memoir/personal essay (5,412 words)
Cory Brown
7 McLallen Street
Trumansburg NY 14886
607 342-0233 corymarkbrown@gmail.com
Compliance
Fear of death is the cause of all our vices.
Michel Montaigne
My sister Margaret is dying in a nursing home in the largely suburban Northeast section of Oklahoma
City. It’s a one-story, three-winged building, about ten rooms to each wing, small rooms. This one seems especially small with Margaret’s large hospital bed taking up much of the space and a portable tray on either side of it and near the foot of it a good-sized TV. The windows in the rooms are dirty, their screens still on even though it’s January, and right now there’s a weak mid-day light streaming in from between the blinds. On the wall on the far side of the bed is a bulletin board with a handwritten
“get well soon” card pinned to it and below that an 8 x 10 drawing of a smiley face. On one of the portable trays beside the bed sits a small bowl of stewed tomatoes and a plate of some sort of potatomeat goulash next to some pale green beans, all untouched, and two glasses of juice—one cranberry, one orange—with that clear plastic that stretches across the top and clings to the side. I think to subvert the room’s gloominess, I fantasize that the stretches of plastic are little trampolines and that
I’m small enough to jump up and down on them, but then I imagine the plastic tearing and I fall into the juice.
Margaret had multiple organ failure a few days ago and pulled out of it, but it left her in a confused state of mind. Doctors say there’s no neurological evidence of a stroke, but the nurses say her speech

and thinking present otherwise. I teach in a small liberal arts college in upstate New York and am on winter break, so I flew down to be with her for what my siblings tell me will be her last days.
Margaret is sixty-five and I’m ten years younger. We’re the bookends for our siblings—between us are two brothers and one sister. The older brother, Butch, lives in the small town in the western part of the state where we grew up and where Margaret lived before she was transferred here and he took care of her a lot the last couple of years as her health deteriorated. The other brother, Bob, two years older than I, lives here in the city and has been overseeing her care since she was moved here. The other sister, Christine, hasn’t spoken with Margaret in several years and they’ve been feuding for as long as I can remember, I suspect because they have such opposite temperaments: where Christine is bubbly and quick to laugh, her laugh almost a tick, Margaret is serious and intellectual. When
Christine does get serious it’s usually to express her conservative Republican politics, whereas
Margaret is politically liberal and disdainful of the right in general. It’s been painful to watch these two go at each other over the years and I have to confess it’s one thing about my relationship with them I won’t miss when Margaret is gone. That thought makes me feel awful. I suppose we sanctify life so automatically that any wandering thought that hints at welcoming another’s death makes us feel guilty. I suspect a lot of that goes on, that many of our thoughts about a loved one’s death are about how it will ease our lives. Life is difficult enough, we feel, without the hardship that that person is imposing on us. But the guilt that those thoughts cause is another hardship, so we’re left having replaced one unpleasantness with the burden of another.
Since I’ve arrived I’ve begun to be bothered by a certain silence in the room, a negative space. My siblings and I talk about her coming death, and surely it’s on all the caretakers’ minds as they care for her, but it appears that no one wants to talk about it within earshot of her. Everyone here knows she will die in a few days, but no one acknowledges it: lots of greetings, no goodbyes. When they do come later, they’ll be too late because she’ll be unconscious. I’ve just arrived in this friendly and chatty state from up north—I’ve been back only periodically—so I’m not immediately used to such
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warmth and conviviality, and in the context of Margaret’s imminent death it’s awkward for me, especially given that these people—the nursing staff—are strangers. I try to put a positive spin on it, not take it personally, by reminding myself that though I’m her brother and have loved her as long as
I can remember I’m here to make her death meaningful to her not to me, so if the staff are an important part of her life, I tell myself, then even though they only recently met her I suppose they warrant her attention and affection as much as I do. Still, I’m beginning to suspect that no one else is going to do the work of pulling Margaret out of her denial.
