Thirty Days Page 18

  ‘Don’t look for me on a Ouija board,’ she told us before she lost consciousness, ‘I don’t believe in reincarnation.’

  And neither did we.

  ‘I’m sorry for doing this to you,’ she said that week, ‘for making you—my children, my husband—suffer.’

  But was she still suffering? I watched her breathe. There were times when I thought I should take a pillow to her face and suffocate her. Instead, I lay in bed and held the pillow over my own face.

  •

  On the last day, there were only three words to say.

  ‘I love you.’

  They may be clichéd, but they are the truth, the essence of life and relationships.

  Love.

  Love.

  Love.

  But there were still ways of showing it. I asked for the room to be cleared. I wanted time alone with Kerryn. I moved my chair close to her. The nurses had removed her cancer cap because she was sweating. I covered her bald head with the hat again. It was all I could do now. The husband who had zipped up dresses, who had watched her pull on underwear, a nightie, a dressing-gown, or her wedding dress on our day thirty-three years earlier, was reduced to one last act: dressing her in a cancer cap I had bought for her in the gift shop at Cabrini Hospital.

  And then, leaning over the railings, I played her songs through my phone—the songs of our youth, when love was strong, and everything lay ahead of us in dreams of what we could build together, the songs we played in the car, parked near St Kilda Beach, where we would kiss, or in our home in Norwood Road, on a record player we discarded when CDs took over. Who would have known that so many of those lyrics spoke of time lost?

  What the young fear is not death but the loss of love to lovelessness. How I wished for the nostalgia when all that we had to lose was a girlfriend or boyfriend. Still, I played those songs and the words were transformed into poetry that the songwriters could never have fathomed. When Steven Bishop sang ‘Never Letting Go’, did he ever imagine my hand clutching Kerryn’s, or that never letting go meant clinging to a life about to be extinguished?

  Jim Croce’s ‘Time in a Bottle’ felt like it expressed our entire story. For all the times of alienation and distance, in that moment in the hospice, through the music, we were in the same bottle. Our argument in the elevator, Rachel’s second birthday celebrated in a tent in the Atlas Mountains, the daily grind of coming home and staring at the pile of dirty dishes, or smelling the crackling fish Kerryn was sprinkling with sesame seed—all that, not only the romance of life, was held in the bottle. The bottle held continents that had been conquered and mapped by explorers hundreds or thousands of years ago, but it also held our worlds, discovered in our early twenties when we first bought a ticket on a Eurotrain and travelled to Berlin and Vienna. In that bottle, I fell from a donkey’s back in Fez, and Kerryn slept through the night as I knelt by the toilet vomiting from food poisoning. Two lives captured and shared in one short shot at timelessness.

  The last song I played was the one she had asked for while she was still conscious.

  ‘Do you want me to play anything at your funeral?’ I had asked.

  ‘A song,’ she said.

  I thought she meant one of those sacred melodies from our synagogue.

  ‘No, a song.’ She thought for a second and sang it quietly.

  ‘You can’t always get what you want.’

  It was the Rolling Stones version, from The Big Chill. That film, more than any other, captured her sentiments over the year of her illness. We had watched it with the children twice in the past ten months. Once at my brother’s, squashed on couches together. The kids marvelled at the famous actors grown old like their parents, the retro period now back in fashion, and their mum’s rhythmic movements to the music.

  We watched it again about a week before Kerryn went to the hospice. We were at our house, Kerryn on the green barber’s chair, her body crumpled.

  Now, holding her hand and leaning over the bed rails, sobbing, I played that song for her.

  No, darling, you can’t always get what you want, but we did okay, didn’t we? Didn’t you do okay for the past thirty-three years—three wonderful kids, a husband who can’t imagine life without you, your family and friends?

  She didn’t smile. She was half-asleep and a yellow-stained eye looked out blankly at me, tears pooled at the corner.

  This wasn’t how her life was supposed to end. It wasn’t how our marriage was supposed to end. The plan was for old age.

