A blast from the past: sharing my essay Amistad (originally published by Provo Canyon Review, 2015)
Hello, Everyone!
I’ve decided to share some of my previously published essays, since it’s nice to have them all in one place, but I’ll still continue to blog about writing when the spirit moves me, so stay tuned for that, as well. Sometimes I go through phases and write in different genres. I’ve been a novelist for years, but lately, the essay form is luring me once again. More on that later, but for now, here’s an essay I wrote after facing death in the eyes. Nothing tougher, huh?
Cheers,
Dawn
~*~
Amistad
When both my best friend, Carol Quinto, and her husband, Mike, were simultaneously diagnosed with cancer, I kept expecting that happy ending Hollywood always gives us, expecting that the diagnosis was a wrong one, that both of them would live.
That’s not what happened.
In an interview with journalist Steven Schaefer, filmmaker Stephen Spielberg said this about some of his works: “When you make historical movies it’s like getting into a time machine and you steer a time machine back and try to experience what they experienced. It’s a little bit like touring Europe and you go to Rome and look up at the Sistine Chapel and pinch yourself to say, ‘Am I standing here? And is this the real Sistine Chapel?’”
I’ve always loved movies, spending countless hours in front of a screen, gazing at classics starring Clark Gable, Meryl Streep, Robert Redford, Fred Astaire, Mel Gibson, Rita Hayworth, Anthony Hopkins, Vanessa Redgrave, or Bette Davis. Good or bad—it makes no difference: movies are my passion. My friend Carol wasn’t as much of a movie watcher as I, but I’d often bring one over anyway after she had become bedridden. She used to say she never watched television, and it was true: she’d much rather have a book in her lap. But if I brought over a romantic comedy like “Sleepless in Seattle” or “Pretty Woman,” she’d watch it.
I brought over “Amistad” one day, telling her how incredible the movie was, how phenomenal the acting. A historical movie, I told her. An important film. In my mind, I fantasized that watching this drama would lift her spirits, would take her away from reality as Spielberg described. Make her pinch herself to see if her life was real.
“I can’t watch this,” she said during the scene of the slaves sandwiched in the bottom bowels of the slave ship. “No one should be treated that way.” She cried, deep hacking sobs at the end.
I felt guilty for suggesting it.
When I simply could no longer sit by and watch Carol and Mike suffer silently, my own selfish need to help them propelled me into putting together a “secret” fund for them, a collection from our writer friends to help pay the exorbitant hospital and medication costs—bills that had propelled Carol and Mike into one bankruptcy five years ago and were now sucking them into another. Because she was proud as well as stubborn, I let Carol keep up her façade and forced everyone to promise not to tell her where the money was coming from. She continued to answer the phone brightly and cheerfully, asking friends and fellow writers about their own lives, rarely divulging her fears to anyone but her closest friends and family.
I was one of those friends, one of the people with whom she shared her frustration with the welfare department. I encouraged her to call the insurance companies to see whether there was anything more they could do for her. I was one of the people who picked up her medication or transported her to the doctor’s.
To all the others, she was an eternal optimist, a Pollyanna. In some respects, I’d agree, but I also knew the Carol who loved a good political argument. Now that I think back, I figure those discussions were her way of releasing the anger she felt about being sick. She’d get into it with me about how much she hated what the American public was doing to President Clinton or about her belief that certain people got what they deserved or that feminism was overblown (she knew that one always got me going). We got into a lot of arguments—and I always lost. She loved playing the underdog and did it well. Sometimes it hurt. I’d get off the phone and slink to the other end of the house to cry on my husband’s shoulder, swearing never to broach whatever subject it was with her again. But when she believed in you and was on your side, there was no one more loyal, no one more liable to go to bat for you. And when it counted, Carol was always there for me.
