TALKING TO DEATH

I hit a car in the Whole Foods parking lot while my father lay dying at a residential hospice, and now the bills have come due: the work of grief still owed, and an actual bill on paper for a lot of money.

Four days into my father’s vigil I was beyond tired and went out to pick up a few groceries. I backed out of my space in the crowded lot, looked over my shoulder and saw a woman driving a white Honda down my aisle. I pulled back in to let her pass, pulled out again and heard the sickening crunch of metal on metal. Mysteriously, the white car was now behind me. I got out to face the driver.

“You hit my car!” the woman declared in high-pitched agitation.

I stared at her, dazed with exhaustion.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “it was an accident. I thought you passed me.”

“You hit my car!” she echoed, even more shrill.

It’s a miracle I haven’t hit more cars. My brain is mud. I probably shouldn’t even be driving.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated, ever-present tears rising.  

She scribbled down my insurance information and copied every letter of print on my driver’s license down to the color of my eyes. She demanded I hold my cell phone up as she called to assure I wasn’t giving her a false number.

Who has lied to you? Will someone yell at you, demanding to know why you weren’t more careful?  I studied the stress lines in her face.

This is taking way too long.

Her driver’s side door was perpendicular to the rear of my car, the point of impact. There was only a small dent and no apparent damage to my rental, a red box like car whose name I could never remember. I liked the red car because I could find it. In the previous month when Dad was in intensive care, I seemed to always have a silver or white car that was immediately swallowed into anonymity by the massive hospital parking structures.

 I guessed $300 to hammer the dent out, knowing the cost is usually double the obvious. Certainly under my $1,000 deductible; there would be no point in reporting to insurance.

Deeming my dad to have no chance of meaningful recovery, the doctors had released him from all the medications that kept him alive. It was predicted his heart would last 2-3 days at most. The watch had now stretched to four long days and nights and I wasn’t about to miss his sacred moment of passage.

“I’m sorry, I really need to go,” I told her. “You have all my information.”

The woman scanned my car for anything else to write down. She was wiry, shorter than me, her narrow face set with determination. It dawned on me she didn’t intend to let me out.

“My dad is dying,” I finally admitted, tears spilling freely. “He will probably die today. I promise you, I’m good for the expenses. Please let me out.”

 “OK, you can go,” she said warily. “We’ll settle it between us.” She got back in her car and unblocked me. “Bless you,” she muttered. My shoulders dropped in relief.

And so I left her, “As I have left all my lovers.” The phrase came unbidden, stuck in a deep groove in my head since the sleepless night before.

It was a haunting line from an epic poem, A Woman is Talking to Death, by Judy Grahn, first published in the seventies. More than a poem it was a manifesto, read aloud at gatherings or between lesbian couples. “My lover’s teeth are white geese flying above me,” we would recite, “My lover’s muscles are rope ladders under my hands, we are the river of life, and the fat of the land.” It was art that spoke the word lesbian many times, helped define a new culture.

In the center of the poem the narrator leaves the scene of an accident because she’s “A queer, unemployed woman,” sees herself invisible, without credibility. The driver in the accident was a black man. It was not his fault. After the narrator left, she learned he was severely beaten by the police. She is sorry, full of regret.

I’d no premonition about an accident when the poem first whispered to me on the hospice cot at 3am. I was the one who stayed the night because Dad didn’t want to be alone, because I’d come to the east coast from California, because I could. I was happy for the time with just us two. I could summon the stamina because I knew it wouldn’t be long. Death was already holding Dad’s hand, hanging on each labored breath.

At three a.m. he had called me softly from my cot, “Sarah, help.”

“What help do you need?” His head was covered by the cloth he now kept over his face all the time.

“I’m alone,” he said. Tears rolled out from under the edges of the cloth.

“Yes,” I said. “You are. And I’m here too.” I took his hand.

“Hey Death, Ho Death,” I chanted silently, as Grahn’s poem unwound back to me its many verses. It was still loaded in my long-term memory, along with “Charge of the Light Brigade,” from seventh grade English.

In the morning I googled the poem, read it for the first time in decades, letting the intensity of Lesbian nation resonate back through me. Beyond the title, the text had nothing to do with my father. I’d never shared that poem with him. He didn’t want to know anything about lesbian culture back then, wanted it to all go away. For the mistakes of those years, I’d forgiven him.  Aside from the title, While Talking to Death, it was Judy Grahn’s story alone.

I sensed, rather than remembered the route back to hospice, driving with utmost caution. Back at hospice, my two sisters were still sitting quietly at their posts.

“How did it go?” my middle sister, Emily, asked.

“OK,” I said, setting down the grocery bag and collapsing on the bedside cot. “I’m tired.”