  I had always done the devil’s bargain: give me a guarantee of health until I’m eighty, and I’ll cut the deal. I would have taken a fraction of that now and shared it with Kerryn.

  My mother would have given it all to her. With my father, she was one of the last to visit Kerryn. She insisted on coming while Kerryn was still conscious. When she entered the room, all her years of loss, all the love she had showered on Kerryn poured out. My mother, who survived the Holocaust as a child and mourned the loss of her own mother, my mother, who was afraid of death and funerals, now faced Kerryn in her dying moments. She always used to say that a mother-in-law could never be a mother. But my mother was more than a mother-in-law to Kerryn, and Kerryn was more than a daughter-in-law to my mother. Kerryn knew how to find the perfect register in which to speak to her.

  My father had always acted as my mother’s translator, patiently transmitting our communications to her in her deafness, because we couldn’t bear to repeat ourselves a thousand times.

  ‘I can’t hear you, Yossl,’ my mother would say.

  He would repeat the words louder.

  She still couldn’t hear.

  He repeated them one more time, this hunched man of almost ninety, screaming with all his might.

  ‘Why are you shouting at me?’ she yelled back at him. ‘You think I’m stupid?’

  But Kerryn knew how to speak to her in a tone that she heard and understood, especially during their regular lunches together.

  ‘Kerryn never lies to me,’ my mother once told me. ‘But tell me, Marky,’ she would later say, ‘did you ever tell Kerryn the title of your novel?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The one you’ve been writing all these years.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You told her?’

  ‘I told only her.’

  ‘So you don’t have to tell your mother. But tell me this. Did she like your book?’

  I hesitated. ‘She said it needed more love.’

  ‘Ah,’ my mother sighed. ‘My Kerrynu knows everything. She loved me more than anyone and I loved her more than anyone.’

  And now, hobbling into the room, my father, who had aged more than ten years in ten months, wept like a baby for his Kerryn, while my mother sat by her side and kissed her arm, up and down, muttering to her, ‘I love you, I love you. What will I do without you?’

  And Kerryn, who was half-dead, still found the strength to console my mother. ‘I will always be inside you,’ she said. ‘And there are many other people in the family to love.’

  We led my mother out of the room. She sat in the lounge, then went out into the street for a cigarette. When she returned, she said, ‘I’m not leaving, I’m staying here,’ and she pointed like a child at the couch in the open area of the hospice.

  ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘you have to take her away. She can’t stay.’

  ‘No,’ my mother said, either lip-reading or hearing what she didn’t want to hear. ‘I’ll be quiet as a mouse. I’ll be good. I won’t disturb Kerrynu. I’ll just peek into the room.’

  As she was led out of the hospice by force, I thought of Kerryn, climbing through the thorns that day thirty years ago in Berlin and clearing off the ivy from my mother’s mother’s grave, revealing the name of the one who had jumped not once but three times off the trains, narrowly escaping death in a gas chamber.

  ‘How much longer?’ we asked, each time the nurses came in. We received the same evasive answer.

  ‘I feel guilty asking
,’ said Sarah, as a doctor as much as a daughter.

  Nothing was going to happen today, we were told, so Rachel and Gabe took the opportunity to do some chores. Sarah stayed, reading a book, watching her mother out of the corner of her eye.

  I wandered around the corridors. An old man was limping around the hospice on a frame.

  ‘The soup here is too hot,’ he muttered. ‘Too hot.’

  He stopped me. ‘Can I talk to you?’

  I was sure he wanted to tell me his life story.

  Kerryn would have said yes, but I was too impatient to take on other people’s stories right now. And I was scared to leave Kerryn in the room for more than a minute.

  Just in case.

  At around 6.15 p.m. the children gathered in the room. Kerryn’s siblings had come and gone, unsure whether they would see her again.

  So it was just us: Gabe, Sarah, Rachel and me.

