Michael Chabon's account of watching his father die in the last few days of his life, struck a chord with this blogger. Like Chabon, this blogger spent the last several days in early January 2010 until his nonagenarian mother breathed her last. The experience was solemn and final. This blogger hopes that his own son and daughter are spared that experience. If this is a (fair & balanced) portrayal of the end of life, so be it.
[x The New Yorker]
The Final Frontier
By Michael Chabon
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the following piece of writing
Ensign Spock, a young half-Vulcan science officer fresh out of Starfleet Academy and newly posted to the Enterprise, found himself alone in a turbolift with the ship’s formidable first officer, a human woman known as Number One. They were waiting for me to rescue them from the silence that reigns in all elevators, as universal as the vacuum of space.
I looked up from the screen of my iPad to my father, lying unconscious, amid tubes and wires, in his starship of a bed, in the irresolute darkness of an I.CU at 3 AM. Ordinarily when my father lay on his back his abdomen rose up like the telescope dome of an observatory, but now there seemed to be nothing between the bed rails at all, just a blanket pulled as taut as a drum skin and then, on the pillow, my father’s big, silver-maned head. Scarecrow, after the flying monkeys had finished with him. His head was tilted upward and his jaw hung slack. All the darkness in the room seemed to pool in his open mouth.
Hey, Dad, I need a line, I said, breaking, if only in my head, the silence that reigned between us. I’m writing dialogue for Mr. Spock.
I’d tried talking aloud to my father a few times in the hours since he’d lost consciousness, telling him all the things that, I’d read, you were supposed to tell a dying parent. There was never any trace of a response. No twitch of an eye or a cheek, no ghost of a tender or rueful smile. I wanted to believe that he’d heard me, heard that I loved him, that I forgave him, that I was thankful to him for having taught me to love so many of the things I loved most, “Star Trek” among them, but it felt like throwing a wish and a penny into a dry fountain. My father and I had already done all the talking we were ever going to do.
Can’t help you there, said my father, a pediatrician, though long retired from practice. Now, if you were writing dialogue for Doctor Spock....
My father had slipped into unconsciousness twelve hours earlier, about an hour after we stopped the intravenous adrenaline that had been keeping his blood pressure up. Until then, he’d been responsive, aware, irritable, funny, querulous, weak, confused, furious, loopy, but recognizably himself. A studied, even militant avoider of exercise all his life, he had been seriously overweight for most of the past forty years, diabetic for a decade. His kidneys were failing. So was his liver. The latest enemy was acute hypotension, which when untreated would drop him into the scary nether regions of the mmHg scale. But the norepinephrine drip that could magically restore my father to a close approximation of the man we remembered was likely to put him into cardiac arrest. His caregivers had gently and regretfully begun to suggest that it might be time to stop treating this particular element among the complex of things that were killing him. A heart attack would be painful and frightening.
It was decided, not easily and not without reservation, to let go of him, and to let him go. It was agreed that, when he went, he ought not to be alone. My stepmother and two half brothers, who had been caring for my father without respite over the course of his decline, were exhausted and depleted. My brother and I, the sons of his first marriage, had flown up from the Bay Area to Portland, hoping not just to spend time with our dad but to give everyone else a break. So I took the first night shift. Following the logic of mercy, I was hoping that it might also be the last.
Back in the turbolift, Number One made the banal observation that people were reluctant to talk in elevators. Ensign Spock conceded her point, but I wondered if this would remain true in the twenty-third century. Once the Eugenics Wars were over, and Zefram Cochrane had invented the warp drive, surely humanity would find a way to eliminate awkwardness, along with war, intolerance, avarice, superstition, and other pressing social ills. I tried to divert myself, with this question, from pondering what it would be like if my father died while I was sitting next to his bed, in a sleeper chair, wearing drawstring pajama bottoms and an “Illmatic” T-shirt, with my stocking feet up on the extendable footrest and my iPad, in its keyboard case, open in my lap, writing a short film about Mr. Spock’s first day on the job. I wondered if I would see or otherwise sense the instant when the hundred billion neurons in my father’s brain abandoned the eighty-year feat of electrochemical legerdemain known as Robert Chabon, and the father I had loved so imperfectly, and by whom I had been so imperfectly loved, pulled off one last vanishing act.
