The Afterlife: A Memoir Read online

  People are fond of saying that the truth will make you free. But what happens when the truth is not one simple, brutal thing? I could not imagine life without my mother. And it was true as well that only without her would I feel able to live. I had had enough of Louanne Antrim and was ready for her to be gone. I wanted her dead, and I knew that, in the year of her dying, I would neglect her.

  I would and I did. In this, at least, I can claim I was faithful to her — to us. I was, after all, her man. It had been my impossible and defining task to be both like and unlike all other men — more specifically, like and unlike her father and her errant, excommunicated ex-husband, my father. What does this mean? I’m not sure I can clearly say. I was, I suppose, never to leave her for another woman. I was never to lie to or deceive her. When I first began to write and publish novels, it was understood by my mother, and hence unwittingly by me, that I was exhibiting, in whatever could be called my artistic accomplishments, her creative agency, her gifts.

  “I’ll come down soon and stay a few days, Mom.”

  “You don’t have to come.”

  “I want to come.”

  “I’m not expecting you.”

  “I’ll come.”

  “Don’t if you don’t want to.”

  “Mom.”

  “Don’t wait too long. I’m going to die soon.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Dr. McCarrick is trying to kill me.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He won’t take my calls.”

  “He’s a doctor.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. It’s a joke. Sort of. He’s busy. Doctors are busy. Never mind.”

  “Everyone is against me. You’re against me.”

  “Mom, he’s not trying to kill you. No one is trying to kill you. No one wants to kill you.”

  I put off the visit. I put it off. A dog in the apartment next to mine started barking, and for a while I lost my mind. Then the dog stopped barking and a year had passed and my sister and I were boarding flights from opposite ends of the country to stand beside my mother’s bed in the little house near the bottom of the hill that pitched down to the parking lot beside the town lake. It was our practice, my sister’s and mine, to fly into Charlotte, rendezvous at the airport car-rental desk, get the car, stop off at Bridges, in Shelby, North Carolina, for barbecue, then head west over the mountains, past Chimney Rock, up around Old Fort, and down into Black Mountain. The drive took three hours. We could have flown to Asheville, thirty minutes from our mother’s house, but Terry and I traveled this roundabout way, I think, in order to give ourselves time to prepare for the ordeal of being — for one last time, in this case — Louanne’s children in Louanne’s house. That day, we managed to be in a hurry and to drive slowly at the same time. Terry talked about her children and about a neighbor who, like our mother, had refused nutrition in the final stages of a terminal illness. It was late on a late-summer afternoon. The farms and weathered churches alongside the two-lane highway had never seemed to me so lonely or so lovely, so beckoning, as they did that afternoon. This was our grandfather’s country; and it was his father’s, and his father’s father’s; and it was our mother’s and, for that brief time — looking out the car windows at the sights along the way, at touristy Lake Lure and the rocky stream descending the grade in low waterfalls beside the road; at the forlorn houses surrounded by irregularly shaped fields planted with corn and beans; at the kudzu that devours more and more of the South, forest and field, every year — it was ours, too. I remember thinking that, after she died, there would be no one left to bind me to this part of the world, and I wondered what might lead me, in the future, ever to return.

  At the house, we found our mother on the hospital bed in the living room. Beside the bed stood the enormous wooden table on which she had measured and scissored fabrics. Bolts of silk leaned in a corner. Bookshelves held paperbacks about Carl Jung and healing. The day nurse left Terry and me alone. Our mother was on her way to dying. She had informed us, earlier in the summer, that sometime before too long, probably before her birthday in September, she would, as she had put it, “take matters into my own hands,” but she had not told us exactly when; there were celestial and astrological considerations that needed factoring, and she was waiting for the right moment. Now the moment had come. Gazing at her emaciated face in the evening light, I discovered something that Terry had known and I hadn’t, which was that our mother used dentures. These had been taken out. Her mouth was collapsed. She made noises and sounds that could not be interpreted as sentences, or even words. Morphine, dropped off earlier by the Hospice workers, waited, sealed, in a bottle in the kitchen. No one, not even the nurse, seemed to know precisely when to begin feeding it to her. So, like the morphine in the bottle in the kitchen, we waited, and the next day my mother “woke”—as the dying sometimes will, briefly — and spoke relatively straightforwardly, if disjointedly, about her past. She called up names of people from Charlottesville and Kingsport and Miami, from Knoxville and Gainesville, Johnson City and Sarasota and Tallahassee. We felt her feet; her feet were warm. My sister gave her a sponge bath and changed her clothes, and we arranged the pillows beneath her head, and the nurse put her teeth in, and my mother asked us, in her broken voice, if we would mind, please, bringing her a martini.

  Playing the role of guardian, playing at being powerful, I asked if she thought a martini a good idea, and she answered, quite sensibly, “What harm could it do now?”