  Gabe was the first to notice her breathing was more shallow. Faster. He started to panic.

  I got angry. ‘Stop worrying.’

  Inside I was saying, what’s the worst that can happen now?

  We called the nurse. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘there’s a change.’ And then all of a sudden, our eyes fixed on Kerryn, we noticed that she paused in her breathing. Five seconds later, like a fish gasping for air, her body jerked and she inhaled deeply.

  We screamed in unison. Despite our anticipation of these last moments, nothing had prepared us for this. She gasped again. Her breathing stopped. Then there was another deep inhalation.

  We screamed again, a chorus. Four times she gasped for air, stopped breathing, then heaved again.

  And then silence.

  We waited. We wanted her to give us one more breath.

  We wanted to say, so that she could hear it one more time, I love you.

  To hear her say it back to us, I love you more.

  But the breathing had stopped. We held our own breath. Was that it?

  The nurse pressed a stethoscope to Kerryn’s wrist. ‘Her pulse has stopped,’ she announced.

  And with that, a life was extinguished. No songs. No words. Only our screams, and our tears, blanketing her.

  They tell you many things about how death looks. I had imagined seeing a body drained of its soul, empty flesh that had once been a human being. I had seen my grandfather’s second wife dead on the floor where she’d been left alone for a couple of days. Her body had stiffened, her fingers rigid in the air like a deer that had been shot.

  What I saw lying before us was my wife sleeping. I even imagined her chest still moving beneath the sheets. One hand was under the covers, the other resting on the sheets. I held her exposed hand. The warmth was draining from it. I lifted the sheet and saw dark splotches on her skin.

  In the background, I heard the nurse tell us that we could spend as much time as we wished with Kerryn before we made the phone call to the burial society. Each of us was holding on to one of her limbs, kissing her neck, her forehead, stroking her arm.

  ‘No. Call them now. As quickly as you can.’

  Instinctively, I knew I had to let go of her body before she was transformed into a corpse. I wanted to remember her asleep. The future would be difficult enough without the image of her stiffening body.

  Two days earlier in the hospice, I had seen an old Jewish man wheeled away in a wagon-like trolley. I knew he had died, because two bearded Orthodox men were standing vigil outside his door, muttering psalms from a prayer book. One of them saw me and looked me up and down as though he was the Angel of Death, whispering, Soon it will be our turn to come for you.

  Twenty minutes after Kerryn had died, a member of the Jewish burial society entered the room.

  ‘I need one of you to help me,’ he said, and turned to me.

  ‘I’d like all my children to stay and help,’ I said, knowing that whatever needed to be done had to be done as a family. Those last moments will never leave us.

  Together, we followed instructions to cover her face with a white sheet. If ever there was a moment of confronting death, it was our complicity in denying her the possibility of breathing again. This was no longer my wife, sleeping silently on a pillow. By folding the white sheets over her face, and then tightly around her body, we were transforming her into a corpse. The four of us slid her onto a board and tucked her into a bag. It might have been a sleeping bag for a camping trip, but there was no turning away from the reality of what we were doing. Zipping the bag was the cruellest moment. The end.

  This was not the wooden coffin that we would have to confront at the funeral, but it was a coffin just the same. Our Kerryn was now a body in a makeshift grave created by the children she had given life to.

  We all held onto the trolley. Among all the clashing thoughts that passed through my mind was a song, a Yiddish song composed during the Holocaust.

  On a wagon bound for market

  There’s a calf with a mournful eye

  High above him there’s a swallow

  Winging swiftly through the sky

  The chorus was sung for the death of a girl who had been snatched from life before her time.

  Donna, Donna, the chorus goes.

  But in my mind, it was Kerryn’s name that inserted itself into the familiar rhythm of that childhood lament.

  Our Kerryn was wheeled on a wagon along the corridor, her siblings and my brother standing against the walls. We led her out into a black car and slid her into the boot. We watched as the car backed out through the gates of the hospice, and waved goodbye, to a wife and a mother, to her life, to Kerryn.