I can give you the exact date of the first time I ever saw Mr. Spock on TV, I said. September 15, 1967.
Hmm, I had just started my fellowship at Albert Einstein. We were living in Flushing. So you would have been ...?
Four. I must have sneaked out of bed, or come to ask for a glass of water. I didn’t know that it was Mr. Spock, or that you were watching “Star Trek.” There was just this scary-looking guy with the ears and the eyebrows. A pointy-eared woman, too, with enormous hair. Super-scary music, two guys fighting in a place made out of rocks. One of them got his shirt slashed open. It was just a glimpse, and I completely forgot it until, I don’t know, maybe six years later, when I saw “Amok Time” in reruns. And “Amok Time” first aired on September 15, 1967. The first episode of the second season.
I had looked up the date on Memory Alpha, an indispensable online repository of “Trek” lore, when, as a brief detour from my work on a new series, “Star Trek: Picard,” I began planning to write a short film, “Q&A,” that would feature a youthful Mr. Spock.
“Amok Time,” my father said. The second-best episode.
Of the original series.
There’s only one series, for me.
I knew my father felt this way, and understood why, though I didn’t necessarily share the feeling. There was plenty more “Star Trek” to love. “The Inner Light,” from “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and “Far Beyond the Stars,” from “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” were two of my favorite episodes of television, period. But, when I heard the words “Star Trek,” I never pictured, say, the conflicted Klingon Starfleet officer Worf, or the buttock-headed, avaricious Ferengi, or the sleek, cetacean USS Voyager, from later series. I thought of the originals: Kirk and Spock and their Enterprise, the NCC-1701.
The best episode, of course, my father continued, No. 1, is “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Then “Amok Time.” Then, No. 3 . . . Ricardo Montalban.
“Space Seed.”
Fourth, the Horta.
“Devil in the Dark.”
It was my job, always, to bother with the titles.
And five. Hmm.
Come on, I said. Spock with a goatee.
Of course. “Mirror, Mirror.”
There were no surprises here. I’d heard my father’s Top Five many times before; in his view, an opinion gained authority through repetition. Every once in a while, a dark horse might slip into the ranking—“The Doomsday Machine” (he had a soft spot for William Windom) or “Balance of Terror” (ditto for submarine movies, of which this was a variation with starships).
Tough to argue, I said. But, good as it is, I always have a hard time putting “City” at No. 1.
In terms of unchallenged quality, ambition fulfilled, and enfant-terrible provenance, “The City on the Edge of Forever,” originally written by the SF wonder boy Harlan Ellison, was kind of the “Citizen Kane” of “Star Trek.” But it was a time-travel story, set mostly in Depression-era New York, and to me it always felt wrong, though interesting, to say that the best episode of “Star Trek” was arguably its most anomalous.
“Amok Time” might not be the best, but I think it’s the most important, I said.
How so?
By addressing the question of Spock’s sexuality, and the nature of desire in a culture that eschews emotion, it makes the classic fan-fiction gesture: to find a hole in the quilt of canon, and patch it. Look at the earliest “Trek” fanzines, like Spockanalia, the first issue of which came out right around when “Amok Time” aired: they’re obsessed with Spock’s Vulcan heritage, his childhood, and, above all, his sexuality. “Amok Time” tried to patch those holes. It rewarded the fanfic impulse, rewarded fandom itself. That probably explains why “Trek” is still around after all these years.
My father endured my disquisition with unusual forbearance. Like all our conversations from then on, this one was doomed to take place on my terms.
