the cassandra pages

Malukhiyah

Wishing a blessed Ramadan to all my Muslim friends and readers.

Yesterday we had to go to the northeastern part of the city, near Anjou to pick up a package, and on the way back we decided to stop at Sami's, a well-known Montreal wholesaler of fruits and vegetables. Sami's is an Arab company, with one large warehouse-like store at the Jean-Talon and another major warehouse in the Chabanel district near Marche Central. But when we walked into this east-end store, we couldn't believe our eyes. The photographs don't begin to convey the vastness of the warehouse, or just how much produce was on display in these towering piles. We had almost no money, and Sami's only does cash transactions, so we pooled all our coins and finally found a cash machine so that we could take advantage of the stop. Extra-virgin olive oil for 4.99...vine-ripe tomatoes for 99 cents a pound...yellow peppers for 1.35...

Sami's also carries all the roots and herbs needed in the cooking of the African and Latin American communities, as well as Middle Eastern ones. I love seeing the stacks of fresh mint, piles of parsley and dill, thyme tied into great bunches. Yesterday, though, I was stopped by this display of leaves and their name in Arabic: "malukhiyah" - these are the Egyptian mallow leaves that are the basis for special dishes loved by Egyptians, Syrians, and Lebanese, and it is this leaf that my father-in-law was always asking for, but I never found. We brought him a frozen package once, but he, of course, dismissed it as inauthentic. If he were alive now, I'd bring him fresh green almonds and malukhiyah, try to follow his directions for cooking the herb with chicken, and endure the insults when he tasted it. Instead, all I could do was to picked up a sheaf of leaves, crushed one and hold it to my nose, and then gently put it back onto the pile like an offering.

Yesterday I began writing about him again; it's time to pick up the pieces of that story and fill in the blank areas: he'd be 100 years and two months right now. I see him clearly in my imagination, eating malukhiyah and gazing out at the Mediterranean, lost in contented thought.

(Does anyone here know how to cook malukhiyah, or have memories of eating it? I'd love to hear from you if you do.)

That quiet like no other

I'd intended to write something entirely different tonight, but when I came across this poem of Cesare Pavese, who was born September 9, 1908, I had to reproduce it here. You can read this and other poems of Pavese, translated by Linh Dinh, here, or follow other links via wood s lot, where I found this one.

Of course, it reminds me of the death of my father-in-law. Today we went to the Arab supermarket where we often shopped for things to take down to him in New Hampshire. I hadn't been thinking about him too much until I saw the bins of fresh dates, yellow and brown, still attached to their stems.

This is what stops: the body that sees, that tastes, complains, appreciates. The material world of associations goes on, but irrevocably altered from the natural impulses: pluck the fruit; cook the succulent meat; prepare the soup in the favorite bowl. Now our task is to go on plucking, cooking, preparing, but for ourselves, with absence seated across the table. Only in my own middle age have I understood that the dead had their own associations, mostly unspoken and unknown to me, their student, and that in my own life I am creating, unwittingly, associations that will stop someone else, someday, in the market or the street, stung for a moment by the grief and joy of having loved me.

End of Fantasy
by Cesare Pavese

This body won't start again. Touching his eye sockets
one feels a heap of earth is more alive,
that the earth, even at dawn, does not keep itself so quiet.
But a corpse is the remains of too many awakenings. 

We only have this power: to start
each day of life—before the earth,
under a silent sky—waiting for an awakening.
One is amazed by so much drudgery at dawn; 
through awakening within awakening a job is done.
But we live only to shudder
at the labor ahead and to awaken the earth one time.
It happens at times. Then it quiets down along with us.

If touching that face the hand would not shake—
if the live hand would feel alive touching it—
if it's true that that cold is only the cold
of the earth, frozen at dawn,
perhaps it'd be an awakening, and things that keep quiet
under the dawn, would speak up again. But my hand
trembles, and of all things resembles a hand
that doesn't move.

At other times waking up at dawn
was a dry pain, a tear of light,
even a deliverance. The stingy word
of the earth was cheerful, for a brief moment,
and to die was to go back there again. Now, the waiting body
is what remains of too many awakenings and doesn't return to the earth. 
They don’t even say it, the hardened lips.

