Death Tax
What’s happening?
I’m in bed, in the master bedroom I share with my husband. Only three weeks have passed since my mother died. It’s midnight or the early hours of the morning; it could also be soon after I fall asleep. And this is definitely a falling, not a drifting. I’ve fallen and, like the old lady, I’m trying to get up but can’t. I’m trying to get up and out of somewhere dark and disorienting, for this is no refreshing pool of water on which to float, or quiet, calm room in which to meditate. I’ve fallen into an abyss.
I can’t see!
The darkness crushes me, stifling—a pillow pressed against my face. The darkness bears down on me, too close. I am scrabbling, flailing. This darkness—a bully. Relentless.
Where am I?
But what I really mean is, where are you?
When I’m on my computer, taking a break from emails or writing, I watch the photos appear and disappear one by one on my screen. Even when my mother or father are not in them, I think she was alive then, or he was alive then, or they both were alive then. I could still call them on the phone and talk to them, go down the hill from my house to theirs and see them, invite them to my house perched high on the hill for our weekly family dinners at the round table with the view my father loved and the light my mother loved, surrounded as it is by windows that extend up to create a transparent ceiling. The image of the glass dining room with my family in it now evokes a conservatory: a room that conserves the precious—our family as hothouse flowers. Or a sanctuary—a room that holds our family as it once was, loving and intact. Sometimes I think, as another photo appears, that was only a month after my mother died. Or, that was two weeks before my father died. It’s like a test. The endless need to know, a toll, forever taxing. What was happening? Who was where?
“He’s in Heaven,” I said.
We were talking about one of her older brothers, my first cousin. As we sat on the edge of the fountain in the front garden, the water caught the sunlight and tossed it back in sparkling diamonds that cascaded into the wide octagonal pool.
“¿Qué?” she asked, her smile turning quizzical.
I pointed to the sky, its usual cloudless summer blue. “Está en el cielo.”
My little cousin laughed. “¡Carlos!” she called out. “¡Dice que Eduardo está en el cielo! Eso no es verdad, ¡está en Italia!”
Another of her brothers, twelve, maybe thirteen years older than her, sat with our mothers closer to the house with its modern wall of windows and stucco frame. Hearing his little sister, he looked up, brow furrowed. Gazing across the lawn at us, his five-year old-sister and his ten-year-old cousin, he attempted a smile, but said nothing.
No one had informed me that we were to hide the death of their brother from the younger children.
Several months earlier, my mother had held my hand, pulling me down the brick path from our house to the front gate where the car waited. For some reason I have in my memory that I was wearing my white First Communion dress. It could be that my mother did put me in that dress (but, of course, without veil, rosary, or tiny New Testament) for this particular occasion, because she was insisting I accompany her to the neighborhood church, where we would pray for the soul of her nephew, my cousin, dead at seventeen from a crash on the notoriously dangerous roads curving cliffside from the city of Lima to the suburban estates. Her sister’s son had gone to Heaven, she explained to me, her reluctant and complaining companion on this mournful outing. It was all very very sad and now we had to go and pray for God to welcome him and keep him safe for his mother. I didn’t really understand. I don’t remember what happened when we arrived at St. Anselm’s, the small Catholic church up our street, where throughout my childhood my mother would sporadically take us to hear Mass from an old white priest. I just remember my mother’s hand pulling mine, the white dress, the brick path.
Once my grandmother was visiting us in California from Peru, which she used to do every few years. We were taking a break from shopping at the local mall to sit in the courtyard at one of the small outdoor tables and eat something, probably pastries with coffee. Imagine an older lady, una señora, with her silver hair up in an elegant bun, wearing a long string of pearls around her neck, and large pearl earrings. Her fingers were adorned with diamonds and her left wrist with gold bangles that, whenever she moved her hands, clinked against an old watch she had worn for years, a watch that belonged to the grandson who died so long ago in that car crash in the far-flung suburbs of Lima.
