A Good Death by Gil Courtemanche Page B

and looking at us with a sardonic, almost spiteful smirk, as though we’re all a bunch of degenerates.
    He has a point. It’ll soon be eleven o’clock and children believe there is more to life than eating, talking and drinking.
    Freed from the difficult task of organizing the lives they’ve been trying to resolve, those attending the informal family meeting at the far end of the table all shout joyfully: Yes! The presents! Come here, children! Come sit by me, my mother murmurs, but no one hears her. She smiles and places herself in the beatific circle of mothers who live only for their children’s happiness. To whom was she speaking? As has been the custom in recent years, William takes his place in front of the enormous pile of presents and begins to distribute them. He produces a red Santa Claus toque and places it proudly on his head. Ho ho ho, he says, choosing a wrapped gift at random and reading the card on it.
    “Grandpa…”
    He looks around the room. Grandpa’s asleep, someone says. We’ll give it to him tomorrow, someone else adds. I don’t think he’s sleeping.
    HE’S STARING UP at the ceiling. We can both hear the bursts of laughter and cries of happiness coming from the family room. He’s a thousand miles from the Christmas tree, listening in on pleasures he can have no part of.
    “I have a gift for you.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Do you want me to open it?”
    “No!… Give…”
    It’s an order. He says nothing more, but I understand. I should have expected his response, which more or less says he is still capable of untying ribbons and tearing off wrapping paper, of opening a gift and finding out for himself what someone has given him. I hand him the present. It looks like a book. He rests it on his chest and inspects a different part of the ceiling. He hands the gift back to me.
    “I… don’t… hmmm… my… glass… es.”
    I show him the book.
    There’s really nothing you can give a dying man that will mean much to him, except perhaps opiates or a good death. The former you can only get illegally, and a good death is hard to arrange. You might be able to find him a friend, but a friend isn’t something you can pick up at the drugstore. This is a book, a beautiful one, about ancient Egypt, one of his great interests. It’s the gift of someone who thinks he’s still alive, a kind of acknowledgement of the militant autodidacticism of his past. A nice homage to this man with no formal education but who spent hours telling us about Ramses and Tutankhamen and the secrets of the pyramids and the riddle of the Sphinx. He opens the book, mutters something and closes it again.
    “Too small…”
    He seems so disappointed, so sad. And I don’t know what he’s trying to say.
    “The… letters… too… small…”
    “Mother says you need new glasses.”
    “No… too… ex… pensive.”
    He was never one to look after his body, as they used to say. He never played sports, always ate like a horse, and every night since 1954 he’s fallen asleep in front of the television. As a kid I thought he was immortal because he only seemed to be bothered by other people’s illnesses. Neighbours, parents. He didn’t seem to believe in sickness, which probably explains why he never showed much concern about our infections or boils or childhood diseases. I never saw him being sick or even pretending to be. One of my sisters almost died because no one called the doctor when she had a simple ear infection. She’d been screaming with pain for a week. Finally my mother quietly rebelled and picked up the phone. Pus from the infection had almost reached her brain. The doctor practically had a fit. A cold here and there, all right, but not attending to a serious infection that could leave her deaf was as inconceivable to him as snow in summer. If my father was ever sick himself, he kept it from the rest of us. He must have been sick sometime, of course, but if so, no one knew about it. He would never be publicly