(This is the latest in a many-year-long series of posts about my father-in-law, collected under the title "The Fig and the Orchid"; please click on that name under Pages, in the sidebar at left, for the whole series.)

Home, but Changed

Socrates is on my windowsill. He looks quite lost here, rather forlorn. I hope he'll adapt to his new home.

Yesterday was the first when I really felt the loss, simple and unadulterated by gratitude or relief. It happened as I was tipping and topping green beans for dinner - a task I often did in preparation for making a Middle Eastern bean and meat stew, a dish my father-in-law especially liked and I had often made for him. The thought process took only a few seconds, but contained an entire journey: the recognition of a subconscious "I'll have to take some to M.", followed by the conscious mind's substitution of fact, and then the finality of "never again," the sharp sting of grief, the welling of tears.

I've been here enough times in my life now to be confident in the dulling effect of time on the knife-edge of grief. The moments of forgetting the person is gone actually do subside, as does the pain they bring in their wake. I know that in this case the sharpness of grief really is less than with most other deaths of people dear to me; it was time, and I accepted that a long while ago. I've also learned that time gradually substitutes a different kind of recognition in the same thought process: the reminders  become linked to a person's memory in a way that slowly raises the floor of the abyss one first feels between the dead and the living. You become grateful for the reminders, and realize they are a way of walking, as it were, between the realms of the dead and the living on a bridge of shared experience and love.

Last night I got up for a while, and as I was boiling water for a cup of chamomile tea in the kitchen, I wrapped my shoulders in a pink mohair shawl my mother knitted for me after she became ill. When she first gave it to me, I put it carefully over the arm of the sofa but absolutely could not wear it; it made me too sad to think of what she was thinking as she knitted it. I couldn't wear it for a whole year after she died; I wanted it near me but every time I touched it it made me cry. But now everything about it is a comfort  -- the beautiful color, the innumerable stitches, the warmth -- and brings her love as close to me as an embrace, as she intended. Maybe even its texture reminds me of that softening effect of time.

On Saturday we had a memorial service at my father-in-law's retirement home. All of the immediate family members spoke about his life, and thanked that community for the caring and friendship they had given him in his last years. The service was nice: intimate, and appropriate. I played the piano - old hymns - as people came in and then played the hymns during the service, which made me happy, and I laughed to myself when I suddenly remembered the first time I played for my father-in-law. He had said "I like your playing - it's not professional." That's what we all call "a family compliment" because that side of the family has such an adept backhand. I remember being totally taken aback and rather hurt at the time. But  now I understand better that what he meant was that there was an unstudied, unaffected quality to the playing that he appreciated: I was an amateur in the French sense of the word, a lover of what I was doing. He always liked children for that same reason, and many people have remarked on how childlike he remained himself, always mischievous, spontaneously creative, liking to surprise people - especially the New England establishment - by appearing in a bizarre costume or pulling out props as well as unexpected words during a sermon or class.

Socrates would have approved.

(This is the latest in a many-year-long series of posts about my father-in-law, collected under the title "The Fig and the Orchid"; please click on that name under Pages, in the sidebar at left, for the whole series.)

Yes, Joy

In the comments on yesterday's post, EasyDiverChris wrote:

The peace and joy you wrote about in this post is a far cry from how I've previously viewed death.  It helps me see my mother's end in a new way and that has helped me cope.

Pat said:

As much as grief hurts, there is also so much sweetness. Did I somehow miss this for 50 years?

and Jean wrote:

One of the things I value most that friends have shared in their blogs is these glimpses of the way emotionally healthy people carry on living, eating, drinking, talking, loving, sharing, in the face of illness and death and grief - that grief doesn't have to be an entirely cold and lonely place. This is not the scenario I grew up with and I guess I never really knew it was possible.

Even our hosts last evening had written, out of consideration, wondering if we wanted to come for dinner or to cancel. But actually, we were delighted to be together with mutual friends.