As we sat drinking coffee and eating croissants, she said, “Sabes, if my siblings and my friends están en el infierno, if they are in Hell right now, no quiero ir al cielo.” She was thinking out loud about her love for her friends and her family. Heaven wouldn’t be Heaven for her if they weren’t there. She preferred Hell with her loved ones to Heaven without them. These were also the years when she would announce—often after talking about the sisters (she had seven) or friends (she had many) who had died before her at seventy-five, or eighty, or eighty-five—that very soon she too would be “con los angeles.” Whenever she said this, about dying in the near future and going to be with the angels, she’d raise her hands and waggle her fingers toward the sky, all the while looking at me with a mischievous smile.
Years later, when we were visiting family in Lima, my mother and I sat in the backseat as my uncle drove us around so we could do our errands. My aunt sat in the front beside her husband, knitting. Suddenly she wondered out loud if she had closed the window in the front room where my 103-year-old grandmother lay, an invalid for the last two years, back at home. Imagine now an ancient woman. Her body had shrunk alarmingly. No longer did she smile or give anyone mischievous looks. She lay prone most of the day in the bed the family moved to the living room so she would always be surrounded by life’s daily commotion. Her hair, a dull gray, was gathered loosely in a clip rather than styled into a majestic silvery bun. She slept most of the time and rarely spoke.
That day on our errands, my aunt worried about her catching a cold if a breeze came in through the open window in the living room. My mother answered by saying maybe it didn’t matter so much if their mother caught a cold, since she was so old, and such an invalid. In fact, my grandmother had told her she badly wanted to die but couldn’t—she was trapped “en este cuerpo.”
I piped up from the back then, thinking it helpful to explain my mother’s point of view in this particular case, since it was also mine. “You know your cousin Juan helped his mother when she wanted to die—because he’s a geriatric doctor he could give her morphine for pain and she just stopped eating one day.”
My aunt digested this information, her knitting needles clicking furiously, as she sat, as always without a seatbelt, and the car stopped and started in the traffic of Lima’s downtown. “Now I’m not going to be able to sleep all night thinking about how my cousin killed my aunt,” she fretted. “¡Carambas! Mi primo mató a mi tía.”
My father died like my great-aunt did. But with years more forethought and planning. And that is the way he liked it. He was always a controlling person, rigid in his rules about a clean house: no shoes indoors, the dog staying outside on the covered porch in its wooden house no matter the weather—rain, thunder, lightning, as well as in having a strict household budget with limited allowances for the entire family—himself, his wife, his children.
In my twenties, when I was still living at home, I saw a book on the coffee table titled “The Final Exit.” Intrigued, but also apprehensive, I asked my father about it. He bought it, he told me, because it outlined effective ways to kill oneself. “What?” I asked. “Why?” He explained, for the first but not, as it turned out, the last time, that he would never accept living dependent on others, old and frail and helpless. His threshold for lack of independence was the inability to walk, to bathe and dress and feed himself. If the time came when that failure of self-sufficiency loomed near, he would commit suicide. By then his own father had fallen in the icy backyard at his house on the East Coast, and been moved to a nursing home where his mind declined rapidly for three years until he died, confused and alone. At the time, still young, I questioned my father’s confidence in his plans, despite the fact that, even then, a part of me agreed with his thinking.
Published in 1991, The Final Exit is still in print, in its third edition, and a New York Times Bestseller.
My father and I sit together in the Reverend’s office, not in a church, but in a hospital. I’ve driven him the fifteen minutes from his house to this hospital in Northern Marin, having agreed a few days prior to accompany him to this meeting. He had received earlier, in the mail, a hot pink sheet of paper to fill out with directions. It’s an “End-of-Life” or “Advanced Directive” document. There are many questions to answer—do you want to be resuscitated? Do you want artificial nutrition or hydration? Do you want comfort care or pain medication even if it prolongs your life? Etcetera, etcetera.
This meeting is instructive for me. I learn much about death and culture and belief systems. About inherent versus learned squeamishness and fear. It turns out that death tax looks different to different people from different cultures and religions and upbringings.