So they’re in a turbolift. Then what?
Then they get stuck.
And then?
I’m working on it.
I went back to my script. One of the machines connected to my father was giving off short, exasperated sighs; another beeped conventionally. From time to time, my father made sounds of mild discomfort and agitation, but he never opened his eyes or spoke. Meanwhile, Ensign Spock and Number One began to understand that they would not be getting out of the turbolift anytime soon. Alone in that placeless place, in a niche carved out from the ordinary routines of duty, they had timeless time for conversation. Hidden things would be discovered and revealed.
I remember you writing Sherlock Holmes fan fiction when you were young. Not “Trek.”
I drew my own Starfleet starships, and Enterprise crew members from alien species. But I never wrote any stories.
I’d thought about this in the weeks since I’d come on as a writer and a producer, and eventually as the showrunner, for “Star Trek: Picard.” As a kid, I had tried my hand at writing fiction that mapped to Robert E. Howard’s The Hyborian Age (1930, 2019), Larry Niven’s Known Space (1996), and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom (and, as an adult, I wrote two Lovecraftian Cthulhu Mythos stories), but never to the “Trek” universe, even though it took up far more space in the atlas of my imagination.
I guess, for me, it was always about the voice on the page. That was the clue I needed to start trying to “make my own.” I read all the James Blish and Alan Dean Foster adaptations, but they were never the voice of “Star Trek.” And I didn’t have the means, or maybe the chutzpah, to make my own fan episodes. Until now.
So, what hole are you patching?
The mystery of Spock’s smile, when he encounters the singing flower on Talos IV.
“The Menagerie.”
Yeah, or really “The Cage.”
That was the title of the original, unaired “Star Trek” pilot, famously rejected by NBC for being “too cerebral.” “The Cage” featured a captain named Christopher Pike (Jeffrey Hunter) in command of the Enterprise, with Number One (Majel Barrett, the wife of “Star Trek” ’s creator, Gene Roddenberry) as first officer and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) as science officer. Great swaths of it were later cleverly repurposed as flashback material in a first-season episode, “The Menagerie,” to tell the story of how Mr. Spock—the only character from the rejected pilot to carry over into the series—following the logic of mercy, hijacked the Enterprise in order to come to the aid of a paralyzed and horribly disfigured Pike, who was thereby established, in the “Trek” canon, as Captain Kirk’s immediate predecessor.
Even a casual fan watching “The Menagerie” immediately noted striking differences, beyond those of cast and characters, between the eras of Captains Pike and Kirk: differences in set design, costumes, makeup, lighting, direction, visual and sound effects. Kirk and crew never commented on or seemed to notice these discontinuities, which were all implicitly attributable to the passage of time between Pike’s day and Kirk’s. All but one, that is, which had long tantalized at least one non-casual fan: apart from the ears and the gull-wing eyebrows, the Spock who served under Captain Pike was nothing like the Spock who later launched a thousand zines.
In the rejected pilot, and in Roddenberry’s original conception of the show, Number One was the expressionless, rational, cool-tempered crew member, “almost glacier-like,” according to the episode’s teleplay, “in her imperturbability and precision” (glaciers evidently having become more precise by the twenty-third century). Spock, by contrast, was decidedly warmer, his animated face and voice freely expressing such emotions as alarm, concern, relief, and even an almost childlike delight, when, having beamed down to the surface of the planet Talos IV, he encountered that singing flower and broke out, in a way that never got less disturbing, no matter how many times one saw it, in a toothy grin. The pretext for my script, the hole in the quilt, was the lack of any “in-universe”—or “Watsonian,” as opposed to “out-of-universe,” or “Doylist”—explanation for Spock’s transition from expressive, even unreserved, to thoroughly glacial.
