The Blue Hours of Middle Life: November 2015

He was my first cousin once-removed, which didn’t really count as family, something I was acutely aware of when the young doctor at Wheatfields appeared in the visitors room, looking grim and wanting to discuss Paul’s condition. After asking whether I was Hannah and finding that I was not, was instead this distant American relation, he disappeared down the hall. It would not be until evening that Hannah would explain the problem: Paul was getting better, or at least not getting worse, “stabilized,” as the doctor had called it. The average stay at Wheatfields was a week—Paul had been there for a fortnight--and the National Health Service wanted something to be done: a transfer back to his flat in Quaker House or into a nursing home.

“I’m being punished for living,” Paul had wailed when Hannah told him the news. He was listing to the right in the bed he had not left since he arrived, the retractable tray across his food-stained, tee-shirted belly filled with yogurt cups, dried apricots, Sippy cups of fennel tea as well as envelopes, cards, and poetry books (a pocket Emily Dickinson, a chapbook by one of his poetry group members), far more lively than his fellow-traveler across the hall, a woman who lay open-mouthed and still as a sarcophagus, gone by week’s end.

The password for Wheatfields’ Wi-Fi was DOTHERIGHTTHING, all in caps, a detail I noted in the black-bound journal I carried with me everywhere. I had flown over from Boston the day before, having received Paul’s e-mail explaining that a fall at home had precipitated his move into hospice: “The cancer is up and down my spine, bedecked, and I cannot get out of bed. But nurses are lovely, the food excellent, my life expectancy a matter of weeks,” he had written. I called him the next morning, a Sunday afternoon at Wheatfields, when he was surrounded by his children and his elder son Oliver handed him his cell phone and he was able to talk: He had loads of visitors. And he loved being the center of attention. His voice was faint and scratchy, but he did not sound like a man who was dying.

“Death is a joke,” he had said, but there was no bitterness, only a kind of brazen giddiness.

Just a year ago, I had flown to the UK to attend a wedding in Wales and stopped to see Paul for what I thought would be the last time. I wasn’t much of a transatlantic traveler and had never been to Leeds: Paul and I had always met in Canada where our families had summer places on Georgian Bay or in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Paul lived with his second wife Helen and my mother, his first cousin, all of them sharing in the nursing care of his mother, the artist Hartwell Priest, who died at home at 103.

Although Paul and I were not of the same generation, we shared many things: a love for writing and all things literary (like him, I was an English professor); a need to parse our pathologic relations (there was craziness in our maternal line, and I needed Paul to assure me, as he always did, that it had bypassed me); and the fact that we both had suffered, in different ways, from the divorces in our families. Once, when I had whined on a walk along Eau de Claire beach in Georgian Bay that I felt my existence was marginal, because I was the product of an unhappy union that should never have been, Paul explained that he didn’t believe anything in this life—certainly not with regards to love—was an accident.

During those three days with Paul in August of 2014, we packed in a lifetime of memories. I rented a car at Heathrow and picked him up at Oliver and Lizzie’s house in Norwich and we drove halfway across the United Kingdom stopping to tour Sandringham (he was of the opinion that if you’ve seen one royal pile, you’ve seen them all, but agreed to indulge my infatuation with all things royal). We went out to dinner at Akmal’s Tandoori Bistro with Una, his good friend from Quaker House and discussed her recent trip to Prague to attend a co-counseling conference. The next day, he put me on a bus to Ilkley so that I might hike the Ilkley Moor, something he was not up to. When I returned, he made dinner of jacket potatoes and pork chops which we ate at his small, cluttered dining table. We were invited to dinner with his colleagues Joyce and Colin at Joyce’s home in Guiseley, where we talked of everything from the lost art of memorizing poetry to the history of Oxfam.

On the last day, we drove to Haworth and toured the Bronte Museum, discussing the triumph of Emily and the tragedy of Bramwell, both of us moved by Bramwell’s last words: “I have done nothing great or good,” then amused by Paul’s observation that the real tragedy of the Brontes was: “not a scrap of humor anywhere!” After the museum closed, Paul urged me to explore the paths beyond the car park to the ruined cottage said to be Wuthering Heights while he rested on a bench outside the gift shop. “Seize the day,” he had said, and so I had, taking dozens of photos on my phone of heather and sheep and stonewalls and skies tumbling with clouds.

