My father’s friend Harold Raizes told him about living wills. Harold brought my father one and my father signed it and Harold signed his and they put them away. I don’t know where. Took them to safety deposit boxes, most likely. Or to Melvin Cohn, the lawyer. (There’s an old story my father used to tell. When he and my mother were in their early years of marriage, my father had Melvin draw up their wills. My father signed his and sent it back. My mother wouldn’t sign hers–it gave her the creeps, the same way she shivers whenever anyone mentions cats. She scrunches up her eyes and shoulders and her body shakes a little. So my mother’s will sat and sat, unsigned and unsent. Finally my father asked Melvin to call my mother and tell her there’d be an extra charge if she didn’t send it back right away. So Melvin called my mother. And she complied. I don’t know when my father let her in on the secret, but he used to tell the story in front of her, and she’d look embarrassed, caught, and she’d laugh.)
My father hated shopping. He didn’t like waiting for my mother when she was shopping; she comes from a long line of people who can’t make up their minds. Large items, small–cars, suits–he bought what was there, as quickly as possible, and was done with it. One Saturday in August six years ago he drove my mother to the airport for a 50-minute flight from Houston to Dallas, where she was going to visit her parents. (In their 90s, frail.) My father asked her, “Are you really going to leave me all alone?”
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I’m not capturing it. The man was nervous. I think he meant to say something about irony, that no activity is a safe one, that by now we’re used to people being kidnapped in shopping malls and stabbed in parking lots, but to be felled by a heart attack while trying on clothes? And he wanted to absolve Walter Pye’s of any guilt. The clothes didn’t kill my father, after all.
So Walter Pye’s was having a big sale; it was possibly the last day of it, a Saturday, a day when many doctors are not in their offices, and two of them were in a nearby dressing room. Just after the salesclerk noticed my father’s upturned feet under the door, the doctor-shoppers gave my father CPR. An ambulance came. Someone in the store who knew our family called one answering machine after the other until he located my sister’s husband’s sister’s husband, who had no idea what to say when asked about my father’s medical history.
When it was clear my father was not going to turn back into himself, the rabbi, my uncle, the doctor, and a nurse went into the hospital room. I went in too, the only member of the immediate family. My sister and mother stayed in the waiting room. My uncle put his hands on my shoulders. The rabbi read the 23rd Psalm. My father, like a lot of other men who were boys in the 1930s, used to know an old parody of it: “The Ford is my auto. I shall not want another…” I read from Ecclesiastes because I thought that summed it up much better: The race is not to the swift. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.
In his memoir Patrimony Philip Roth tells about his father’s brain tumor, describes how his 86-year-old father asks the surgeons for one more year, then three and four. Roth imagines his father finally demanding “only what I deserve–another 86 years.”
In a little pamphlet the rabbi gave us there’s a story, taken from the Buddhists, about a woman who grieved and grieved because her son had died, and she would not bury him. A wise man told her to go from house to house and to bring back a mustard seed from a family that had not known sorrow.