The Doylist explanation, by the way, was sexism. The NBC brass of 1965, in rejecting “The Cage,” are said to have been unable to tolerate the idea of a woman as second-in-command of a starship in 2266. In reconceiving the show for the second, successful pilot (“Where No Man Has Gone Before”), Roddenberry transferred Number One’s emotionless, “cerebral” cool to Spock. Codified as “logical,” it became the defining characteristic of all Vulcans, creating the one-species, one-trait template—a kind of intergalactic racial profiling—that haunts the worlds of “Star Trek” to this day. When Barrett returned to the cast of the regular series, she had been demoted, and safely confined within the role of the innocuous, lovelorn Nurse Chapel, whose only distinguishing trait was her unrequited—unrequitable—desire for the character to whom Barrett’s husband had fed, as it were, the soul of Number One.
Many early fans tended to despise Nurse Chapel, in particular the female fans who essentially created modern fandom—arguably the dominant cultural mode of our time—in the pages of Spockanalia, The Crewman’s Log, and other pioneering zines. They saw her as unworthy of the formidable Mr. Spock, embodied by Nimoy with banked fire and clean-limbed grace. But, if Christine Chapel was a relative nullity, there was nonetheless an insight, canny and poignant, in the Chapel-Spock dynamic, the tension between one who longed for recognition, connection, and a return of love and one who was, by training if not by nature, incapable of delivering those things. That incapacity, and the hope that it might be cured—the imperturbable perturbed, the ice thawed—was a crucial element of Spock’s attractiveness, and not only to women, and not only in a sexual sense.
Spock was unreachable, disengaged, remote, forever caught up in his research and his work. He sought relaxation in solitary intellectual pursuits, and seemed ill at ease in a crowd. He was loyal, and steadfast in the face of trouble, but he was not available. And yet now and then, in extreme situations, often under alien influences, Spock would be seized by transports of rage, or joy, or sorrow, the emotions disinterred from their burial site inside him. The feeling was there, deep and molten—volcanic—held in check by dint of constant effort.
In “Star Trek” ’s imagined future, amid the rocks and under the red alien skies of Spock’s home world, Vulcans called that unflagging effort a “philosophy,” enshrined its founder, Surak, and looked with cool condescension on those who did not submit to its regime. But, as I would discover as an undergrad in the halls of the Philosophy Department at the University of Pittsburgh, a redoubt far stauncher than the planet Vulcan of a logic far fiercer than Surak’s, the Vulcan way had little to do with philosophy and even less to do with logic, and there was certainly nothing alien about it. It was just good old repression, of the sort practiced by human fathers, among others, for many long and illogical centuries.
Ilove Mr. Spock because he reminds me of you, I said.
I put aside the iPad, climbed out of the sleeper chair, and went over to the bed. It was past four o’clock in the morning. My father swallowed. He breathed. Every so often, his breathing gave way to the raw but nugatory cough that had plagued him since—and had perhaps been triggered by—the Reagan Administration. Only now each cough ended in a strange mewl that might have been pain but sounded more like frustration, like the whine that entered his voice when he was tired of your arguments, tired of your nonsense. He never opened his eyes, but now and then his features began to approximate a facial expression—surprise, annoyance, skepticism—before slackening, as if in a failed attempt to mark the meteoric passage across his brain of some thought or emotion. For the first time that night, I considered the possibility that he was going to survive it. There was a logic, an implacable, animal logic, in hanging on, in dying only when you could hang on no longer. I saw that now as clearly as yesterday afternoon—it felt like a thousand years ago—I had seen the implacable logic of our mercy.
I reached down to stroke my father’s hair, something I had not done or even contemplated doing in the fifty-five years of our acquaintance. The contact felt strange. It was not that we never touched. We hugged to mark arrivals and departures, and over the past year, as his passing began to feel more imminent, I had started, when saying goodbye, to sneak in a hasty kiss that was ninety per cent sound. But I wondered how long it had been since I had touched my father’s head, and if that span—half a century, say—was normal or weird.
“This is some crazy long hair you got going on here, Dad,” I said aloud.