In mid-January, Mike had just died and Carol decided she needed to put together her will. She asked me to contact a notary and bring him to the house to witness the will she had handwritten. We needed two witnesses, so I contacted my friend Gail and her husband, Joe, both of whom knew Carol but not her family or her other friends. “Don’t tell anyone else about this,” she said to me. Her thin hand clasped my arm. Still strong. “Promise me.”
I did.
In the hospital during a painful episode the week before, Carol talked to me about ending her life, confiding that she’d put aside a bottle of pills at home and might need help. I swallowed hard, told her I knew how she felt, but that I wasn’t sure I could help her. No matter how much I loved Carol, how much I hated seeing her go through the years of knowing she was going to die, how it killed me to see her grieve when her husband died, how difficult it was to know the pain and embarrassment she endured day after day when forced to ask my help changing her bedpan, I knew I couldn’t help her end her life. Yet time and again I was faced with my own selfishness about that. Shouldn’t she have been afforded the dignity of choosing her own moment to leave this life? Would I want her to help me if I had been faced with the same decision? I had put some of my beloved dogs out of their physical pain. Why couldn’t I do the same for a friend I dearly loved?
Later, I shared my trepidation with Gail and Joe, and we talked about what might happen if Carol took it upon herself to commit suicide, whether I’d have to be there at the end, and what they could do to help me. I didn’t want the horror of coming into such a scene, didn’t want to be involved in something that could essentially be considered a crime, but mostly, I didn’t want to lose my best friend. Still I didn’t want to admit that it would happen eventually. Death doesn’t ignore anyone.
That afternoon when Gail and Joe entered the house, I saw things through their eyes. The house was Carol’s third since I’d met her. Her first, a contemporary Florida pool house, had been impressive and sunny, indicative of the lifestyle she and Mike had been leading up till then: he, a printing contractor who knew how to play the horses; she, a published author just coming into her own. Their second house, a small mud-brown rental, was a direct result of the bankruptcy they filed shortly after he discovered he had lymphoma. It was there that Carol first entered the hospital and discovered her own cancer. Carol and Mike had bought this small house during one of Mike’s remissions and had painted and papered the tiny rooms with hope and enthusiasm. They laughed about fitting all her books into the tiny guestroom, they planned trips to gambling resorts when she received her advance for her next Regency novel, she called him her hero, he called her his babe. They called the house their new beginning.
When their illnesses started claiming that hope, Carol had moved into the guest room, leaving Mike alone in the master bedroom—not because they wanted to be apart but because their physical bodies were consumed with pain. Both needed their own beds. They talked to each other through their open bedroom doors about how to promote her next novel and what he wanted for dinner.
Though I prepared Gail and Joe for what Carol looked like, they couldn’t keep the shock off their faces when they entered the tiny bedroom or their amazement that she took up such a small portion of the double bed. The notary, the manager of the bank where I regularly made anonymous deposits into Carol’s account, also couldn’t control his emotional reaction to the bone-thin woman in the bed.
At fifty-two, Carol looked like a ninety-year-old concentration camp survivor. The luxurious shoulder-length ash blonde hair she’d been so proud of had fallen out in clumps a few months earlier when she’d undergone extensive radiation treatments. Her brown eyes loomed huge and questioning in the small structure of her skull-like face. When she spoke, her dental plate slipped about, and her smile—always charming, always available for everyone she met at a book-signing or a writers’ conference—was tenuous, shaky, as though she was afraid if she smiled too wide her teeth would slip out between her lips. The flannel robe she wore hung in deep folds from her narrow shoulders and the half-sweater arms she’d fashioned to keep her skin from bruising made her look like an accountant protecting her sleeves from carbon paper stains. Underneath the covers, Carol’s hip bones stuck out like pelican wings and her legs, purple with bruises and thinner than my wrist, were pillowed to keep her tortured backbone in a comfortable position.
Though she acted as if she’d been in bed with nothing more significant than a cold, everyone knew differently. All three of her visitors tried not to look at her yet couldn’t help but stare. I pretended not to notice, while Carol managed to joke with them about how hard it was to balance the pages she needed to sign, how her knees were too bony to place a book atop them, how we all needed to get out of there as soon as possible so her mother wouldn’t be suspicious of why we were at the house.
