Ich war ein schwarzer Leichnam unter Lebenden (I was a corpse among the living)
I was mesmerized in the balcony as my eyes followed the suspended Sputnik chandeliers’ dreamlike ascent toward the ceiling, passing right in front of my face as their lamps gradually extinguished and the house settled in anxious darkness. I had a series subscription to the Metropolitan Opera’s 1975-76 season. Tonight was Richard Strauss’ revenge-laden opera, Elektra. The score, atonal and irritating, was a perfect paring to the brutal story, which played out on a severely raked stage that appeared to be made out of shattered slabs of concrete with a gaping hole in the center. I should have skipped this performance and traded my ticket for a different opera on another night, something lighter: Hänsel und Gretel, Carmen, or Boris Godunov. Electra’s not the best thing to see less than two weeks after your mother died. Especially at the end of the 90-minute, intermission-less opus as Elektra sings, “Ich war ein schwarzer Leichnam unter Lebenden.” That’s exactly how I felt, like a “corpse among the living.”
On December 1, I returned to my classroom to teach music to elementary kids after a week of bereavement leave, which also included a too-sad-to-eat Thanksgiving. It had rained most of the day, but when I arrived in Manhattan and parked under the opera house, the skies had cleared, and the temperature had dipped below 40º. My mother died on November 20, 1975, and we buried her in the family plot on the 24th. She had refused medical attention before her death and instead refused to have us do anything that would have required her to see a doctor or go to the hospital. Reluctant at first to release her body to an undertaker, the coroner wanted to ensure we had not been neglectful or caused her condition.
Six years earlier, almost to the day, my mother drove her red ’63 VW convertible through a stop sign on a rural country road. At the same time, a large sedan, moving at high speed and with the right of way, arrived at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere between Emmaus and Macungie.
“Naimi, I have no regrets in life, and when my time comes, and God wills it, I’m ready to move on.”
My paternal grandmother was sitting in the passenger seat reflecting on her life as my mother, realizing what was about to happen, screamed.
“Maggie, this is it.”
They had been coming to pick up my brother, Mitchell, from his weekly bagpipe lesson. My brother, somewhat of a savant in musical instruments, had acquired some fluency at twenty-six, all self-taught. The bagpipes, however, required some coaching.
My mother loved her Beetle, a car that suited her well, especially in the summer, when the top could be lowered, and she could feel the wind while driving. The cooler autumn weather leading to winter required additional protection as the thin canvas roof leaked cold air at high speeds, not that she tended to go fast or be reckless on the road.
My mother desperately tried to reach Maggie’s purse, where the nitroglycerin tablets were safely stored for emergency use. “Just in case,” she had told my parents during her visit. She had a bad heart. As much as my mother tried to get hold of those pills, she couldn’t reach them; her pelvis, broken along with several ribs, kept her where she was. She listened as Maggie took her last few breaths. It wouldn’t have mattered; the approaching car’s impact had torn through the passenger door, jagged steel petals blooming into her side.
I was at school; it must have been a Wednesday night, as most dorm mates were holding choir rehearsals at their churches when the third-floor hall coin-operated phone rang—a knock on the door.
“Buzzy, phone. It’s for you.”
“It’s for me,” I said at the same time.
Somehow, I sensed it was my brother, Mitchell. He was five years younger than me, a high school freshman. Someone had driven him home along with his bagpipes. He was alone. My father was in Pittsburg on business when he got the word. He began his long drive home to Emmaus. Muriel Berman was at Allentown General Hospital to be with my mother. I found a friend to drive me home.
My father and brother went to Lunenburg three days later to bury Maggie. I stayed with my mother in Allentown; her first nights were troublesome. Besides her physical condition, she struggled with the guilt of Maggie’s death. She was also facing involuntary manslaughter charges.
On her first night, a silicone umbilical tube dispensed an unusually heavy drip of morphine, and she experienced an almost believable struggle between good and evil. She spoke about completing ten things to prove that she would remain on earth, a choice between life and death. She said the list appeared on an illuminated screen hovering over her bed while doctors worked feverishly to stabilize her. She started to execute the list of ten items on the screen, reciting poems and checking off specific experiences in her life. When she got to number nine, “Do Something Practical,” she immediately considered her wristwatch, a recent gift from my father. She struggled to take it off her wrist, and she swallowed it whole when she managed to unclasp it. It was the most practical thing she could think of doing, she told me later, figuring that if she choked on her Timex, it would end her life, and if she succeeded in swallowing it, it cleared her to move to the tenth item on her list, to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”
“Mrs. Proffit, what did you do with your watch?”
“I swallowed it.”
In a panic and not quite believing her, the doctor moved a portable X-ray machine over her stomach and took the shot. The resulting image confirmed it. She had swallowed the watch and passed it a few days later. A nurse discovered it, rinsed it clean, and gave it to my father. It had stopped ticking. My father dropped it off at the Hess’s department store watch counter to test the worth of the watch’s warranty, telling the clerk that it had fallen in the toilet. It took a licking, but it was not ticking.