My father, I know, is excited to have been summoned to this meeting. To talk about his life and his death and how he wants to be treated in a medical emergency. He is also intrigued by the fact that this Reverend who is talking to us from behind her desk in her hospital office is female. As a life-long feminist and champion of girls and women always, I am gratified. As someone who grew up in a world where men and women stayed in their lanes, so to speak, with roles clearly defined by sex and gender, my father is fascinated.
He and I, both cerebral, both intellectual, ask many questions about the document itself as a cultural artifact as well as a series of practical questions that must be answered. The Reverend tells us about the Wisconsin study where they piloted this exercise: the contemplating and answering of questions about end-of-life. We discuss the differences in culture, even within the US, and she acknowledges that this initial study was very white, middle-class, and midwestern.
At one point, the Reverend asks about my father’s wife, about my mother. Why is she not here? She sees from the hospital records that my mother is also elderly and that she is also a member of this medical system. My father and I both answer, knowing exactly why. My mother, Latina rather than Anglo, Catholic rather than Protestant, superstitious rather than atheist, cannot stand to think about death, to imagine the end of her life, to think about the particulars. She only ever attended funerals reluctantly. She never went to her mother’s grave to visit or to commune with the spirits or to meditate. She never took me to a single funeral when I was growing up. She wanted to protect her children from what she saw as depressing and morbid and possibly traumatizing. She was appalled when, at her uncle’s open-casket funeral in Concord (to which she went very purposefully without her children), her aunt made each grandchild line up to kiss their grandfather’s embalmed face. Meeting a reverend in a hospital to talk about the way she might want to die was not my mother’s idea of a pleasant afternoon. I could see, however, that in many ways it was for my father, who believed that he could control his death if he tried hard enough, just as he made rigid routines of his daily life, sometimes at the expense of peace and calm at home with his wife and children.
This day with the Reverend, we fill out the form with her. Sometimes I cut my father off and answer for him, knowing what he will say, what he wants for himself in the future if he is caught in a stroke or a heart attack. I want the same for myself. We only ask for clarification with one question—something about respiratory failure with pneumonia, and if the use of oxygen will save a life still worth living, would he want to receive this intervention? It is the only box that she ticks off for him as “Yes.”
A few hours before my mother died, I sat by her hospital cot in my sister’s house. I had pushed a chair as close as possible to her in order to more easily touch her, rub her fingers, smooth the skin on her arm, squeeze her hand. At one point my father sat beside me in stoic silence as I cried and touched my mother, who was silent in her dying, unable, by then, to open her eyes or communicate. Although I wasn’t facing him, and couldn’t see him, I sensed my father’s presence and knew he was sitting in the armchair next to me, his face pensive. After a few minutes I felt on my shoulder his hand, the one with mangled and missing fingers from a long-ago mountain climbing accident. With my free hand I covered his damaged one, taking the unexpected comfort it offered. For the last time in this life I held both my parents in the same moment.
The summer before my mother died, I drove with her and my younger son to my sister’s house in Sacramento. We listened to a variety of music from my own collection—reggaeton, ABBA, classical—as we passed marshlands with egrets in the water and hawks in the sky, farms with cows grazing in the hot sun as it beat down on the rolling hills, then housing developments, malls, and dusty acreage with FOR SALE signs.
“Hay una canción bien linda que se llama ‘Quiero Vivir’—¿crees que puedes buscarla ahorita para tocarla?” My mother’s request, to find a new song she’d recently discovered and play it in the car, was directed to her technologically savvy grandson sitting in the backseat. He immediately took out his phone and started searching. He found a song with the same title and played the beginning for my mother but no, it was a different version with a male singer and hers definitely had a woman singing, not a man. In total, my son found three different versions before he landed on the one my mother had heard and fallen in love with, a lighter version, and sung by a woman’s sweeter voice. In the end, my son put all four versions on my phone, where they remain.