Without a spoken word, we shared the knowledge that nothing would ever be normal again.
The procedure took all of fifteen minutes. I bustled around the room, straightening up Carol’s bed, passing papers from one person to another, hunting for Carol’s license. “I haven’t used it in so long, I don’t even know where it is,” she joked. And, finally, it was over.
“Take these and put them someplace safe,” she said, handing me the packet. “When Lynne gets down here, give them to her. And promise me you won’t tell anyone else.”
I had been talking to Lynne, Carol’s sister, for weeks, reporting on Carol’s condition, and letting her know what Carol herself wouldn’t reveal. But Carol didn’t know that. She also didn’t know that her stepdaughter had been calling me. What she was now asking—to keep this secret from Dawn and Jean, Carol’s stepdaughter and mother—would be hard to accomplish. But I’d made my friend a promise, and I was going to keep it. The one thing she still had left was a sense of pride.
As I walked Gail and Joe to the door, the television was on low: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, dancing and singing away in “Top Hat.”
When I got home that day, I read the will and the living will. Certain friends would be given bits and pieces of Carol’s life, special books, her collection of slot machines, and her beloved cat, a pretty black and grey longhair she’d nicknamed Mouse because of the cat’s weak, plaintive voice. Her sister would be executrix of the meager estate, and her stepdaughter and granddaughter would get some of the more treasured items, like the novels she’d written. A Regency romance author, Carol had made a name for herself and had a loyal legion of fans. She continued to hope right up till her last days that she’d be able to finish the novel she was working on and that the others would become a family legacy. A niece would be awarded the house and its contents. Her mother would receive the few pieces of jewelry Carol owned and the life insurance policy she had wisely gotten more than two years before, when her doctor first said, “I think you have about six months left.” Near the end of the list of instructions, Carol told Lynne to give away some of her photos, noting that I should receive some of them.
I cried to my husband that night that I didn’t want anything from her, but that I hoped she would leave me a letter, as she’d promised in her will. She didn’t. There was one for another friend, someone with whom she’d had a problem in the past, and several for other people, but none for me. I often comforted myself by believing it was because I was constantly there, and she just didn’t have a chance to write to me.
In March, Lynne finally came. By that time, Carol had spent almost a month in the hospital and some days, it seemed like she wasn’t going to come home. On several occasions, her mother, her stepdaughter, and I had slept in the hospital room, taking turns moving Carol so she’d be in less pain, doing the nurses’ job for them, all of us listening to her moans and her rattled breathing, and wondering whether she’d make it through the night. Through it all, we watched countless movies, talking more about the celluloid figures on the screen than about how we felt, never discussing with Carol how much we’d miss her, how painful it was to watch her disappear.
When we knew she was going to come home, because there was nothing else the doctors could do for her, Carol asked to see the Hospice workers. I was at the hospital the day the representative came to Carol’s room and told us what to expect. Still convinced she wanted to orchestrate her own death, Carol came right out and asked the woman whether she’d be able to get enough medication to make the passage easier. The woman’s answer surprised me.
“We’ll keep you medicated so that you don’t feel any pain at all, and you can rest assured that you’ll just drift away. Like going to sleep. And after you’re gone, we’ll be here for your family. You won’t have to worry about anything. We’ll take care of it all.”
The Hospice worker left. Carol slept. I stared out the window and wondered how I was going to tell Lynne. What was I going to do with the living will I was now carrying everywhere with me?
Finally, one afternoon, I couldn’t take anymore. Sitting at the side of her bed, I held my friend’s bony hand in mine and looked into the eyes she could no longer close when she slept. “It’s okay to let go,” I told her. “Everything’s taken care of. Everything will be all right after . . . .”
Ironically, she comforted me. She told me it would be all right. And I believed her. She was confident, strong. She’d always been right.
