Marianne

My aunt Marianne had been sick for years, but it is hard to know severity when it comes to the elderly. There is their standard sickness, a low-level but chronic malady that is inconvenient and uncomfortable but nothing more, and there is a clock ticking down. I couldn't put my finger on when the former transitioned to the latter for her. I doubt even Marianne knew.

When I hear that she is in the hospital again -- at first reportedly with a stroke, then downgraded to pneumonia, then upgraded again to both of these at once with blood poisoning as a garnish -- I don't have to be told that her journey is reaching its conclusion.

The doctors tell her family that the stroke was bad and that she would not recover from it. "Bad" in doctor parlance does tend to suggest terminality. "Bad" is a harbinger of euphemisms like "discuss the options and "prepare for what may happen."

My mother says Marianne is going to be moved to hospice, either in-house or at a hospital. It would be easier, she says, to visit Marianne in the hospital rather than her home. She will let me know.

My immediate family has a long-standing group text going where we share upcoming family events, product recalls, and funny news stories. In it, my mother has been delivering updates cribbed from the people around Marianne. When I read that she is being moved, I ask if she is going to another room or home.

My mother replies, "Nope. No ruby slippers this time."

My immediate family lives by our jokes. I write that, given that the koala population is functionally extinct owing to a wildfire, at least Marianne never has to live in a world without koalas. I'm not sure why my family does this, except that it dilutes the trauma. It makes me feel less alone that the world will go on even though she will not.

Marianne's property, the outbuildings of it, had to be sold off piece by piece to pay medical bills over the years, so it is as though her home eroded around her as she did. She has her home still, but she will not return to it.

Members of my family have dyed their hair dark at the first signs of graying. This hid their aging from me when I was a child. In the last decade, most conceded defeat and so it was as though age all at once caught up. It was only a few years ago that Marianne stopped having dark hair, not coincidentally when her health problems began to escalate, so this awareness was more acute.

My mother is the youngest of her siblings by a wide margin. Marianne is the oldest, so to me she was always old. If I were to trace it backward, there is every chance Marianne was my current age when she first entered my memories.

My mother used to care for my grandmother's home, as well as my grandfather as he convalesced and then my grandmother as her health deteriorated. She was paid enough for this that it sometimes felt like her most solid work, though I was only peripherally aware of amounts. Given that my mother did this labor, her siblings looked down on her. It could be that she was chubby-cheeked while they were in their late teens and early twenties, but I always sensed they thought she was at a lower stratum than they were, the dalit to their brahmin.

In my grandparents' home, there was a long frame of black and white pictures of each to them taken the same year. While her brothers and sisters look like the people they grew into, my mother is a pouting child too shy to look into the camera.

Marianne's photo was furthest right, her hair styled in a fashion that would not be out of step with June Cleaver. Given that she raised me, I fixated on the photo of my mother rather than those that followed, but Marianne in that photo seemed so like the Marianne I knew, of so different a generation that she seemed in some way unreal.

Marianne has a daughter who still lives with her, Lisa. Owing to some issue in the womb, Lisa is mentally handicapped in a way that makes her an eternal child in some ways. My cousins and I have always doted on Lisa, though she has at least a decade on the oldest of us, if not more. (The mathematics of my family is obviously not my strong suit, as I've sorted them into "Old," "About My Age," and "Young" without much further nuance.)

What have people tried to explain to Lisa? I have worked with teenagers with mental impairments for almost a decade. Lisa's cognition is lower than theirs. She is bashful and fond, seeking affirmation, beset by kindness. Lisa has watched her mother's condition worsen. She is old enough that she has seen death, but not yet the death of a parent.

I can do nothing for Marianne. I do not think this is my attempt to comfort myself, or not alone. But Lisa is a near innocent standing before an experience that could throw someone into existential panic. I want this experience to be as harmless as it can be without lying to her. It isn't my place no matter, but I do not want to think she does not understand.

Lisa cannot function without intervention. She will never be independent. She still has her father, but his health is poor enough that he spent overlapping days in the hospital with his wife. Marianne may be among the things keeping Eddie, her husband of a startling sixty-four years, anchored to this world. When he loses her, it is hard to believe he will be fighting as powerfully.