Emily nodded in affirmation. We all knew the word ‘tired’ was just a placeholder for an alert state of exhaustion so profound it begged new vocabulary.

“How’s Dad?”

“The same.”

I pulled two pillows over my head and tried to sleep. Maybe if I’d told my sister about the accident, she might have helped me think more rationally. I didn’t want to give my family one more thing to worry about. I wanted to be a rock, stay up night after night, do what was needed. I didn’t want anyone to suspect I was coming unglued.

My cell phone rang several times. I ignored it.

After a restless ten minutes I abandoned sleep and checked the messages. Both a police officer and my rental car company had been calling. The other driver had reported me to everyone she could think of.  

Oy.

The police officer had a British accent, unusual anywhere for an American cop, even stranger in North Carolina. My dad lay breathing heavily in what we assumed was the beginnings of the death rattle.

“What is your local address, mum?”  

Had he really said ‘mum’?

“I’m from California, sir. I’m living here in the local hospice facility with my dad. He’s dying.”

“Ah, so sorry to hear that,” his words clipped, yet his tone belied sympathy.

“It’s important that you come back here, Mrs. Young, so we can get your statement for a full report.”

 “I can’t. It’s a small amount of damage,” I assured him. “I’m not worried. You can handle it between the two of you.”

“Well, I’m not so sure it’s a small amount of damage.”

  His words made no sense, but the melody of his accent was soothing, as if he were reading me a story. He took my information over the phone as I rocked in the wooden, old-style rocker on the hospice porch.

The day after the accident an orderly, an older African-American man, noticed I was spent beyond the edge. He opened a little used room, wheeled in an extra bed and encouraged me to sleep. It was the bath-room, the room where they bring the dying who want a bath. He said the staff often slept there when working extra shifts.

I slept for hours and when I woke I had surrendered. It was not for me to claim front row seating at Death’s passage, to think I was needed for my dad to let go. I started sleeping at my mom’s house. My brother-in-law, a better non-sleeper than I, took over the night shift at hospice.

A couple of days later I asked another orderly about opening up the bath-room for one of us to sleep there again. She said no, quite sure no one had ever unlocked that room for family members before.

After eight nights it was clear that Dad was not going to leave with the cymbal’s clash of another heart attack, but the slow, mournful chant of his organs gradually closing down, his body wasting from no food or water. On the ninth day it seemed certain that Death was only inches away and I spent the night at hospice again. I woke suddenly as a loud croak burst from Dad’s throat. Maybe it’s the Death frog, not the Death rattle we’re waiting for. I was less reverent now, impatient, bone weary of my young daughter’s daily plea, “When are you coming home?”

I sat one hand holding his and the other hand on his chest. In between long breath apneas I felt the slowing of his heart, like a stream formed after a flash rain dwindling to a trickle over the rocks. I breathed with him. This is why I’m here. His body was coming to rest gently, as if landing on a feather bed. Suddenly a loud wrenching cough twisted through him, and his breathing returned fast and rough as if he were saying, “No. I see where this is headed, and I’m not going there, yet.”

By the tenth day Dad had burrowed so deeply into himself we decided to leave him alone at night, certain now our constant presence was hindering the process. Death needed alone time with Dad.

The morning after his first solo night, my youngest sister, Liz, texted: Just talked to the nurse. Dad is alive, had a “pretty good night.”

Me: Ah, that’s sad

My sister: Yes. Life is ineffably weird.

I had to look up ineffably.

“Ho and ho, poor Death, only the arrogant invent a quick and meaningful end for themselves, of their own choosing.”  

I plumbed Grahn’s poem looking for hidden wisdom. On night fifteen I slept at hospice again, but not because I believed anymore “this was it.” While I knew Dad couldn’t live indefinitely without food and water, I had stopped expecting Death. I stayed because my middle sister believed we should, and she wanted my company.

We sat as the animal-rasp pant of the last stage began. We ate Doritos from the vending machine at 1am, threw them at each other, laughed hilariously at our attempts to cover the smell of my father’s decay with air freshener, strew rose petals over his bed, embraced the not quite human sound that arced from Dad’s throat. I stroked his hair, watched his face change from young to middle-aged to old and back again. My sister and I fell asleep.

At 4:30 am I bolted up, jarred awake by the absence of harsh breathing. I woke my sister and we draped ourselves over either side of Dad’s shrunken body as the breath finally left him with a gentle sigh. The sacred moment arrived as Death kissed Dad’s warm brow.

At that moment it seemed this had always been the plan. Maybe it was Death who had laid the cloth over dad’s face, so they could have the long private chat needed to let go of 87 years well lived. Death, who needed fifteen days to make the point his business with my dad was none of ours. Death, who likes attention, waiting for the carpet of red rose petals we laid out for him.  Death, who likes to slip in un-noticed, waiting until we were relaxed, laughing, no longer poised grim and sorrowful.

