My wife’s father sat, flanked on either side by his daughters, Jodie and my wife, Amanda. For reasons that are lost in the thick history of my wife’s family, he is generically referred to as Nurn. Nurn is sixty-plus, with a salt of gray hair and a big round belly and a rich, sonorous voice. He would make a great part-time Santa Claus, were he not Jewish. Mandy’s mother, tired, smiling thinly, cuts another piece of date cake and poured a glass of milk for me. Seven hours of airplanes. It was one-thirty a.m.
“Yes, I suppose – it’s been difficult,” said Nurn, looking into his empty glass. “I received the call four days ago from the nurse. She said, ‘Your father has something very important to say to you,’ and the nurse put him on, and my father said to me, ‘Dan, I’ve had it. No more. I want to die.”
Nurn paused, his tired, red eyes brimming with tears, and his daughters touched his arms.
He said, “I went to him. And when I talked to him, as best I could understand him he was concerned about the money. He thought that he didn’t have enough money to keep him on life support. I told him this wasn’t the case, and he seemed to feel better about it. About going on, and living.”
I wanted to ask something, but I kept quiet.
Nurn said, “And I told him that he can continue to live. And that maybe his life won’t be exactly the same as it was before, and perhaps he won’t have the independence that he had, but his friends can visit him, and maybe he can talk with them. And he can be happy, I think. Maybe he can live, perhaps not an existence of the body, but an existence… of the mind.”
His daughters silently cried crystalline tears. They rolled down on his shoulders.
He said, “But I have to tell you… without Grampa, your Grammy is less and less… present. Apparently Grampa was the only thing keeping her in check, and with him gone… well… there is very little of her present anymore. She has become… Violent.”
Nurn’s big body quakes and trembles. I hold his hand and it burns in mine.
“It got… Bad. We had to call the police. And the officer came, and I must tell you… this is important… he was so kind and understanding. And he handled the situation so professionally. He didn’t hurt her at all. And later, I thought, how kind the officer was to take care of her, like that…”
“You’re a great son,” said Amanda, holding him. “You’re the best son that ever was.”
“And so I called his captain, I called his captain to say specifically what a good job he did. In taking care of my mother. When someone does a good job, of course… it’s important, to say thank you, to the person in charge…”
Nurn collapsed and cried, thick guttural sobs racking his body. “Because,” he breathed, “because that is the way I was raised.”