This is the way of these things. One reaches a certain age and family members begin to die. I haven't had grandparents in seven years. Death is apt to whittle down my aunts and uncles in the course of the next few decades, though I would thank it to take its time. Marianne was the eldest, but she has siblings not far removed from eighty -- though don't ask me by how much.

What must it be like to have people around your bed preparing for your death, discussing funeral arrangements as you still draw breath? Marianne is too drugged to be aware, but the notion of it chills me.

I find myself, in my paralysis of uncertainly about what to do, irritated about her dying interfering with Thanksgiving or my party this weekend. These are not in actuality my concerns, but I can focus on them safely. Over them, I have some level of control in a way I do not have in Marianne's dying. I can postpone a party, but not my aunt's mortality.

Writing is a way to separate myself from the experience of her death, but I do not feel I have much of a role. Her children should be there, if possible. I would need to be told I ought to be there. Otherwise, I would feel invasive spectating, having nothing to say to her on her death bed, as this surely is, but a generic apology. "I am sorry that this happened to you." What good is that? She is not fully there, thanks to the drugs. If an apology falls on the deaf ears of the recipient, but is said for an audience, it is performative.

I receive a text that the doctors are putting Marianne on "Comfort Care," which involves depriving her of food and water, but allowing her air and morphine. New York does not permit assisted suicide, but this seems to be a way to skirt that. I would not be comforted by a lack of food and water. A warm chocolate chip cookie and a Coke can work wonders for my desire to remain alive.

I have caught intimations before this that Marianne was ready to be done with her life, that when her illnesses and the debt from them began to accumulate, her will to live slipped. These comments were a year old, if not more. She is dying in the immediacy of the next few days, but she has been dying by degrees longer than I can know.

It must be better to die quickly, to hardly know it has happened. Lingering over one's death may allow one's family the luxury of an attempt at closure, but it comes at the expense of entertaining the Grim Reaper for longer than one must. Death is quick but dying is interminable.

My mother sends pictures of Marianne in her hospital bed. There is a hand on Marianne's shoulder, though it is not my mother's and so I am unsure who took it. There is nothing restful in her unconsciousness in these pictures. A body is there that resembles Marianne, as though it is not finished being made, but her essence is lacking. It feels wrong to have these on my phone, to take them, but it is what someone needed to do. I am chronicling it this way; they are chronicling it that. Seeing this feels voyeuristic. It is trite to comment on how frail the dying seem, but that is one of the best words for it. To look at this picture, where she is unconscious but not resting, it is difficult to say that Marianne is there.

Her mother lived into her nineties, but Marianne won't. I see no plenty in victim blaming, guessing vices that might have given her a shorter stay on the earth. That would be only to tell myself that there might be a way to keep myself from this fate as long as I might, but it is cruel in the moment.

When I went to my cousin's party last month, I thought that this could well be the last time Marianne would be alive for it. I thought, but did not say, that I felt the next time all of us would be together again would be a funeral. Two years ago, at the party, Marianne did not look well, but she still looked like herself. This year, she was wilted until she lived only under duress, resentful for the imposition.

It is all waiting from here. Marianne is not going to spring up and live another year. There are no more ruby slippers, no further long trips up the dirt mountain road. Marianne has seen her home of half a century for the last time, will never again sleep in her bed. Her life is behind her. I don't know where she falls, theologically, if there is any relief in an afterlife for her. My mother is an atheist, or was last I knew, but the rest of her family seems like the textbook definition of WASPy. I do not know if Marianne believed in a merciful God, just as I know so little else about her.

This is the first sibling my mother will lose. For years after my grandmother's death, if one caught my mother in the right light, there was still a hollowness. That her relationship with her sisters was not always the strongest provides no relief. My mother is given to contentious family relationships.

I could not rattle off Marianne's biography. Did she go to college? Did she work? She will die near to where she was born and where she lived. Where did she go on her honeymoon if she went on one? She married Eddie young -- my math bears this out -- so perhaps she had no honeymoon.

