The Dictionary of Death Curses

My father’s funeral was better attended than I anticipated, given the man made a career from diagnosing and describing the end of so many lives. Sitting up the front of the local church, I had felt the press of people at my back but didn’t want to turn around and look at their faces. When it was my turn to eulogise him, I waited until the last moment to raise my eyes and look out over the collection of people, many of them physically uncomfortable in church, but on the whole looking back at me with serene half-smiles. It’s in the quiet time between the wake and the day ending that I’m allowed thirty minutes to sit at the kitchen table, finally alone, and thumb idly through the hefty featureless tome clad in a nondescript shade of blue. And it’s then that realisation comes. Like correctly predicting the plot of a movie, or remembering a good dream all day, the feeling sends a surge of satisfaction up through my gut, and I sit back in my chair. I’m not looking at the words, not really, just turning the pages to look for diagrams among the long paragraphs.

I remember when he would see patients in his study. After dark or on weekends, people would come to the door, and my sister or I would show them through to the study where he sat behind his desk, hunched over a journal. He would look up and smile as though their arrival was that of an old friend dropping in unexpectedly for tea, not a patient suffering from a prescient obsession with their own mortality. Sometimes, with their permission, I could sit in the far corner by the window and listen while he read to them from the book. They never came back. For a long time I thought it was because they didn’t like what he’d said. What he read in the book. He was never sad or shaken delivering the news; that always came later, after they left, before we went out of the study for dinner or to walk the dog around the neighbourhood. There is nothing in the book that permits a person to die, much less encourages it. I don’t understand the details but that much I’m sure of—whatever he found in the book, the rest of it was his job to put together. They would go away then, the patients, with three or six or half a month to live, and my father would be reticent for a while. It was easy to see defeat in the sadness, even regret.

But now I know why they never came back.

Towards the end, when he was dying, my father would diagnose and describe himself like he had done for countless other people. Every twinge or ache he would impassively relay to whichever of us came in next to visit—me, my sister, my wife, or a nurse. And he would pass along instructions, prescribing himself medication or therapy without looking the least bit sad. His eyes burned like a log fire, not overly bright but with a captivating, pleasant warmth. Other people mentioned them at the funeral: kind, welcoming, twinkling, they said. But they were none of those things. As I look at the dog-eared pages, reading the words those log-fire eyes read often up until a year ago, I think it would be nice to remember him with glimmering eyes. But that’s not the man he was. And it’s not the man those patients came to see. Not the eyes they trusted to send the words from the pages of this featureless blue book to his brain, to be turned around and sent back to his mouth.

The strange thing was he never used the book for himself. He called it “The Dictionary” and kept it on his desk so he could reach for it whenever a new patient came into the study. Its inscribed title is longer and more didactic. I’ll never remember it. Instead I’ll remember the way he would pick it up, settle back into his chair, touch the bridge of his glasses, and open to somewhere in the middle. How his chin scrunched when he read straight from the page without looking up. I found the book earlier today when we were in his desk drawers looking for some paper or another, to give to a relative over from Queensland. It was there on the same corner, aligned to the edge, and when I picked it up there was a clean imprint left in the dust accumulating on his desk.

None of the patients came back, not because he gave them bad news.

“He was the best physician this community has seen in many decades,” the pastor said in the opening act of my father’s funeral. “Every child, every pregnancy, and every dying person received the same compassion from his surgery, or from his study at home.”

How odd, I think, they call it a surgery. As far as I know, my father never performed surgery there. But then, I never saw him working anywhere but the study, so I can’t be sure. And although his book never left the study, the room never smelled like death or sadness. Because, I realise at the kitchen table two doors away from the study, there was no sadness in that room. No dismay, and no resentment. What he read to them from The Dictionary gave them understanding, so they could feel a little more in control of their dying. It’s not the going that scares people, but the not knowing how or why. He flicked a switch and the stairway they climbed to the end was illuminated in vivid, awesome detail, not welcoming, but never again obscured behind a cocktail of prophylactics. By then they grasped they were dying, and The Dictionary gave them comfort that this wasn’t some mysterious, unfair thing happening to them and nobody else. It was, and still is, all written down here for anyone to read. Mechanical, matter-of-fact, and above all, predictable. Finally they can—could—abandon a life of worrying about every sharp pang and infected cut.

Like then, it doesn’t matter now that he wasn’t actually reading the words from the page. The book is eighty years old and reads today as a comical anachronism. When the understanding comes to me and I sit back in my chair, I’m overwhelmed by such a lightness that I can’t keep back a giggle.

“That bloody book,” says a voice over my shoulder. I startle and fumble The Dictionary. “That bloody book told me I was done for. Gave me three months and not a day more, and here I am a year later. At the funeral of the man who wrote it.”

I open my mouth to speak, but there’s no bitter note in the old woman’s tirade, so I hold my tongue. She seems bemused more than upset, a look I recognise from the departing faces of my youth. Telling her the truth, that my father didn’t write the book and, in fact, likely never read it, won’t do the three of us any good. She smiles sadly at me and shakes her head before shuffling out of the kitchen into the front garden. I watch her go; she doesn’t close the gate behind her.

I can hear my family tidying up the living room and I’m thankful for the half-hour alone. It’ll be dark soon, and I’ll need to put the book away so I can order dinner for us. When I put Diagnoses and treatments: A modern Australian medical practitioner’s guide to the common ailments afflicting young and old back on the shelf, I will have forgotten the few words I could recognise among the faded uniform typesetting. But the comfort of knowing will still be there. Like me, as it was for them.