Four days later, evening, a message on my machine.
“This is Aunt Libby. Don’t call in more than a half hour.”
I am too late. Next morning there are two calls, one message in a faint voice, “you are cleared to call Carol Watkins November 3, 4 or 5 around noon to arrange visit.”
I come home after badgering tennis balls with Shakespeare. Tell each one of the conflict of business and art. Who’s your favorite poet? Save the pearls.
I call right after lunch, on the new number, her private room.
I have the green light.
“I’m not coming to see your house you know. When do you want me to come.”
“Not before 10 AM.”
She has had to change all the addresses on her magazine subscriptions. It will take her till June she thinks.
“No, when in weeks and months?”
I ask, “is there something you want me to take from your house? Where are the photographs of your father, the watercolor of Jesse.”
“You’re welcome to anything in photographs. Marvin’s album of old plane stamps is in the cocktail table of living room. Old photographs are in the bottom of the wardrobe in the back bed room. The watercolor is in the little chest in the hall, in blue plastic. You can do pretty much what you want.”
What you want is to take them to dinner and a show.
11/13/04
Call to confirm visit. Yesterday she got her easy chair and lamp delivered. Says it’s too bad they have to be in a hospital instead of her house, which observation raises questions.
She, “if anybody had told me I would have to endure this I couldn’t possibly.”
Articulate, “I am busy making myself happy, being cheerful to people. I got an idea from a meditation book about putting monsters in the closet so that’s what I do with the possibilities of what I may have to go through. I put them in the closet.” But her monsters turned into such wimps.
Terminal, but on aspirin? Does she believe in the favor of God in a quiet death?
11/24/04
Her lawyer cooks his turkey in two parts. First soaked in brine and cooked, then the white meat is removed and the brown meat cooked later while the white is kept moist. This, people, is on a need to know basis. She is a thoroughly institutionalized turkey, so we talk about gassing cats. You see the connection.
Somebody we can’t mention, has just mercifully gassed their cat. Quality of life issues. My AZ nephew doesn’t have the guts to get rid of his. I ask how she’d like to be done. She says her brother nearly did himself in one time while gassing cats in his garage with good old carbon mono. She says she has no thoughts except that the monster is behaving decently in his closet.
I close with, “Aunt Libby, my friend, my aunt. She, “my ancestor.”
11/30/04
Various birds descend. Susan, Christy, Robert, Cynthia etc are coming to visit December 16th or so. She says she hopes she won’t be too vegetative from the medications when they come. Aspirin can just loop you out. Too vegetative, she has these observations that provoke silence in me. Four or five thoughts come at
the same time and none of them do I permit
expression. After all, it’s a little late to say what I want after so many years.
She introduces the notion of selecting the day of your death, gives some examples.
I tell her, not that I’m in denial, that as far as I’m concerned she’s not going to die, not that I want or would ever think of limiting her choices in any way, can’t have that, but what death?
They say the creed all their lives then when it matters they renege, “life everlasting!” I’ve known her all my life, but it is inevitable that this attitude too will be taken.
She told the factotum that she’s heard that Drs. can identify the last two weeks, so she says she’ll just give him a call, sort of a snooze alarm to prepare, but he didn’t like that much, maybe he likes her more than is good for him, as other men have.
He’ll get over it!
Ha. She is just not forthcoming to the male race. I have an advantage over them because I knew her before she knew that I knew her. She didn’t know I was conscious during all the embraces and hugs and kisses. She didn’t know I was conscious as a five year old sleeping in her bed. She says I think she’s a saint. But I have to tell her others do, not me. I think she’s a beautiful woman.
She absolutely crowed at her announcement that she was marrying Marvin. Felt like she really put one over that time.
I used to taunt her horribly about the greeting card profanations of Easter and Mother’s Day promoted by department stores such as her own ilk. Pro mercantile, she says, “don’t you believe in Mother’s Day?” The graphologist was right about her, “while you possess much emotional depth, you do not make it a practice to display your feelings.”
Selecting the day of death she has already counseled a Catholic lady on the afterlife from John 14, which she now quotes to me and says “you get a new body but it may be spiritual, you will recognize each other, but there will be no gender.”
The lady says, “say it again, say it again.”
Since you’re going to be seeing people in heaven, I ask her, “when I die are you going to come running up to me and say na na na na?”
She’s not going to bite on that one either. We bandy Lewis’s Great Divorce with the grass and light so real they hurt your feet and eyes.
No, she says, she’s doing pretty well on her new pain schedule. A Tylenol every four hours and now a small Percocet at night that gives hallucinations from 9:30 to 11:30. Has had a good intellectual talk with Senior Pastor about the end of things.