The longer I live, and the more deaths I experience, the more I see they're all different. It's easier to feel joy at the end of 99 years of a well-lived life than when we all feel robbed and someone is snatched from us too early, or violently and suddenly. In fact it would feel, well, greedy to ask for more in this case. But in most deaths of people who've lived, say 50 or more years and had a chance to love and be loved and do some of the things they wanted, I think it's important to celebrate and be joyful for their time among us. Of course we always want more life - so did my father-in-law, even at 99! But death is less of a tragedy to me than it used to be.

What's tragic is never living one's life: failing to be present to the moments as they pass, failing to see, failing to participate.

I haven't always known this, and even now I know and live it imperfectly. I'm learning to live in the face of illness and troubles and aging and uncertainty, which means un-learning being depressed and self-absorbed about my own troubles, and realizing that life goes on in every moment, it is we who step off the track and feel like it's going on without us, or convince ourselves that "life" belongs to other people, or a previous time never to be recaptured.

Death also reminds me to live as if tomorrow might be my own last day -- not foolishly or rashly or graspingly, but with gratitude and intention, trying to understand what I'd regret if indeed I were contemplating the last few minutes or hours of my life, and acting to change my way of living, so that I have fewer regrets.

The things that were important to my father-in-law during these last four or five months were highly personal things he had not done in his 99 years. He took the long bed-ridden hours as an opportunity to reflect, to see most of the people he really wanted to, and to tell them what he needed to tell them. He said things to his children, and others, that he had never before said. Yes, he was also angry and frustrated at times at the loss of control and privacy and dignity he had always cherished. But on balance these months were a gift, and the people who shared them closely with him are all grateful that he used them well and that we were able to be witnesses to some of his thoughts and to his growth. He didn't resolve everything about his own life, or about religion, in his own mind, but he made big steps toward other people. That's part of why I feel joy now. And the other part is that he's not struggling any longer to overcome, by sheer force of will, a physical body that was tired out. Finally, it took over and let him go.

Obscurity and Struggle

"I don't know what to tell you," says the doctor. "This is the way it is when someone is dying. It isn't the heart, the kidneys, any one thing anymore. They pass in and out of lucidity. And it's very hard to tell you what to expect." He's a good guy, this doctor, and we don't have unreasonable expectations, of him or of this process. We're all waiting, wishing it could be easier.

There seems to have been a change starting on the weekend. My father-in-law is very weak but still insisting on getting up even though his legs won’t hold him; they're giving him morphine now as well as a sedative, to try to keep his blood pressure down, help his groaning, and keep him a little more manageable because he's been really angry, disoriented, and unable to communicate what he wants. He's refusing his other medications, and today, even water, though he ate last night, and apparently it's been a real struggle to give him the morphine and lorazepam. It seems like we're getting down toward the end but that it's going to be a struggle right up to the final moment; J. and I will be heading down there again tomorrow.

Why the refusal to give up, to go gently? Because peace flowing out of a simple conclusion never suited this contradictory man, whose mind has wrestled with the big questions as long as it could - and perhaps still is, as he grapples with confusion, growing darkness, and the fear he might have been wrong. Life -- the material body and the rational mind -- are what he knows and what he can hold onto as true. The rest: unknowable, and, except in poetic speculation, that was never the territory he wanted to travel.

Waiting

We arrived at his apartment in the evening, the day after he had called and said he was dying and wanted to tell J. he loved him. The next day he had severe angina – the first really intense episode since the angina attack and hospital stay that had precipitated this entire decline - and was given nitroglycerine tablets, then a nitro patch, then some morphine. When we got there he was resting comfortably in his bed, on sunny yellow sheets, wearing a dark blue nightshirt covered with white moons and stars. We didn’t stay long, and told him we’d come back the next day, which we did, arriving there around dinnertime. He refused food, though, having already eaten two big meals earlier in the day.

He moves painfully from the bathroom to his chair in the living room, stopping at the kitchen counter to collapse onto the seat of his walker and be pushed the rest of the way, eyes shut, loud moans accompanying each breath.“Let’s have some action!” he says, his eyes roaming anxiously around the room. “What are we waiting for?”

