Chapter Thirty-Two The Layton Prize
Thirty-Two
The Layton Prize
From what would become his deathbed, my father complained about an award he had won that he didn’t want, the Layton Prize. It came with money and a trophy, but he said he’d rather not have his name associated with it. I searched through his email to learn more. I looked online. I checked every spelling of the name. Eventually, I realized: there was no Layton Prize.
He became increasingly tormented by the thought of this award. He couldn’t get comfortable, agonizing about the Layton Prize.
“Dad, would you like me to decline the Layton Prize on your behalf?” I asked him.
“Oh! That would be great,” he said.
“My pleasure. Would you like me to say, ‘We politely decline the Layton Prize’? Or ‘We respectfully decline the Layton Prize’?”
“Respectfully.”
“Done.”
Then he was able to settle down and sleep.
As we die, our minds go all sorts of places. We can’t hold it against a person, what they think about in those final days. My father’s mind, circling the drain of consciousness—he called it “a surrealist repertory theater”—preoccupied itself not with thoughts of his soon-to-be-widowed wife, or his divorcing daughter, or his college-bound grandson, but rather with an unworthy, imaginary accolade. He monologued, too, about his parents having disappointed him. His mother had died at 102. He said his father had sucked all the air out of the room; everything revolved around him.
“I have no idea what that must be like,” I said.
Even in the throes of near-death he clocked the sarcasm.
“Yeah, you got some of that,” he said, “but you didn’t have it as bad.”
He wanted me to read to him. I went and got a stack of books off the shelf the same way I did when Nate was little. I read a page or two from each. He shook off everything from P. G. Wodehouse to Shakespeare, saying all of it was “too thinky.”
Of my impending divorce he said only, “I knew the marriage wouldn’t work out.”
“Okay,” I said, and fed him mashed-up strawberries.
At around three in the morning he said he didn’t like how he felt and wondered if there might be a quicker way. It took me a minute to realize he was asking me to kill him.
“I’m not going to do that,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I think the only way out of this is through.”
He rolled his eyes and muttered something about New Age bullshit.
“How long will it take?” he said.
“As long as you need,” I said. “No longer and no shorter. Everyone has to go through it. Most people throughout history have suffered and had no one to help them. But you won’t be in pain, and you won’t be alone.”
From memory, he recited a bit of a William Blake poem, “Oh Jerusalem!”
Bring me my bow of burning fire!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
I looked it up on my phone and read the rest of it to him.
From memory I recited Yeats’s “The Four Ages of Man.”
Together we did the first page of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
Looking on, my mother clapped. I was glad we’d made her happy. Even under the circumstances, she remained stylish and feisty, showing up for each day in black jeans and full makeup no matter how bleak the agenda.
“Auden: ‘If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me,’?” I said.
“Auden didn’t say that,” my father said, bringing the volley to an end.
“What do you mean he didn’t say it?” I said. “Of course he said it. It’s from his poem ‘The More Loving One.’ It’s on the plaque outside his building.”
“Allen Ginsberg made it up.”
“Hmm,” I said. I decided to let it go. “Well, doesn’t it seem like something he would have said? Do you remember what he wrote back when Christopher Isherwood asked him to marry Erika Mann to get her a British passport and save her?”
“No.”
“One word: ‘DELIGHTED.’ Isn’t that great ? Whenever I get asked to do anything—blurb a book, moderate a talk, watch a friend’s baby, if I say yes I try to say it like that—‘Yes, I’d be delighted. ’ I think about Auden, about being the more loving one, and so I never resent doing favors. Because isn’t it a gift, being given the opportunity to do a good deed? Aren’t we lucky to be asked?”
“Hmm,” he said, and went back to sleep.
I felt lucky to be there with him, to keep him as comfortable as possible with the help of the “comfort pack” of medications I’d picked up from the hospital pharmacy. At first, he hadn’t wanted to accept the help of hospice, even though the nurse visits and equipment and medications were free and offered us support in caring for him. Only once I began referring to hospice as “drug concierge” was he persuaded of its value. The administrator did an intake, gave us an oxygen tank, a walker, and moral support, then left a phone number to call if we needed anything.
Every few hours, at his request, I helped him from his bedroom to the living room, then back again. I held him around his chest as he stagger-glided across the floor leaning on his walker. I felt his heart beating against his ribs like a bird knocking against the walls of a cage.
The last time he asked me to take him, it was harder for him to walk. Together my mother, Aunt Kath, and I wrangled him back into the bed and nestled him under the comforter. It was so much like putting a child to bed. I put some classical music on my phone, which I set on the nightstand. He closed his eyes.
My mother, aunt, and I went and sat in the living room. A few minutes later I went back to check on my father and my phone. I walked into the room. Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major was playing. My father’s eyes were open, and he was gazing out the window, through which afternoon light was streaming. He looked happier than he had in a long time. I stood there looking at him for a minute, and then for another minute. He hadn’t blinked. I reached over to my phone and turned the music off.
“Dad?” I said.
I put my hand on his arm. He didn’t move. I couldn’t tell if he was still breathing. I stared. It seemed at first as if he was, but I couldn’t tell if it was a trick of the light. His heart, so furious against my hand a few minutes earlier, was still.
My father and Beethoven and I had been in that room and now it was just me. I absorbed this new reality and then went into the living room.
“Kath?” I said, asking her if she’d come in. She and my mother both did. Kath gently pulled back the covers and checked his pulse.
“He’s gone,” she said. “He waited for us to be out of the room. I’ve heard that a lot of people do that. They want to be alone.”
My mother and Kath and I stood there.
“He looks so young, doesn’t he?” my mother said, staring at his face, which had lost all its tension. “He looks like he did when I met him.”
My mother usually waited for five p.m. sharp to have a cocktail, but on that day she mixed us vodka cranberries at three.
Each of us, my mother in particular, had been consumed by his needs and his will and his presence for a long time. Now he needed nothing else, except for us to contact the saintly hospice nurse one last time, which I did, and to take calls or to decline calls and then to discuss what to do about all the calls. Then to say goodbye as the funeral home director came over and bundled him into a red velvet bag that looked remarkably like the sleep sack Nate slept in as a baby.
“Look how cozy!” my mother said, relieved that they were not using a zippered plastic body bag. We watched as he was carried out, looking thirty years old instead of eighty. As he crossed the threshold of the house, I whispered, “Goodbye, Dad.” My eyes spontaneously filled with tears like water seeping out of the ground.
When David got off calls with the older members of his family, they’d say, “Very good…Very nice…So, that’s it,” on repeat with various intonations until someone hung up. He and his sister did that with each other as a joke: “So, that’s it!” “So…that’s it?” “ So , that’s it.”
There would be no more conversations with my father. We’d had our last fight, shared our last meal. The men from the funeral home slid my father’s body into their hearse. My arms ached from having hoisted him into his bed the last time. So , I thought, as I watched the men drive him away from the house and up the driveway, that’s it.