“Outrageous Ending”

To know just how he suffered would be dear;
To know if any human eyes were near
To whom he could intrust his wavering gaze,
Until it settled firm on Paradise.

 To know if he was patient, part content,
Was dying as he thought, or different;
Was it a pleasant day to die,
And did the sunshine face his way?

What was his furthest mind, of home, or God,
Or what the distant say
At news that he ceased human nature
On such a day?                              

                                       E. Dickinson

My most important in-law died without even knowing of my existence, or that of his first grandchild. I first met both my in-laws the day Josh died, not an ideal scenario, but we were summoned urgently half the country away because Josh had taken a turn for the worst and was not believed to make it another full day. We figured it was not the ideal moment to brief them on details that would certainly upset the situation more, besides, Josh had been coming in and out of consciousness for the past couple of days. Joe, Leo and I took the red eye and arrived at dawn. There was confusion in the house as we arrived from the airport; lots of commotion and a sense of loss filled the air, the very stuffy and stifling air in that huge dream house that overlooked the Pacific Ocean. As we dropped our bags in the hallway, our intuition told us we were too late, but held hope that we would still share a word with him before he died. We later learned that as we entered the house, he took his last breath. In a sense, he kept his promise of waiting for his kids to arrive.

Albert, the eldest of the three, the only son who lived with my in-laws, kept walking in circles before us, like a headless chicken. He looked distressed, disoriented and confused. To add to this mayhem, a dishevelled woman came out of nowhere.

- “This must be Lenny”, I thought to myself. Without any formal introduction, or knowledge of who I was, she yanked me from my wrist and hurriedly took me inside the bedroom where Josh lied dead. Before me, a most nauseating sight, a man had wilted away consumed by Cancer, bed sores, emaciation, and the consequence of shooting up morphine for months. He was only fifty four but looked a hundred years old. His skin looked like yellow papyrus that clung tightly to the bones, like a mummy. He might’ve taken his last breath upon our arrival, but in true honesty, it was evident he had stopped living long before that.

The room smelled badly, a stench only similar to that of abandonment and neglect, of being forsaken by God. I stopped breathing through my nose and put both my hands over my face to block the smell. Lenny jerked me closer to him, opened his eyelids with one hand and put the other on my back to push my body forward so I could see that Joe was the only son to inherit his green eyes. She then turned him over, weightless like a leaf, for me to see the putrid open sores on his back -full spinal chord in view. I felt my breath abandon me and the room started spinning, I must’ve fainted. When I came to, I overheard Lenny telling Joe that I was a weakling.

-“she has no stomach to be here, and who the hell is she by the way, your girlfriend? Why did you bring her here? She can’t handle death” – she expressed emphatically. I never heard Joe’s answer.

As I walked towards the voices in the living room, Lenny swept me from head to toe and then asked me to help fill out the death certificate and translate legal documents from English and Dutch, to Spanish. I didn’t speak Dutch but with logic and common sense, I figured out what was what and where it belonged.

-“You look like a smart girl, you’ll figure it out. The funeral people should be here shortly, they’re Mexicans like you, so you deal with them” – she commanded as she walked away to her bedroom.

While I stared at the rusted old typewriter, trying to make sense of the past hour,  Lenny braided her long blonde hair, spread some rouge on her cheeks, sprayed some perfume on her neck, changed into her black Bikini and off she went to the beach to mourn her husband by herself. After years of constantly caring for this sick man, she was finally experiencing liberation and she needed to be alone, with herself, with her thoughts.  You could palpably see this woman shed the weight of his illness with every step she took on that deserted beach on a cool early morning in March 1978.

My main idea for me being there was to help her out emotionally in this hard time, it turned out this woman had an igneous heart and an alabaster soul, the by-product of surviving the war, or maybe the reason why she did.  I then realised that my presence was obsolete and would only aggravate her in the long run.

