As I write this, I realize I am stalling. I don’t want to write the next part.
Over the winter, Diz’s back pain had refused to get better. When she finally went in for an MRI, they found that the pain was caused by a tumor at the base of her spine. There was a very confusing month of tests and trying to figure out how to run the farm without Diz and often without Jim, who drove her to and from the various medical appointments. The tumor was too close to the spinal cord to remove surgically. She did chemo, but the cancer went into her organs anyway.
One day she came home from the hospital, gray and grim-faced, and told me, “My Tokuhashi is four.”
“What’s a Tokuhashi?” I asked.
“It’s a Japanese guy. A doctor. It’s also a measure of your life expectancy.”
“So is four good?”
“‘Good’ compared to what? It’s good compared to two. Bad compared to five. Means I’ll be dead in less than four months.”
Actually, it was about three months. She was often away from the farm, down at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. They sent her home to die, though, with palliative care administered by dear, dear people from the Home Health and Hospice organization. I wasn’t in the room when she died, but Jim and Earnest were. Will had made a grocery run into town and so missed the moment of passing.
Her death put the farm seriously at risk. It may strike you as insensitive to talk about the farm’s health in the same breath as the death of a person, but it’s not. The farm was part of Diz; she was part of it. It was the only thing she owned and one of the few places she’d ever lived—she had devoted her life to it and staked her pride on it. An intelligent woman, she was a fierce advocate of “the small farm life,” which she knew to be a dying tradition. A dying part of American identity. One reason she was so tough and worked so hard is that she was by God not going to relinquish her little corner of it without a fight. Coming in her own desperation to Brassard’s farm, back when she married Jim, had been her last stand, and we who did not die could not take that lightly.
That all sounds like bullshit, but it’s not. One of the last conversations I had with her reveals it unequivocally.
The hospice people had moved a rented hospital bed into the former parlor of the house, downstairs, so it was easier to tend to her needs and get food to her. A big, chrome-tubed thing with motors that raised and lowered it and tilted the head end forward, and so on. It sat in a circle of oxygen tanks and catheters and bags of urine and a wheelchair and a wide range of paraphernalia on little tables brought from other parts of the house.
I was sitting with her as Jim and Earnest were taking a break from tending to her and getting some chores done; Will was upstairs taking a nap, recovering from night duty with her. At Diz’s insistence, I was reading local news to her from the Valley Reporter. It’s basically an advertising weekly, but it’s also full of local sports team scores, marriages, births, little news items about farming or business.
She always had me read the obituaries. John somebody, aged eighty-two. Mary somebody, forty-seven, survived by so-and-so. Mrs. Helen something, of natural causes. When I read that last, Diz burst out in a harsh cackle that startled me.
“Ha! That old witch! I prayed to God I’d outlive her and dance on her damn grave. Aah-haha! And I did! Goddamn it, I did it!” Her voice was grindingly hoarse by then but full of vengeful glee.
Mrs. Helen Crutchfield, sixty-three, died of natural causes in her home, surrounded by her loved ones. Diz had outlived her—it wouldn’t be for long, true, but the fact gave her enormous pleasure. Diz’s obit would be almost verbatim the same.
“Why’d you hate her?”
She puckered her lips, then grinned contemptuously. “Not worth talking about. Nothing that woman did in her life was worth wasting your breath on. But I can tell you I’ve waited a long time for this moment. A lo-o-o-ong time.”
Her satisfaction was absolute. A glint of the old Diz gleamed in her eyes—sardonic, irreverent, implacable, cruelly amused by life. Seeing it for the first time in many months, I realized how I’d missed that furious light.
I paused, not sure I should go on reading or let her indulge the moment longer. Suddenly her hand shot out and grasped my wrist. She jerked me toward her with a startling strength.
“Now, you listen to me. I’m dead. I’m outta here. Sayonara. That means you are going to have to take care of these men. You get that? They saved your pathetic little life, how many times, how many ways, and you owe them. You are going to have to step up and pay your dues and take care of these men.”
The effort exhausted her and she let go of me and fell back on the bed, but her eyes stayed blazing on mine. She looked like a kamikaze mother wolf or mountain lion in defense of her litter. I had never before experienced such absolute ferocity in a human being. I felt seared, scalded inside. The bruises on my wrist lasted days.
Her eyes stayed, pinning me, beaming a savage fire at me, and bit it