Maybe part of the reason for the silence is that she has already hung on much longer than she was expected to, which makes it easy to assume she’ll go on living indefinitely. Another reason may be that, though this is probably not the case for the workers here, when people are alive it’s naturally difficult to imagine them dead. I’m sensing that difficulty myself. Margaret is still very much with us, even though her body is deteriorating before our eyes. For years she’s been obese and has had diabetes and unhealthy eating habits. She’s also been fending off uterine cancer the past few months, first with radiation and then tomoxifin, a drug whose side-effect stimulates appetite and she now weighs over 400 pounds, according to a recent hospital chart. She also has congestive heart failure, chronic kidney disease, and edema. She’s had no feeling in her feet for weeks and I notice they’ve begun to curl backward. Two days from now I will walk into her room to find that though she’s on her back, the sole of her right foot is facing up. It will be an hour before she complains of the discomfort and with help from a nurse moving her body around I’ll get it straight. Her catheter was removed a few days ago because of chronic urinary tract infections—the staff changes her bedding every few hours. Open sores have formed on her hands, in the folds of her stomach skin, and I'm told all along her underside. I haven't seen them because I'm asked to leave the room when sheets are changed—I think of them as moss or mushrooms growing on logs in a balmy climate. Hospice was called when they stopped healing and she refused to let the nurses clean them because it hurt too much she said. Nonetheless, in spite of this deterioration, she’s still very much present and thus it’s
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difficult to imagine her dead. Somewhere in his writings the philosopher Martin Heidegger says that death is not an experience but an existential event. You can’t live through it, so you can’t experience it. Experience is not just what we live by, it’s constitutive of being. And it makes no difference if it’s someone else’s death we’re trying to conceive of: we can’t comprehend another’s demise any more than we can our own.
So as I watch Margaret even in extremis I find it almost impossible to think of her as dead, and I’m so astonished by that difficulty it seems a wonder to me we aren’t talking about it in every conversation we have, referring to it occasionally and then standing around with our jaws hanging open. A lot is made among homo-sapien exalters—I’m thinking Aristotle and more recently Jacob Bronowski—of the awareness of death as a mark of our special status among species, but as consciousness evolved most certainly the first thing not to evolve with it was an understanding of death. I suppose the
Buddha is saying as much when he responds to the question “What is the meaning of life” by answering, “When caught in a burning building is no time to contemplate the nature of fire.” That is, the mystery of death is a tacitly understood condition that calls for us to move on. But I don’t think we can move on until we acknowledge it, which I suppose is why that exchange is in the Buddhist literature.
W hile the staff changes Margaret’s sheets I walk down the hall to look out the window of an emergency exit door, at the sparse patches of dry grass between the business properties, and at the big garbage bins and traffic along the city roads. When Oklahoma is going through a drought— which is relatively often—there’s a particular appearance in the grass and the soil that’s difficult to describe. It’s takes on a bright but pale golden color, but it’s not pretty. The only way I can describe it is to say it’s painful to see, which I suppose is why in contrast, when it’s had some moisture, it’s so pleasing to see it green. At the moment, as I said, it’s dry. The exit door is next to the room of an old woman who cries for her mother. Nurses say she thinks she’s nineteen, which is when she lost her
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mother. “I don’t know where I live!” she screams. “Mother! Mother! Where are you? I can’t find my way home! My mother says I can go home—can I go home? I don’t have no home, I don’t have no home, I don’t have no home!” I’m standing outside this woman’s room wondering if she goes on like this all day every day. I ask a nurse about her and she just shakes her head. I’m hoping Margaret can’t hear the screams because our own mother died only a few weeks ago and out of the blue she’ll cry out for her.
After a while I’ll notice Margaret’s door open and when I enter she’ll ask for a hamburger, fried chicken, and pepperoni pizza, which she’ll have trouble pronouncing. Yesterday I fed her a hamburger one slow bite at a time, brushing off the bits around her mouth with a tissue, and next week when she’s stopped eating altogether I’ll bring her a box of fried chicken after she’s asked for it for hours and it will sit on her table untouched until I throw it out the next day. We conjecture that she asks for these things because the stroke has damaged the brain’s natural functions of restraint, and having been addicted to fast food for years they are her default desires.
