Susana Moreira Marques - Now and at the Hour of Our Death

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At the entrance to each village, right before or right after the exit off the main road, there is typically a Virgin. Normally, she is inside a bell jar, as if needing special care; as if, without the glass, and unprotected by people, she in turn would be incapable of protecting them.

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The boy skates from one end of the empty café to the other, pretending not to hear the conversation taking place between his parents and the nurse. They are talking about medication, about nutrition, about how much longer his father will have to wait for a liver transplant. His mother speaks loudly, and briskly, having decided to spare her husband the need to discuss his own health. The boy’s skateboard makes a monotonous sound on the café floor reminiscent of a fan or any machine that, when left on in an empty room, amplifies the silence. Out there runs a wide road, but there are few cars. A client comes into the café for coffee. The boy stops skating, goes to the counter, serves him; the man leaves again. Out there might lie a continent of wide-open spaces, yes, of large deserts. The boy resumes skating, resumes his role as just another teenager, pretending once again to feel alienated and unconcerned with the passing of time.

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ILLUMINED: 1. One who cannot be dazzled. 2. One who is not blinded by too much light, and will not allow themselves to be enthralled. 3. One who sees the world lucidly, as equal parts pain and joy.

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The nurses and social workers who work with the terminally ill have the look of those who have dedicated their lives to something larger than themselves (as it sometimes is with monks, who renounce their very identities), or of those who hold convictions they deem unshakable (as it sometimes is with Muslims). They do not seem cynical or guarded, as you might expect from those who live with death on a daily basis.

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Land, roads, people, time, time, people, roads, land. What matters here is different, very different.

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‘Be quiet, or the doctor will take you to the hospital,’ she says, and her husband stops groaning. He hasn’t talked or walked for a year now and only eats when she threatens him with a trip to the hospital. What is it he sees as he lies in bed? Or does he simply keep his eyes closed and live in other images?

*

When our legs stop working, we will walk through our memories. When our legs stop working and our eyes stop seeing, we will walk through our memories and they will be clear. When our legs stop working, our eyes stop seeing and our ears stop hearing, we will walk through our memories and they will be clear, and forgotten voices will recount everything once more.

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Articulated beds, diapers, morphine, gauze, creams for cuts and abrasions, serum drips, tubes, needles — illnesses come with practical problems that need solving; and death is chiefly a physical process. There is little that is literary about death.

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On the road, ‘25 Minutes to Go’ — Johnny Cash singing like a doomed man.

In any case, our lives are all on a timer, and it would be best not to forget it.

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When the tour boat glides by, the river hides itself.

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A. died. And so his family, finally free to lend a hand, came together. A. left behind a daughter he’d barely seen. She lived far away and would probably not make it in time for the funeral.

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A GOOD DEATH: 1. A peaceful death, with minimal suffering. 2. A death in which both the dignity and identity of the dying are maintained up until the last moment. 3. A death in which the person dying is surrounded by family.

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There’s something of the missionary in the way the doctor makes her way by road, tracing circles, not only caring for the ill at each turn, but also spreading the word about the good death.

Hers is a big soul. Not like the strangler character in Miguel Torga’s Trás-os-Montes story ‘Alma Grande,’ as terrifying as the very fear of death, but someone who will hold your hand as she chases away that fear.

The families are grateful, and years later will still tell her their news, as they would someone they’d shared a sacred moment with, as, for example, with a midwife.

*

There’s a cross by the road. By the road, there’s a cross.

*

Throughout the house are paintings, saints, flags from far-flung countries. She has never left the village. Her children traveled once they’d grown up. Her husband also traveled, spending most of their marriage abroad. He would only come home on holidays, and, even so, she never left him. He only came back for good once he’d grown old. He was out of his mind, yelling at her, threatening her. He can no longer remember this, but his eyes are still full of rage and the desire to harm. He has stopped eating, which is perhaps another way of hurting her. Or perhaps, in his dementia, he knows she has more than enough reason to poison him. Maybe he doesn’t think any of this; the bad man has simply lost his appetite.

*

On bedside tables, clocks mark the times for their medications. No one seems to notice the irony in having clocks at the bedsides of the dying.

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In the country she emigrated to, they say people go to heaven. At home, as a child, she would hear them say: he’s dead, and he won’t be coming back. She chooses to come die at home.

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Man has blood on his hands, but God has more. Man has the dead on his mind, but God does, too. Man has nightmares, but God does not sleep.

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Fear in the eyes of the man who will not walk. He fears falling. He fears staying fallen and looking up from all the way down there, at the books he can no longer read, on their tall shelves; or falling in the yard, lying on the cold ground and looking up at the tips of fruit trees and at birds hopping towards his eyes. He thinks his wife wouldn’t be able to lift him; that she would have to call for help and that others would see him, fallen; that they would have to then pick him up and wipe the bird droppings off, or, if he was in the house, drag him towards the sofa, which was actually so very near. As he pictures this, he shakes even more. He stops talking to keep from shaking. He stops thinking to keep from shaking. Later, he will come to forget the word Parkinson’s.

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… pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

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The little boy rides his bike down a carless street that seems very long to him. At the end of one street is another, and then the field: the world in all its possibility and impossibility. When he returns to his village many years from now, if there is still a village, he will see how small that street really was, and the field, just a little larger than a backyard. Perhaps, many years from now, he won’t see any children drawing their whole wide worlds and he will feel like an endangered species.

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Now and at the hour of our death.

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During the last week of his life, she thought every night would be his last; that the following day, she would no longer hear her husband breathing. After a while, she was so tired she started hoping it would happen quickly. Then she would feel guilty and start crying because he had not eaten his yogurt at breakfast.

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Now.

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The last notes I take are about a man who sings to his wife. After she was diagnosed with leukemia, he began to play the guitar again. When she came home from the hospital one year ago, M. thought she would die soon after. But she got better once she was home, and so they began their second life together.

‘ Todos me querem eu quero algum / quero o meu amor / não quero mais nenhum. ’ He played and sang as she tapped her feet and hummed along from the living-room sofa because, even though her memory sometimes failed her, she could still remember the melodies. Whenever he played on local radio stations, he dedicated every song to her.