Then, on a Sunday morning, my father was suddenly lucid and told me matter-of-factly that he would die in the afternoon. I don’t know if it was the directness and certitude of his statement that rattled me—he was always clinical, always rational, always dry—or that his death was no longer just an idea—it was happening, it was real—or if, during the week I’d spent by his side, we had bonded without my knowledge or consent and, all of a sudden, I loved him. So I lost it. I started crying. “I’ll be all right,” my father told me. I got down on my knees beside him and buried my face in his stale blue blanket. I wanted him to pet my head. I wanted him to soothe me. He stared up at the ceiling as I begged him not to leave me alone with my mother. I was passionate in my supplication.
“Promise me that you’ll send me a sign,” I pleaded, reaching for his huge, weird hand. He jerked it away. “A big sign, more than once, that you’re still here, that there’s life on the other side. Okay? Promise me you’ll come through to me somehow. Give me a sign that I won’t expect to see. Something so I’ll know you’re watching over me. Something huge. Okay? Please? Do you promise?”
“Go get my wife,” he said to the nurse.
When my mother came in, he pressed the button on his morphine drip.
“Any last words?” my mother asked.
“I hope this was all worth it,” he replied. For the rest of his life—around four hours—I sat on the chair and cried while my mother got drunk in the kitchen, ducking her head in every now and then to see if he was dead yet.
Finally, he was.
“That’s it, right?” my mother asked.
The nurse took his pulse, then pulled the blanket over his head.
The memory should have rustled up some grief in me. It should have reignited the coals of woe. But it didn’t. Remembering it all now in Reva’s bed, I felt almost nothing. Just a slight irritation at the lumpiness of the mattress, the loud swish of the sleeping bag whenever I turned over. Upstairs, Reva’s relatives had the television on high volume. The suspenseful sound effects from Law & Order echoed down through the floor.
I hadn’t been to a funeral since my mother’s, almost exactly seven years earlier. Hers had been quick and informal in the funeral home chapel. The guests barely filled the first few rows—just me and my father’s sister, a few neighbors, the housekeeper. The names in her address book had been doctors—hers and my father’s. My high school art teacher was there. “Don’t let this take you all the way down, honey,” he said. “You can always call me if you need a grown-up to lean on.” I never called him.
My father’s funeral, on the other hand, had been a real production. There were printed programs, long speeches. People flew in from across the country to pay their respects. The pews in the university chapel were uncushioned, and the bones in my butt rocked against the hard wood. I sat beside my mother in the front row, trying to ignore her sighs and throat clearings. Her frosty lipstick was put on so thick it started melting down her chin. When the president of the university announced that the science department would establish a research fellowship in my father’s name, my mother let out a groan. I reached for her hand and held it. It was bold of me to make such a move, but I thought we might bond now that we had something so huge in common—a dead man whose last name we shared. Her hand was cold and bony, like my father’s had been on his deathbed just days earlier. An obvious foreshadowing to me now, but I didn’t think of that then. Less than a minute later, she let go of my hand to dig around in her purse for her little pillbox. I didn’t know exactly what she was taking that day—an upper, I thought. She kept her coat on in the chapel during the ceremony, fidgeted with her stockings, her hair, glanced back viciously at the crowded pews behind us each time she heard somebody sigh or sniffle or whisper. The hours felt interminable, waiting for everyone to arrive, sitting through the formal proceedings. My mother agreed. “This is like waiting for a train to hell,” she whispered at some point, not to me directly, but up at the chapel ceiling. “I’m exhausted.” Highway to hell. Slow road to hell. Express bus. Taxicab. Rowboat. First-class ticket. Hell was the only destination she ever used in her metaphors.
When it was time for people to go up and say nice things about my father, she glared at the line forming up the central aisle.
“They think they’re special now because they know someone who died.” She rolled her red, quick-roving eyes. “It makes them feel important. Egomaniacs.” Friends, colleagues, coworkers, loyal students spoke emotionally from the rostrum. The people wept. My mother squirmed. I could see our reflections in the gloss of the casket in front of us. We were both just pale, floating, jittery heads.