The Color of Dying

This is a story about how attitudes about life and dying are intimately connected.

• Short story

								
The Color of Dying

Her eyes were half open. Half alive, half dead. Half here, half gone. He stared at her breathing as if he could make it stop. “Okay, one more is all you get,” Jeffery whispered.
She was his last living aunt. Years ago, after her husband of 62 years died, she had asked him to move into the big house with her. “I guess this makes me your fag hag,” she said after the funeral. She nonchalantly tossed the words into his lap as they sat in the back of the white limousine (she refused black) driving away from the cemetery that hot and humid August day. “You seem surprised,” she said, throwing her hand up dismissively and turning her head away, “as if I even knew such a word existed.” She turned back to him, patted him on the knee and consoled him “That’s the trouble with you homosexuals. You spend so much time in the closet and then when you do step out…”
“It’s come out, Martha,” he interrupted, correcting her as he stared out the limo window, trying to regain some dignity after her startling comment.
“Come out. Step out. Fall out. Who cares. I think for most of you it’s prance out from what I have seen,” she said, defending her position. Then, seeing he was about to scold her as he always did when she throws out a stereotyping word, she added quickly: “except you, Jeffery,” and patted his knee again. She waited, and, seeing that he was ignoring her, continued, “Anyway, my dear, your gay community is so caught up in its own world that you think we straight folks don’t know the language. Well, you’d be surprised what an old ‘bee-otch’ like me knows,” she added, snapping her fingers in the air above her head. “I read Maupin, you know.”
He watched her labored breathing for hours – maybe days, he no longer knew – hoping each one would be the last. “I said only one more!” he gruffly whispered again, seeing her frail body struggle for another breath. He really wanted to scream it at her, laying there, now nothing but a fetal 88-year-old. Imagine – fetal, yet 88. Fetal-to-fetal. The great Mandela.
Maybe the hospice lady was right:  she was holding on until her “room up there” was just the way she expected – and demanded – it to be.

She liked throwing him off balance like the time they were studying Caravaggio’s “Boy Bitten by a Lizard” in a museum in Florence. “If dying was a color,” she whispered to him, “what would it be, Jeffery?”  
He looked at her to see if she was serious. He saw, as usual, that she was very serious when asking such a question “Gray. White moving towards black. It would have to be gray.” He quickly threw back, not wanting to ignore her question (he knew better) but making it sound like he was not interested at all in pursuing the topic. “White is alive, black is dead. Gray is moving toward death from the day we are born. It’s that simple.”
“How plain, Jefferey. How… mediocre. I would expect that of so many but not you. Ask a thousand people and nine hundred and eighty would say gray.” She became oddly silent as if she had drifted off somewhere and just when he thought that the morbid conversation was happily over, she announced – Martha always announced when something important had to be said. “No. Dying is flaming pink – no pun intended, my dear –” this time just barely touching his shoulder  “ – flaming pink merging to magenta then swallowed by deep, rich purple. You must watch more sunsets, Jeffery,” she patted him on the knee and rose to move on to the next room. 

She was wrong, he thought to himself as he rose and stood looking out at the view from her hospital room. It was gray. Most of life is gray. “Mediocrity is gray,” she would rightly say. Gray and safe. She despised safe. She celebrated color. “Color is for dreamers,” she would say “and” – laughing to himself in the sterile gallery – “drag queens.” How she loved drag queens. She told him once that he should try doing drag and that his drag name should be Dee Dee Cupp, sporting huge bouncing breasts and a hairstyle – pink of course – that would make Dolly Parton jealous. He stood fighting the liquid that was pooling at the rims of his eyelids. He recalled the day after the doctor had told her there was nothing they could do to stop the cancer that had invaded almost every part of her. She filled her apartment with pink, magenta and purple flowers; this was her way of telling him when he returned to town. He had grabbed a taxi from the airport, anxious to see her and find out what the doctors had told her. She opened the door and handed him a bouquet of the same colors, kissed his cheek and told him “the colors of my life have changed, my dear.”

He turned to look back at the hospital bed with its shiny chrome railing, pulled up to keep her from – from what? He felt that nauseous combination of anger at her for having to leave and anger that she was still here. Another labored breath. He remembered when he was only 12 how he watched his dog Buster breathing like that. He ordered Buster to stop breathing, then, too, but Buster was stubborn just like this woman. The vet said the shot would make him stop but it was taking too long. He first ordered then begged the stupid dog to stop. “Can’t you do anything I tell you?” he pleaded through his tears. “Just stop. Please. Stop.”

“Stop what?” the nurse asked. “Is everything okay?” And, seeing that she had startled him, apologized. “I’m so sorry; I thought I heard you say something.”
“Nothing. Just remembering. It’s nothing. How much longer do you think?” he asked, forgetting that he had asked her the last time she had checked in on his aunt and on every visit before that. “I’m sorry. I know. She’ll go when she is ready. I just can’t watch her like this. There is nothing magenta about this, you know. It is very gray,” he mumbled as he stood by the bed.
“Magenta?” the nurse asked.
“The color of dying. Aunt Martha insisted that the color of dying was magenta.”
“Oh yes,” the nurse said, remembering a similar conversation she had when Martha was first admitted. “She asked me that soon after she came here. Only she told me that it was also purple and flaming pink and if I didn’t understand I was to ask you. What do you think she meant?” 
“I’m not sure. Something to do with closets and prancing, I think,” he said and, as the nurse left the room looking more confused than ever, he bent over his aunt’s bed and whispered in her ear “You bee-otch.”

His parents taught him independence that, to him now, was really loneliness disguised as maturity. His father, James Jeffery Logan – he dared anyone to address him as “JJ” – was a professor of linguistics at the University and from whom, although he hated to admit it, he absorbed his love of words. He was tall and stern, a dark, full head of hair bordered by gray. His demeanor was clear, concise and steady like a Latin conjugation. His mother, Mary Elizabeth – “Liz” – lived somewhere in the shadow of her shining academic husband and followed religiously the mantra: “don’t rock the boat!” Somewhere between shadow and shine a boy grew up despising the boat that he was terrified of rocking yet loved it when it sailed him to the exotic ports of language.

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