The Death of Irene

It seems to me that the feelings, actions, and script for death is set. We know how we should feel and yet the experience is so foreign and mysterious that for me it is hard to feel quite the way I should. I remember as a child a neighbor four or five houses up the street died, a fairly young unmarried woman. My father gave me her Bible and I was afraid of opening it up, of letting whatever she had that was guarded in the closed pages attack me. Death and germs were closely intertwined in my childhood, perhaps because of the polio scare when I was a child.
What has most bothered me, though, is the numbness I often feel when someone dies. After I cry for a few minutes (the only time I have cried uncontrollably at a death was when Turron, my dog, died of old age a few minutes after he had run up to me.), I have to work to make the moment meaningful, trying to recreate the life of the person who died. Vaguely I am aware that there will be a sense of missing pieces, stories that can be told but not shared, and the sense that a door has been shut in my face. But this is not the script that I am supposed to follow.
I have visited the dying. My friend Ove, whom I lived with for a year and have regretted leaving on and off for most of my life, wanted to celebrate his 50th birthday before he died. When the nurses and doctors told him that he was too sick, he wept so uncontrollably, that they shot him up with cortosone and he walked around his house, the one he had been born in and returned to, dressed in a black suit that was now too big for him, shaking hands of his farmer relatives, who may have slipped off to wash their hands. The next day he was back in the hospital in serious shape and when I went to say goodbye to him, he clasped me so hard that I had the bizarre idea that he was taking me with. And unexplainably, I had an erection.
What do you say for last words? "Vi ses?" We'll see each other. Perhaps he knew that the embrace was the only way to part. And how did he feel when I rushed off to catch a train?
My aunt had managed an architectural firm as their executive secretary. One of the partners in the firm had designed her a marvellous house. It was simplicity and elegance, built on a small plot of woods with a swampy finger of a lake behind the house. The oak trees grew up through the large balcony and the whole back of the house was glass, except for the kitchen. She had a wild flower garden in front.
And now she was in the dreary confines of a nursing home where she looked out onto a golf course across the road. At least there was that. Some of her things were in the room, but much of it was too big for the space and many other things had already been picked over as she passed from her house with her husband to the "elderly village," to separate rooms for her and her husband Frank in the "elderly village's" nursing home, to widowhood at 90 and another move to a nursing home without many pretensions.
She lost her ability for short term memory and drifted into the past as if it were the present, worrying about her mother and father, asking my father if he had seen them. But she always recognized my voice and could remember that I was coming home. I seemed to inhabit a small part of her mind that could maintain a connection with the present.
Seldom am I around when the people I love die. After seeing her for a five days, I had to go to a conference for three days and on the second day after I left she died. Unlike my sisters and father, I was not part of her death vigil. It was my sister Barbara who was with her and noticed that she was dead. At the end of the journey, this final step was small. A little difficulty breathing and then it (a ninety year stretch across most of one century and a small part of another) was over.
I had promised to write something and wrote on my way back on the plane from San Francisco to Minneapolis in a notebook I purchased after I learned that Irene had died. I wrote in Danish which seems to me often to be my own private language since I only use it a few times a month on the phone with a friend who is agoraphobic. But the pages of the notebook were not really bound and before I finished the second page, the first page had already begun to hang from about a half inch that still connected it to the notebook. What I had written had tried to work itself up into an emotion, but instead had bounced and wandered, more focused on the trip out where I had seen an incredible view from the window, the Missouri winding harshly through the furry winter hills blown free of snow, watersheds, the Grand Tetons, Lake Tahoe and finally the barren hills around San Francisco. While I tried to force myself into a more appropriate mood, I remembered the line in Tristam Shandy where the speaker compares his father at his brother's death to Cicero at the death of his daughter. They both had been heartbroken until they realized the great opportunity for writing. The more I tried to write in the notebook, the more I realized that I was trying to fit the proper lugubrious mood.
