Take It And Run

"Merry Shabbos!" I call to the room at large, spreading my arms wide and slapping what I hope is a smile on my face. While my intention is to inject the sweltering silence with some noise, any noise, I fear my outburst only makes things worse, especially since lifting my arms in greeting puts the pit stains on my poorly-buttoned periwinkle button-down on full display. I begin praying for a meteor to hurtle through the French doors leading from the dining room to the backyard and put us all out of our misery. Surely Jesus grants wishes of such importance and selflessness during Shabbos? By the time I remember that there are some major differences between Jesus Christ and Santa Claus, I resign myself to the inevitability that we will all make it out of here alive.

Dan gets up in his pompous way, clearing his throat like a tractor plowing through a field. “Ahem… Thank you for that wonderful… for that surprising proclamation, Mavis. Merry Shabbos indeed. Well. As you all know, I have something quite important to say, and I wanted to wait to say it to the group as a whole, rather than contact you all individually…”

This sends up red flags and I know that his announcement is more meaningful than an in-depth description of the last time he ate Mexican food. Forks and knives clang against Deb's fine china, the tinny symphony dulled by the tension that swirls around us like heavy steam in a sauna. It’s stifling and almost impossible to breath through the thick mist of foreboding that coats the wood-paneled walls with beads of awkward condensation.  

Aunt Sylvia responds to his abrupt outburst with her fallback expression of sheer malevolence. “We all know how much you get off on the sound of your own voice, Dan, but quit beating around the bush and just spit it out," she hisses through sharp, carnivorous teeth, her tone somewhere in the no-man's-land between a harumph and a cackle. 

Dan looks scathed and outraged that someone would have the gaul, the audacity to cut him off, but since he is as terrified of Aunt Sylvia as the rest of the human race, he restrains himself from giving her a piece of his mind. Which, in the grand scheme of things, turns out to be a good choice, since Dan doesn’t have many pieces left to give.

    He resumes talking, but all I can hear is Charlie Brown adult-speak. His mouth is moving but it’s just womp womp womp, womp womp. Womp. I can see the loose, limp look on his face and if he keeps it that way much longer it’ll stick, I’m sure of it. Dan will walk around for the rest of his life with his mouth hanging open so wide that children will try and throw small things into it. He’ll end each day by emptying dimes and peas and buttons and marbles and gum balls from his mouth into the trash can. Knowing Dan, he’ll keep the gum balls, sticky and worn from hours marinating in his saliva, yes, but he’ll keep them all the same. Save them for later, when he needs to move his mouth around but understands that everyone is tired of hearing him speak.

    It’s hard work to extract myself from this grotesque vision and bring myself back to the dinner table. What I want to do is shake my head like a wet dog, to manually unscramble the tangents my mind has taken and reorder my thoughts, but I have enough mental acuity to know that mimicking an animal would be a terrible decision at this point. Choosing to vibrate my hands under the table, I take stock of the situation. Dan looks at me imploringly. Gwen shivers with her eyes tilted toward the ceiling. Leah is on the verge of tears, damp pools gathering at the upturned corners of her eyes. Aunt Sylvia obscures her face with her hands, hands so frail they are practically see-through except for the deep purple veins that run through them like silly string.

    "Uh, what?" It’s the best I can come up with.

“Were you seriously not listening?” Aunt Sylvia barks, removing her hands from her face, a face where not a single tear or mark of desperation has seeped. “Always in your own head, never paying attention. Jesus H. Christ, Nick could’ve done so much better.”

She’s said it many times. She actually said the exact same thing, complete with Jesus H. the first day we met, when Nick brought me to Shabbat dinner and I passed the roast chicken too quickly, as if there is such a thing as passing food at an inappropriate pace. But hearing it now, after everything that’s happened, it slices deeper than it ever has before; Nick isn’t here to defend me this time, isn’t here to tell Aunt Sylvia to mind her business and shut her bestial mouth.

“Sorry,” I say, with more deference than was my intention, but her intimidation unfortunately has an effect on me. She knows how weak I am right now, and she uses it to her advantage. “Could you just repeat that? I swear I’m listening, I was just… somewhere else for a second.”