We sit in our own chairs, waiting, suspended with him in this interminable purgatory. After a cursory “hello” upon noticing us, he sits in his chair, moaning, unseeing, for a long time. Now his eyes open; I move the little rush-seated stool closer to him. “Let’s do something!” he insists, seeming agitated as he searches my face. “I think the three of us should take some action! Where are my shoes?”

“In the back room.”

“They’re hanging on a hook,” he elaborates, and then clutches at the neck of his bathrobe. “Where are my clothes?”

“Also in the back room.”

“What good are they, lying there? Let’s do something! The day is starting.”

It’s six in the evening, but no matter. “What do you want to do?”

No response.

“Shall we pretend it’s morning and we’re going to chapel?” He raises his eyebrows. “If you were going to speak to the students in chapel today, what would you tell them?”

“That I want to DIE!” The words emerge in a growl from between clenched teeth.

“Oh. I’m not sure they’re going to want to hear that.” He gives a slight, very slight, smile.

“When did we get to London?” he asks, suddenly.

“We’re not actually in London."

“Really?”

“No, unfortunately. If we were there we could go to the museum. Like we used to do after breakfast." He gives me another wan smile. I’m thinking fast. What to say next? “We had a lot of good times in London, didn’t we? Do you remember John W.? And Lady W.?”

“She’s dead!”

“Yes.”

“Is he dead now too?”

“No, he’s very much alive and always asks about you.”

“So we’re not in London?  Where are we?”

“In your apartment in X.”

He looks at me, astounded. “Really? Amazing!”

“See, all your books are here. Simone de Beauvoir.” He looked surprised again. “Up there on the shelf. Your daughter arranged all your books for you.”

“Alphabetically?”

“No, they’re more by subject area. That’s a little French section up there: Simone de Beauvoir, Stendhal, Andre Gide... you have a wonderful library.”

“Keep it!”

“I think we probably will. All your children have good libraries.”

He nods, and then sits, silent. At length he rouses himself and makes an announcement to the room: “I know what we’re waiting for.”

“What is that?”

“We’re all waiting for me to die.”

A little stunned, neither of us have any idea what to say, so we are silent as well.

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” he goes on. “Putting someone in their bed for months and just waiting for them to die.” He shakes his head. “I don’t think it’s Christian.”

I think hard, trying to choose between various ways of responding. Finally I take the riskiest one. “So, would you prefer the hemlock?” I ask him, speaking gently.

“No,” he says solemnly and sadly. “I wouldn’t drink it.”

“Neither would I, probably. So I guess we just have to wait.”

“I suppose so,” he says, and shuts his eyes.

(This is the latest in a many-year-long series of posts about my father-in-law, collected under the title "The Fig and the Orchid"; please click on that name under Pages, in the sidebar at left, for the whole series.)

Beyond and Before

Phone conversations have become almost impossible, and in person, they are at best happy but disjointed. Last week there was a crisis: a narcotic pain medication to try to help him sleep better threw him for a complete loop, resulting in several days of agitated disorientation. He shouted in frustrated Arabic a lot of the time, which we could only decipher with difficulty. And then, gradually, the medication wore off and was cleansed from his system, and he returned to the state he’s been in for a while now: part here, part in the past; fatigued and weak but still able to eat, get up for a few hours of sitting, still appreciative of brief visits even if the memory of them vanishes quickly. It goes like this:

The caregiver helps him into the living room, sometimes using his walker, more and more often the wheelchair. His eyes are nearly closed, and he groans with each step. Finally he lands in his chair, a controlled collapse with helping arms around him, and rests, eyes tightly shut now, while she brings his food, cut into small bites, and sets it on a tray in front of him. At length he opens his eyes and slowly, slowly, reaches for the fork, spears a bite of meat, maneuvers it toward his mouth, opens the mouth, places the morsel on his tongue, begins to chew with his few remaining teeth. This man whose great pleasure was eating, who I’ve seen wolfing down unbelievable portions of food and talking about the abundance and joy of eating for days after a wedding banquet or party – “the shrimp were enormous, and they had a great platter of them! The beef was so succulent, so tasty!” – is exhausted after four or five bites. On a good night, when there is something he especially likes – stuffed grape leaves, for instance - he’ll sit up and go on eating, with long intervals between, for an hour. But more and more it is like this. He’s not drinking enough either, and so the caregiver puts a small bowls of cut-up watermelon in front of him, and he picks at it for a long while.