There seemed to be something else missing from my aunt's death. Usually when someone dies, you hear a story that may develop in repetition which eventually seems to be the meaning of the death. It could be final word, some irony, such as the man who dies while caring for his demented incapacitated wife. With my aunt's death there was no story. She had been in pain, she was on opiates, and a few weeks after the doctor's prediction, she stopped breathing. My sister said that she waited to see me before she died and I believe they wanted that to be my story about her death.
My father, as a Christian, refused to accept condolences. "Why should I be sad? Why should you say you are sorry?" After a while I saw it as a little homily in action or a reaction that he hoped could be used as an example in a sermon. I could almost hear him using it himself. My grandmother at the death of her last sibling was inconsolable. That large family that had emigrated from Jutland and lived first in Minnesota, then North Dakota and finally spread out along the border between Montana and North Dakota, no longer existed. I saw in my mind a creation, since by the time I saw the family farm there was running water and the renters had begun to collect old cars in the yard, including a smashed up one in which a daughter had died and the father became lame. My father had pointed out in the large photograph of the farm house where windmill had been painted in. The windmill I had seen in that picture had had a special meaning for me since my aunt had lost her thumb in the gears of a windmill and then I thought that perhaps that was why it had to be painted in. But my father did not have my grandmother's sense of being abandoned. If he did, he did not show it.
The night before the funeral, one of my sisters had gone through all of my aunt's photographs. I took a wood bound photo album that I had once shown my aunt after I found it in a box in our garage. I had planned on keeping it, but she suddenly said that she wanted it. Not understanding, I had said that she could keep the pictures and then she had told me no, she wanted it. I was surprised at the time because I saw my aunt as incredibly unsentimental and a bit ashamed of the whole western fantasy. This was somewhat born out when many of her close friends were unaware that she had been born on the treeless plains of Eastern Montana. The album reminded me that I had known very little about my aunt's life. I also took some pictures of flowers in my garden that I had sent her in the last months of her life. For an unknown reason, they remind me more of her than the album or the vases or the pottery or needlework she gave me.
These articles are emblems of my aunt. They are not like her necessarily. My image of her as sophisticated, and in the context of most of the people I grew up with she was very sophisticated, was always being contradicted in small ways. Her husband was not especially sophisticated. He was from a Yugoslavian immigrant family that lived on the iron range and worked in the mines. He was on a par with my farm relatives and in many ways more sophisticated than my father, who never said ain't but believed that Christianity was a reformation of Islam until I proved to him that Mohammed had been born in the 7th century. I remember my aunt once asking to keep a tip tray with a cursi little Mexican girl on it because she liked it so much. The album was beautiful, but it seemed too crude, too culturely infused with hyped messages to fit with my image of my aunt. I saw my aunt as the architect saw her when he designed her house.
And how do I fit into this death and life situation. Not very well, I would say. I still feel that I have all the wrong reactions and am frustrated because I cannot react the way I should. I feel a bit closer to my aunt after writing this, perhaps more than the last few years of her life where she became a gypsy being moved from home to home. She and Frank also removed themselves from the context that I had used to feel I knew them and perhaps even care for them, the symphony, the theater, the events, the fine little restaurant on a shady street in south Minneapolis. Those memories and feelings are easier to access now that the sterile little apartments are no longer a barrier between me and my better memories of Irene. It is hard to admit since it seems to make me even less of the proper mourner, but her death has liberated me from thinking of her frail, hopeless, bored, forgetful and allowed me to remember her as the fabulous avant garde cook, the woman in charge of a bustling office, the beautiful clothes, and at times the hysterical laughter. And also, now I can look back at those pictures when she was in her twenties and see that she was a rebel, both in her behavior and thought, the country school teacher who lived far enough away from her pietistic Great Depression, Great Plains parents and brother to have lovers, smoke cigarettes, drink, play cards, dance and vote democrat. But then, the pictures never show more than the thinnest slice of time and the Irene I mourn in my way, sadly enough, I hardly knew.