When we had said goodbye the next morning in the car park of Quaker House, Paul smiling Gandalf-like in the midday August sunlight near the vegetable garden, Una giving me a hug and a tea-towel which said, Force May Subdue but Love Gains, I had thought: This is it. The last goodbye. And yet, nearly a year later, when had I read his elegiac e-mail from Wheatfields, “So Hail and Farewell, bright, bright spot in my life,” I had cried. I wasn’t ready to let go.

So I rode the bus to Wheatfields in Headingly most days for the last two weeks of Paul’s life, carrying my black journal everywhere and recording everything: from the chalkboard in front of the cake shop on Woodhouse Lane, which read: “The more you weigh, the harder you are to kidnap. Stay safe. Eat cake.” To Paul’s commentary on the art in his room—the watercolor painted by his grandmother of the fierce-mouthed, head-scarfed Cuban woman and the reproduction by Leonardo of the heart-shaped face of the Young Woman with an Ermine: “See! The old woman is talking to the young one, and she is saying, ‘As I am, So shall you be.’”

I recorded the Symposium-like discussions that seemed to take place most afternoons in Room 5 with Paul’s many visitors grabbing extra chairs and crowding around his bed to discuss whether Christianity was an instrument of Judeo-Greco-Roman imperialism or whether old age really was a second childhood. I noted the singular family tableaux that gathered one evening around the deathbed: Paul’s English ex-wife, Diane, whom I had never met; Martin, the affable English cleric whom Diane had left Paul for; Hannah, Diane’s daughter from her first marriage, whom Paul had raised from the age of 2 and loved as his own child; and Una, Paul’s faithful friend from Quaker House, who brought him ices in freezer packs every night. And everyone was getting along! Diane was telling me about Hannah’s father, who left her for another woman, and Paul was telling Martin about his ancestor, Diggery Priest who came over on the Mayflower and went directly back to England, unable to stand the climate.

“Garlic and sapphires in the mud/Clot the bedded axle-tree,” Paul was saying, his voice softer and weaker so that I had to lean in close to hear him.

I had been in the UK for twelve days and Paul was still at Wheatfields, the issue of whether he would stay or go still unresolved, though Hannah, Oliver, and Joel were secretly touring a nursing home in Headingly, despite Paul’s opposition: “I feel called to heaven,” he quipped, “but not to a nursing home.”

In the meantime, I was reading aloud to him from “The Four Quartets.” I had taken a side trip to Cambridgeshire to visit a friend in Great Gidding, and she and I had walked to the tiny, medieval chapel of Little Gidding, which Eliot had visited in 1936 and after which he had titled the last section of his poem. I had shown Paul photos of the church on my cell phone and he had been thrilled because he had never been there.

Paul and I were playing a game where I would read him one line and he would see whether he could fill in the next. When I started with the opening of Burnt Norton, Paul said, “April is the Cruelest Month,” which was from “The Wasteland” “and I worried that the exercise would prove too frustrating. Then, a few minutes later and surprising both of us, he had sung out the lines about garlic and sapphires.

“Well done!” I said, clapping my hands.

“Keep going,” he whispered.

And so I did, and while he could not recite any more intact couplets, he nevertheless corrected my pronunciation of the German “Erhebung,” my Italian pronunciation of “Figilia del tuo figlio,” and my English pronunciation of haruspicate. When I came to the line, “Like the river with its cargo of dead Negroes, cows and chicken coops,” and stopped to say, “Jesus, what a racist!” Paul did not miss a beat and said: “What did you expect? He was from St. Louis!”

“Well, Becky, this has really taken our friendship up a notch,” Paul said, taking small, steady spoonfuls of chicken noodle soup. It was early afternoon on a Monday in the second week of September, and the doctors would take Paul off the discharge list that evening. A group of ten friends from The Struggling Christians had just left Room 5, having finished their repertory of Gregorian chants, Paul trying to sing along, though apologizing that he was “a bit off key.”

“I don’t have words for how amazing it’s been,” I said.

“The next time we see one another, I will have the entire Four Quartets memorized.”

“Fantastic!” I said, patting his glistening forehead and thinking, magically, that maybe this was not the last time. I put on my rain jacket, squeezed his free hand hard, and attempted to give him a hug; it was absurd to say goodbye to Paul while he was eating his lunch, and yet if I didn’t go now, I would miss my train to London.

Thirty-three hours later, Paul passed away.

“PAUL IS LIBERATED!” Hannah had e-mailed, all in caps in the subject heading.

I would like to think that somewhere Paul is singing: “And all shall be well and/All manner of thing shall be well.”