She also asks often that I wipe her eyes. Her right hand can still slowly lift to scratch an itch on her nose or wipe away sleep from her right eye (not her left, because she can’t reach that far with it), but her left hand lies immobile, the back of it all scabs and open sores, and the fingers have curled so far under I think of it as a small animal sleeping or hibernating. She will catch me two days later leaning over her body from her right side and looking down at it, and she’ll say “What?” and I’ll say, “Oh, I was just looking at your hand,” and she will say, “I know, bad.” When either of my brothers comes into the room they will typically uncurl her fingers, first of that left hand and then of the other, massaging them. I’ll hold or massage the right hand and do often, but I’m inclined to let the left one hibernate. I guess I still want some things to be sacred, though I also suspect I’m just scared of it because it’s such a stark reminder of my own mortality, the raw unsavory fleshiness of existence.
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A few minutes before I visit her today I consult with one of the nursing home administrators. She’s an older woman with long gray hair and a friendly, toothy smile. She says she worked at a hospice for several years and tells me that when my sister chose tomoxifin to prevent the spread of the cancer she chose to lose her dignity. She could’ve chosen a speedier death, the woman says. She also says
Margaret has gotten selfishly needy the last few weeks, and that if she herself had known when her husband was dying what she knows now she would’ve chosen a quicker death for him. Next week on the day Margaret dies, as my brothers, other sister, and the nurses in and out of the room listen to her death gurgle as they call it, a macabre kind of background noise almost machine-like, like a sump pump dredging a flooded basement, I will ask this woman, the administrator, if there’s a story behind the eagle emblem on the tee-shirt she’s wearing, and she’ll tell us of her Kiowa grandfather who designed this insignia for the American 45 th infantry division. She will say she likes to tell what she thinks few people know, which is that before the war the insignia was a swastika. I look again and can detect a swastika in the eagle on her shirt—its wings the arms of it—and while she’s talking I’ll think of the irony of the swastika’s original signification of good will and fortune and of it being a part of the insignia for an American infantry division.
That irony will make me think of the irony in our typical attitude toward the dying we care for, that no matter how much we love them we feel, stemming undoubtedly from our own fear of death and the irreversibility of life, a certain condescension toward them: we’re healthy and they’re not. I wonder how apparent that condescension is and if they detect it if their response is usually a general anger or, rather, acceptance and forgiveness: do they typically see it for what it is and choose to forgive us for both our healthiness and condescension? Most of us caretakers of the dying feel it is we who are being generous, with our time and love. In fact, so blind in our condescension are we that were the dying to explain to us their forgiveness we would probably not understand it and attribute it to their deliriousness.
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Where it gets difficult for me to understand my sister’s behavior is not in her recent desire to live, causing her to choose a drug that prolongs her dying, nor in her current death-denial, but in her behavior when she was healthy. Why is it so hard to see our self-destructive behavior for what it is, and why do we continue to engage in it when we so obviously want to live? My brothers and I have been discussing our anger at Margaret and how little sense it makes to be angry at someone who’s been depressed and addicted to bad food for years and who is dying. I alternate between being angry at her and being angry at cranberry juice and fried chicken—at materiality itself—at these thin
Oklahoma clouds in the sky above me here that haven’t let down a drop of rain for weeks. I suppose, though, that I have to acknowledge the obvious in self-destructive behavior: that right alongside that strong desire to live is just as strong a desire to die.
In the long hours watching her sleep, or just sitting with her with the TV on or off, I think about
Margaret’s struggles in academia as yet another reason she felt bad about herself. For a few years in the 1990s she was in the PhD program in American History at Oklahoma University. In our hometown for the past few years she was a realtor with my brother Butch in a real estate and auctioneering business my father had started. She would make the hour and a half drive to Norman every week to do research and go to classes and meet with faculty. Much of her research was on our family genealogy in Western Oklahoma, early pioneers; she wrote academic essays about them as part of her course work and I believe she was hoping to write her dissertation with the material. But she managed to alienate some professors and got kicked out of the program. In the early 1980s she'd also been kicked out of the PhD program in History at the University of Texas at Austin —I don't know why but when the topic came up she would make vague references to sexual harassment.