That night, Carol demanded someone be with her every moment, told us (her sister, her mother, and myself) that it was “unfair” that she was alone. So, we took turns sitting at the side of the bed, holding her hand, stroking the thin strands of hair away from her face. The television was tuned to the American Movie Classics channel. Nonstop.
We talked about the movies, her sister and I, trying to keep each other awake across the bed. Carol’s morphine intake was incredibly high, and it altered her normally clear perception of reality. She often didn’t make sense when she spoke, though the comments we could decipher were usually related to whatever movie was on.
“He’s so handsome,” she said about Cary Grant in “Bringing Up Baby” with Katherine Hepburn. Later that night, she complained about the noise Jimmy Cagney made when he was shooting the bad guys in “White Heat.”
Finally, the morphine started doing the talking for her, and we could no longer understand what she was saying.
By two a.m., Jean and Lynne needed a break. The night nurse had come, so they went into the parlor for a nap. We turned the lights down, but left the television on, and Carol spoke sporadically to me. Often I didn’t know what she was saying. Most of the time, I made idiotic conversation about the Errol Flynn movie, the name of which I’ve now forgotten.
At one point, Carol cried out in pain, and when I asked her if she wanted to be moved, she weakly nodded. The nurse and I lifted the sheets; her on one side of the bed, me on the other. Carol’s tiny frame barely dented the mattress, her legs akimbo, the diaper no longer even attached because we’d had to change it so often that it was easier to just lay it flat on the bed. I lifted Carol’s hip gently, yet she still screamed. The nurse tried to shift her from one side to the other, and Carol’s moan turned to a sob.
“Teach her how to do it,” Carol whispered to me.
The nurse raised her eyebrows, surprised that I would know how a patient could be moved better than she would. I just smiled at her and said, “I’ve had a lot of experience. You have to move her just right or her back goes nuts.”
We got her settled. I asked Carol if she was okay, and she mutely shook her head. “What else can I do?” I asked, now feeling more helpless than I ever had.
“Pray,” she said.
As we pulled the sheets and blankets up over her body, the nurse and I recited the Lord’s Prayer. It had been ages since I’d said it and a couple of times I stumbled, but we finished, and Carol went to sleep.
She never spoke again.
At ten that night, Dawn called me and said, “She’s gone and Lynne’s having a tough time. Can you come?”
I didn’t cry on the way over, too numb to do anything but maneuver the car. Lynne and Dawn were sitting outside on the tiny front porch. When I got out of the car, they stood. I dropped my pocketbook, went to Lynne, and clung to her. We sobbed for a long, long time. Finally, we went into the house and Lynne said, “Mom’s in with Carol. I can’t get her out of there.”
I went into the bedroom and found Jean staring at her daughter’s face. I reached over and tried to close Carol’s eyes, but I couldn’t. I remember thinking she would have been so embarrassed to know that she had died with them open.
The television was still on. A romantic comedy with Carole Lombard and Clark Gable. A movie Carol would have loved. I shut the TV off.
An Indian writer, Vaishali Honawar, reviewed “Amistad” and noted that many of the slaves “committed suicide along the way, preferring death to a life of humiliation. The men aboard Amistad (the word means ‘friendship’ in Spanish) also refused to accept their fate. Instead of death, however, they chose revolt as their means to freedom.”
Cancer is a slow, relentless process of coming to the end of life, not a process for the faint of heart. It demands your complete attention and honesty. It’s a thief of the most terrible kind, stealing your heart, your smile, your time. And it doesn’t give anything back . . . to the dying or the living.
It is the worst form of slavery.
I thought I’d never again be able to watch “Amistad” without thinking of how I felt after discovering that my best friend was a slave to the cancer ending her life, as clearly as if she’d been shackled to the disease. I saw the movie one more time in a dark theater. I cried then. Yes, because the movie was emotionally-driven and the acting superb, but also because the analogy loomed crystal clear. And because it was safe in the dark to cry.
