A Poignant List of Lasts

Painting by Wayne Hogan

The Last Time I Saw Paris
A Poignant List of Lasts

Mel Livatino

There must come a day when we play for the last time, but I don’t remember it.
After all those hours, days, years, there’s no goodbye.
No final triumph, no clinking glasses of grape juice.

Michael Paterniti, “Introduction,” Love and Other Ways of Dying

        For decades I have been an inveterate maker and collector of lists. I suspect it began with my going to college full-time five years later than my cohort and thus feeling a deep wish to catch up, to know in a fierce way all the best that has been thought and said, as Matthew Arnold prescribed. Lists were a way to quickly gather to myself the best. So over the years I have collected and compiled scores and scores of lists of the greatest books, novels, detective stories, poems, dramas, essays, beginning and ending paragraphs in literature, films, beaches, vacations, heroes . . . . I have filled nearly a quarter of a file cabinet drawer with such lists, some of my own making but mostly the lists of others. These lists are silent prayers that I may one day read or see or do or know all these things. I won’t succeed, of course, because I have only one lifetime, and these lists require many lifetimes. But never mind the impossibility; it is a pleasure just to possess the lists, as it is a pleasure to have money in the bank one knows one will never spend. These lists are their own quiet joy.
        One of my recent lists came to me on the morning of the 60-year reunion of my grade school class. I had been asked to emcee the event but had given no thought to what I would say until that morning. Then at 7 a.m. one of my sons woke me with an urgent phone call. Could I sit in his new home for half an hour while the insurance appraiser examined the house? So I sat in the deep green of his yard on a morning full of sunshine and thought about what I might say. It was then I realized this would be the last time my classmates—who had graduated in blue suits and white dresses with innocent faces on a June day sixty years earlier—would ever be together. We would never again be in each other’s company. This would be the last time.
        That last sentence rang in my head like a tolling bell, and soon I was no longer thinking of my class or my speaking responsibilities but of the other last times in my life. I knew there were hundreds of books and thousands of articles devoted to lists of firsts. I had encountered them all my life, but I knew only one book devoted to lasts, a collection of the last words of dying men and women. The reason is simple. It is easy to know a first—the first time a European set foot on the continent of North America, the first time a man circumnavigated the globe, the first time someone flew faster than the speed of sound, the first time a man stepped on the moon—but we often don’t know the last time something happens until it is history we can no longer remember. Our egos register the accomplishments of firsts, but our hearts want to linger on lasts. On that sunny morning in my son’s yard, I listened to my heart.
        And my mother’s face swam before me. The last time I saw her alive, she was only 63 years old but looked more than 80. My father had flown her up from Florida a month earlier with acute emphysema. She had also suffered a number of small strokes and probably had brain cancer as well as dementia. For a month she lay in a hospital bed gasping for every breath. Finally, when the hospital could do no more for her, my father moved her to a nursing home. I never saw her in the nursing home, though she was there for three days. Did I mean to visit her the day she died? I don’t remember. I only know that a security officer came to my classroom on the morning of May 1, 1980. In the hall he told me my mother had died. For the first time in my life, the terrible finality of death struck to the center of my being. She would never again hear my voice; I would never again hear hers. I would never again look into her eyes. I had last seen my mother under the hospital’s stiff white sheets, bone-thin, gaunt-faced, ashen-haired, gasping with all her might for every breath. Did I hold her hand? Did I tell her I loved her? I can’t remember because I didn’t know it would be the last time I saw her. I only know I could have been a much better son.
        The last time I saw my father alive came twelve and a half years later, in December, 1992. Six years earlier he had had a stroke that left his left side numb, something he talked about every time I saw him. In time I got tired of hearing it. Then in July, 1992 he collapsed on the street from a second stroke. He smiled at his neighbors as the ambulance took him away. He thought he would soon return to the mobile home he had come to love in St. Petersburg, FL. Though he lived another seven and a half months shuffling between nursing home and hospital, he never saw his home again. I visited him in August and October, and then on Saturday morning, December 19, I received a phone call from the hospital telling me my father had seven minutes left to live unless I authorized the hospital to put him on a ventilator. A Living Will provided that no extraordinary measures be taken to prolong life, but on that winter morning I wanted to see my father one last time.
        My sister and I flew down the next day and I stayed through Christmas morning. On one of those days my father and I had angry words about his treatment. Some tension still hung in the air on Christmas morning during my last visit before I flew home. What I most noticed that morning was how deeply tanned he was despite five months in a nursing home and hospital. No words or thoughts come back to me, just his suntan. I never saw him again.
        On March 15 an official call informed me my father had died that morning. I like to think death came gently and that he did not struggle. I know he no longer wanted to live, and now he would not have to anymore. It was over, the struggle was done, he was gone. Did we talk on the phone during those last three months? I hope so, but I no longer remember. In the twenty-four years he has been gone, what I remember is his deep suntan against those blazing white sheets on our last Christmas morning together.Whenever that picture comes back to me, as it has many times, I also remember that I was not a good enough son.
        The last night I slept in the house of my mother and father before I got married was Friday, July 15, 1966. My small bedroom was on the second-floor. Beside the bed was a low brass-rung bookcase on which I had placed the books that had fired my intellect and imagination, my hopes and dreams, through six years of part-time and two years of full-time college, which I had just completed a month earlier. Those books and years launched me out of a hated job in a printing plant and into my career as a college teacher of English. Outside the east window of my bedroom was an apple tree that blossomed into huge pink and white flowers each May. Those blossoms pressing against my window on sunny days each spring when I was a young man remain one of the loveliest things I’ve seen in 77 years of life. The next morning I dressed in my rented morning coat and went to church to marry my wife. I thought it would be forever.