The following summer, the summer my mother died, I drive again with her to my sister’s house in Sacramento. I look over to her as I steer the car on the long highway northeast toward the state capitol. She looks happy. She’s smiling and tapping her hand on her thigh to the beat of the music I’ve put on for her, knowing what she likes. We listen again and again to “Quiero Vivir,” the lighter version with the woman singing, the one she prefers. I believe she is happy to be in the car with me, to be going to her other daughter’s house where she might get better, to be having what she hopes may be a second chance at life. I know it from her smile and her conversation and the bright way, like a content and curious bird, that she looks around her, out the window at the barns and silos, the clumps of cows under tight cliques of shady oaks, the marshes reflecting the blue of the sky dotted here and there with white clouds. I don’t know that this will be my last car ride with her.
Quiero vivir means I want to live.
About ten days after our car ride together, three days before her death, my mother and I find ourselves alone in my sister’s house. My niece and nephew are at camp or dance class, my sister may have been running errands or at a work meeting. My own sons are at summer jobs an hour and a half away in our own county southwest of Sacramento. Even the dog is outside in the yard. My bathrobed mother sits in her wheelchair. She is thin, so thin. For the last two months she has been slowly starving, the pounds finally (ironically!) melting away after almost an entire lifetime of yo-yo diets.
In the unusual quiet of the house, my mother turns to me. “No quiero morir,” she says. “Quiero vivir.”
Recently in Madrid’s Museo del Prado I saw my father. I saw him in a portrait by the Spanish Baroque painter José de Ribera. It’s not really my father, of course, who has been dead over a year, but the painted visage is so similar to his it’s as if Ribera used his aged face as a model for this portrait of a saint. The room was hung all around with paintings by Ribera, Goya, and El Greco. Ribera, as I commented to the friend walking around the museum with me, surely did love his saints. There were so many old saints, all men, depicted as reflecting into the middle distance, receiving a vision from above, or dying. The one who had my father’s ninety-three year old face was Jerome, wearing a single toga-like garment draped across his skinny shoulder. A skull sits by him, representing, as the plaque next to the ornate frame claimed in Spanish and then English, his ascetic two years in the desert searching for peace. My atheist father was definitely not a saint but he was measured in all things, including food and drink. He took walks and worked in his garden until a week before his death. He was an intellectual, with texts including Japanese history, Western philosophy, and the great works of English and American literature sitting on the living room bookshelf that spanned an entire wall. Jerome, considered the most learned of the saints, spent his life reading, translating, and weighing in on moral debates.
My father appears to be there, in front of me, mere feet away from me. His close-cropped hair, only ever washed with bar soap and brushed forward, his broad forehead, his bushy eyebrows, his long, thin nose, his white beard. Yet he is not there; he is gone, unreachable, untouchable. I feel the tax of finality press on my shoulders, the back of my neck. I cannot talk to him and know he hears me—I cannot touch him and know he feels me—I cannot explain to him and know he understands.
At one point I step closer to Ribera’s painting, closer to my father’s face, extending a finger toward the canvas, eager to show my friend a trick of brushstroke, or an inspired use of color. In my peripheral vision a black-uniformed docent, official ID lanyarded around her neck, leaps from her chair. ¡No tocar!
My mother had been gone a month. The tax I’d paid since then was heavy. Sometimes I could barely stand under its weight.
My father chose this time to start giving me various articles from the house. “Make sure to take Grandma’s plates the next time you’re here,” he said once. Or my brother entered my house ahead of our father one evening for our weekly family dinner carrying the box of antique silverware my mother had always protected fiercely, counting the spoons after every dinner party.
“Why do you have that?”
“Dad made me bring it for you to keep here.”
After my father negotiated the transfer of three or four of this type of household article, I said to him, “Dad! Just because Mom’s gone doesn’t mean you have to empty the house. You’re still living there!” A thought entered my head. “Wait—are you thinking of doing your final exit plan? I thought you were going to warn us before.”
“Consider yourself warned.”
I sit on a bench with a visiting friend and my heart hurts. It’s that familiar pain, a little dulled a year after my mother’s death but still weighing on me, unrelenting. It’s a bright sunny day with just a bit of breeze—a fresh breeze tinged with salt from the ocean in front of us. My friend and I have come especially to this seaside town in my county, a fifteen minute drive from my house. We’ve been close for decades, since freshman year at our all-girls Catholic high school. We sit companionably, side by side, gazing at the blue-green ocean and the silvery white city and the rusty red bridge. Ferries come and go, pelicans and seagulls fly about, and visitors stroll with their tiny fluffy dogs up and down the path that closely borders the coastline. Our conversation drifts like chaff or straw on the surface of the water, this way and that, from past to present to future and back again.