As an inveterate storyteller, I see the shame in not knowing Marianne's story. It didn't seem my business and she always was on another circle of family interaction. I played with and chased my cousins, I ate birthday cake and Halloween candy, and Marianne was among the people watching me do it. She was a presence on the periphery, seated in a chair, a cigarette held between her fingers.

In explaining something about her to Amber, I pull up a mental map of my family tree on that side. I cannot even be certain which of my family members are her children, who were always aunts and uncles in my head rather than cousins. (I can account for four and can name their children, so I am not utterly remiss.)

A year from now, Marianne's death will not reverberate to me. I remember annually some milestones, losses and gains. Marianne's death, sure to come this week, will be a tragedy and I will feel it for days, but not weeks.

When Amber goes to work, I talk to my cat Kit-Kat about how much I miss his brother Jareth. I begin to cry. What part of these tears are owed to the animal in an urn on my wall? Should any should be tithed to Marianne?

Her death is, in its way, the death of any family member. It is a general, not a specific. At base tribal biology, one is unsettled by death contracting one's family. There are only so many family members until one's own neck is on that chopping block, as it were.

A few hours later, I receive the message that Marianne has died and wait for it to feel like a relief.

I post about it online, finding that I don't have a good picture her. I will on no accounts use the pictures I have recently been sent. She is in a few pictures from my wedding, a tiny figure among many. I choose a fuzzy picture, as it is the only one that features her and no one else. People -- friend but mostly acquaintances -- offer their condolences, which seems strange. I was merely announcing a fact. It is sad that she is gone, but it does not affect my daily life. I posted it because I want the attention and because many of my cousins are my friends there, and this would not be the worse way to find out.

One of my cousins -- or a second cousin whom I've always thought of as my cousin -- posts how she has been despondent all day. I feel almost guilty to have had any part in reminding her of her loss.

I speak to my father on the phone, because I'm not sure that my mother wants to talk about this. I've been deferring to my father to see how my mother is. I expect that she will reach out when she needs to reach out. Or maybe she won't, maybe she's too much like me and she'll hide her emotions away until someone pries them out of her. I will act as though this is not the case.

He gives me little facts, such as that Lisa wants to go to a group home. She said, "Dad no fun, want to go to the group home." She has more friends in there than she has up on the mountain up a long and winding dirt road.

Eddie may not be long for this world, that much is made clear to me. When he passes, Lisa will go to his son Little Eddie. Little Eddie is not a young man either despite the diminutive, being my parents' age. I don't think that he particularly wants the burden of having his sister with him. He has a home and a wife, and his children are grown. They have the room. Still Lisa needs to be around people with whom she is more comfortable. In her shoes, to the extent that I can imagine being in her shoes, I would want to be at a group home.

He tells me that Marianne got pregnant around 16 and had her first child around 17, which is the same time when my grandmother gave birth to my mother. This begins to explain the age difference between the two of them. I want there to be at least decades between them. That would make Marianne 80, which is no short span of time on Earth.

Near the end, Marianne was declining to eat and drink. She would just smoke a cigarette after cigarette. At my cousin Emily's party, her daughter told her that she would not leave the table unless she saw her mother drink an entire glass of Pedialyte or Ensure. Refusing to eat and resisting drinking does suggest one is done with life. Marianne smoked all her life, as the huskiness of her voice attested. Smoke helped burn away the rest of her.

When Marianne was having her stroke, she fell out of bed. Eddie told her that he was calling the ambulance, but she ordered that he not do that. He was to put her back in her bed and give her blood pressure pills, of which she took too many. When she did arrive at the hospital, the staff struggled to bring her blood pressure up enough. The implication was that she knew what was happening and was trying to hasten it. I can't know if this is true, but I see the story more clearly this way.

That night, getting into bed, Amber says that she's sorry about my aunt. Is she was expecting me to be more upset than I am? I assure her that it is fine.

Soon in Xenology: Marianne.

last watched: Schitt's Creek
reading: Ella Enchanted