Anna in the Afterlife (2 page)

But even triumphing over Gert could not tempt Anna back. She was already high above them, swinging on her heavenly swing, her two pianos perched on a cloud, her music ranged around her in a semicircle like a rainbow in the sunlit heavens. Light as a bird, Anna had flown up to heaven, and all it had taken was an ounce of clear fluid. If word got out, the whole world would be doing it, all the old Chinese in their gray pajamas and black cotton shoes, all the old Jews in their skullcaps and prayer shawls, all the old Indians in their turbans and saris—there would be a run on needles and little glass bottles; someone smart could make a fortune.

Her family hung over her bed not knowing what to do or where to stand or what to say. Anna would have liked to smile sweetly and grace them with forgiveness, but Jews never had much interest in sin and redemption. Once a year they fasted, ostensibly to cleanse their sins and start the year anew, but Anna had never known a Jew who thought he had committed a sin.

Deathbed scenes were historically quite moving; Melanie's death in
Gone With the Wind
, for instance, was heart wrenching. But then Melanie had been young and beautiful, tragically deceived and deeply forgiving, all of which Anna was not. Nor had Anna a besotted but gorgeously handsome Clark Gable crying in the hallway. Anna's husband Abram, whose face she could no longer recall, had been dead for thirty-two years and was barely a wisp floating at the back of her mind.

Aside from calling out for Jesus, Anna's many and various roommates who had died had, in their death throes, called upon their mothers:
Mama, Mama, I'm afraid! Mama, hold my hand
.

Fear had never been Anna's concern; her main emotion throughout life was indignation. Even now she was thinking whoever had designed this living business should have seen to it that the end was not so messy and miserable. Why wasn't there a cutoff date, maybe at age eighty, at which time the subscription ended, and everyone knew it and was ready for it? A simple pill or a shock administered to the breathing center of the brain and that would be that. This arrangement was too hit-and-miss. Some were lucky and died in their sleep (no one she ever knew). A few others had a five-second massive coronary and it was over. But look at her, seven years chained to this bed. What kind of joke was that? What kind of a joker had cooked up this arrangement? A lunatic, an imbecile.

So who could she call on for help in her last moments? Certainly not the lunatic. As for her mother, her mother had never held her hand or reassured her about anything. She tried to conjure up her mother's face but got an image only of a white head of hair and a voice admonishing her to wash the floor.
Wash the floor, Anna!
Her mother: Sophie, a Polish-Jewish washerwoman, a cook and a chicken plucker from Kutno, a peeler of potatoes in a shtetl somewhere in the wilds of eastern Europe. What would she know about comforting a child? What did she ever know?
Eat! Sleep! Wash the floor!
Sophie had been a great buxom beauty whose first husband had run off with a young girl, forcing her to send the children from that marriage—Sam and Ava, Anna's half brother and half sister—to an orphanage. While they lived there, Sophie had become a midwife to earn her living and pay for the Jewish divorce, “the get.” What did she get afterward: she got Moishe the tailor, the man with constipation, who fathered Anna and Gert. Anna tried to recall what she knew about her father. Almost nothing, that he worked over a sewing machine ten hours a day, that he made her take castor oil every night, that he inquired daily about the movement of her bowels.

Gert had a gold mine of stories about their father. She always took Anna by surprise in that sly way she had, when she came up behind her and said, “Do you remember the time?” Anna never remembered Gert's memories; she was sure her sister made them up. This one was a dirty story. Their father, with all his straining and trying to move his bowels, had terrible hemorrhoids. One night the doctor sent Anna's mother to the drugstore with a little slip of paper. “My husband is so sick,” she told the druggist. “He can't stand the pain. The doctor said I have to get this…” and she handed him the scrap of paper.

“Oh, you can't want that!” the druggist said. “You must be mistaken.”

“Yes, we have to have it, the doctor said we have to use it tonight!”

If you use it tonight, you could end up killing him,” the druggist said. The instructions given Anna's mother by the doctor were to bring home what the druggist gave her, fill it with ice and apply it to her husband's private parts.

“You know what it was?” Gert challenged Anna. “It was a condom, Anna! Isn't that a laugh? She was supposed to put ice in the condom! But the druggist thought it was for…you know what!”

