Herewith, the latest selection from dusted-off published poetry and short fiction, circa 1970s vintage and beyond....
About What It's Like To Die (part II)
My father's coin collection intrigued me. I would often beg him to take out the box and let me inspect the coins. "I'm too tired", he'd say, "not now", and I suspected with a child's cunning that he wanted to keep them all to himself.
"Please, please, Daddy" I would pester him until he might let me see them. Once, I was presumptuous enough to ask if I might keep one of the coins.
"I'll give them all to you", he told me wearily.
"When?" I asked eagerly.
"Some day". Some Day was a handy reply that he often used when he wanted to put off stating something definitely where I was concerned. Some Day frustrated me; I had no tolerance for the promise implied in those words, made ambiguous by their constant use.
"When, when?" I would persist.
"When? When I'm dead", he finally replied.
I never again asked to be permitted to see the collection although I often thought about it, and about my father's reply - frightened into docile submission on the subject.
Years later he started collecting quarters as a way of saving money. The glittering silver hoard piled in a box was another source of wonder to me. Occasionally I was given one of the large copper pennies which were then so common and I would run to a little store down the street; a cramped, dirty little place, where I might buy a special treat. Once, I decided to take one of my father's quarters, curious to see just how much something so much more elegant than a mere copper penny could purchase. My mother discovered me in the act of taking the quarter. She was furious with me and I took refuge under my parents' bed. I refused to come out and my mother warned. "Wait, just wait until you father comes home!" Wait I did, crying in the dust-balled dark for hours, wondering what my fate as a discovered felon would be. When finally my father came home from work he spoke quietly to me, said he was certain I would never do anything like that again. Nor did I.
He was an inveterate and unrepentant smoker. There was not then the campaign against smoking that there is now, although later, when it became evident how ill my father was, it was assumed that his smoking had acted as a carcinogen. Actually, he told me once that he had begun smoking as a child, picking up cigarette butts on the streets of Warsaw, perhaps to assuage the pangs of hunter.
I can remember my father sitting at the scratched porcelain-topped table in the kitchen, rolling cigarettes. Later, he bought a cigarette-making machine, a small gadget that expedited his cigarette making. His fingers were permanently stained a hard amber, and his teeth gradually rotted from neglect.
When I was no longer living at home he was admitted to hospital with a gall bladder attack. While he was there, he mentioned to his doctor a consistent ghostlike pain in his head, but nothing much was made of it. Shortly afterward, he was diagnosed as having cancer of the throat. He was given radiation treatment and was in and out of hospital for years.
At the General Hospital I visited him, never believing that he wouldn't recover. Then at the Princess Margaret Hospital I began to realize, on an abstract level, that he might die. At the Doctors' Hospital he permitted himself to be used for new approaches to the disease; became a guinea pig. He said if anything new could be found, that had good results, he was willing to help. It bothered me that he was being used as an experiment. All through those times he was reasonably cheerful. He never gave up hope.
Later on, he would sometimes be in a hopeful mood, sometimes he might be querulous and I was always uncomfortable, somehow panicky, not wanting to reveal my thoughts of finality to him.
Once he sent me out to get him some ice cream to relieve his throat and I gratefully went out to the street and ran from store to store, to try to buy some ice cream in a small container to take back to him. I felt like shouting at everyone, 'My father has cancer! He's dying. Doesn't anyone care?!' Despite that I was then a mother of three young children I felt like an orphan child myself, lost in an alien city, everyone oblivious of my frightened confusion. Unwillingly unable to help myself, I visualized his end, comprehended his physical pain, his psychological torment, coming to grips with the inevitability of impending death.
Once when I got to the hospital he was writing and I asked him what he was writing about.
"Just writing", he said casually.
"About what, Daddy?"
"About what it's like to die", he replied calmly. But then, another day, he would tell me he wasn't ready to die, not yet. And he hung on. In and out of hospitals.
At my sister's wedding, a scant half-year before his death many of my father's old friends approached me and said, emotion straining their voices, that he would be all right, he would come through. One even assured me, "We'll see that he has the best doctors look after him. We'll raise the money. Nothing is too good for him."
When he was at home in the later months, he would sit quietly in the living room, smile grimly if the occasion demanded it; sit with his head cocked sideways, to make the indentation in his throat less conspicuous.
At first, the first year of his cancer, he struggled to give up smoking. At this juncture, after his operation, he decided there was no point and soon after began smoking again although not as much as formerly.
Then there reached a point where he spent most of his time in the bedroom, upstairs. My parents by then were living in their second house, this one on Brunswick Avenue. My father had, a few years earlier, bought a small smoke shop on Bloor Street, next to the Brunswick Hotel. It was a tiny store, a break-even business. Now, my mother with the help of my young brother tried to run the shop and look after my father as well.
The bedroom always seemed dark; even during the day a half-dusk prevailed and there was a palpable odour of medication, of sickness, a hint of death. My father's muscular bulk had gradually declined, his skin turned an unhealthy grey. His flesh hung from his bony arms, his cheeks were gaunt, much more so than the picture of a half-starved youngster just come to Canada. My mother fed him a partially liquid diet; easier to get down.
My father had graduated over the years, to collecting coin sets and the bedroom was scattered with coin sets sitting on all available surfaces; they and the medicine, books, glasses of water. Now, conversations were desultory, awkward and halting. What was there to say? When I brought my children over - just toddlers - they were cautioned to be quiet, not to bother grandpa. He looked at them but I wondered if he saw them. They seemed small comfort now.
Finally, he was admitted to Baycrest Hospital. There, in a large room with other terminal patients, all elderly, all seemingly near death, he lay in a shrouded bed. His nose, once patrician, now stuck bonily above his flesh-depleted cheeks. He would flicker a faint attempt at recognition, attempt to mumble a few words in response to a whispered query.
There was no more writing now, no reading, just a long agonizing wait. His eyes looked bruised and dark in his shallow face and his breathing was laboured. Under the sheet his form was so slight, perhaps that of a sickly youth.
I wondered if his thoughts were bitter. If he was resigned. The mechanical task of breathing was done by his body's machinery. In a way he had ceased to exist. Still, I was unable to believe my father was dying. He did, though. When no one was there, no friends, no family, he slipped away.
c. 1979 Rita Rosenfeld
published in Canadian Jewish Outlook, Vol.17, No.7
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