The Futilitarians Page 19
Tolstoy had been death-obsessed and death-haunted nearly his whole life and the big moment had finally arrived, but, as Blythe says,
the dying are in the hands of the living, who generally remain more loyal to deathbed conveniences than to deathbed revelations. It comforts them to know that the dead knew and felt nothing. “He felt nothing,” they will later tell each other, forgetting that there are more things to feel than pain and fear.
Oh no, I thought, had I been more concerned with myself than my dad when I asked about the morphine? When later that night, curled up on one of the awful dorm couches in the family lounge after twelve hours at the hospital, I just wanted it to be over? Nurse Craig had planted the seed; Blythe and Tolstoy watered and fertilized it. But I honestly don’t remember thinking much at all that day. That morning, alone with Dad, I told him what I wanted to tell him. He seemed unconscious but I thought I felt him squeeze my hand. The room was filled with late-morning sun. I don’t know. I held his hand and tried not to think about how one might describe the sunlight on the IV bags, tried to stay “in the moment.”
Years ago, at a Cape Cod junk store, I bought a 1906 copy of Memoirs of My Dead Life, a collection of essays by the Irish writer George Moore, for its great title, embossed white on a gray-blue spine, and a quick scan of the startling last page. Along with women, literary reputation, drinking, and “authenticity,” Moore was also at times preoccupied with his inability to fully focus on the life happening in front him, to stay in the moment. In the book’s final essay, “Resurgam,” he’s been informed by his brother via telegram that his mother is dying. On the journey from Paris to his ancestral home in Ireland, he hopes that his mother will die before he gets there, thus sparing him the pain of the ultimate mortal confrontation. He spends much of the time musing about his childhood, and thinking about how best to describe the scenery from his train carriage, like the morning light on a passing field (“soft as the breast-feathers of a dove”), or the nature of existence (“a fly climbing a glass dome… climbing and falling back, buzzing, and climbing again”). He can’t help himself. “This sudden bow-wowing of the literary skeleton made me feel I wanted to kick myself.” Even at the funeral itself (he was relieved that his mother had died hours before his arrival) his mind drifts, and he starts planning his own cosmic Irish burial and afterlife, replete with island pyres, dancing nymphs, and exploding planets.
Though regarding death Moore entertainingly evades and Tolstoy excruciatingly delves, both worried about turn-of-the-twentieth-century modern man losing touch with his true condition. What was “the real thing”? This question is what The Death of Ivan Ilyich labors so painfully toward. In the beginning of the novella, Ivan Ilyich, a forty-five-year-old examining magistrate, is already dead, as if Tolstoy is illustrating how absurd and false death rituals can be when the living are still so preoccupied with, well, living. Upon hearing the news of his death, his colleagues view it as some kind of professional misstep, and everyone gauges it immediately in terms of his own self-interest, what it means for their position in the ministry—maybe someone will get a promotion, maybe someone’s brother-in-law can be transferred to town to get his wife off his back. In the house of mourning, a card game is furtively planned for later that evening. The widow tries to find out if she can wrangle more money from the government through one of her dead husband’s colleagues. During the exchange, her black shawl gets caught on some ostentatious furniture, and a broken, rebellious spring in the ottoman the man is sitting on creates bad feelings in the room.
“Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and commonplace—and most horrifying,” begins Tolstoy’s telling of his life story. A middle child born into a family of government bureaucrats, Ivan Ilyich was wedged between a “cold and punctilious” successful older brother and an embarrassing failure of a younger brother whom everyone tries to forget exists. Ivan Ilyich was an affable striver, a creature molded by his need for approval, whether regarding questions of morality or career or marriage or interior decorating. His decisions were compelled by what was considered “the right thing” by people in good social standing. This is what torments him so thoroughly when he falls ill after bumping his side while demonstrating to a draper how he wanted the curtains hung in his new home, which was purchased through a coveted promotion. Over three months, without a definitive diagnosis, he deteriorates quickly. His illness, manifesting in relentless pain, becomes intimate adversary, both part of him and detached from him, a gnawing animal, an “It” with “Its” own agenda, which even begins “Its own proceedings” against him during court sessions while Ivan Ilyich is still able to work.
Ilyich also fixates on the special, wary tension that sometimes exists between doctors treating lawyers, people used to their own spheres of authority, a tension maybe even more pronounced today, because when those professional spheres overlap, the outcome is usually damaging and expensive. Dad did the same things Ivan Ilyich did—researched different treatments, resented and mistrusted his own doctors, consulted others. Ivan Ilyich’s doctors, stuck in their professional masks just like Ivan Ilyich had been stuck in his, can’t be trusted, can’t agree, and can’t help. As his physical pain becomes intolerable and death seems the obvious outcome, he gets twisted up in a helix of hope and despair. But why is he suffering so much moral anguish in approaching the end when he’d done everything “right” in life?