Very funny, Anna thought now, Gert with her condoms. Anna hadn't even known the name for those things till a few years ago, from the talk shows talking about condoms all the time and should they be passed out to little children in schools. Even Abram, in all his years of being married to Anna, kept a box of them hidden under his socks and didn't once say the word to her face.

Now Gert was stroking the cheek of Anna's handsome grandson, saying “Smooth, like a baby's tushy.” Gert with her dirty mind—even at the side of a deathbed.

Anna's granddaughter, Bonnie, was holding Anna's hand and singing to her, a beautiful song about white sands and gray sands. Danny, Janet's husband, was standing over by the wall, reading the letter pasted up there from the mayor, congratulating Anna on reaching her ninetieth birthday. She noticed no one in the room was actually crying. Her family had no idea how long this death would take—it could test a person's patience. Anna could see that her breath was coming in short, shallow gasps, with long intervals between. Her chest heaved, and then rested for many seconds. When the hospice nurse came in to check, she whispered to Anna's family, “She's having agonal breathing now.”

Agonal
, Anna thought.
The last agony
.

But suddenly, Anna had a shock! The stage hands were wheeling in the tunnel, the famous tunnel she'd heard about on Oprah, the tunnel filled with all the people from the past who would be there to guide Anna into the next world. It looked a little like the Holland Tunnel, a long arc of white tiles (quite a few missing), and filled with stinking car exhaust. But it also had a McDonald's in it, and a replica of P.S. 9, Anna's elementary school, as well as the Ferris wheel from Coney Island. This was a major production. Anna was surprised anyone would go to so much trouble for her. She saw her first grade teacher wearing a big white feather in her hat (now maybe Anna could make up for an unforgivable grammatical error she had once made when meeting her teacher on the street), and there was her sister Ava carrying an Ebinger's cake (to make up for all the unkindnesses she'd done Anna).

That light at the end of the tunnel was too bright—and also in her eyes. But who was that tall figure with the unruly head of hair ambling toward her; who was that sweet-faced man, smiling that loving smile, holding out his hand to Anna? Her husband's face materialized after all these lost years, his wonderful brow, his blue-green eyes, the smile that took her in and wrapped itself around her. She could feel her heart stopping at the sight of him.

At her bedside, the nurse was urging her family to say goodbye and leave. A good idea—Anna had so many last-minute things to think about now.

The nurse counseled them: “You know, the dying find it hard to die while the family is here. She feels your energy and that's what's holding her back. But hearing is the last sense to go—so you could all say a few words of farewell to her.”

“Happy New Year, Mom-Mom,” her granddaughter whispered in her ear, shocking Anna with the news. New Year's Eve! What a convenient night upon which to die! How fitting. How economical! She wouldn't have to pay even for one minute of the new year, not one minute of the new month, in this hellhole. If she could exit before midnight, even her tax liability would end here.

There was a flurry of all the heads of her beloved people bending over her bed, some tentatively stroking her good hand, her forehead. It was an ordeal for them, she understood this. She was wasted, emaciated, hollow, a bag of bones. Her eyes had rolled up into her head, her mouth hung open, her bony chest heaved with irregular gasps.

Don't worry
, she wanted to say.
I'm up here already, I have my beautiful auburn hair falling full down my back, all my fingers are ready for Mozart, my heart is open to Chopin. My beloved Abram is going to kiss me at the stroke of midnight. Go home, children. This is nothing at all, this getting of wings. Go home and live a while longer. Welcome the New Year. No one ever dies; it's just a fairy tale
.

IN THE DAYS when Anna was still walking the earth, she picked up a magazine called “Finest Finger Nails” in her doctor's waiting room and read an article called “Is Desairology for You?” A caution in red ink just under the title warned that desairology was an aspect of cosmetology that required a mature and courageous person. “Caring for the nails of the deceased can be a meaningful part of your career.” The desairology practitioner was advised to execute contracts with her living clients, having them stipulate (as was necessary in any important pre-need planning such as wills, trusts, and burial plots) the color of the polish they preferred in death. Sparkles and swirls were not recommended for so serious an occasion but false nails were acceptable for the sake of ultimate beauty.