  I must be going to America, she would have thought, if souls can dream, watching us vanish behind the sliding door, as she was returned into the arms of her mother and father.

  Abracadabra.

  One minute my wife was there. In a flash she was gone.

  EPILOGUE

  In the ten months of Kerryn’s dying, I prepared myself for everything except for her death itself. By death, I mean her absolute absence: the empty pillows on one side of our bed, her toothbrush in the bathroom, the wedding band on my finger and hers in a velvet pouch.

  I picked up her cancer wig and fitted it to my head. I opened and closed her cupboards of clothes and shoes. I wrote messages from my phone to her phone. I called her number to hear the sound of her voice. Mostly, I became obsessed with saving her digital life. I was terrified I would lose that part of her that was captured in thousands of photographs. I integrated her virtual world into mine, merging our emails and downloading her messages. Her privacy became my property. Here I was again, assembling primary sources to try to make sense of them. I needed to get the main character right.

  I snapped secret photos of one of my daughters seated at her mother’s computer. They looked alike from the back. I opened the newspaper, turned to the crossword page, and tried to guess the nine-letter word as she had done. Had I known how, I would have attempted the sudoku puzzle that was part of her morning routine. I exchanged my iPad for hers and watched movies on it in the middle of the night. I lightly touched the on/off button, which held the imprint of her finger. Her last Solitaire game was left open. I stared at it, frightened to make the last move in case the game was erased.

  I made minor changes in the house. I moved a chair from upstairs to my study downstairs. I bought a turntable and emptied out a cupboard full of vinyl records. I sat in the dark, listening to the songs of our courtship—the songs I had played to her in the hospice on the day she died.

  A week before Kerryn’s death, I wrote her eulogy. I had read it to her while she was in a state of semi-consciousness. She smiled at parts, while at others she seemed to drift into a distant zone. But at the end she showed that she had absorbed it all.

  ‘It’s too long,’ she whispered.

  She was right, as usual. I cut it down, but it was still too long for the thousand people who crowded into the funeral chamber on a sweaty, thirty-degree day. But, for me, only words could rescue her from the oblivi
on of death. Nothing could be too long.

  When Kerryn gave me permission to write her story, I felt guilty accepting the lifeline she had thrown me—to write my way out of my grief. Perhaps I should have rejected it and acted more like my mother, who shouted in anguish whenever she saw Kerryn suffering.

  But I accepted her gift, and for thirty days, I wrote. On the one hand, I know that writing this book is my way of restoring Kerryn to life, so we can have our one last dance of love. But on the other hand, I know that without Kerryn alive to read this, and to answer me, my dance is solitary, and marks not the continuation but the end of a love story.

  When we visited Prague together and saw the legendary hiding place of the golem, we observed that the ladder to the door of the attic is positioned halfway up the wall. No matter how hard I try, the door to Kerryn’s life is forever closed to me. At times, the door opens with new revelations. When I showed the John Clare poem to Kerryn’s siblings, they immediately recognised it. ‘Our father used to recite “I Am!” in the shower, or when he was shaving,’ they said. ‘He learned it by heart for a competition at school.’

  What else will I discover as I continue my search?

  One thing I know with certainty: the letters I found in the laundry cupboard have given me a peek into a part of our lives that we thought we had lost. The words of our youth console me and, at the same time, consume me with remorse for the things that will forever be left unsaid.

  But our love never died. That was our miracle. And now that she is dead, all that is left for us is the story.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  How do I thank all the people who propped up my family while Kerryn was dying—our friends and extended family, my Monash University colleagues, and all the individuals who sent us food packages and visited us from overseas? And what can I say that expresses my appreciation for those who enveloped us in love and consolation after Kerryn’s death, and knew to stand back when we needed to grieve in solitude? Thanks to the doctors who gave Kerryn ten months of extra life, and the nurses and palliative carers at Cabrini, who made that short period tolerable.