After the meal he rests and then opens his eyes and looks at us. “I can’t make out who has died, or who died first,” he says, suddenly, sounded remarkably like himself. “I’m not sure if my uncles are still alive. Do you know?”

“Your uncles in Damascus? Is that who you mean?”

“Of course!”

“I think they are probably dead.” (They died forty years ago.)

“I think they may be too. But did my mother die too?”

“Yes.”

“I think she died before Uncle A, because I remember what he said when he heard the news. I can see him coming into the house. But of the rest I am not sure at the moment.”

“Do you remember going to the cemetery in Damascus with your sons?” I put my hand on J.’s shoulder to remind him this was one of them.

He thinks for a minute. “Yes. I remember reading the inscriptions.”

“And those were your parents’ graves…”

He looks unsure. “They may have been,” he says, finally. “How is your father?”

“He’s fine. He’s playing a lot of golf.”

His eyebrows shoot up. “Really! So he can still take aim.”

“Yep!”

“Alhamdullilah!” ("All praise belongs to Allah.") At this the J. and I burst out laughing, and he joins us, his shoulders shaking and his face in a big grin. It's the last thing we expect him to say in that context. The caregiver, sitting at her book in the corner, looks up with a surprised smile on her face.

“I brought you the Arabic papers from Montreal, Dad,” says J., when the laughter has passed.

“Oh.” I go over to the table and unfold the papers. “Do you think you can see the headline?” I ask. He shakes his head no. “Here,” I hold it up and show him the big red Arabic letters at the top.

He peers at the writing and sounds some of it out. “You're close -- this one is ‘Phoenicia’: it’s a Lebanese paper,” I tell him. “Look, here’s an ad for travel to Lebanon.” We look at the picture of an airplane in clouds together; I can’t tell if he can see it or not. The caregiver peeks at us, fascinated; she is new and doesn’t know much about him yet. “And look, here’s your old friend Bill Clinton, and Hillary and Obama.” He smiles wanly. “And here’s a priest – actually I think it’s a patriarch.”

At that he brightens up. “Which patriarch?” he asks.

“I don’t know. He’s all dressed up, though.”

“They all do that.”

“Maybe he's Greek,” I say. “I’m not sure and I can’t read any of this!”

He laughs. “Which one is the top now?”

“Which patriarch?”

“Yes, which one do they all defer to?”

“I don’t know but it seems like the Greek patriarch gets the most attention.” We look at an Egyptian paper after that, but he's losing interest, or perhaps it just depresses him to not be able to read any of it. It's hard to tell. I fold the papers and put them away.

“Is this spinach?” he asks, looking at an untouched pile of green on his plate.

“Yes. Do you want to try some?” He shakes his head no, and when the caregiver asks if he's finished he says yes, and she takes the tray away. But he doesn’t seem tired enough yet to want us to leave.

“Guess what I’m reading?” I ask, taking a chance.

“What?”

“Plato.”

“Good for you. Which one?”

“The Republic. I read it forty years ago but it’s better this time around.”

He nods but I’m not sure if he’s remembering, or connecting.

“I didn’t remember how lively the dialogues were. He can be very funny too. He was a very smart man, your friend Socrates.”

“Not always,” he says, shaking his head. “The smartest one of my uncles was your father, the one I always met coming back down the hill.”

It's hard to make these quick adjustments, but we're getting better at it. Who did he think I was now? A cousin, obviously…“In Damascus?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“The one with the orchard in Bludan?”

“They both had orchards.” His eyes roll up toward the ceiling; it's easier to follow the memory than make an explanation. “Oh, the figs we used to eat from those trees!”

Conversing with Aged Men

I just started re-reading Plato's Republic, and in the first three pages came across this dialogue; I wonder if my father-in-law remembers these thoughts from his friends. I'm sorry that it feels too late to read it out loud to him - but maybe I can try. In better days, he would have like that - and what's said here - a lot.