The night before Dad crashed, we had our last, albeit brief, conversation as I fed him what I didn’t realize would be his last solid food ever, horrible slippery canned peaches from one of the compartments on his plastic dinner tray, my other sisters in the room discussing what needed to be suctioned with the aspirator and how. He’d had a small stroke on the right side of his body and was talking with great effort and difficulty, an extreme frustration for someone who made his living with words, who’d often say that all he needed to do his job were a pen and a legal pad, who’d tell us over mandatory Sunday dinners–cum–cross-examinations that we had to be careful with our words because that’s all we have to make ourselves. Haltingly, he told me he was sorry that he missed Silas’s birthday dinner over the weekend, that he hoped our son understood that he wasn’t feeling well. From the beginning, Dad had embraced Silas as one of his own blood tribe, fully and unequivocally, never as a stepgrandson. He even overindulged him, having a special affection for outsiders. That our last exchange was about him felt right and true.
After our younger sisters went home, Kristin and I had a drink at a bar across the street from the hospital that we referred to as the real “family lounge,” since the one in the Touro Infirmary didn’t serve drinks. Earlier that day, Kristin, a politician—though she would’ve said “public servant”—had met with a group called Resurrection After Exoneration, ex-prisoners who’d served time, were eventually found innocent, and were now dealing with the steep challenges of reentry into the society that had allowed their wrongful convictions. Formidable in her tailored suit and pumps, Kristin was worked up and distracted by the injustice of their plight, half with me at the bar, half mentally tapping her government-issued BlackBerry, conjuring up partnerships among city and state agencies that could help with the exonerees’ particular problems of finding housing, of finding work, even with their years of ample, certified training. Their stories were amazing, she said. I was thinking the same thing. Of the many differences between us, that’s one of the biggest—in situations like that, she sees potential solutions, I see potential material.
Then a thoughtful, inward look overtook her, the one that mirrored my other siblings’ faces with increasing frequency in those days, that averting gaze searching for elsewhere in the room to land, the one that augured an attempt to assess the legacy and imminent death of our complicated dad. She said, “You know that’s one thing that Dad did a really good job with, teaching us to get pissed off about injustice and not to trust authority.” I reminded her, for fun, that she was now “the man.” But I agreed it was true, that the Jefferson
ian doctrine of healthy rebellion that Dad advocated, somewhat dangerously, to his teenage children was still pretty influential in our lives. As Jefferson said, “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”
On his deathbed, Ivan Ilyich finally begins to understand this, the necessity of questioning the status quo in order to connect with some sort of moral truth, when during his agonizing inner contortions he asked himself: “What if my entire life, my entire conscious life, simply was not the real thing?”
It occurred to him that what had seemed utterly inconceivable before—that he had not lived the kind of life he should have—might in fact be true. It occurred to him that those scarcely perceptible impulses of his to protest what people of high rank considered good, vague impulses which he had always suppressed, might have been precisely what mattered, and all the rest had not been the real thing. His official duties, his manner of life, his family, the values adhered to by people in society and in his profession—all these might not have been the real thing. He tried to come up with a defense of these things and suddenly became aware of the insubstantiality of them all. And there was nothing left to defend.
Of all of the things that might’ve tormented Dad on his deathbed—Rebecca’s and Rachel’s suicides, unresolved financial messes, certain professional aspirations never realized—a life of mute compliance with the status quo was not one of them. He was defiant and pissed off until the very end about anything he perceived as injustice. A week before he died, Dad wanted one last encounter with what he thought was possibly the greatest moral travesty in our country, capital punishment, and one last visit with the convicted murderer he’d grown to care about. When I asked Mom why Dad felt compelled to go up to Death Row in such a weakened state, after four days of chemo, she said he just wanted to be a lawyer. It was all he really wanted to do. She also said that he just couldn’t let go of his client, Ronald.
The week before Dad’s final trip to Angola, I’d had my last table 5 lunch with him and Soren at the Rib Room to talk about their death-penalty work. Dad ordered seafood gumbo; my brother and I split a gargantuan rare king-cut steak. For years, I’d been wanting to write about their work from the father-son angle, to find out what it was like. I also had a theory that since Dad had gotten his Death Row appointment around the time Rebecca and Rachel died, his pursuit was somehow driven by trying to save another life, by some kind of futile cosmic accounting, and I wanted to know what he thought of this theory.
They began the conversation by explaining how they were recruited into representing these inmates due to a burgeoning constitutional crisis on Louisiana’s Death Row. Dad near the end of his career, Soren near the beginning of his, decades of experience separating them. A “sliver” of time existed at the state post-conviction stage (before federal habeas corpus) in which there was no statutory right to counsel for Death Row inmates in Louisiana, a procedural limbo that Soren tried to explain by arranging heavy cutlery on the space between our plates. The salad fork was the state trial, the dinner fork the post-conviction appeals, the knife the federal court, and the dessert spoon the Supreme Court. Between the dinner fork and the knife was the sliver where cases started piling up on Death Row with nearly half of the inmates lacking legal representation, an opportunity for overzealous prosecutors to start issuing death warrants.
