It is true that this can be a consolation. With life as with so many things, more is not necessarily better; all of us can imagine countless conditions, inner as well as outer, that may make an earlier death better than a later one. No one, I think, would wish a longer life on an eighty-year-old Jewish man about to die peacefully in Poland in 1938. And very few of us would wish longevity on someone whose bodily suffering has become so unbearable that they no longer regard their life as worth living. But even if we could somehow maintain perfect health in perpetuity, we should not necessarily want to prolong life forever. It is very tempting, as the French scholar Philippe Ariès once wrote about death, to “annex it to the territory of the devil.” But many very wise thinkers regard a timely death as fundamentally good, and make far bolder claims for its merits than mere relief from pain. The devout may view death as an important transformation or a welcome homecoming, while the secular may see it as both morally and psychologically necessary, because a life that went on forever would be devoid of meaning.
I have always thought that this was true; our time here, it seems to me, is made precious by virtue of being scarce. But, as I have discovered again and again, what one thinks and how one feels can part ways radically in the face of grief. I am glad, unequivocally, that my father is out of pain, but that is as far as I am able to go. Way down in the core of selfhood where emotion begins, it is impossible for me to offer death any more gratitude than that, or to pretend I don’t wish that my father—my brilliant, funny, adoring, endearing father—were still alive, and would be alive forever. “The best argument I know for an immortal life,” William James once wrote, “was the existence of a man who deserved one.”
* * *
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Like death more generally, my father’s own was somehow both predictable and shocking. It happened one September, just before the autumn equinox, that time of year when the axis of the world tilts definitively toward darkness. By then it was so evident that my father was in the autumn of his own life that I suppose I should have been more prepared for him to die. But as the ER visits had piled up over the years, I had gradually curbed my initial feelings of panic and dread—partly because no one can live in a state of crisis forever but also because, by and large, he himself bore his infirmity with insouciance. (“Biopsy Thursday,” he once wrote me about a problem with his carotid artery. “Have no idea when the autopsy will be and may not be informed of it.”) More to the point, against considerable odds, he just kept on being alive. Intellectually, I knew that no one could bear up under such a serious disease burden forever. Yet the sheer number of times my father had courted death and then recovered had served, perversely, to make him seem indomitable.
As a result, I was not overly alarmed when my mother called me one day to say that my father had been hospitalized with a bout of atrial fibrillation. Nor was I surprised, when my partner and I got to town that evening, to learn that his heart rhythm had already stabilized. The doctors were keeping him in the hospital chiefly for observation, they told us, and also because his white blood cell count was mysteriously high. When my father narrated the chain of events to us—he had gone to a routine cardiology appointment, only to be shunted straight to the ICU—he was jovial and accurate and eminently himself. He apologized for inconveniencing us, confessed that he was nonetheless delighted to see us, and attempted to thwart the cardiac-friendly dinner prescribed by the hospital by sending us out to find a decent bowl of chili. Maybe tomorrow, we said, figuring that he would be discharged by then; but the next day, although he remained in good spirits, something was amiss. When we arrived in the morning, we found him extremely garrulous, not in his usual effusive way but slightly manic, slightly off: a consequence, the doctors said, of toxins building up in his bloodstream from temporary loss of kidney function. If it didn’t resolve on its own, they planned to give him a round or two of dialysis to clear it.
That was on a Wednesday. Over the next two days, the garrulousness declined toward incoherence; then, on Saturday, my father ceased to talk. This was as mysterious to his medical team as it was distressing to the rest of us. In addition to cherishing conversation, my father had always made sense of the world through speech; all his life, he had talked his way into, out of, and through everything, including illness. Over the years of medical emergencies, I had seen him racked and raving with fever. I had seen him in a dozen different kinds of pain. I had seen him hallucinating—sometimes while fully aware of it, describing his visions and discussing the mysterious nature of cognition. I had seen him cast about in a mind temporarily compromised by illness and catch only strange, dark, hadal creatures, unknown and fearsome to the rest of us. In all that time, under all those varied conditions, I had never known him to lack for words. But now, for five days, he held his silence. On the sixth, he lurched back into sound, but not into himself; there followed an awful night of struggle and agitation. After that, aside from a few scattered words, some baffling, some seemingly lucid—“Hi!”; “Machu Picchu”; “I’m dying”—my father never spoke again.
Even so, for a while longer, he endured—I mean his him-ness, his Isaac-ness, that inexplicable, assertive bit of self in each of us. A week after he had ceased to speak, having ignored every request made of him by a constant stream of medical professionals (“Mr. Schulz, can you wiggle your toes?” “Mr. Schulz, can you squeeze my hand?”), my father chose to respond to one final command: Mr. Schulz, we learned to our amusement, could still stick out his tongue. But his sweetest voluntary movement, which he retained almost to the end, was the ability to kiss my mother. Whenever she leaned in close to brush his lips, he puckered up and returned the same brief, adoring gesture I had seen all my days. In front of my sister and me, at least, it was my parents’ hello and goodbye, their “Sweet dreams” and “I’m only teasing,” their “I’m sorry” and “You’re beautiful” and “I love you”—the basic punctuation mark of their common language, the sign and seal of fifty years of happiness.
One night, while that essence still persisted, we gathered around my father and filled his silence with all the things we did not want to leave unsaid. I had always regarded my family as close, so it was startling to realize how much closer we could get, how near we drew around his waning flame. The room we were in was a cube of white, lit up like the aisle of a grocery store, yet in my memory, that night is as dark and vibrant as a Rembrandt painting. We talked only of love; there was nothing else to say. We told him how grateful we were, how happy he had made us, how fully and honorably he had lived out his days. My father, mute but seemingly alert, looked from one face to the next as we spoke, his brown eyes shining with tears. I had always hated to see him cry, and seldom did, but for once, I was grateful. It gave me hope that, for what may have been the last time in his life, and perhaps the most important, he understood. If nothing else, I knew that everywhere he looked that evening, he found himself where he had always been with his family: the center of the circle, the source and subject of our abiding love.