This year my family and I placed bets on the death date of my godfather Jack. My husband gave him less than a year, my mother, a survivor herself, gave him a little longer - maybe two. It sounds callous, but we're tired of looking back on the Jack who used to be.
It's hard to recall the soft-spoken John Lennon look-alike with the Arkansas accent who used to heft me onto his shoulder and play opera until I slept in his arms. I can occasionally recall leafing through books on the sun-warmed hardwood floor of Jack and Anita's New York apartment, Jack regaling me with tales of his stint as a B-movie actor. "You can tell the bad guys," he'd say, pointing at the television. "They always smack their lips."
There was a time when Jack's one-line assertions about the world made sense, when he could recite Shelley without slurring, when it was still funny that Jack and Anita used to make me, as a toddler, repeat "I'm the bad one," for a laugh.
I regularly visited Jack and Anita's new San Diego home as a teenager. One day, just back from the beach, my nose gave me the first clue as to what caused his behavioral differences from hour to hour: I realized that what Jack added to his coffee wasn't cream.
He didn't even give me time to change out of my bathing suit, but plunked a mammoth copy of The Collected Works of Shakespeare down on our laps, squeezed himself up against me, and demanded that I read the part of Desdemona. Our faces were centimeters apart. He pressed his sweaty thigh against mine, still ocean-damp. Fumes of alcohol escaped his mouth like diesel exhaust as he slurred words together in an accent created by vodka. I was afraid to get up and heft the gargantuan book off my aching thigh, saved by the sound of Anita's key turning in the lock.
Shortly after my wedding, Anita sent Jack to stay in a motel without his keys "for the duration," she claimed. "He can get sober or rot there." As she tells it, they packed him a little knapsack, as if he were going to camp; perhaps she even wrote his name on his underwear with a felt-tipped pen, so someone could identify him later after he gave himself a concussion or worse. He carried the liter of vodka - in its neat spill-proof plastic bottle - as if he were cast in a remake of The Lost Weekend. I imagine his mouth open like an old man who has forgotten something in a room he has just entered, his arm reaching toward home like a toddler at day care, his remaining hair flapping on top of his head in the wake left by Anita's car racing away.
To no one's surprise, he was kicked out by the management for excessive noise-making, then stuck in jail for public drunkenness. Perhaps it was then I decided that to consider him as a living person hurt too much.
Jack told me one spring break as I lounged on the couch under his feral gaze, "I chose to be an alcoholic, for its beauty." I labored over that statement for years, never coming to understand it.
The sicker Jack becomes now, the more he changes. The fine long handsome bones of his face have compressed and crimped and changed shape as if his face is being sucked in through his own nose. Less John Lennon, more Keith Richards.
Therapy may have failed to help Jack, but Anita seems to be finally making use of it. "I'm thinking of serving him with divorce papers," she told me. "I always knew if I went to therapy, I'd want to leave him. That's why I waited so long."
What keeps her from that final step might be what stops all of us from cutting him off completely. We don't know how to break it to him that he's as good as dead already. We cut him off, but then he lures us back with a month or two of sobriety, a flashback to the lucid Jack who at once began to learn Mayan.
With his behavior as dangerous and unpredictable as it has been, lately I've imagined the details of Jack's funeral. I wonder, who will miss him? Will I cry? What would I say if asked to eulogize him: "Jack spent his life in pursuit of his own death?"
When my grandmother passed away six years ago we organized a stunning photo display of her 86 years. (Ironically, it's at her funeral that Jack broke his longest window of sobriety). We loved her so much that we photographed her often. I realize that my photographs of Jack stop in the late '70s and hardly comprise a handful, and though I found this strange at first, it hit me as more proof of what I already know: You don't photograph the dead.
- Jordan E. Rosenfeld is a writer living in Petaluma, Calif.