In a moment of seeming lucidity today, as if on cue with my thoughts, Margaret tells me she has squandered her life, and I say that’s all right, and she starts crying and almost in a panic asks incredulously, “How is that all right?” I answer in so many words that we all feel that way because
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there’s nothing in life we can do to live up to the miracle of it. I was winging it and don’t know if she’s bought it because she looks at me quietly and through me. Her right eye bulges from the edema and she can’t focus her gaze, so talking to her is like talking to an altar or a moon you can only catch a glimpse of through clouds, especially when she asks, as she often has these last few days, if she’s a prostitute in a hotel, or if she’s on an Indian reservation, or if she has any children. I can’t remember my life, she says often. And she thinks the nurses are trying to poison her and are, in her words, imposing restrictions. “People say things and don’t say things,” she says, which is about as poetic an articulation of estrangement as can be made, I think to myself.
And she often asks about money, thinks she’s in what she calls “insane debt,” which may merely be an indication of how psychically deep financial debts can be, though maybe she means she's rendering to sanity what she owes it, has been “borrowing” coping mechanisms for years — deflections, projections, rationalizations—and now sanity has entered the scene like a loan shark: insane debt. Whatever the question, she’ll look at me in that off-centered way and expect an immediate answer and it’s not clear to me that it would comfort her to negate her delusions or answer truthfully, that she has no children and is not married or that indeed she owes the state a considerable sum for months of room and board and 24-7 nursing care and for two recent medical crises, but that this debt is an abstract one and there is no cause for alarm or even mild concern because the state will never exact payment no matter how long she lives. What sense would it make to explain all that to her?
I imagine when she asks if she has any children she is calling up from the recesses of her brain a pregnancy in her late twenties when she was in graduate school, the result of an affair with a
Pakistani graduate student promised to a young bride back home. She aborted it because, she told me years later, she didn’t think our parents would accept a mixed-race child. Our family has been staunch Catholics for generations and she adored our now dead war hero father, who once said to
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me that on the abortion table the mother should be aborted as well. So Margaret was trapped, and when pregnant, though that was unbeknownst to me then, she took me out for pizza to ask what I thought of the morality of abortion. I’m sure my answer was forgettable, but what I would’ve said if
I’d known what I know now is wait and ask yourself that on your deathbed. I wish I could tell her now that that’s what I wish I’d said, and that she could appreciate the absurdity of that answer and see that it calls for her to forgive herself. But I don’t know if she could because I can’t trust her for who she is, or was. I feel that all my brothers and I can do for her now is care for her and help her die.
I begin to think that it’s fortunate she’s not herself because it means she can’t be suffering in the way we think what suffering is. But later that day, as I’m reading to her from a novel she says she hasn’t read and doesn’t know of, Brideshead Revisited—answering with a quick no and yes my questions Do you know of it and Would you like me to read to you from it—as I’m reading a passage of simple narrative she suddenly says, “Oh, this is about the transition to modernism.” I look up from the page to her and though I’m not exactly stunned because she’s been an intellectual her whole adult life, it’s a blow still because it means her mind is active. But I realize later the blow I feel is as much from gratitude as from sorrow because it’s I who witnessed it. I say to her in response simply, “Yes, yes it is,” afraid to walk through the door she’s opened, to discuss the narrator Charles Ryder’s guilt for having betrayed his friend Lord Sebastian for a piece of his gentrified life, or the role class and race play in the modern novel at large, Marlowe and Kurtz and Nietzsche and the emptiness at the core of consciousness that racism and classicism had been constructed to fill. Margaret, Sebastian was a
Catholic, I’d say to her, Christianity in bed with slavery, elitism, sexism, all the modes of oppression modernism exposed. Ryder doesn’t kill himself, I’d say, but he’s depressed, self-destructive, barely capable of performing his military duties, disdainful of the egalitarian, art-destroying forces of modernism that are rendering the world a flat, dull, shallow place fit only for the war-mongering beasts of philistinism. His is a torn soul, caught between his love of old-world beauty and the self-
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hating guilt its elitism creates, the elitism he longed to be a part of, the elitism that heightens by contrast the beauty of those very pre-modern artifacts modernism condemns and that he loved and longed to recreate in his sketches. Is that where you are, Margaret, or were? I’d ask. Caught between your politics of democratic generosity on the one hand and your own participation in the realities of racism on the other? Your open-armed attitude toward different races in your hometown on the one hand and your abortion of your own mixed-race child on the other? But I didn’t ask, so I don’t know.