Anna hoped that someone would not soon be painting her dead fingernails. She expected they would go on having a life of their own. Hair and nails were reputed to grow for months, even years, after death.

The article warned that even if one could overcome the natural repugnance of working on the nails of the dead, the desairologist must understand it was a physically dangerous vocation as well. Mortuaries usually required the practitioner to sign a waiver excusing the mortuary in case she contracted a disease during the service. She was urged to be immunized for tetanus, hepatitis B, and tuberculosis. For extra safety, the gloves and clothes she wore during the service should be sealed in a plastic bag until they could be decontaminated. “Don't let the idea scare you,” said the article. “Your client never hurt you when she was living, she's not going to hurt you after she's passed on. Just be as cautious working on a corpse as you are on a living body.”

Even though Anna herself had passed on, she cringed at the idea of being exposed to additional fatal diseases from a manicurist. She was aware her body could not defend itself: it was about to be turned over to unctuous funeral directors, hairdressers, and—God help her—desairologists. She would have nothing to say about it. Anna had formally died at 8:35 P.M. on New Year's Eve; the mortuary guaranteed pickup within two hours. Her remains—a terrible ruin of loose skin and skeleton bones—were still on the bed in her room in the nursing home. A few things had been done to them—she didn't pay much attention at the time; she had been listening to a great flock of wild parrots screaming in the trees outside her window, an impressive farewell recitative that she appreciated.

The van had been summoned and should be there shortly to pick her up. Years before, she had given her daughter Janet a long list of absolute instructions about her funeral. No transients should be there, no flowery baloney in the newspaper, no treacly “adored wife, beloved mother, devoted daughter, cherished sister.” She wanted no strangers gawking at her, crying crocodile tears and then going back to Janet's house to stuff themselves with food that cost a fortune, pretending they were heartbroken that Anna was dead. She most definitely did not want a rabbi who had never laid eyes on her and would make a big speech about how good and charitable she was, like the baby-faced rabbi who had done so for her husband Abram, so long ago it was in another lifetime. At the funeral, this boy who had barely grown a beard, this know-nothing about life, had called Abram “a boat whose journey is now over and is about to dock in the next world.” “
Daddy is not a boat!”
she had whispered to her daughters. They had warned her with dirty looks. “Shh!”

So could she trust them now to do the right things for her funeral? To refuse the services of a desairologist? To allow no makeup to be applied to her sunken, sallow cheeks? To refuse to have her ravaged flesh dressed in fancy clothes—especially those with a high neck or a tight waistline? To insist that they lay not one finger on her? She understood that she'd have to be deposited in some refrigerated morgue, but no cosmetologists! No embalmers! No
doveners!

Her daughter Carol's mad husband, Bard, after he had killed himself, had been cremated. His ashes were supposed to have been scattered from a small sailing yacht near Santa Barbara, floating off into the wind while a canon by Pachelbel was played over the loudspeaker. This image had so entranced Bard's mother that she had flown down to LA to bring her dead husband's ashes (saved all these many years) to be mixed with her son's. As it turned out, the mortuary, named after a sea god, got rid of all their clients'' ashes in a big garbage dumpster. No Pachelbel's Canon, no sea breeze, no rose petals tossed upon the waves by sobbing widows, just a dumpster with some rotten hamburger meat in it, dirty baby diapers, and empty milk cartons. The police got tipped off by a garbage collector, then the lawyers jumped in, then even Carol and her sons became part of a class-action wrongful death suit. One of these days they would each collect $500 for pain and suffering and for eternally knowing that the ashes of their beloved husband and father were not being strained through the baleen bristles of a great white whale or dusting the wings of a seagull, but instead were in a landfill combined with coffee grounds and discarded tampons.

For all these reasons Anna had rejected the idea of cremation. Furthermore, Abram was already buried and she had every intention of inhabiting the plot next to his. In any case, ever since World War II, cremation wasn't a good idea for Jews, not just because they didn't believe in it but because enough Jews had been cremated by Hitler. Anna wasn't going to sign up for entering the ovens as her last personal choice.