I called him “uncle” all my life, though we were not related by blood. When my father was dying in 1969, he asked his dear friend and colleague in the School of Social work to keep an eye on me, my mom and brother over the years.
A few weeks ago when I got the news he was dying, I called him so we could say our goodbyes. It wasn’t an easy call to make, but I’m glad I did. He didn’t have the strength to talk for long, but he did make reference to that promise he made my father all those years ago. “I hope I’ve fulfilled that,” he said as we both choked on our tears. “You have,” I assured him. “You have.”
For the past few weeks I’ve received daily emails from England keeping me abreast of his condition and interactions with visitors. He was so loved. He never married and had no children or grandchildren, yet in his last days he had a crew who came in to read to him, rub lotion on his hands and feet, massage his chest and back and distract him with You Tube performances by the stars of his generation.
An email I read today reports his death Thursday morning:
He was with Mary when he died. She had gone over to the home first thing to be with him this morning and it was all very peaceful. She had hummed a few Klezmer tunes to him and talked to him about beautiful things. He was aware of her being there and could hear her. She suggested he just close his eyes and think of the most beautiful thing he could think of: Corinne. This brought a smile to the corner of his eye and a tranquillity to his face. He was thinking of her and Mary sang “Strangers in the Night” to him. He took a few deep breaths, and then he was gone.
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Published in the daily Yedioth haaronot, Israel.
Translated from Hebrew by Dena
My Cousin Sidney
Tracy sits beside my cousin Sidney’s bed and reads him letters from friends.
He listens.
No one talks about recovery in the emails and letters.
Death is an established fact in this room at Parkside Nursing Home, where in each of its seventy-five pleasant rooms houses a person waiting for his end.
This cousin of mine, whom I came to visit and say my goodbyes to, never married. There are no offspring around his English bed, no loving wife, but friends and loved ones gather around him from around the world, for a month now, as he is swept into his death.
He has no need for lies, he yearns for the end, but still enjoys a good chat.
A short one.
He is seized by fatigue and apologizes, so they will leave.
“How was the night, Mr. Wasserman?” asks the nurse, who comes in to tune the pain-control machine, which injects the pain relievers.
“The night was good,” says Sidney, with the softness he reserves for the nurses,
“it’s only the morning that is crappy.”
Lean, almost fleshless, he eats nothing and seems like a man floating among the sheets, escaping from the prison of the flesh. spiritual as a monk in his Chinese robe, his head lying on the pillow like a death mask but his eyes still full of humor.
He is eighty-four and has incurable pancreatic cancer. His full life is drawing to its close consensually. Surprisingly I discover in the week I spend at his bedside that being there fills me with calm acceptance, not terror. I found him late, only about six years ago, when I started spending time in Oxford, for writing. I sought companion ship and conversation in my non-writing hours and found a forgotten cousin a mere twenty minutes away, a distance travelled by comfortable train. A wise sociologist; our grandmothers were sisters, or something like that. It is a distant blood relationship but a close relationship of spirits. And we started to talk like friends about love and fathers, mothers and closeness, coupledom and aloneness. Do you know how it is, suddenly gaining something that you had always had but never noticed? On the eve of last Passover, when I was alone in Oxford, we went to a pub and celebrated an unkosher holiday with good conversation.
The retreat of the flesh exposes his spirit and clear mind. The sharpening features of a man who had always been elegant, smiley, and attentive. A sociology professor who looked at the world from the sidelines but remained inside it. Full of compassion. In the ’60 he left the United States for good, after it murdered the two leaders that h e loved: Martin Luther King Jr., in whose marches he marched as a white intellectual believing that everyone is equal, and J. F. Kennedy, whom he criticized but loved. At that time he had enough of the pernicious continent and came to Reading, England, where he taught and lived about half of his life, to his death, after which he will be buried in a Jewish cemetery although he has been a lifelong atheist, because that is what his father, Isidor Wasserman, requested.
Inside the torments of his terminal illness, dimmed with pain and with its relief, he asks and inquires, sometimes sings, remembers, sinks into sleep and wakes up happy about the election of Barack Hussein Obama, who closed a cycle that will let him die in peace. “Because when I marched with Luther King, who would have believed I would liv e to see a black president?” He falls asleep and wakes up for the visit by what they call McMillan Nurses here. These are British nurses who visit the homes and rooms of the dying, to make sure they are comfortable. “Comfortable”, that is the word that is always repeated. The painkiller dosage grows gradually, along with the pain, and blocks it until the patient is gone. I am impressed with the English way of doing things. “How can you photograph him?” asks me cousin Bonnie. “All I see here is disease and death and I get spooked.” But I am not dejected at his sight as I am at the sight of my mother, who has been withering, humiliated, for years now. My cousin Sidney is retreating from life fearlessly, nudged into sleep, slowly fading away. At his bedside, death is only a companion who quietly waits to take his part without drama, and the dying man yields himself to the scythe-bearer in the same dignified way he has lived all his life.
Igal sarna
2008–11–29