You don't come to see me, Socrates, as often as you ought: If I were still able to go and see you I would not ask you to come to me. But at my age I can hardly get to the city, and therefore you should come oftener to the Piraeus. For let me tell you, that the more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation. Do not then deny my request, but make our house your resort and keep company with these young men; we are old friends, and you will be quite at home with us.

I replied: There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus, than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travelers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to inquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult. And this is a question which I should like to ask of you who have arrived at that time which the poets call the 'threshold of old age' --Is life harder towards the end, or what report do you give of it?

I will tell you, Socrates, he said, what my own feeling is. Men of my age flock together; we are birds of a feather, as the old proverb says; and at our meetings the tale of my acquaintance commonly is --I cannot eat, I cannot drink; the pleasures of youth and love are fled away: there was a good time once, but now that is gone, and life is no longer life. Some complain of the slights which are put upon them by relations, and they will tell you sadly of how many evils their old age is the cause. But to me, Socrates, these complainers seem to blame that which is not really in fault. For if old age were the cause, I too being old, and every other old man, would have felt as they do. But this is not my own experience, nor that of others whom I have known. How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question, How does love suit with age, Sophocles, --are you still the man you were? Peace, he replied; most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master. His words have often occurred to my mind since, and they seem as good to me now as at the time when he uttered them. For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men's characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.

I listened in admiration, and wanting to draw him out, that he might go on --Yes, Cephalus, I said: but I rather suspect that people in general are not convinced by you when you speak thus; they think that old age sits lightly upon you, not because of your happy disposition, but because you are rich, and wealth is well known to be a great comforter.

You are right, he replied; they are not convinced: and there is something in what they say; not, however, so much as they imagine. I might answer them as Themistocles answered the Seriphian who was abusing him and saying that he was famous, not for his own merits but because he was an Athenian: 'If you had been a native of my country or I of yours, neither of us would have been famous.' And to those who are not rich and are impatient of old age, the same reply may be made; for to the good poor man old age cannot be a light burden, nor can a bad rich man ever have peace with himself."

Plato's Republic, Part One, Prelude.

99

(I've removed the video link, as I said I would, and rewritten some of the copy below to reflect the dialogue that was previously in the audio. You - and he - are all back in the realm of the imagination now.)

It was a good day. When we brought the cake in, he sighed and said, "I'm afraid I might make the hundred!" He cut it himself, ate two pieces (when he wasn't busy shelling the green almonds) and after a while reached for the knife again.

"Do you want another piece?" we asked.

"I seem to like it!" he said, helping himself. There were a few presents, many cards, and two shiny mylar balloons, which he marveled at, remarking, "These are the first balloons I've ever been given!" - probably true, he hasn't ever seemed like the balloon type but today, he liked them.

His face had lit up when we gave him the package of green almonds and he figured out what they were. Immediately he set to work trying to crack them - with his few remaining teeth. I took a hammer out onto the balcony and split some for him on the concrete floor. When he got the first nutmeat into his mouth, he smiled and nodded."They don't taste quite the same as they did," he said.

"Well, they've probably been traveling for a while." He nodded, that was true, but he kept eating them anyway.

"Where are they from?" the caregiver asked. "Are they really from Syria?"

My father-in-law looked in her direction and nodded, his mouth full.

"They're from the Middle Eastern market, but I don't know from where. Maybe even California; a friend of mine there says she has a big crop on her trees."

"They're from Bludan," J. said, and his father raised his eyebrows approvingly.

The nuts looked good though - soft and white, as if you took a blanched almond and soaked it in water. "What do you call them in Arabic?" I asked.

M. looked up and said, "Loz. L-O-Z." He split another nuts form its inner shell with a practiced thumb. "The almond-seller used to walk along the streets, calling out "Loz!" - he sold the almonds whole, soaked in water, and we'd go down and buy them -- delicious. These don't taste quite like that."

He had noticed that we were taking pictures. When we said goodbye, he thanked us and said gently, "I probably won't be with you next year, but I hope you will have many happy memories thanks to all the beautiful pictures J. has been taking. He must have hundreds!"

"Thousands, is more like it. I think he has more of you than of any other person."

"Really??" he said, looking rather pleased.