Likewise I don’t know if she really understood me when I said it was okay that she feels she squandered her life, that we all feel that way because we can’t live up to the miracle of it. I find myself in the next few hours warming up to my answer, telling others of the exchange over dinner, thinking myself into boldness and suddenly believing it, as if the words had been spoken not by me, but by Father Rex himself, the priest from our home town who administered her last rites the other day. He is beyond incredulity and in my fantasy has told me to say ten Hail Marys and all my sins will be forgiven. The words have all escaped my mouth now and they float down with their long black capes behind them like a flock of Draculas, sharp teeth gleaming in the night, or like paratroopers floating onto the beaches of Normandy, trained to kill all the naysayers and disbelievers, the doomed nihilist Nazis crouching in their little pillboxes, Nazi hands gripping the handles of their little machine guns, the words on the beach crouched down with grenades in their hands poised to toss them. Our father was not at Normandy—when he landed at Anzio a month earlier Allied troops had already broken out from that bloody beachhead (Anzio’s)—but he got his fair share of fighting, liberating Rome, shooting his way up the Apennines and getting shot at, wounded twice and being awarded the silver star. One of the highlights of his time in Italy, we were told, was his visit to St.
Peter’s in the Vatican. So in our family members’ minds as we grew up, the Catholic Church was inextricably woven into our father’s efforts, and the Allied efforts in general, to save Western civilization from totalitarian rule, and thus its almost inviolable position as a virtuous institution.
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But I begin to feel guilty for having stolen Margaret’s anger at herself for having, she said, squandered her life. A lingering flame of vitality and I’d grabbed the candle from her hand, licked my thumb and forefinger and snuffed it out, watched the smoke float up and dissipate with a selfsatisfied gaze. Why not let her feel that anger and regret? Why quell that expression just to make myself feel better about her own self-regard in the waning days of her life? Especially if she was trying to make sense of her own participation in the racism that had marred her happiness, in the source of her decision to kill the fetus of the child she possibly longed for the rest of her life. Maybe in trying to mitigate her guilt I was trying to escape my own participation, to free myself from the quagmire. And even if she did understand me, isn’t it possible I merely exacerbated her own selfloathing by reminding her that not only did she deny her fetus this “miracle of life,” but she herself didn’t treat her body as a part of that miracle.
Three days before she dies she asks if she’s going to die and I say yes and am I where they send people to die and I say no you’re not in a hospice, but plenty of people die here I’m sure. Then she says, “I would die for you,” and I say nothing, I realize later because I want her to repeat it—it’s not every day someone says that to your face. And when she repeats it I say, “I would die for you too,
Margaret,” but only later do I realize she means it not as a general expression of love and devotion, though it probably also is, but as an agreement that she’ll go along with what we—what I, my siblings, and this institution—have decided to do with her. She’ll go along with it. She’ll die for me.
So many of her statements these last few days are so richly ambiguous that it makes me feel foolish for thinking even an extensive exegesis could untangle them. If I had time and energy to unpack them, would she be able to affirm or deny? Part of me wishes she could live longer so I could find out, and another part of me wants to respect her brevity, out of a belief that the essence of dignity is
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in letting one’s language exist in its raw state, letting it scream and kick like a newborn, full of energy and multiple potential meanings.
