I WOULD RATHER AVOID THIS PARTICULAR "STAGE" COACH

On the plane down to South Carolina to see her brother, a month after her father’s death which had happened eight weeks after her mother’s death, Susan, for the first time in her life, had no fear of flying. No fear, really, of anything. Anger? Yes, in abundance. But fear? The two worst things that she’d always imagined happening had just happened. The idea of a plane crash was strangely comforting. If it turned out that there was an afterlife, she’d see her parents again. If not, she’d be very dead and, one would imagine, completely unaware of missing them. She would also, she hoped, stop being so furious with the hospital and the doctors and the fates…and, right now, with Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.

The trip down south gave her time to think. To digest. To fume. The “Grieving Process”, like the much-vaunted “Healing Process, was just the latest psychobabble. How did these people come up with these pat pet theories?! Gawd. Grief wasn’t a process at all. A “process” had a logic, a strategy, a timeline. Grief was a snarling dog, always underfoot, sometimes nipping at your heel, sometimes staring balefully from its food dish, but always making its presence known. Susan wanted to scream, “Bad grief! Bad, bad grief!” and lock it up somewhere where it couldn’t gnaw at her. But no matter how she tried to forget that it was there, it would invariably come back out to bite her on the ass.

As an English professor, Susan had occasionally quoted Mark Twain. He had once opined that anger was “an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything in which it is poured”. But on this day, on this plane, because she needed to pour her anger into some convenient vessel, Susan homed in on Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. The Swiss-American psychiatrist, in her quest to impose order on disorder, process on chaos, had reduced the dying process into packageable, palatable bits. There was a “dying process”, a “grieving process”, a “healing process”, all very clean and easily charted through five recognizable stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Musing over those five words, Susan wryly recalled the way she had learned and absorbed history at high school. In Grade Eleven, she had memorized "the six causes of the French Revolution" to prepare for an exam and had set herself an acronym to remember them: SIRBCA. There was 1. the System of the ancien regime;

2. the Influence of the French philosophers like Rousseau; 3. the Revolution of the American states against British rule in 1776;

4. the Bancruptcy of the French crown; 5. the Character of Marie-Antoinette, she of "let-them-eat-cake' fame and, finally, 6. the Arrival of the mob in Paris. That was the way history was taught back then: memorized dates and acronyms. The initials of two of Susan's classmates, Danny Schwartz and Arlene Horowitz, had helped her to remember that during the Napoleonic Wars, Denmark got Schleswig and Austria nabbed Holstein.

"The five stages of dying"... just something else to remember in order of appearance, she mused. Thinking about it riled Susan even more than the tray table on the side of her seat which required a doctorate in physics to figure out.  It infuriated her even more than the constant bump of the overweight flight attendant’s right buttock as she tried to navigate the narrow aisle to peddle her alcoholic beverages. It exasperated her more than the discomfort of having to keep her elbows close to her body, hemmed in as she was on both sides by two other passengers, as she attempted to eat a vegetarian meal which would have garnered “5 minus stars” in the Michelin guide.

The dying process had become reasonably clear to Susan; she had gradually understood that her father was already in that process. His body had been slowly breaking down and his lungs slowly filling up. After successful surgery to unblock an intestine, the doctors had determined it was now a matter of “tinkering” to balance medications.  “Tinkering”, she snorted to herself. What a mockery of a word to describe her father’s arms swelling so much that the skin tightened and broke, to explain testicles growing so uncomfortably huge that it became something no daughter should ever have to see.

Her father couldn’t be put back on Lasix to combat water retention. Too much of it and his blood pressure would plummet to dangerous levels. Too little of it, and fluid would keep building up. He had lain in his bed through three weeks of hospitalization with a drainage tube in him before and after the surgery, all because of the sudden intestinal blockage that had brought him to Emergency. Between visits from family, medical staff and hospital spiritual counselors, invited and un-, he had had lots of time to absorb what was happening to him, and had fewer illusions than Susan or her brother about getting better.

But Susan never saw her father go through the five clear and present stages of dying.  “Anger” never showed its face nor did “Denial”. She never saw “Bargaining”. She did witness “Depression”. It was quite brief and not easily distinguishable from the grief her father was feeling over having lost a wife he’d lived with and loved for sixty-four years, who had died a scant six weeks before his colon, just like his whole life, took an unexpected twist.

Mostly what Susan saw was “Acceptance”. The family had always used the words “stoic” and “strong” when describing her father. To his face, she had often called him “Braveheart”. He had also answered to the name “Bionic Man” because of the Teflon valve from a groin bypass and steel wires from quadruple bypass open-heart surgery. The man set off more alarms at airport security than suspected terrorist hijackers.  

Susan’s father’s words to her, the night before he died, had been, “Baby, don’t be disappointed.”  “Disappointed????? “Her daddy, her guide, her hero was losing weight, breath and his life with every hard moment, and he was worried about her being “disappointed” that he wasn’t going to make it???  But that was very much the way he was. When it came to illnesses, operations (seven of them during his life), he had been very much a “no muss, no fuss” kind-a guy.  He’d soldiered on, facing whatever life threw his way. “Denial” and “Bargaining” would have been false currency for a man like him.