  Had there been gin and vermouth in the house, I would surely have mixed her a cocktail. Or maybe I wouldn’t have. Did I offer her a taste of beer? I don’t remember. Was she still taking oxygen? I can’t remember that, either. Green tanks and plastic hoses were everywhere. The part-time nurse practitioner, a sweet and competent, though hardly medically knowledgeable, hard-line Christian fundamentalist, and my mother’s two female friends, pagan Wiccans as far as I could make out, were in a battle over my mother’s soul. It was a minor flare-up of social conflicts in the New South of the old Appalachias — the Christers versus the Shamans — staged over the proxy that was Louanne Antrim’s wasted body. Back and forth it went, in whispered private conferences, little peace talks out in the yard:

  “They’re saying occult things. They’re going to hand her over to the Devil. I’ve got three churches praying for your mom to rise into Jesus’ arms.”

  “That Pentecostal girl’s trying to convert Louanne to Christ. Your mother left organized religion behind a long time ago. It’s not what she wants.”

  “Every time I pray for your mom, they come in and they stop me. I’m just worried sick over your mom.”

  In the end, it fell to me to administer the morphine. I should say that I decided, as the man on the scene, to be the one to give the morphine. Every four hours, I pressed a lorazepam tablet to powder in a spoon, introduced into this powder a small measure of the liquid morphine, drew the solution into an oral syringe, and squirted the drug into my mother’s partly open mouth. I was careful to squirt toward the side of her mouth. My sister and I swabbed her dry lips with sponges. On the third night her death rattle began. I put on Mozart piano sonatas, but after a while, getting into the spirit of things, I switched to Miles Davis. At some point before dawn, my mother’s face relaxed and her skin cleared, and, though her throat and chest still rattled terribly, she smiled. It was a broad, unambiguous smile. Terry said to me, “Look, she’s getting younger.” It was true. In the hours before she died, Louanne began to resemble herself as the young woman we had seen in photographs taken before we were born — full of radiance and with her future and whatever crazed or credible hopes she had ahead of her. Amazingly, this effect occurred in spite of the absence of teeth. I sat in a chair beside the bed and read to her from The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor, which she did not seem to appreciate at all — her smile vanished and she actually scowled at the opening to “A Wife of Nashville”—and, though I like Peter Taylor well eno
ugh, I felt in that instant real camaraderie with my mother. I left off reading and told her that she had been a good mother, a good artist; that Terry and I loved her and were grateful to her for her care; that those years in Tallahassee, in particular, had been pretty good years; that both of us, both her children, however much we might miss her, had a great deal to live for; that we would be all right without her. The sun came up. Terry drove back to the hotel for a shower and a nap. The New Agers and the kind Christian were away somewhere; and I held my mother’s hand and told her that the house was empty except for the two of us, it was just her and me in the house, and it was a nice day outside the windows, birds were in the trees, a breeze blew the leaves, clouds crossed the sky, and if she wanted to she could go ahead and die, which she promptly did.

  From 1966 until the summer of 1968, my sister and I lived with our mother in Tallahassee, Florida. Across the street from us was a church whose steeple had been removed and laid on its side to peel and rust in the yard beside the church. At the top of the street was a gas station where Apalachicola oysters could be bought for five dollars a bushel. Our father was teaching in Virginia; though our parents’ first divorce was either final or on the way to being so, he visited monthly, pulling up in his black Volkswagen Beetle, parking in the driveway made of seashells and sand — the cue for Terry and me to rush from the house screaming with excitement. Often, the first evening of his visit we would spend as a family, sitting on the concrete-and-brick porch, shucking and eating dozens of oysters and looking out at the church with its decapitated, useless steeple. My sister and I conspire to remember these as good years, primarily because there was sparingly little head-to-head conflict between our parents, given that they were infrequently together; but also because the three of us, Terry, my mother, and I, became a family of our own, a family that existed in the absence of the family we wished we could be. Terry and I did fine in school; we rode our bikes, built forts using lawn furniture, played with friends from across the street. I joined the Cub Scouts; she was a Brownie. Occasionally, our mother allowed us to stay home from school, and our party of three became a tea party in the living room. There was something approaching normalcy in our lives. In retrospect, I would say that it was a forced normalcy. Our happy family was a worrisomely happy performance of family.

  This calls to mind a particular event. When I was nine, I got to play the part of Young Macduff in a Florida State University production of Macbeth. My mother worked as an assistant costumer in the theater department. It was she who would eventually make my costume, a yellow-orange tunic with a sash for a belt. The tunic, despite repeated washing, became bloodier and bloodier with each performance. Here are some lines from act IV, scene 2, spoken by Lady Macduff and her son, before they are murdered by Macbeth’s henchmen:

  L. MACD.: Sirrah, your father’s dead,

  And what will you do now? How will you live?

  SON: As birds do, mother.

  L. MACD.: What, with worms and flies?

  SON: With what I get, I mean; and so do they.

  L. MACD.: Poor bird! thou’dst never fear the net nor lime,

  The pitfall nor the gin.

  SON: Why should I, mother? Poor birds they are not set for.