        The last time my first wife and I slept in the same house with our three sons was the first Friday of August, 1975. Though I knew the movers would take us to our separate houses the next morning and that we would never live as man and wife in the same house again, I do not remember that night. It is entirely erased. What I remember instead is a June dawn some six weeks earlier when I could not sleep. I got up with the breaking light and hiked to my office on the second floor. On a whim I turned on the stairs to look out the two small casement windows that gave onto our back yard. The early morning light on the trees and grass and roses so arrested me that I sat down on the landing for the next hour looking out at a world that would no longer be mine. I thought of the wife who was leaving me, of my three sons, 2, 4, and 6, who would no longer live in my house, and of the house and neighborhood that a few weeks hence would belong to other owners. While I thought about these things, I continued looking at the light in the yard. None of it would be mine anymore.
        These memories brought to mind a similar leave taking my great-grandparents must have gone through. Old photographs had often brought the moment to mind, and now, sitting in my son’s sunlit back yard, I was imagining it again. One day in the early 1890s my great-grandfather and great-grandmother departed Sicily for America with two young sons and a daughter. (Another son, appropriately name Ignacio, would be born in America.) What image burned itself into the retinas of their eyes in this last glimpse of each other? What were their last words? What was in their hearts as they stepped away—for what they knew would be forever—from all they had ever known and loved? Multiply what they saw and heard and felt several million times, for it is the greatest last in American history. Those millions of severed human hearts are what this country was founded on.
        My great-grandparents suffered another severed heart on the day they saw their only daughter off to a convent on the other side of the continent when she was only twelve. Their last sight of each other was in Chicago’s Union Station. In Seattle, WA, their daughter would live into old age, but she would never again see her parents or brothers. What color were her clothes on that day in Union Station? What look was on her face? What words crossed their lips, what feelings moved through their hearts in their last moment together?
        Every day I think of the long string of lasts that my wife’s eleven years of dementia brought to our lives. The last time she prepared part of a meal. The last time she did the dishes. The last time she drove a car. The last time she could read even a single word. The last time she wrote a word. The last time she read something I had written. The last time she signed her name. The last time she spoke three coherent sentences in a row. The last time she would select for herself the clothes she would wear that day. The last time she got dressed by herself. The last time she was able to take a bath by herself. The last time she used the toilet without help. The last time she wore non-diapered underwear. The last time we ever had a conversation. The last time we ever made love.
        I remember the approximate dates of only three of these. The rest live in vague places on the calendar of the years; I cannot put my finger on a date or even a month. Because they were lasts, not firsts, I didn’t know they would be lasts until long after the time had passed. I hoped and waited—without even knowing I was hoping and waiting—until one day much after the fact I realized she would never dress herself again, she would never speak coherently again, she would never again read or write, we would never again have a conversation . . . . The last time for each one had come and gone, but I had not known it.
        Some days after that morning in my son’s yard, one more last comes to me: the last time I saw Paris. On a pre-dawn hour in early October, 2009, I rode in a bus along the Boulevard du Port-Royal to a train station, thence to the airport. The city’s shapes were shrouded in darkness; the people’s faces were grim; few spoke. Nor was the airport much better. Orly and DeGaulle are not Paris. They have coordinates on maps and measurable perimeters, but they have no coordinates in the heart and no measurable perimeters in the soul. This was not the city I had adored for nearly half a century.
        So forgive me if I substitute the first time I saw Paris on the cusp of turning 31. It was mid-June, 1971, and on the ride in from the airport the buildings and wonderful blue street signs were ablaze in sunlight. For years I had been aflame with the desire to see Paris, and now, traveling on a bus through the Left Bank, I recognized the streets from Hemingway: Blvd. Saint Germain, Blvd. Saint Michel, Blvd. Raspail. My eyes fell on them the way a pilgrim’s eyes light on shrines. The city that afternoon was a birthday cake of light . . . and I was young . . . and all Paris was before me for the first time.
        I do remember the last time I saw Paris with my wife, however. It was early October, 2004, at the very beginning of her dementia, when she was simply forgetful–“Can’t find my keys,” “Can’t find my purse,” “Can’t find my glasses”–but normal in every other way. For two days we rode the top deck of the Open Tours buses taking in all of Paris on four separate tours and then taking the tours all over again because we wanted to devour every surface of the city with our eyes and ears. The weather was warm, and the city was bathed in sunlight. Sometimes the branches of the trees we rode under tickled the tops of our heads. We were ingesting the city’s light into our very beings. We were as giddy as teenagers. It was a heaven I will always remember.
        I will also forever remember the morning near the end of our two weeks when we sat on the lip of the large three-tiered fountain in the Place Saint-Sulpice and looked into the sunlight while a stranger clicked the shutter of our camera. Less than a hundred yards behind the man taking the picture was the Studio Hotel, where I had stayed on my first night in Paris thirty-three years earlier. In the photograph of that moment that sits in our living room, my wife and I are lit with sunlight and smiles. In that photograph the list of lasts that will mark my wife’s life with dementia is still years away. The items on that list are not even conceivable as we sit on the lip of that fountain in the morning light. All we knew was how happy we were. On that morning we thought we would go back to Paris many more times.
        On January 3, 2015 she was diagnosed with severe congestive heart failure and given six months to live. We never did see Paris together again.
        On March 6, 2015 I watched her take her last steps. She took them ever so slowly on the arm of her daughter and son from the car to our house. I saw her last smile when she looked up to see my face on the porch waiting for her. I saw her sit down for the last time, on the stairs just inside the front door. A minute later I watched her take her last breath.
        One day I will remember all these things for the last time.