From the terrace I could spot the black bikini in the distance as I sought help with crucial medical information not accessible to me on the papers before me. However, Lenny was unavailable, she walked the Manzanillo Bay back and forth, from end to end, tirelessly, not minding my request for help and ignoring me completely as she walked in front of the house. It was obvious that she considered my presence surprising, intrusive and offensive – to say the least.

Joe’s parents suspected that he had a steady girlfriend but they did not approve of me, or of anyone else for that matter; now I was introduced as his wife and upon seeing my stretch marks when they lifted me off the floor, lied me on a bed and removed my sweater, it had to be mentioned that our one year old son had stayed behind under my mother’s care.

She felt so insulted, she was fuming.

-“How could you do this to me today? She should’ve stayed home where she belongs, she’s not one of us”. She yelled in anger as she stormed out to the beach in front of the house.

-“Nice to meet you too”, I said to myself. And so I sat alone in the living room for hours, a dead man lied a few feet away from me and I could not be anything but perplexed and sympathetic at the nonchalant reaction of this man’s immediate family. The three sons were also nowhere to be found, they had been at the tennis courts while his father’s body was being hauled from the bedroom to the Hearst. Nobody cared to know where Josh’s grave was.

-“Someone please tell them that death is forever, and what they do today, will never be erased” – I pleaded to no avail to whatever higher power heard me.

 -“It´s  just a physical body, it will rot and merge in the soil, we shall see him again, the real Josh is forever gone and does not dwell in that rotting shell”. They kept telling me as I cried oceans amidst amazement and disbelief. Nobody saw him being buried. There was no funeral, no service, no food, nobody spoke about who he was, what he did, his legacy… No musicians played a sombre tune to alert the world of the loss of a fellow human. There were no tears aside from mine and I am not so sure I cried the loss of his life, but the unfairness and awkwardness of the events that day. Nobody deserves to die that way; there should at least be one mourner when a casket is lowered into the ground, one person who truly feels that the death of this individual is actually a loss to the world. But there wasn’t.

For the longest time, everyone would complain that his presence was never seen in any of the family pictures they had, seems like Lenny was always doing something with them, but not Josh. One lazy day, not so long ago, we visited his brother and coincidentally; he was doing some spring cleaning. A box containing childhood pictures came to our attention.

-“See? The old man never shared anything with us, it was my mom who made the family life, not him.” – Leo grunted in disappointment as he tossed the picture towards Joe, who agreed.

-“Yeap, we were obsolete in his life, he never gave a shit about us, if it hadn’t been for Lenny, we would’ve been completely neglected” – Joe attested.

Curiosity took the best of me and I grabbed the box of memorabilia. I first saw a picture of Lenny and the kids on a sailboat in Grand River, where they parked their camper for the summer so the kids could enjoy water sports. Next picture was by the Christmas tree, a tree so filled with presents that you could hardly see its shape in the background. Joe was sitting next to a big TV set.

-“We had the largest sailboat on the river, see? And here, that’s our brand new colour TV, we were the first ones in Ancaster to have a colour TV, and we had two, one in the basement and another in Lenny´s bedroom! All the kids wanted to come home and watch cartoons in colour, we were popular!” – Joe was proud of those moments etched in photographic paper.

Upon careful observation of all the pictures in the box, on the bottom left corner I spotted a shadow. It was the silhouette of a man wearing a Fedora and extending his elbow outwards like holding a camera to take a picture, seen from behind. It was Josh! Josh was in almost every picture they cherished so much, his hat, his elbow, his shoe, his car, his briefcase… his presence in every picture he took of his family at play. These men condemned their father’s absence, but if it hadn’t been for him working so hard to provide all the luxuries and all the toys, and the hours he spent driving home for lunch everyday, those pictures would not exist at all.

The biggest disadvantage in his life… someone had to take the pictures and film the movies! Nowadays, nobody even thinks about him at all, and the unfairness towards him still haunts me.