There’s that word again: dignity. It’s just as possible that my silence—my unwillingness to probe
Margaret for the reasons she feels she’s squandered her life—is merely another instance of the condescension caretakers inflict on the dying: where I would normally ask her questions to help me and her both understand her full meaning, here, because I think of her as a being from another world, an alien who’s floated down to us in her near-death bubble like the good witch of the North, I think everything she says is imbued with some transcendental wisdom, a form of knowing unavailable to us mere healthy earthlings. Is it possible that mystery and dignity are concepts we construct to hide truth behind, perhaps another ruse of the Catholic Church, the whole culture in cahoots with it? I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole, I’m afraid, and finding that not much down here is sacred: violation, solemnity, dignity, even sacred itself, all mere code words for power. I wish I could discuss this with her.
As she’s sleeping, a new nurse comes in to give her pain medications and in a few minutes Margaret will wake and ask this nurse where she’s from, and the nurse will say, “All over—Indonesia, Israel,
Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea.” She’ll ask my sister if she wants to hear some Indonesian and she will say yes and the nurse will speak in a strange tongue and my sister will speak back in what sounds to me like Portuguese, which she learned in Brazil in the Peace Corps in the 60s, and the nurse will speak back, still in Indonesian, but surprised sounding, as if my sister had spoken Indonesian.
Two days later during her last hours she will occasionally croak out the word water, but she won’t be able to open her mouth, and she’ll even choke on the little that I’ll release with a straw onto her lips, dipping it into a glass, plugging the top with my forefinger, then releasing the stream over her mouth.
Her breathing at the end will become intermittent and will even stop altogether for a full half-minute
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or so before resuming with one more breath. Then at the very end, the last five minutes or so, so much bile the color of pea soup will pour from her mouth that a few tissues won’t be enough to keep it from dribbling down the side of her neck. So someone will toss me a towel and with one hand, my right, I'll wipe it up—my right hand because this whole time my left will be on her forehead, as if measuring her temperature, palm down, and as much as I think at the time it’s for her I’ll realize later it’s for me because though her hands are cold her forehead is warm, and maybe, I will hope, she and
I are still in the same dimension.
When I believe she’s finally gone because she’ll have not taken a breath in what will seem like a full minute, she’ll take another breath so suddenly I will jump. When she finally goes, two or three minutes later, the nurse having felt for a pulse and read the O2 instrument and nodded to me, not shaken her head like in the movies, one of my older brothers, Butch, standing at the foot of the bed will ask me to close her one eye that’s still open, the right one, and I'll try but it won't stay shut and he will see and say, “Oh, it won't stay shut.” Three days later I'll be reminded of this eye when I notice—as I’m saying goodbye to Butch on the evening of the funeral, as we’re sitting in his dustcovered 4-wheel-drive pickup truck in front of his trailer house where he lives alone and whose two bedrooms just a few feet away are stacked to the ceiling with family and personal memorabilia—I’ll notice that the setting late January sun is irritating his own chronically twitching right eye, as it tears up not from an emotion but from, I presume, both a general and localized fatigue. And I'll want to reach over, massage his brow with my thumb as I often did hers in those last days, and those last few minutes almost continuously, and close his weeping eye.
But now, two days before she dies, the nurse, the one who speaks Indonesian, wakes her and asks how she is and fresh out of sleep she says, “Dead.” “Bad?” the nurse asks. “Dead,” she says, this time with alarming certainty. Across the bed from the nurse I ask, “Do you feel like you’re dead,
Margaret?” But even before the words are out I’m ashamed for the nurse and myself both our insipid
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denials. “Dead,” she corrects us. “What makes you think you’re dead?” the nurse asks, ever the therapist. “I’ve gone through all the proper procedures,” she says. “I’m dead. Now can I have some water?”
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