I’ve chosen this location for our afternoon outing not only because it’s beautiful, with San Francisco framed by Angel Island, Belvedere, and the Golden Gate, but because by sitting in that precise location, on a bench, beside the curving path that meanders gently along the edge of the bay, I can pay homage to my mother. She loved this town, this view, this path, the sky and the sun and the sea. I’ve sat with her many times on one of these benches, looking at the waves and the birds and the boats, at the city across the bay silver and white against the sky.
I tell my friend about my thoughts. How I know my mother would have loved to be with us right then, on this bench, observing the locals as well as the visitors and tourists as they pass by, a moving panorama. “I feel so sad,” I say, “because a few times in the last couple of years she called and asked me if I wanted to come here with her. And I usually said no, because I thought I was too busy.”
My friend turns her head toward me as she contemplates what I’ve said. She tells me it’s normal to have these feelings of sadness laced with guilt, or with frustration for not doing things differently, before it’s too late. Her father died five years ago—a man so kind, so refined, a soft-spoken man, a gentle man. In his last months, his deteriorating mind prompted him to ask his daughter if she would sleep in his room. “Will you stay with me tonight?” he’d say, afraid of the darkness, of the emptiness that had morphed for him into a threatening solitude.
But no, she rarely had the patience to keep him company for the long quiet hours in what had become for him the lonely night. She tells me that instead she’d go off, impatient, wanting a break, wanting time with her husband or on her own, to rest, to watch television, to sleep, to unwind. Not wanting to answer the constant questions or block the inappropriate demands of a sometimes querulous, always needy father. And she feels regret, still, after five years. “Now I want so badly to go back in time and stay with him. But I can’t.”
I tell her how I thought, I believed, I had at least ten good years with my mother. Years that I planned to fill with drives and bench sitting, with view gazing and clothes shopping, with tea drinking and trips to Lima to visit my aunt, her beloved sister. “In my mind I was so sure that I would be able to catch up and be with her more. Because I knew my children would both be in college soon, and I would finally have time to spend with her.”
But fate cheated me. Life asked of me a sacrifice that I didn’t want to give. Death demanded of me a tax I did not want to pay. I was forced to give up a future with my mother. And she would never come back. She was not spared at the last minute, as was Isaac, nor would she resurrect, as did Lazarus or Jesus himself.
“At least,” I add, trying to be cheerful, trying to be positive like my mother always had been, “she would be so happy to know that we’re here together.” Remembering her, thinking of her, missing her.
I’m still in Madrid with my friend, visiting my son during his semester abroad. This afternoon he’s at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, and will meet us later in the evening, after his classes are over and he can take the bus to have dinner with us at a restaurant in one of the city’s many plazas. My friend and I wander about, strolling from museum to café to the steps that lead up to a grand, empty conservatory from the Fin-de-Siècle era in the Parque de Madrid. The day is warm and humid, and tourists like us are everywhere, eager to take in as much of Spanish culture as possible. In front of the glass conservatory is a trio of musicians, young people, two of them playing violins and one a cello. They play a favorite of mine, Pachelbel’s Canon in D. My friend knows I love this piece, and suggests we sit on the steps with the other park visitors to listen to the music among the trees. As we settle down, arranging beside us our bags full of booty from the museum gift shop, a couple from the audience steps out in front of the musicians to dance an impromptu dance, a beautiful, lyrical, graceful dance, the man twirling and holding and following his partner as she sways and dips and turns.
I know immediately that my mother would adore this moment. The city, the park, the trees and the grand old conservatory, the audience spontaneously gathered on the stone steps, the music and the dancers. After she went to Greece with a group of adventurers, on her own and in her eighties, she showed me a video she’d taken of two of her fellow travelers, one of them a pretty young woman, who spontaneously stood up to dance salsa in harmonious tandem at a restaurant where they were all eating dinner. My mother was so pleased with this video, with the spontaneity and the guitar and the clapping, that she wanted me to see it often, to have me take the same pleasure in watching it as she did.
