The Deathbed in the Living Room
A happy ending is having someone who loves you holding your hand as you die. Or being the one who does the handholding.
I wrote the text below when I last was in my grandmother’s old home in Romania, in March 2019. Three months before, my grandmother had died there, in the safest place I ever knew. I did not know at the time that my stepfather too would die, two years later— but isolated in a COVID hospital ward. We now know what a privilege it is to die at home, cared for by the loved and the loving. All the other deaths in my family are much easier to imagine and process than this last one: I cannot picture my stepdad dying alone, intubated, surrounded only by other intubated people also dying alone. Every time I conjure the image, my mind rejects it.
Here is what I wrote at the time:
Insomnia. For some reason I chose to sleep in the bed where my grandmother died. My grandfather too, before her. It’s the bed where they each spent the last years of their lives. It’s the bed to which we all took when ill in this house.
I too spent many nights here, sick with the stuff of early childhood and, I now remember, a really bad flu that caught me as I passed through town for work in the mid-1990s. My grandmother nursed my fever with compresses and camphorous massages the whole night, then, next morning, sent me back out into the world a mended woman.
One year (I must have been about six) I took to this bed for weeks, sick with something neither me nor my mother can recall. My grandmother decided to cheer me up by buying me two freshly hatched yellow ducklings from the market. They jumped all over me, burrowing under the sheets, nibbling at my earlobes with their toothy beaks, and shitting minuscule wispy threads all over the place.
I must have gotten a lot better at some point, because I recall bathing with them — a delight, as the ducklings dove and waded and generally enjoyed their time in the tub so much that eventually one of them just went limp from all the exertion. I took his (her?) tiny body in my hand and rushed it to my grandmother, dripping with bath water, panicked that it had drowned. My grandmother performed one of her magic massages, then wrapped the impossibly fragile, motionless body in a fuzzy pink doll blanket and put it in a bread basket on the radiator until the duckling reared a little groggy head and started to make barely audible sounds — not quite quacks yet, more like miniature dinosaur sighs.
Eventually the ducklings started to sprout unmistakably white feathers out of their yellow fuzz, threatening to become absurd presences in our communist apartment block. They were whisked away to a country home where, clear as daylight yet never mentioned out loud, they were destined to become roast.
I have no idea why this bed and not another one. Perhaps it’s because of its central location, in the living room, a single bed masquerading as a couch. (Come to think of it, it’s exactly what I bought myself back in Brooklyn, ostensibly for guests.) It offers an excellent view of the television, though in this country that was hardly an advantage until the 1990s, when television became watchable instead of merely an instrument of state terror. And it has plenty of room for milling and sitting around it, making the patient the pivotal point around which the entire household revolves.
Making the ill and the dying central to our lives has some tradition here. We’re caretakers. My grandmother nursed my grandfather on this bed for a few years. Then it came to be my mother’s turn to take care of her. This makes me now, perfectly healthy and with no plans to die, somewhat of an interloper in this bed. The live limb of an exquisite corpse made out of the dead and the ill, in this town where too many of mine have gone over the past four years. Perhaps I was not ready to make peace with the bed, with the dead.
Also, the springs suck.
