Free Remembering Raquel by Vivian Vande Velde

slip away.

Albert Falcone, Father (Part 2)
    Father Kevin has just finished telling me that—though the time God has given us on earth is short because we were created to spend eternity with Him in heaven—it is always sad to lose one
so
young.
    I appreciate that Father Kevin is trying to console me.
    But "
sad"?
    I thought when Cleo died my heart had died along with her. But now I see I was wrong.
    With my wife dying and then my daughter, it's like my own life has been negated. I suddenly realize I have no purpose. Forty-two years of my taking up space on this earth—for what? To keep my company's books straight? To keep the patch of lawn at 432 Williams Street well tended between the Steinmillers, who lived there before, and whoever will move in after I've gone?
    When Cleo died in December, I thought:
I must be strong for Raquel.
    There's nobody to be strong for now. There's nobody to
be
for now.
    Raquel took her mom's death so hard.
    We had been up front with her all along, telling her the numbers for this particular cancer were not good, but Raquel wouldn't believe it.
    "You've got to be strong," Raquel would tell her mother. "You've got to fight it."
    Like the cancer was a villain from one of those fantasy books she loved. Like there was a way to vanquish it if we just stayed pure of heart and searched hard enough and endured a certain number of hardships on the way. Well, Cleo
was
pure of heart, and the hardships to be endured were the chemo and the radiation—but in the end nothing was enough.
    Raquel was a smart girl. She knew the difference between fiction and real life. But she couldn't believe there was nothing we could do—she thought there had to be some alternative medicine or experimental treatment. She became angry with her mother for giving up, when in truth Cleo simply came to accept what was happening.
    I remember Cleo asking me to get a do-not-resuscitate order from the nurse. "I've asked her several times," Cleo said. "I know my memory's not good with all these drugs, but I'm sure I have, and she keeps saying she's left one with me, but she never does."
    I went and got one from the nurse, and held it while Cleo, barely able to grasp the pen, signed.
    Raquel was furious.
    We tried to explain that all it meant was that the doctors would not take heroic measures to prolong Cleo's life.
    "Why don't we just take her out to the ditch behind our house and shoot her?" Raquel demanded.
    Despite her own pain, Cleo recognized that Raquel was speaking from a pain of her own. By then Cleo, who had always been so pink and round and beautiful, was pale and haggard, with her skin-and-bones frame bruised black and purple and yellow from all the different needles. Her voice was thready and hoarse. "Honey," Cleo said, "I'm going to hold on for as long as I can. This just says that they won't jam a feeding tube up my nose when I'm unconscious, or keep my lungs going with a ventilator, or restart my heart if it stops."
    "Those kinds of things happen all the time," Raquel said. "And then people recover."
    "But this is if I'm not going to recover." Cleo tried to take Raquel's hand, but the IV line gave her limited reach, and Raquel stood and moved to the window, keeping her back to us.
    "You never know," Raquel said. "Not for sure. People are always talking about miracle cures. Are you saying you don't believe in God?"
    If you don't believe in God at any other time, you have to believe at a time like then, or you would go crazy.
    Cleo barely had the strength to keep her eyes open, much less reason with Raquel. So I said, "We all believe."
    I thought Cleo had fallen asleep, but then she whispered, "It's just if God wants to cure me, he'd better do it before my heart stops, or before I need a feeding tube."
    Raquel said, "That's barbaric."
    But by then Cleo truly had fallen asleep.
    When I went through Raquel's room yesterday, looking for mementos to bring here to the funeral parlor—photographs, pictures