I tell her that volume 2 of the 3, A Tulip Blooms From the Heart, is going to be ready and sent to her in pre-proof next week. How it’s all about love. She quotes Thornton Wilder, Bridge of San Luis Rey “…but the bridge is love.” Yes it’s love, love in love about love in life. Beginning or end, alive or dead, the old and young remember each other. The young are influenced by the old to a thousand generations of those that love Him. Still going.
“Here’s their story,” I tell her, going through the table of contents by memory, “you’re last, sweetheart.”
Henry is first, tragedy, gravity, humor, laughter, joy. All you Pennsylvania Dutch nuts. She’s said for years she comes of a line of peasants way back to Adam. It’s because they ate wheat and the Italians ate pasta, she maintains. Food makes the man. The individual character traits, the strengths are also common to the community.
As if I’m getting too close she says she never liked having her picture taken, tells me of the worst picture she ever took was in 1944 when she was a plane spotter. In that day planes were everywhere and people were on the roof of the Media courthouse to forestall the Nazis, sending warning descriptions downtown for analysis. She worked in the Chestnut Street branch, her own version of MI 5. Had to get clearance. One morning they herded them into a prison-like room at 4 AM and took their pictures. Yes she destroyed it, the jail mug.
“No, I don’t think you’re going to die,” I say.
Henry and Anna and Flo and Howard and Jay and Bea are still living, still challenging youth with their lives’ boundaries.
She says people are praying for her.
“Can I pray for you.”
Yes.
“Can I pray for you now.”
Yes.
Can I pray for you out loud?”
Yes.
I do.
We say goodbye.
12/7/04
Call around 5. No answer. Call again. No answer. Resisting asking Mr. Riddle again, I call again.
“So you’re still there?”
Yes, on the new regime of Tylenol, and wowsie, just had a Percocet.
Are you hallucinating?
No, but she’s learning to ask for help. There are these rituals of self defense where she has a box of tissues and flashlight on one side of the pillow, call button on the other, feet slightly exposed at the bottom of the bed. Has hot feet!
We talk of releasing life.
She told factotum: “I had written up an obituary but I guess I lost it. I guess I can do another one for you before you need it.”
Mellow.
Says she has told Pastor she wanted no family eulogies. Said what Robert and I did at the parents’ occasion was a sibling contest. I’m silent.
But she wants to fight about it, says, well you’re being awfully silent. You think her finger is on the call button here? Is there any shock value in the remark?
“You see the world through ideas and eyes that oppose romance,” is what I would say if I replied. I tell her that I’m practicing negative capability, holding in mind two conflicting truths without having to choose between them. Just sittin’ releasin’.
I ask why her sister claimed she was the family deviate. She says that she always thought her sister had an abnormal immune system because she got twice what others got only once, that she even contracted impetigo from one of her students in her first teaching job. As to the sister’s religion, who was only 10 when her father died, Uncle Will, having a daughter her age, Gladys, sent both to camp with the Reformed. Later she was Presbyterianized.
Lib says she has warned Pastor that family is going to descend on her death. So he should look out. But I’m descending now, it’s Thanksgiving, seat belt fastened. She saw her picture in A Tulip Blooms from the Heart, Vol. II, says it was taken at 15 ½ for her school year book, that Jake’s letters were really pathetic in their presenting the view that he was caring for his grandchildren. Grind his bones.
Her façade is opaque as ever, referring to her letters therein. Somehow she thinks I have earlier letters. I don’t. She says she had mixed feelings at her father’s death. That Anna tried to give her children normalcy in that June of ’29, after Grandfather Jake’s death, had a house party at graduation at Penn State where she was a house mother, then a surprise birthday party for Lib’s 19th. Sounds rather like a celebration.
She is pleasantly surprised that Carole Watkins stayed up all night reading her story, called A Red Portfolio. I tell her it needs to be called Conversations with a …. We can add different words here depending. Beastie?
She says that although Bee was always kind to Rena she also always thought her an intruder and never warmed to her. And who has Lib ever warmed to? I told her that when Edwin Arthur Yeo and Rena visited in Pittsburgh I had heard my mother say words to this effect and as soon as they arrived went up to Rena and told her “I think you’re pretty.” As to saving Browns Mills from the auction block she quotes Shakespeare “be not the first by which the new is tried…” meaning, bear realistically the fact that loss wins. My decreasing sympathy for realists thinks loss sucks.
Keep a low key. Even keel. Don’t keel over, is that it? Don’t rock the baby. Releasing life.
I should send her Chang Pomes. Then she would complain I’ve gone from garrulity to brevity.
On the theology of sin and self examination she says she can’t help, i.e., after charging sibling rivalry at two successive funerals! Yes, she missed her biweekly shower attending a jazz Te Deum concert at the Rest Home, strings, oboe, viola, violin, everything but a harp. That’s coming. Saints or sinners, I can’t make up my mind. Joey & Melissa, Robert, Cynthia, Sue, Christy, Nick, then, as of 12/26 Aeyrie, me, Anne.
