A Good Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

he’ll throw up on the table, I take his arm to calm him down. It’s an involuntary kindness on my part; I recognize it but have no idea where it comes from. I don’t love this man. I don’t even like him. My mother gets up and goes into the kitchen to hide. Her refuge. I realize she doesn’t want to be a witness to what’s going to happen next. She knows the truth but doesn’t want to hear it. Knowing it is bad enough.
    My father’s eyes are those of a fish that has been on the counter too long. He looks at me as though he’d like to strangle me. I know the look. It’s his look of anger and inexplicable violence, the look murderers give policemen, an expression of hideous simplicity. I’m no longer afraid of him, but he thinks he can still terrify me. Why don’t fathers love their children? Or rather, why do children so rarely know that their fathers love them? These aren’t the questions that interest me particularly, although I think they’re legitimate ones. I just want to know. Not understand. Know. What do you think, Dad? What about those trout, and that walleye? What if you’ve never loved anyone? Not even yourself? And what if I’m like you? Like father, like son. I’m terrified of becoming my father. Isabelle is chatting with the teenagers over by the Christmas tree. I drink to steady my nerves.
    “That walleye…”
    My father has difficulty breathing.
    “The… wall… eye… It’s… com… pli… cated.”
    He picks up his plate. It seems he wants to stand up. I hear someone speaking. It’s all right, Pops, we’ll get it. Don’t get up. Someone is being thoughtful. I was going to say “like all girls,” but his illness shakes up the categories. We all react the same when he takes his plate and starts to get up. We know him, we know what will happen. He’ll probably fall and the plate will break and the cheese will land on the rug. We want to prevent that from happening. My father has always carried his own plate into the kitchen, never anyone else’s. He never helped my mother except for that one plate, which is his and therefore his responsibility. All his life he has put his own plate in the sink, turned on the tap, carefully washed it and set it on the counter. He never dried it. Drying dishes was a woman’s job. Or a child’s. But he always washed his plate. Now we take the plate from him. He doesn’t say thank you because we are not doing him a favour. He sighs and looks at me. I look down at my plate and forget about the walleye. Why is he asking me to bear witness to the theft of his plate? It’s not as though I’ve ever even tried to pretend that I harbour any sympathy for him.
    What does an old man do who, as death approaches, has it explained to him in incontrovertible, scientific terms that if he wants to live for another few years he has to stop living, move as little as possible, eat things he doesn’t like and avoid having strong emotions? How does he react to being told that if he wants to go on living he has to cease being alive? He thumbs his nose at the few extra days such a diet would procure for him. He knows better than anyone that he’s going to die anyway.
    He lives with his death. He feels it in his limbs, which no longer follow him around; he senses it in his sleep, which refuses to come as he lies on his back staring at shadows he doesn’t recognize on the ceiling. How does anyone as proud as him react? Does he bow down and die politely according to the rules, as his doctors and everyone else around him advise him to do? Does he suddenly become compliant, obedient? Sometimes I think that’s exactly what we’re asking him to do. My father is neither obedient nor polite; he rages against the death that wants to rob him of life. But he knows…
    Stubborn as ever, he insists on washing his plate as though his entire life depends on it. But tonight, in the great irritation that is Christmas, such a thing is not permitted. We spare him the gesture. We