Susan’s mother might have been closer to Kubler-Ross’ model of the five stages if she hadn’t been so doped up with Prednisone, Morphine and assorted “puffers”.  Sitting on the plane, fuming in her constrained space waiting for her lunch debris to be removed, Susan ruminated on the word “puffer”.  Such a cute word. It conjured up songs like “See the little puffer-bellies all in a row”. It made her think of “puffins”, those little rotund black and white confections who look like penguins who've been inflated by a bicycle pump. “Puffer” was not a word that should ever be used in connection with watching your mother grab a device in panic and suck deeply from it in the hope that air would reach her starving lungs.  

Susan’s mother at 90, had had an incredible life force. Eight months before this final hospitalization, she’d signed up for Italian lessons at the Instituto Italiano di Cultura di Montreal and belly-dancing classes at the Golden Age Centre. . Mother and daughter had also begun planning for the year that their sixty-fifth and hundredth birthdays would coincide. They would do something spectacular involving laughter, music, meringues glacées and profiteroles  

Susan had pretty much thought her mother would go on forever. Somebody in the world had to be the first to overcome death, aside from Jesus, so why not her mother?  Still, there was that one day, about a week before Mom died, when she’d said, “You know, Susie…for the first time, I think I’m not going to leave this hospital.”   At that stage, fighting pneumonia which she’d licked so many times before, she still had a chance of pulling it off and going home just like all the other times. So, yes- maybe Susan had robbed her mother of the chance to discuss the dying process. But she knew her mom as no one else could. Hope and motivation had been called for; sentiment could wait. As Susan watched the flight tracker trace the miles from Montreal, Quebec to Savannah, Georgia, she went over and over it in her mind. Would her mother have gone to the “Anger” and “Bargaining” stages, briefly, had she been given the opening to talk about dying? Probably not, Susan told herself.  Conversation hadn’t been much of an option. Discussing death and dying would have been a stretch with the oxygen mask her mother was never allowed to take off.

Susan’s mother had loved life, blessed with a youthfulness and will to live that would not necessarily make her “go gentle into that good night”. Despite pains, pills and puffers, she and her family had imagined that she would just keep going like the Energizer Bunny.  

During the final three days, when she was moved to the ICU where doctors fought until the last day to turn things around, Susan, her father and brother were at her side constantly, holding her hand, rubbing her back, singing her favourite songs and talking all through the night in the surprising stillness of the ICU. During those final two days, her mother heard nothing but “I love you”, “You’ve been the best mother”, “the best wife,” “you’re so strong”, etc.. She wasn’t a stupid woman! To the extent that morphine allowed her to hear, process and react to what was going on, she had to have known on some level that all these “I-love-you”s’ were a tad excessive. She had to have realized that they were being repeated a lot more frequently, with great emotion and a growing sense of desperation.

In her shrinking world of breath and non-breath, there wasn’t much time for Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance, unless she had perhaps gone through all the stages quickly while no one was looking. A typical quicksilver Gemini, Susan’s Mom had done most everything quickly, till time and sluggish lungs slowed her down. Her dying and her death were so intricately linked that no one really knew where one ended and the other started.

As the plane slowly began its descent, Susan, whose ears tended to clog up, pinched her nostrils and recited the "kay kay kay, kaw kaw kaw" mantra which her Ear, Nose and Throat specialist has recommended foer such occasions. As the aircraft wafted slowly downward, Susan took in miles of mudflats, green and brown marshes and, finally the runway. She waited for the reassuring thud of the wheels hitting the tarmac and, like most of her fellow flyers, opened up the overhead compartment while the plane was still in motion, collected her make-up kit and retrieved her carry-on bag from the front. .

Customs declarations, immigration and passport control all finally checked off the interminable post-deplaning checklist, she went through the Arrivals gate and there was her brother. This was the first meeting since both funerals, and the joy of reunion, Susan thought, would, from now on, probably always be tinged with sadness, as brother and sister hugged and and hung on to each other. "We're orphans now", her sixty-year-old older brother said.

They walked arm in arm to his car, buckled up, and started the journey over the state line to Beaufort (which Susan would constantly explain to her Montreal francophone friends was pronounced "Bew-fert") in South Carolina. With the car radio tuned to a local station playing rockabilly, Susan's brother began to talk with great enthusiasm about his recent visits to a grief counselor.

"You know, Suze, it's one of the smartest things I've ever done. My grief counselor is really helping me deal with guilt and other misplaced emotions and unresolved issues. It's been so healing! This week, we've been exploring the 'Seven Stages of Grieving- shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing and acceptance' . And it's all based on the original theories of someone called Elizabeth Kubler-Ross."

Susan's last thought, before the endless driving on the highway lulled her into sleep, was, " Did I pay for cancellation insurance if I want to fly back home tomorrow?"

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