My friend films the man and the woman dancing in the middle of the park in Madrid, obviously expert dancers, moving so gracefully to music my mother loved as much as I did. She sends the video to me so that I have it on my own phone. Every time I glance at it, or play even a few seconds of it, I have this urge to send it to my mother so that she too can partake in the pleasure of the music and the movement. But of course I cannot. The time for seeing through my mother’s eyes, for judging events by her standards, the time for sharing moments and sights I know she would enjoy, is over. My soul protests this tax as excessive, the toll as too heavy. I no longer have her as a sturdy backdrop to my own experiences and reactions; she is no longer there as standard bearer, as prism of reality, as sharer of beautiful spontaneous dancing in Spanish parks or Greek restaurants.
My father dies three months after my mother. Many of my friends immediately assume it’s because he was heartbroken after his wife’s passing, desolate and adrift without her. They want it to be one of those poignant, tender stories where a couple, married over fifty years, cannot live without the other. “No,” I correct each of them. “That was definitely not the case!”
My father dies because his strength begins to ebb dramatically. He knows he will soon be too weak to do his morning calisthenics, drag the two garbage bins down the long driveway once a week, clean the kitchen floor with the wet rag he’s proudly repurposed from a worn-out bath towel, pick himself up after one of his middle-of-the-night falls in the bathroom, cook for himself, dress himself, walk.
My father dies the way he promised. Several times in the past decade he told me, “I’m not leaving this house except in a pine box.” He delivered on this promise, only that he left in a plastic body bag instead of a wooden coffin.
My father dies because he wants to. He is finding it harder and harder to walk, mobility his personal test for life being worthwhile. When I was a teenager, our dog was run over by a car. He survived long enough to be taken to a vet, who told my father that the dog needed an expensive operation to save his life but that it would not guarantee the ability to walk or run. My father chose to have him put down. When my mother was dying, but we didn’t know it yet, my father told me she shouldn’t live if she would never walk again.
My father dies by choice. He dies on the day and at the time he chooses. He dies from the poison the hospital sent to his house by courier.
My father dies after I play Für Elise for him over and over on the downstairs piano, knowing it is his favorite piece. He dies after his children gather around him as he lies on his bed wearing, incongruously, a bright blue hoodie. He dies after he takes the two antiemetics a half hour before the potion. He dies after I tell him about the legacy I’ve inherited from him—a love of walks. He dies after taking the poison, holding the coffee mug with both hands and complaining briefly of its bitter taste. He dies after I stand from the chair I’ve been sitting on at the foot of his bed and hug him, telling him how much we love him. He dies after I arrange his pillows more comfortably under his head, adjusting the hood of his blue sweatshirt. He dies after I lie beside him on the edge of the bed, hand upon his. He dies after his heart slows then speeds up then slows again. He dies after I rub his hand, press gently on his chest to feel his heartbeat, smooth his forehead. He dies after I cry silently next to him. He dies when his heart finally stops.
I’m by myself. Driving south to Los Angeles. Listening to my music. “Quiero Vivir,” my mother’s song, comes on, picked at random from the shuffled playlist. What to do? I want to fast forward to another song, one not fraught with tax and grief, one that won’t send me back to the stabbing anguish of her death. What’s happening? Where am I? Where are you? But this time I don’t. I decide to lean into the pain, even though it feels like I’m cracking my ribs open for it. I give in to the memories, and find my mother once again as the woman with the sweet voice she loved sings, over and over, quiero vivir.
Marianna Marlowe is a Latina writer who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. After devoting years to academic writing, her focus now is creative nonfiction that explores issues of gender identity, feminism, cultural hybridity, intersectionality, and more. Her short memoir has been published in Narrative, Hippocampus, The Woven Tale Press, Eclectica, Sukoon, and The Acentos Review, among others. Her memoir in essays, Portrait of a Feminist, will be published in the Spring of 2025.
BACK TO ISSUE