Free Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death by Katy Butler Page A

volatile,
    wind-filled sails—her rock and our paterfamilias. Now, with my
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    knocking on heaven’s door
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    brothers still keeping their distance in California, shards of his
    shattered role were falling to her and to me, his disorganized,
    bright, well-meaning daughter.
    As the notary turned the long legal pages and busied herself
    with her stamps, I looked at the language that foreshadowed
    our new world. We had no idea how flimsy these paper amulets
    would turn out to be.
    After my mother and I called Fidelity and set the money transfer
    in motion, I took my father for a walk in the forest surround-
    ing Colonel Clarence Wadsworth’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century
    wedding-cake mansion recently refurbished by the city of Mid-
    dletown. My parents and I had walked its woods and streams
    for decades, flouting the nuns in the days when it was a private
    religious retreat center run by Our Lady of the Cenacle. I held his
    hand. He dragged his right foot. Autumn leaves lay everywhere.
    I asked him if his life was still worth living.
    “Are you talking about Do Not Resuscitate ?” he asked pro-
    nouncing it Re-Sus-Ki-Tate . I wasn’t thinking that specifically, but I nodded anyway.
    He said my mother would have been better off if he’d died of
    his stroke. “She’d have weeped the weep of a widow,” he said in
    his garbled, poststroke speech. “And then she would have been
    all right.”
    As we shuffled through the fallen leaves, I thought of my
    English grandmother Alice, whom I’d hardly known. She’d died
    in 1963, at the age of eighty-three, on the custodial wing of
    a South African hospital, the first of our family to die among
    strangers. Five years of devastating strokes had left her so
    incontinent, incoherent, and angry that she refused to eat, and
    her devoted husband Ernest and his unmarried sister Mary had
    been forced to stop caring for her at home.
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    katy butler
    Alice’s years of lingering misery—then a far rarer pathway to
    death than it is today—provoked a spiritual crisis in several of
    my father’s four siblings, and they openly wondered why God
    was punishing her this way. “The noises she made were impos-
    sible to interpret . . . and did little for my always wavering faith
    in a merciful God,” my late uncle Guy, a well-known South
    African poet, wrote in his memoir about her last, worst years.
    Within hours of her death, he stood with my stunned grandfa-
    ther at the foot of her bed, contemplating her fixed sightless
    eyes and emptied form. “She was no longer the painful parody
    of what she once had been,” Guy wrote. “She was dead, bless-
    edly dead, and free at last, beyond the agony of fumbling for
    words and meanings in an eighty-three-year-old body.”
    Her husband, my grandfather Ernest, died in 1965 at the age
    of seventy-nine, at the tail end of times when medicine did not
    yet routinely stave off death among the very old. He went to his
    backyard woodshop one day, completed a set of chairs he’d left
    unfinished for thirty years, cleaned off his workbenches, had a
    heart attack, and died two days later in a plain hospital bed.
    Holding my father’s soft, mottled hand, I vainly wished him
    a similar merciful death.
    “Losing my—arm. W-w-w-ugh. W-w-ugh. W-w-w-w-ugh.
    One thing,” my father said, gesturing, trapped in the prison of
    his damaged speech. I understood: after a day or two in the army
    field hospital in a state of suicidal despair, and after months
    of rehabilitation, and countless nights drinking on the Rhodes
    University campus with other wounded and demobilized veter-
    ans, he’d picked himself up, abandoned his hoped-for career in
    chemistry, reeducated himself as a historian, met and married
    my mother, and made a good life.
    “R-r-r-r-ugh. R-r-r-r-ugh. Rotator—.” He shrugged, and
    again I understood. In his sixties, a tear in his rotator cuff,
    repaired