The Color of Dying Page #2

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

• Short story

								

They left him, dying just 40 days apart; his mother literally losing her mind to a massive stroke and his father, suddenly feeling the emptiness she left behind for which he could not find the words, laid down one night and, Jeffery believed, ordered his own heart to stop beating.  With no one or no reason to hide from any longer, he became acutely aware of the secret room – the one that started appearing in his dreams at thirteen when he entered the exclusive private boarding school that his father had chosen for him before he was even born – that he now realized was no room at all but the essence of his being. How does one accept something so little seen or known except as a collection of words both compelling and terrifying? He was, to paraphrase a title from one of his favorite authors, a “stranger in a strange self.”
He tried his mind at writing about this new and uncharted territory of his self and, having some modest success, decided to keep at it. But the words and sentences and paragraphs that paid his bills turned this territory into a jungle as he struggled over every word and every phrase fearing that each would not be good enough. It mutated into a nightmare of second-guessing and self-doubt. Coming to terms with being gay was nothing compared to the fear of writing it “just right” or the fear of rocking someone else’s boat. Writing had become an exhilarating and exhausting task. He fell passionately in love with the characters in his stories yet struggled with the words to describe them. The irony was that, in his stories, there was a piece of himself in every person and every situation; he could only ever write incomplete fragments, the safe ones that his readers adored. It seemed to him that his sexuality had slipped out of the closet but left his self behind. 

He sat in the small dining room that was set up for family and friends of hospice residents – they did not call them “patients” here.  He hadn’t had a cigarette in nearly ten years but somehow the thought of doing something else with his mouth other than cheer on – or was it push – Martha’s last few yards of her journey, was somehow strangely comforting.  Smoking had never really been something that he enjoyed but having a cocktail – a gay man had to have come up with that term – and a Marlboro Light at his favorite gay bar gossiping with friends or cruising the crowd was, it seemed, the proper thing to do. He resisted, mostly because it was too far to go to buy a pack and he would have to smoke outside anyway.

Martha had not, at first, been his favorite aunt, ironically. That would have been Martha’s younger sister who died, at 80 years of age, two days after white water rafting on the Russian River in Alaska. Tillie – she hated the name Matilda – was absolutely insane; literally. She had been diagnosed manic depressive by the age of 21 and, believing, in her own mind, that that was less a diagnosis than a recipe for how to approach life, she took it beyond the limit. She used the initials of her condition and referred to herself as an MD, a doctor who was not afraid to prescribe a full dose of mania to “suffocate” the depression. She reveled in his homosexuality and loved the gay bars. She and Martha were the only two of his family that he ever asked to hang out with him at his favorite bar, but Tillie was already no stranger to gay bars long before he ever came out. To the best of his knowledge, she was the only straight woman he knew that somehow got invited into a drag show – a woman dressed as a man dressed as a woman – and got away with it. Until, that is, she showed her breasts to a particularly rude man. Even then, there were many who believed she was a he on hormones.

At his father’s graveside service, where the mound of dirt above his mother’s grave had barely settled, a friend of his father had put his arm around him and told him: “Unless we die first, we all become orphans sooner or later. Age does not buffer that reality.” Martha would lessen the sting of that realization.
His sister, four years younger, carried the bitterness of their parents’ deaths like a prom corsage on her breast. She was working to save her second marriage and the death of her mother (whom she despised), and now the loss of her father (whom she adored), had come at the worst possible time. The closeness of their deaths made matters even worse. For days after that, whenever talking with her on the phone, supposedly about the estate and the will, she would trudge on and on through the sludge of her poor life, tarred and feathered by loneliness and fear.  He remembered how Martha would sit with her, sometimes for hours, listening and nodding, smiling and furrowing her brow in concern. Then, just about the time he thought he could take no more and wondered why Martha even put up with it, she would, without looking up but knowing he was watching from the far corner of the parlor, gently extend the index finger of the hand she was resting her chin on and very gently tap her temple and then move it in a couple of circles without even cracking a smile.  He thought of how he almost did not make it out of the room in time to reach the bathroom, bury his head in a bath towel and laugh until he cried.  He knew that on Martha’s part, it was not out of meanness or indifference that she would seemingly mock someone. She had lived with Aunt Tillie for many years and, as she would often say, “I know one when I see one, and, God bless ‘em, that is one of them!”

He sat by her bed again, his eyes and mind too tired to cry. He gently reached under the blanket to take her hand in his. He was lost in his thoughts, wondering why a woman who was so sure that death was an adventure would keep hanging on, when one of the nurses, the one Martha liked best because she cursed, came in telling him he had visitors in the lounge area.
“Why didn’t they come to the room?” he asked, a little annoyed that he would have to leave his aunt’s bedside.
“I think she will explain everything, Mr. Logan,” and before he could ask what that was supposed to mean, she turned and left.
He hesitated, looking back at his aunt, then turned and walked to the visitor’s lounge. He recognized the visitor even as he was approaching the lounge. Sitting tall and upright in her motorized wheelchair was Mrs. Sylvester with her son William standing beside her. As he entered the room, William stepped forward, offered his hand and extended his sympathies, then, against Jeffery’s objections, left the room explaining that his mother wanted this time alone with him. 
“Come, sit,” she said as she deftly pulled the wheelchair up close to one of the comfy chairs in the room. “Sit,” she said again as she patted the pale green corduroy arm of the chair. She was stately looking with her snow-white curly hair framing a serious face that seemed to be in direct contradiction to the bluest eyes and gentlest mouth he had ever seen. Her dress was simple yet elegant, picked out, he was sure, after hours of deliberation just for this visit. Mrs. Sylvester was one of Martha’s best and oldest friends. They shared a birthday, although Mrs. Sylvester was five years older and, according to his aunt, this was an important detail Mrs. Sylvester would not let her forget. 

								Rate this book:5.0 / 3 votes