“Repeat the whole thing?? I’ve been speaking for four minutes straight!” Leave it to Dan to know exactly how long he was speaking for. He doesn’t even need to use a timer, he’s just been yapping for so much of his life that he’s developed the supremely useless talent of knowing exactly how long any given word takes to say, particularly his own words. 

“I’ll just skip to the end, then, shall I? I said that we’ve decided to pull the plug. It’s time.”

I hear him this time, and every particle of my body wishes I hadn’t. I want to gag at the words. Pull the plug. It’s such a tame turn of phrase for the ending of a life. For the ending of Nick’s life. Nick is the kind of person who should go out with a bang, not with a euphemism for tube removal and off switches. I’m sure that’s a gross underestimation of how “pulling the plug” actually works, but it’s all my mind can conjure at the moment.

“No.” I say it simply, matter-of-factly, as if I, his fiancé and best friend, have any say in the matter. I don’t have any say. The wedding is a year away. I have no legal standing to ground myself upon and his family, his father, knows it.

“It’s already been decided, Mavis, and it’s happening tomorrow. You’re more than welcome to join us at the hospital.”

“More than welcome? More than welcome? Who do you think I am, a co-worker of Nick’s from Buffalo that you’ve deigned to invite to a family barbecue?” When I get agitated, my recriminations become very specific. “You can’t do this. You just can’t do this. No one even consulted me! Don’t you think his fiancé should have a say? Maybe he’ll recover, maybe… he’ll get better. This is Nick. I know Nick better than anyone. Better than any of you. Nick will get better and he’ll stay better. We’re getting married.”

“What makes you think you should have any say?” Aunt Sylvia’s quiet words, once again, slashing like a blade. “Maybe if you two hadn’t had such a long engagement, we would be consulting his wife on matters of his health, but you decided to take your sweet time. And besides,” she pauses, and I can tell she’s about to inject something meant to eviscerate, “you were there when it happened, when he did what he did. And you did nothing.”

It’s not entirely untrue, and the validity in her statement is what cripples me, snatches the voice right out of my mouth. I had been there. Well, downstairs. Not in the same room or anything. But I had been there, in the house, when he swallowed those pills. Watching a true crime documentary on Netflix while he decided to take his own life, decided that our life together wasn’t enough to keep him going, to keep him moving forward as though through molasses, through a pain I thought I might never understand. But I understand it now. How caustic, that I finally comprehend his greatest suffering now that he’s essentially gone, in a state where I can no longer reach out and tell him I finally get it, Nick! Come back, I get it!

No one says anything after Aunt Sylvia’s declaration. The entire room is looking at me, wondering what road I’ll take; will I declare war on the ancient creature and scream my head off at her lack of empathy? Or will I cower, shutting myself down until I can be alone and lick my wounds? I decide on a combination of the two, unable to howl at Aunt Sylvia the way my ego would like but not ready to back down.

“That’s a horrible thing to say,” I murmur, knowing that if I raise my voice to her she’ll just spout more evil accusations and maybe even some not-so-veiled threats. I can’t deal with a threat from her right now. I turn to Dan. “What can I say to change your mind? How can I get him more time?”

“You can’t,” Dan says with a strange sympathy. “It’s been a week. He’s brain dead, Mavis. We’re doing the right thing. The humane thing. We’re giving him what he needs.”

I know there’s nothing left for me to say. I can spend the next hours crying and pleading and getting snot all over myself to prove how badly I need him to stay plugged in, but it won’t do any good. He’s been gone for over two weeks, but tomorrow, he’ll be dead.

****

    Walking into that hospital room for the first time sixteen days ago, all I could think about was Cat Stevens - the family cat, not the singer songwriter. Although some of his music would’ve accompanied the situation perfectly. It’s essentially the same act as when Cat Stevens was put down; you walk into sterility feebly masked by “comforts of home.” Vases of flowers, get well cards, cheery and confident medical professionals. You walk into your best friend's hospital room knowing he’s brain dead. And not to say that one death is more meaningful than another but I think, and close my eyes to listen to the steady pump pump of Nick’s heart monitor, that Cat’s death had been infinitely more tragic. He hadn’t planned it, had no idea it was coming, no time to grapple with life’s mysteries before passing. I don’t give a shit about those people who go, You know, we had to put Jermaine down, but I think he instinctively knew it was his time to go. It was actually really beautiful. Fuck that. Cat Stevens was terrified and howling, so obviously not ready to pass on in some gorgeous moment of clarity.