I say, do you remember who I am.
“I can’t forget it.”
Always opaque, she says “we feel we have to protect the image we have of ourselves, therefore we say nothing or everything.” She is learning to ask for help for sure.
She is interested in the subject of dying on demand. The old folk’s grapevine has it that within limits people can die when they want to, that is when they have accomplished their desires. The aged are as culpable of myth and fantasy as children, scheme with great cunning. The underbelly of the institution, the secret code of the resigned spreads in little cocktail hours and wine tastings, usually among the little old ladies, who glow and giggle to each other like Sexton and Plath about their boy death, about how they want to die. That’s where they share the initiated secrets, tell each other how. The glory of pneumonia. Then they boast to their sons and daughters, like they just got an A on their homework, that they know how to do it.
In some sense she is more beautiful than she has ever been, the pink chair she sits in is reupholstered with silver thread, silk and rose. Sometimes she wears a pink sweater and the white hair flies out over the sides of her head. She jokes that they think she’s an angel. It’s a little spare, flying just the same, halo around a sun on fall days in the mountains. The aurora whitens the brow. Since we are in the mountains now, I saw a cliff with patches whiten in the blizzard, a little locus amoenus, the lovely place. She should be proud to wear it. This is not the nature of the golden age though, but the silver verge of afterlife, beauty swallowed up in light. Beauty is the highest flesh can come to it. Human garden spots disappear like grass, a residue greater than memory, the fruit, the spiritual fruit of the life they don’t see or we either. Life and visage culminate in a suspended natural law, the corn is gold, the ox with the lion, earth recreated. You in the midst of Broadway think this exaggeration? The Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout.
Virgil, before the Renaissance, had “the ram in his pasture change his fleece’s color.” (5)
See the gold flower in her face?
Where silver is can gold be far behind?
They believe a certain godly nature to be in the gold!
Black wires turn to white, silver wings, the mild accepting eye.
There are more sudden ways to go, in a flash of exuberance all fleshed up, but consider the true case, for a minute, the case of the vine raising its “clusters on the neglected thorn” (5)
Hallowed does not mean softened, eyes lit with resignation. She had not lost her temper until some days after the Thanksgiving visit, signs off the phone again with bite. Do you want beauty in the flesh, the dreaded subcutaneous layers shimmering slightly, intact when they walk? Or with the deeper being life eternal, the faithful kind, your own mother if you like, whom gravity has flattened to the skeleton of face? Do you want the brow, the bone, the bite, the jaw await the resurrection? You love more the flesh you’re about to lose.
On this verge she won’t play my game any more than I play hers. She wants to say something outrageous to provoke me. I want her to speculate, something she disdains as a purely male phenomenon, therefore beneath her, “When you come running up to me when I get to heaven what are you going to say?”
She really wants to tell me she has found another misspelled word, a factual error in this manuscript.
12/9/04
It is December 9. I live in Phoenix but planted a red oak last year. Its leaves now are changing red, vermillion, scarlet, maroon, will end in brown. Across the street a cottonwood turns gold. Leaves shower the street, covered in gold. I pull back the curtain, sit in a chair. Maturity is not a new thing. Get it? Just disrespected among argumentative youth who have such grave reserve about authority.
Not to offend, but it suggests her relatives should get in touch with their eternal selves, just look at the last name on the driver’s license. Equivocating theys, something I’ve always wanted to do, they never bothered to Americanize it. It’s just as old world as ever. Isn’t the new world anyway just a bunch of nuts cracked open?
Sadly for puerility, their last name combines meanings of completion and maturity. Yes and no it is Tolkien’s ring and winter’s age, white hoarfrost up to the knees. The man-woman is ripe, filled like the lieder in the northern ear.
They snipped off their braids of hair and stored them in the trunks. Now I’ve got them.
It doesn’t suggest death, effort satisfied, it implies progeny and ancestry. The bone-hard skeleton of principle, the virtue proven circumstances, the solo 90 year old who converses first with God each day. Certainty seems to bring youth into judgment. "I'm as good as you are! Who are you to tell me what to do?"
Who wants to grow old? Everybody. Maturity balances, reconciles, adjusts. Youth exaggerates, advocates, accelerates. Less is more, we say. Arrested development is not maturity. Ironically, maturity prolongs youthfulness, decreases lines in the face, diminishes toil, fret and care. Why not balance, reconcile, adjust? "Well, you have to learn it for yourself." (Ecclesiastes 8:1).
12/15/04
She doesn’t see how all the obese women on her floor manage to maintain their weight with the portions they are given, worries for their handlers’ effort in moving them all. She’s in the middle of family visits. Joe III and Melissa last weekend, Robert, Susan, this. They have not called to confirm. Don’t expect it. But I tell her I see it could get better, communication, because when people get older they get wiser? She says that visiting a relative on the way out reminds them of family.