My mother lived in a fluid world between reality and fantasy for three months: in her private hospital room in Allentown and somewhere in the Berkshires. The Berkshires, for my mother, in her pain-killer-induced state, was where the dead resided: an evergreen-trimmed heaven with an occasional dusting of snow. Nurses, doctors, and visitors moved around her bed as freely as the departed did. She never discriminated between the living and the dead; all were welcome, and she treated them equally.
Doctors told her she would never walk again.
Losing her driver’s license for three months was her punishment for involuntary manslaughter. Her sentence came nearly six months after the event and seemed unnecessary after the mental and physical pain she continued to endure. And despite her doctors’ shadowed pronouncement, she regained the strength and determination to transition from wheelchair to walker to cane to no aide at all.
For the next six years, she tried to reclaim her life as it was before the accident, but undetected internal injuries and regret dampened her will.
I went home for Sunday dinner in late August 1975. My mother prepared Thanksgiving early, she said. It was all there, laid out on her Finnish Arabia china: turkey, stuffing, cranberry jelly, all of it. Toward the end of the meal, she left the table and began to climb the stairs. Asking for assistance from my father, she let out a short, sharp scream as he circled his arm around her waist. She never came downstairs again. The rest of us cleared the table in silence.
I then began more regular visits home on weekends, arriving by supper time on Fridays or late Saturday afternoons if I accompanied a morning dance class in Manhattan. Coming through the door, I would greet my father and take him out for dinner before going upstairs to see my mom. It seemed like he needed more care and attention than my mother did, lying in bed on the second floor. It was a welcomed time for both of us. We would talk about each other’s week at work: teaching and trucking. Once back home, I would climb the stairs and enter my parent’s bedroom. My mother was in bed, frail and ill, her skin jaundiced. We had given up on convincing her to see a doctor, hoping her diseased state could be easily cured. She took our suggestions as trying to find a way to get her out of the house and remove her from the family. She wasn’t having it.
On the nightstand within her limited reach was a small machine to chip ice cubes that she would suck on to quench her thirst, a fifth of Jack Daniels to dull her pain, and a bottle of Sudafed to cool her overwhelmed lungs: her self-prescribed medicines and nourishment combined. She survived on nothing else.
Throughout her illness, my father continued to sleep beside my mother every night until that Wednesday, when he rolled in the cot beside the bed. When I answered the phone, he told me he thought she had quietly slipped into a coma; at any rate, she would not respond to his voice or touch. He asked what to do, both of us agreeing that he would let her sleep tonight and wait for the morning for any change.
I called early the following day. There was no change. My dad was silent; I suggested that now was the time to call for an ambulance and that while she had said she wanted nothing to do with doctors or hospitals, there was little else we could do to take care of her at home.
Two hours later, I was teaching a fourth-grade music lesson when the PA system speaker interrupted the singing.
“Mr. Proffit, please stop by the office at the end of the period.”
When I arrived, the secretary said to call my dad at the hospital. She gave me the number. I dialed, stated who I was, and was transferred to my dad. He said that he was there with my brother, that doctors were working on her, and that he should speak with admissions about getting her a room when he was asked to return to a small waiting area off the emergency room entrance. Someone asked him if he wanted to talk with a clergy member, would he prefer a rabbi, priest, or minister? It sounded like the beginning of a joke. I drove home in a dream that day, just one week before Thanksgiving.
It took nearly a week to get my mother back to Lunenburg. The hospital authorities questioned us about her extreme condition. Was there foul play or abuse? Why would anyone abstain from medical help when she was so sick? An autopsy was ordered. The undertaker advised against us seeing the body. A closed coffin was suggested.
A short service was held against the grey November morning at the funeral home, a pristinely white and austere old New England farmhouse with an attached barn. The house had been my first-grade teacher’s home, who was also my father’s first-grade teacher. The burial took place at the family plot in North Cemetery. My mother’s new neighbors to her left included many from the 18th and 19th Centuries, whose names carved in stone slept under a blanket of lichen and moss. To her left were those more recent from her side of the family, and immediately next to her lay my father’s mother and father.
We returned to Pennsylvania after a reception at my aunt Barbara’s house. I drove, as I had done on the way up a few days earlier. Somehow, I had kept it together through the time my mother died until she was buried, trying to be strong for my father.
I pulled onto the Mass Pike just outside Worcester and continued driving across the commonwealth, passing Sturbridge and into Western Massachusetts. That’s when I broke. Somewhere near Stockbridge, James Taylor sang about snow in the Berkshires in early December. I thought of heaven, pulled into the breakdown lane, turned off the engine, and handed my father the car keys.
