His eyes were barely open, closing to narrow slits.  His breath was labored when we arrived, but became quieter and more even.  His upper dentures had been removed, and in combination with the morphine and tranquilizers he was getting made it impossible for him to speak.  He was able to nod or shake his head in response to yes or no questions.  He tried to embrace me once and seemed glad that I was there (though unsmiling)  At times he seemed to be making an attempt to smile, as when Jerry told a "philosopher's joke."


Curtiss put some Bach on the stereo, Gould playing the WTC, and later some Haydn.  I wanted Dad to hear some of the music he loved.  Music also alleviated the unbearable silence of the room.  I tried to speak normally to Dad but found myself referring to him in the third person and apologizing--when someone is semi-conscious, you naturally fall into talking about him rather than to him.  I was sad for Jerry, his faithful friend who discussed philosophy with Dad every evening, and who now sat in quiet grief in a chair across the room, as if he couldn't bear to sit close to his dying friend.  I was sad for Joe Cary and later for Bill Moynihan, who were both trying unsuccessfully to hide their grief.

There was an odd smell, not pleasant, probably an antiseptic.  The smell of dying.  I still have it in my nostrils and clinging to my clothes.  It's hard to bear this odor--it's not overpowering, and I can't identify it, but I know that it will linger in that room after my father is gone, and it will pierce my heart with relentless persistence.

Tasha is devastated.  We embraced when I went to the store.  This young woman has a close friendship with my father and is finding his illness unbearable.  She's not sure she will be able to sleep in the house after he is gone, but mournfully observes that she has nowhere else to go.  We have appointed Tasha the steward of Dad's house--we are grateful for the loving care she provided until hospice took over.  She is an exceptional young woman and I am glad to be able to provide her with a rent-free place to live.

Aunt Joan is supporting me over the phone and saying that I am the "greatest" for handling everything.  I have power of attorney, and I often wish that my father had not bestowed it upon me because of the sheer amount of onerous responsibility it entails.
I have been hearing Joan's voice in my head all day telling me what to do next--it's almost like telepathy.  On the phone, she advises me to go outside and take a walk, get some fresh air.  She apologizes for not being there with me--it's only because her doctor has said that she is not allowed to fly.  She is not one to show her pain to others--I know she needs to talk to me, which is how she grieves.  We have always understood one another without having to say a word: two Aquarian women, very alike in many ways, as an aunt is like her niece, even physically, but very unlike in others--still, we know each others' minds and always have.

Curtiss has been crying from time to time and is ashamed; I told him that crying is appropriate and he should cry all he needs to without worrying about incurring my displeasure (I am a no-crying-in-baseball person, unfortunately, and I tend to regard tears as a sign of weakness even though they are not.) I cannot normally cry in the presence of others, but today a tear slipped down my nose as I held my father's pinched hand, blue from broken veins where many IVs had been inserted.

When I went outdoors for a walk around the grounds,  I sought out a tree that I used to climb as a child.  It still stands with its huge branches like arms extended, alongside the moss-covered ancient stone wall.  I climbed onto the wall, put my arms around the branches, and allowed some tears to fall where there was no one to see but the birds and the neighbor's barking dog.

It seems very cruel of Nature to produce such a beautiful fall day with its slanting late afternoon sunlight, just as though my father were not on his deathbed.  It seems strange that life around me continues as usual, unaware that another old man is about to leave this world.  There are, after all, thousands of old men the world over dying at this very moment.  There are thousands of daughters going through the agony I am now experiencing.  The experience of dying and of being a survivor is universal, and of course this thought provides no comfort.  No thoughts are providing comfort.  Deathbed scenes from literature keep flashing into my mind: little Nell from Old Curiosity Shop, Barkis ("Barkis is willin'") from David Copperfield, little Paul from Dombey and Son (Dickens was a master of the deathbed scene) and of course Beth from Little Women.  Deathbed scenes in books are, as it turns out, quite unreal.  There are no heroics, no inspiring last words.  Only the gasps of a soul struggling to keep a failing body alive.

I believe that my father is trying to stay alive until after my brother Joe arrives tomorrow.
I have heard it said many times that a dying person will wait until all the grieving survivors leave his bedside, and then let go with relief, as though dying can only be safely accomplished when one is alone.  Crying alone, dying alone: connected, perhaps.

It would be lovely to be cared for right now.  To be getting a massage, somewhere far away from my father's sickbed, to be annointed with fragrant oil, to be wrapped in sweet-smelling warm blankets, to be served tea and scones on a silver tray.  Lovely to be in bed with my cat lying next to me, silently faithful like a dog.  I must allow people to care for me, but I am not good at allowing this.  I am not good at allowing anything.  I want to control, take charge of everything, even death.  I want to command the angel of death to leave my father's house until my brother has said farewell.  But there is nothing like death to remind us how powerless we really are.