I amuse her with my vigilance and care of children, because she sees people divesting themselves of them. Maybe they don’t realize how long it takes to grow up, 38 years. Depending on their choices that is near or far. Look at Milton. The modern shudders. Milton was close to and dependant on his father until this age. You don’t want your children to grow up to be Milton do you?
She says she expects it of me, look at my care at extending the life of our old dog. Other people would have gassed him. She says, because he is an analogical joke between us, you won’t get rid of him as long as I’m alive. Not true. He left Palm Sunday, she waited till the Saturday after Easter. He’s blind in one eye, can’t hear, his right hip makes him walk in circle, he’s incontinent at best, can’t get up, can’t sit down, has to have 5 minute breaks when he walks across the street, pants like he’s run a mile. His last days were heart howling.
I already told her how my father made me watch him drown the kittens. Multiple times. I don’t tell her that Joggy is the agent of deliverance to our family. God can work in a dog. Sounds like a story from Guideposts. He can’t really stand up unless he leans against something. When he leans on me it is just about like rocking your son to sleep in your arms at 3 AM when he has a fever. He perks up when he sees another dog just about the way she does when visited. Makes her feel a little special for people to fly out to see her from the earth.
But you don’t have to worry darlings, earth isn’t going to end, death is going to be swallowed up in victory.
She says she’s still not in total agreement about my effort to collect and distribute her things. I tell her, just say so and I’ll cancel it. But she says, “oh no.” Far be it from her to make decisions.
One of my tennis buddies is going to give away his wife’s wedding ring! Well why not. The people in church gave theirs in the offering plate. Along with their 54 Chevy Belair. Another guy gave the royalties for his talking book, $110,000. Just stood up and announced it. I myself bought shares in the restoration of a grammar school.
In a way I considered it reparation for Jacob the Elder (see Book III). All these Christians giving everything away. One time we took 11 large boxes of medical supplies and drugs to St. Vincent De Paul. Just carried it up to their storeroom. Never got a thank you. Sent also a large amount to missionaries in Thailand. Never heard a word. In those days if you were in leadership in any way at all you got invited to a dinner in the sanctuary and afterward pledges and checks were taken. The first time you think it is maybe a dinner of appreciation. All this worn furniture, just auction it off. My grandfather’s tables and chairs and copper kettles. His letters gone. This old world.
Farewell sorrow,praise God the open door,
I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.
Her original opinion was that it was all tawdry used junk anyway. “So what do you care what happens to it?” But of course it matters.
Do you reject the body, the material? Spurn the flesh? Immolate temptation? Up in smoke. Is that a heresy, the rejection of the body, or shall we keep the body under. Mind body opposition. Marriage is honorable in all? Do you know what happens in marriage people? Like she says, in heaven there is no gender. Get it while it’s hot. The earth is the Lord’s, he gave us the dominion of his hands. Make up your mind. Opposition or union. Sow to the flesh, reap the spirit? “I believe in the “communion of the saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting.” They all think they’re going to live eternally in heaven, but the joke is they won’t be there five heavenly minutes when oops, it’s back down to earth again. Then the passenger pigeon and the buffalo, the apache but not the businessman will thrive. Oh the restored prairie, pure ocean.
Do you have a vision of the afterlife, the new heavens and the new earth? Read to the end. Does she think that a piece of the true cross is meaningless, the Bible of St. John, the manuscripts of the Pope? Nothing material is invested with meaning. Do you hear the Mennonite here? Put not your trust in horses.
Her visitors are praising my art on her wall and the written Tulip on her table. Her lawyer wants to take Aeyrie’s 16x 20 print home when she dies, which she is thinking about doing while they are consider her history. The earth wave on the wall changes colors in the light and gets comments. Now she calls me Bosy, referring to James Boswell, Dr. Johnson’s biographer. I think I am learning to write. She says nobody has ever been able to understand what I wrote. Reductionists. Realists. Let us not prize ordinary men. Visitors want to borrow the Tulip. It helps to be told by the press? It’s some kind of democratic thing, beauty and truth, depends on press agents. The puzzle has many pieces and the more you fill in the better you understand the rest. Tulip and Portrait show the huge conflict between my childhood memories and the present person she is, the great unexplained silence of conspiracy in the family of Mennonites.
Odd notes left over. The house next door, 198K. If she sells for that she can live on it a year and a half at $300 a day plus the lawyer. “There’s only one electric line to the attic.” That explains it! “Jerry broke the plumbing,” cost her $67. She thinks I’m Bosy because Boswell rewrote. Her friend Betty wants to write. The yellow forsythia in the turquoise vase was kept by the school.
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