  My father is not dead, for all your saying.

  L. MACD.: Yes, he is dead. How wilt thou do for a father?

  SON: Nay, how will you do for a husband?

  And:

  SON: Was my father a traitor, mother?

  L. MACD.: Ay, that he was.

  SON: What is a traitor?

  L. MACD.: Why, one that swears and lies.

  SON: And be all traitors that do so?

  L. MACD.: Every one that does so is a traitor, and must be hang’d.

  It is but a moment before the killers enter. The stage directions call for Young Macduff to be murdered first, crying out, “He has kill’d me, mother: Run away, I pray you!” and for her to flee into the wings, crying “Murther!” In our production, both deaths occurred onstage. First I went down, stabbed in the back and in the stomach. My pretend mother ran to my side and knelt beside me. Then she was killed. She fell across me and lay dead (though breathing heavily). It was in this way that I came to fall in love with Lady Macduff. I mean that I fell in love with Janice, the college girl playing Lady Macduff. The lights dimmed to end the scene. Each night, I watched from beneath my mother who was not my mother, as the lights’ filaments faded; and, when the stage fell dark, I whispered in Janice’s ear, which was practically in my mouth, “Okay, get up,” because the smell of her, and her hair falling across my face, and her ear in my mouth, and the pressure and heat of her body pressing down on mine became too intense to bear.

  It seems to me that some of the archetypes for my adult life were introduced during the period of the play: the man who appears and withdraws, appears and withdraws; the woman who is both my mother and a girl on whom I have a crush; and the real mother, who dies for want of the love and protection of a man, her husband. These are rudimentary formulations; nevertheless, they point to a fact of large consequence, the fact of my precarious victory over my father and my attainment of my mother. Like Young Macduff in the moments before death, I became my mother’s confidant. In doing so, I became her true husband, the man both like and unlike other men. And, in becoming these things, I became sick.

  My main ailment was a debilitating asthma that required trips to hospitals and doctors’ offices. I swallowed drugs that kept me awake nights, struggling to breathe mist from an atomizer that hummed away on the table next to my bed, while my mother sat at my side. She had a way of sitting beside me on the bed — at a certain angle, leaning over, maybe touching my forehead or holding my hand, perched the way mothers everywhere perch on beds beside sick children — that I will never forget. This was our intimacy. In later years, after she and my father had remarried, and her alcoholic deterioration had begun in earnest, the image of her in the Tallahassee days, serving tea in china cups, or sitting up nights with me on the edge of my bed in the little house on Eighth Street, would be supplanted by the more violent image of the increasingly damaged Lady Macbeth she was to become. When we say about something or someone that we are dying for that thing, that person, we may miss the more literal meaning hidden in the metaphor. I was a boy dying for his mother, angrily, stubbornly doing her work of dying, the work she had begun before I was born. In this version of the story of my illness — the story of our collusion in illness — I was not merely bringing my mother to my bedside, not simply bringing her close. Rather, I was marrying myself to her, learning to speak the language of her unconscious, which, as time would bear out, was a language of suffocation and death. In sickness, we were joined: she was I and I was she.

  I bought the Dux. Of course I bought top of the line. If you’re going to buy a brand-new rest of your life, why go halfway? The guys who brought it in and set it up were not only deliverymen; they were true believers, real aficionados. One of the men was large, the other less large. The large man did the talking.

  “This is the bed I sleep on.”

  “Really?”

  “Best bed I ever slept on. I’ve slept on every kind of bed. Take a look at me. I’m a big guy. Most beds, I’d get two, three years and the things wear out. Not this bed.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m telling you. I sleep on this bed. My mother sleeps on this bed. My sister has one of these beds. My mother’s sister sleeps on this bed.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Sleep like a baby.”

  Like a baby? What if I wanted to sleep like a man? It didn’t much matter either way, because I wasn’t going to get any sleep at all. Not that night. Not the following night. Not the night after that.

  “Hey, come over. I got the bed.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. It’s here.”

  “I can’t believe you got the bed.”

  “I got the bed. It’s here.”

  “Have you gotten on it?”r />
  “Kind of.”

  “Have you put the sheets on it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Is my pillow on it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Is it as tall as the other bed?”

  “Just about.”

  “You got the bed!”

  “I got the bed!”

  Talk about up all night — however, not for reasons one would anticipate or wish. It was a bad night on many counts. In the first place, the bed felt too soft. In the second place, it was too springy In the third place, it seemed too transmissive of vibrations caused by movement. In the fourth place, it was too final. It represented the end of the quest for itself. And now, here it was. The bed was mine. It would be the place not of love and rest but of deprivation and loneliness. All during that first night, I lay awake and felt the bed. I felt myself sinking into it. I felt, sinking into the bed, the absence of familiar pressures against my shoulders and hips; and, without those familiar pressures, I felt adrift. If R. moved even an inch, I felt that. If she turned over, the effect was catastrophic. In the morning I was wrung out, and so was R.