    It weirdly seems easier with Nick. He has to go because he’s technically already gone. Alive, heart beating out a steady rhythm, a ventilator supplying breath. But dead. Dead of all the things that make a person a person. And Nick had been the most person person I’d ever known. He pulsated with energy, kinetic yet somehow warm rather than intimidating. Charming and empathetic, always fiercely real with the people in his life. Ted Bundy without the narcissism, Republicanism, and the urge to kill. As far as I know.

    It’s harder than it was the first time, seeing him so still and languid now. The vomit around his mouth and the blood at his temple were cleaned up after he got out of surgery and someone - his sister probably - has trimmed his hair and beard. But it won’t last. They’re pulling the plug in a couple hours, which means I’ve been here since last night; I raced here immediately after Shabbat dinner, making my own peace of mind apart from his family. You’re more than welcome to come. Yeah, Dan, no shit. 

I get up from my chair, walk to his bedside, and bend down to kiss him delicately, lingering for ten seconds and pretending we’re anywhere but here. Knowing this is the last time I’ll see him, I lean back up and stare at his face, trying to store as much detail as possible until I can’t take it any longer and turn to run from the room, only to run into Dan and his wife Joyce in the doorway. Joyce is more subdued than last night; without an audience, she has to sit with her grief and let it finally overtake her.

Even Dan is more chastened than usual, and he never even needs an audience.

It’s over now, and I can’t stay. 

****

It isn’t until two days later when I see him again, all of him contained in this tiny little urn. I hear someone, some small cousin or something, say that the urn is “kinda big.” The Mosses insisted on the most ornately adorned, gaudy vessel the funeral home had on offer. You know, in case Elton John and Beyonce died on the same day and were taken to the same morgue to be interred. That’s the only reasonable scenario. Fifteen pounds of chunky pewter. All of him, combined and mixed together. Now add the dry ingredients of your cake mix to a bowl and sift together until well combined. Ocular tissue commingling with pubic hair. Not two things that are typically associated with one another. The dirt he rarely cleaned from under his fingernails - or do they clean bodies at the morgue? What an odd aspect of the job. 

    I was only eleven when Cat Stevens died. Cat Stevens was his full name but by the second week we were all calling him Yusef. We didn’t have the insane amount of money that vet visits and evaluations and surgery require, and our empty coffers meant that when Yusef got sick, my parents stuck to their euthanasia guns. I begged for time and thousands of dollars to eliminate every traitorous cell of his tumor. It just made sense; grandma had surgery and chemo and radiation, so why couldn’t Yusef have all those things? Did he not deserve treatment equal to that of the family matriarch who (in a Hungarian accent) came to this country with no money, no shoes, or a place to live? She didn’t even have pockets from which to pull out her nonexistent cash.

    I stayed with Yusef as they needled him down, more for his sake than my own. When it was all over I asked the vet if I could take his ashes home so we could at least have the grand ceremony I staunchly believed my cat deserved. It turns out that vets don’t just hand over a sack brimming with your dead pet. I went home, empty-handed, totally cheated out of a great funeral opportunity. I wanted a memorial for a life cut too short. To set up some kind of permanent vigil. I wanted people to come prepared with some lovely words to say about a cat, words of remembrance punctuated by some joke about how Yusef could lie in a sunspot when it was ninety three degrees and sixty percent humidity. All I wanted was one single moment for my goddamn cat because that’s how My Girl taught me how to say goodbye.

Nick doesn’t belong here, within this urn. In this place, with this family that never understood him. They never appreciated his wildness, his demand for adventure and excitement in a world full of boredom and apathy. I’m not the same way, and it always made me wonder why Nick chose me, but I valued his untamed nature, even if I couldn’t always keep up with it the way he wanted me to. He would have hated this funeral, with all the coal black outfits and somber attitudes; it’s not a reflection of who he was. How dare they do this to him, how dare they burn his body and put it in that vile urn where his remains will fester for the rest of time. 

 The room empties out as the catering company finishes setting up the smorgasbord of deli options, and I’m left alone with Nick for the first time all day. And the thought hits me, feral and unexpected. Just take him. Pick him up, hold him again, and take him away from here. 

So I do.