As my darling father was dying, he experienced something called Anisocoria. It was after Nina’s explicit instructions that he let go, and he was in the midst of complying. His rattling lungs had stopped making any noise, and his breathing turned into shallow panting, like a tired puppy. As my mother walked into the room in her nightgown, my father looked at his wife of 40 years. I think it took all of his power to watch her walk her across the room, and so the last intentional thing he ever did in his life was to want to look at the mother he gave me.
I loved them both more for that, and I knew that it was the greatest gift and the most wicked curse to love someone like they loved each other. As their child, I understood that they made me because they wanted me, and in some way, I was fulfilling my whole duty to them all at once.
I can never ask him what he thought in that moment as he watched her walk, but I can hear him say “I’m so lucky she was my wife. Gosh. I don’t know how I got so lucky.”
I expect he thought she was beautiful. I expect he wanted to cling on to his life for another thousand years. I expect that he remembered her thick, wavy gold and brown hair and her huge, shockingly beautiful smile when they met.
I think the hardest part about dying is dying: the heavy chest, the wet lungs, the persistent and exhausted heart. Your guts falling apart inside you. A general feeling of, expressed when a new malady would present itself, specifically like “oh, goshdammit. What now?” I think the second hardest part must be disappointing the people who don’t want you to die. Our history lives in your still-alive mind. Our memories are seething within the neural networks of a briefly available life. When you exit you will, as the arbiter of so many of our memories, be taking those with you into an ocean we can not wade into. Not yet.
His eyes went out as she walked to us, and the Anisocoria set in. Anisocoria is described as “your dad looks like a nice little old man one minute and the next minute he has those crazy Marilyn Manson eyes where one pupil is huge and the other pupil is tiny.” Marilyn Manson never did shock me until that moment when I resented thinking about his stupid makeup.
I would rather have thought about David Bowie, who had Anisocoria because of an accident as a teen.
Regardless, this condition means crazy things are happening between your brain and your optic nerves. None of the things that are happening are good for you, and my father had a look of surprise on his face.
I think painters like Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Paul Ruben used to sit over their led trays of poisonous paint and dream of Heaven and Hell as they went crazy. They managed to slow down perception and capture an experience of dying that is either beautiful, or horrible, or both. I imagine the last thing you see when you’re alive is the entire Flemish Baroque period on acid, happening inside a bedroom in Kentucky. Loud, sudden, with Mariah Carey or Jesus singing in the background of it all. For real: upon the exit of our mortal coil, you witness something shocking, breath taking and breath-ending.
Maybe, though, it isn’t as complicated as rapturous angels or summoning demons or your long dead family members with trumpets screaming your name from the recesses of your firing neural network. Maybe it is not walking into the light, or chasing the sun, or losing your nerve endings or flying towards the gods. Maybe it is not the entire cacophony of human strength and defeat as you hurdle to the void, but if you were to watch a dying man, you would certainly be convinced it was a significant experience (to put it mildly).
Maybe in the end it is enough to remember your whole life’s meaning is held within a small woman after 40 years together in a blue flannel nightgown, bleary eyed, exhausted and deliberate. Maybe in the end you gasp looking at the force of the love that will carry you on in the world.
