A Scent of Apples
I’m not afraid, only as expectant as snow in the air.
“Come as soon as you can.”
I drive in low gear, skidding along the icy roads and turn up their driveway.
The first death I witnessed was my mother’s. We assumed she’d be fine, even after the doctor said he’d need to remove another blockage and resection her colon. But after they wheeled her from recovery, mummy-like on the gurney, she never regained consciousness. For weeks, she lolled in her hospital bed, limbs ragdoll limp, eyes slit open, unseeing. Something went wrong on the operating table, but none of the doctors would say.
It is both suffocatingly hot and freezing inside the 1980 log home Don built with his own two hands. “I’m glad you’re here.” His wife embraces me.
I walk into the living room and stand next to his hospice-issued metal bed. Never say How are you? to a dying individual. It’s insensitive. Say It’s good to see you. Can I hold your hand? Is it all right to kiss you?
“Don, I’m here now—with Harriet.” I lay my palm on top of his hand.
Floating inside my nostrils, a feather of a smell. Don’s breath, still warm. He pants, and pushes a minuscule cloud from his mouth. I imagine the molecules of vapor waltzing as they leave his lips. Satellites of wonder. A cidery smell. Circling.
“Hyperalimentation,” the surgeon told us. “We’ll need a machine to help her eat and that will feed her nutrition through a tube we’ll put in her neck.” Within a week, she contracted an infection, an outcome from being on the feeding machine that the doctor had warned us about. The following day the infection turned deadly and the doctor told us that they would need to flood Mother’s system with antibiotics, despite the fact that she was allergic to penicillin. The day after that, she was placed on a ventilator.
In 1966 Yoko Ono balanced a Granny Smith atop a plexiglass stand in a London gallery. Art goers watched the apple age over time—wrinkle and weep at its ends—and smelled the acidy, tart, smell of things mistakenly kept in cages. It is not yet Don's smell.
His breath—like apples on the edge of fermentation.
Outside the living room’s picture window, a thick crust of ice paralyzes a weeping cherry tree, its branches caught in the act of pointing to the snowy earth. The front door opens and with the shrieking wind come Don’s children.
The emotionless son never takes off his coat, says a few words and leaves quickly. The angry daughter resists Harriet’s hug, talks about her father in the past tense.
How much can Don hear? I lean over him. Watch his chest move and his eyelids flicker.
My father finally intervened and asked the doctor to silence the wheezing ventilator. We kept vigil around her hospital bed, expecting death to immediately claim her. Her skin turned pale and sagged from her face, but she continued to breathe on her own, for a full ten minutes.
Molly, Don’s cat who’s run away, reappears. Yowls on the doorstep. Harriet says it’s a sign. The cat knows it’s almost time. And Harriet lets her in. But the orange tabby doesn’t go to Don. Fleeing the inexpressible inhabiting the house, the cat shoots down the stone steps where Don keeps his workshop.
On the wall above the basement steps hangs a weathered street sign. Intercourse, PA. Their secret on display. Don and Harriet had a never-mind-what-the-children-say second marriage. They used to meet in a Boyertown Park and neck in Don’s pickup. They told me the street sign was a real antique, the first time I came to their house for a neighborly dinner and they quietly explained how long Don had left to live.
“Mother’s breathing began to slow, the time between her inhalations, lengthening. My father brought his forehead close, whispered in her ear, held her hand.
Then something happened to her.
A pulling away and a lifting up from her face and body. Like heat waves.
I saw it.
The aroma of apples seeps into me. Don reaches out his hand and then, exhausted by the effort, relaxes back into the pillow. Harriet climbs onto the hand-crank hospital bed, covering him with her body.
Love and death are surely the closest any of us get to God.
The grandfather clock sounds the time, but there is no time. There is nothing in the dark room except the cold and warmth alternating in layers, and the smell of apples, ripe, and bursting with the yeasty odor of something about to change.