That same night, Obama would be elected president for the second time. After the polls closed, my sister’s Rabbi, her friends and mom’s friends would gather at her house for the first of many circles of remembrance.

After the ceremony I finally bought a ticket home.

I returned home full of grief and body pain. We sat Shiva for seven days, a beautiful ritual, and Dad’s spirit stayed with us. But work and parenting and the rest of life revved back up with no sentimentality and I had to steal time to remember. After having sat for fifteen days with such exquisite attention to Dad’s death, I found myself bereft and bewildered that he was gone.

Three months later, a packet arrived from Avis with ten black and white photos of a severely damaged white Honda, for which I was being billed $5,000.00. The photos showed a buckled front hood and smashed right headlight suggesting a full-on front-end collision.

Clearly the parking lot woman was trying to pin another accident on me. I was being scammed! Friends echoed my outrage. I emailed my insurance company investigator detailed diagrams depicting the event. She agreed I couldn’t have caused the damage.

What kind of person would take advantage of such a vulnerable time to cheat someone?

“You’ll defend me, right?  When do you tell the rental company I’m a victim of insurance fraud?”

“We’re done once we deny the claim. You have no witnesses. You didn’t confirm damages or return for the police report.”

Because I was busy, talking to Death.

“What did the woman say when you interviewed her?”

“She was vague, didn’t want to talk.”

“Doesn’t that prove she’s covering something up?” It dawned on me the investigator might believe I was the one not telling the truth. My aching neck muscles tightened. Like in the poem, “There is no witness,” not even me.

“We can pay the claim and it goes on your record as your fault, or we can deny it. It’s up to you.”

A small kernel of doubt started to form under my skin, followed me in my business of the day. What if I was wrong? What if I were so deep in conversation with Death I missed a significant accident?

I sent for the accident report from the North Carolina DMV. I pulled my children’s matchbox cars out of the closet to practice all the potential accident permutations, the cars solid in my hands. A new possibility emerged. If after passing me the woman wanted my spot she might have quickly backed up behind me. At high speed I could have backed directly into the front of her car and caused that damage. Yet what about the dent I saw on her front left fender? Or did I?

All I knew for sure was my dad might die any moment and I had to get back to his room. I had dashed across the country, left a workshop I was leading, left my children for an indeterminate amount of time to be at his side.

Maybe it was Death who sent the anxious woman to block me in at Whole Foods to keep me from driving recklessly into a much more serious accident ahead.

“Hey Death, ho Death, We left as we left all our lovers, much too soon to get the real loving done.”

Four months later my dad’s altar is now cluttered with kid’s unfinished homework and other ordinary stuff. I flip through the accident report finally arrived from the North Carolina DMV, stare at the diagrams the anxious woman had drawn for the British police officer. The pictures depict how I swerved out of my spot into the front of her car and returned to my parking lot space where she blocked me in. Just like the matchbox cars.

Tears streaked the accident repot as I stared into the altar photos of Dad with his childhood dog, as a young father, holding the one fish he ever caught, celebrating his last, 87th birthday.

Dad, why are you still so gone?

I’m not a person capable of missing an accident. So many things I’ve been so sure I knew. And about grief, I’ve known least of all.

There’s been nothing in my well organized and planned life to prepare me for this series of events: intensive care, the Death watch, missing an accident, death itself. I’ve tried to be a dutiful griever, scheduling time for feelings and tears. Yet I am still pinned to the floor by the brutal shock of loss.

 My father is dying… I say to the woman in the lot. Did you block me in so you could hold me while I sob about how hard it is to watch him waste away, how ready I am for him to be done, how unprepared I am for him to be gone?

“Yes,” she says lovingly, no longer my villain.

I didn’t like that woman, let alone want her to touch me. Death has been slowly turning my heart inside out, as painful a stretch as the tiny opening of the cervix widening for a baby’s head.

I hit a car and left. Not only do I feel bad about it but the bill has come due and I have to pay a lot of money. My shoulder, back, and neck still hurt and it’s not just a metaphor. There’s no list to bring any of this to a close. My father’s death is my first deep loss and I’m adrift. It is time to stop talking to Death and listen. Just listen.

Sarah Young is a California based, Queer writer, who writes regularly for education-based journals on her work in culturally responsive and anti-racist education. This is her first published piece of personal memoir. “Talking to Death,” interweaves themes of her father’s death in hospice, a mysterious car accident, and reflections on Judy Grahn’s seminal poem on Lesbian experience, “While Talking to Death.”