Angola occupied a large region in my dad’s psychic terrain, a moral proving ground for his abilities, intellect, principles. Soren’s, too. They were both roughly six feet three, with full heads of brown hair, brown eyes, and large handsome features, and had both been athletic as young men, but were a little desk-softened now. I suspect that as litigators they let their physical stature do some of the work for them in the courtroom. They sat across from each other at table 5, volleying experiences, a kind of genetic ricochet I found fascinating and distracting as I sipped the cabernet and tried to keep up. My brother described at length his humiliations in court and inexperienced bungling. My father, his sure-footed confidence in moving his client’s case through the system. Pumped up on wine and a conversation that ballooned with import as verbal paragraphs turned into whole chapters, Soren called Angola “the end of the end of the end. Where nobody gives a fuck about this last little tendril of humanity. These guys are the edge of the edge of the edge.” Both of their Death Row clients’ narratives had been absorbed into their own. They could walk you through their clients’ childhoods, middle-school and (brief or nonexistent) high school careers, tour you through the scenes of the crimes for which they were convicted, a levee in St. Martinville, a restaurant kitchen in East Baton Rouge. Both believed their clients could have been good, productive citizens if not for some drug-fueled mistakes, misfortunes of environment. Both were intimately, not just professionally, invested in these extremes of how people are made and unmade.
How people are made and unmade. Maybe that was the line of questioning we were all pursuing, the belle chasse, the beautiful hunt? This sliver, this moment of vulnerability in the vast, arcane legal procedure that brought these men into each other’s lives, interested me, had metaphorical value. In the genteel vault of the Rib Room, at the height of its lunch rush, which never seemed like a rush, more like a slow swelling of the stage’s backdrop, I imagined there were all kinds of slivers out there opening up, liminal, indeterminate gaps within our determined structures, places where you could get lost or make some soul-saving connection.
But it was not metaphor driving this conversation. It was the trajectories of lives gone wrong, lives destroyed, and society’s attempt to reckon with it all. Ronald had confessed to the brutal stabbing death of an eighty-five-year-old Cajun patriarch while on a drug-crazed search for cash. As the man checked the water levels at the levee to report back to his crawfishermen sons, as he did ritualistically every afternoon, Ronald stabbed him fatally and took his money. He spent it on crack cocaine, then went to the house of a former landlady to try to get more. When she said no, he stabbed her as well, ran her over in his car in the driveway at the end of a cane field. When he returned to burn the house down, he attacked her with a tire iron. She survived.
Dad was clear-eyed about his client’s guilt, the bloody, irreversible damage he’d caused, and the need for his incarceration. But Ronald’s defense attorney had been beyond incompetent, Dad said. He called no expert witnesses to attest to any mitigating factors in Ronald’s life, and though he pled guilty to first-degree murder, Ronald still received the death penalty, which had never happened in the history of the state. The same attorney was assigned to his direct appeal. Ronald began to study law and to seek help. He never claimed to be innocent, just poorly represented. A string of underqualified attorneys was assigned to him, and Ronald filed motions to dismiss each of them. Six years after Ronald’s conviction, Dad stepped in to represent him.
Death Rows across the country are filled with stories like Ronald’s, Dad said, devastating childhoods, poverty, truncated educations, addiction, the cul-de-sac of a system skewed against the poor. After nearly two hours of the technicalities, the anecdotes, Dad laid out the moral basis for his years of working on the case. He felt this administering of death to men by men, the ultimate judgment, defined hubris like no other issue. In this “Christian country” (his thick fingers gouging the air with emphatic quotes) you have a system rife with racial and economic inequity, waste, dysfunction, ineffective counsel, vindictive prosecutors, judges with political aspirations, grieving sundered families, and this system plays God.
“The commandment says ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ It doesn’t say ‘Thou shall not kill, except you assholes in Angola can kill anybody you want.’ It doesn’t say that.”
And there was an even more basic rationale than morality. While the legal work was complicated, he explained, the motivation was simple. His client just wanted to live.
“Hey,” he said, “I want to live, too. And the woman my client left for dead, mutilated in the cane field
and who miraculously survived, she wanted to live, too. It’s our natural imperative.”
But then, whether it was illness or intractable injustice wearing him down, turning defiance to defeat, he slumped back a little in his chair, suit jacket bunching awkwardly around his shoulders, bluster dissipating. Buskers worked the curb across the street, a raggedy clarinet and a banjo duo sitting on overturned five-gallon buckets. We could barely hear the music, just some high reedy scratches and plinks through the muffled din of the Rib Room.
“So much futility, disappointment,” he said. “A system as broken as this one will eventually win. You can only chase so many windmills.” He was convinced that even after all these years of work his client would remain in the same place, same condition, as when he’d first gotten the case, something an attorney never wants to happen.
“So does it mean anything, Dad?” Soren asked, trying to wrap things up, sensing Dad’s fatigue. “This crazy shit that we do? What is the lesson learned? In terms of the unquantifiable benefit. Being a man who stands up for what he believes in, does that mean anything?”
“Meaning? Only for the person who does it. I’m better for it because I thought I did something good. Attempted to do something good. Beyond that, no. You can affect people, but can’t make meaning for them.” Soren thought it was a great answer. I wasn’t sure.