Over the past year, as the effects of lifelong improvidence had begun to impose a final reckoning, my father had been obliged to liquidate the vast collections of stamps, coins, trading cards, autographs, comic books, and historical ephemera that he had amassed with methodical recklessness since his boyhood visits to the stamps-and-coins department of Abraham & Straus. He was no longer able to boast, with a pleasure untainted by accuracy, of having been prescient in all his investments, correct in all his predictions, wise when all others were fooled. Even the sad form of entertainment that had enlivened his decline—out-doctoring his doctors, burying nurses and therapists under encyclopedic blizzards of facts (lest anyone begin to suspect that his mighty Spock brain should be added to the list of his failing organs)—was now denied to him. His magnificent hair was the last of his vanities. It was beautiful: thick, flowing, the hair of a bard or a Romantic virtuoso. One of the many things to have broken my heart during the past year was the sight of him at the bathroom mirror in the step-down facility that had been one of the steps of his long journey down, brushing his Brahmsian hair with an old-fashioned bristle brush, the kind that his mother had used to brush mine when I was a little boy.
“Dad,” I said. “OK, I really need you to hear me.”
I put my other hand to his head. I stood there, trying to find or feel my way into the darkness inside his skull.
As the world first learned in “Dagger of the Mind,” Spock, like all Vulcans, possessed an ability, albeit limited, to share thoughts, memories, sensations, and, somewhat paradoxically, emotions across short distances, by means of a “mind meld.” This procedure generally required that he place one or both of his hands against the face or head—as near as possible, presumably, to the brain—of the being with whom he intended to meld minds.
It’s OK, I told my father, through the contact of my fingertips to his febrile skin. You can let go. It will be OK. We will be OK.
Good for you, my father said. I’m with the Horta on this one.
In “Devil in the Dark,” which my father had ranked among his Top Five, the Enterprise came to the rescue of a mining colony on the planet Janus VI, where a terrible monster, the Horta, was preying on pergium miners, picking them off one by one. The episode rises above the banality of a premise as old as Grendel, and some creature effects that are truly risible—even to a ten-year-old in 1973, the homicidal Horta looked like an ambulatory slice of Stouffer’s French-bread pizza—by making an honest effort to imagine nonorganic life and then, in the characteristic turn that gives the “Star Trek” franchise its enduring beauty and power, by insisting that fear and prejudice were no match for curiosity and an open mind, that where there was consciousness there could be communication, and that even a rock, if sentient, had the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It was, in its way, a near-perfect example of what had drawn my father, and me, and fans around the world, to “Star Trek” and its successor shows for more than fifty years.
But, as I stood by my father with my hands on his head, vainly pretending that the silence that prevailed between fathers and sons, as profound and mysterious as the silence of elevators, could thus be subverted and overcome, I suddenly remembered the crude three-word sentence that the acid-secreting Horta burned into the surface of a rock, after mind-melding with Mr. Spock: “NO KILL I.”
Point taken, I told my father, abruptly letting go of his head, and then, aloud, “Dad, I’m so sorry.”
I’m not sure what my father’s last words were—possibly “I can’t believe you guys had breakfast at Kenny & Zuke’s without me”—but I know that, apart from one more whispered “goodbye,” those were mine to him. I had never in my life been more desperately sorry about anything.
My father hung on for six more interminable days without regaining consciousness. When he died, he managed to do it during a scant five-minute interval when one of my half brothers, both of whom had kept vigil at his bedside all that week, in a round-the-clock rotation with my stepmother, happened to step out for a much needed cup of coffee. Later, someone told me that this is not uncommon, that the dying, even when completely unconscious, often seem to choose a moment when they have been left alone to set out across the final frontier.
In the days and months that followed, I tried to find ways to mourn my father. I said Kaddish. I talked about him to my own children. I posted boyhood photos of him to Instagram. But mostly I wrote episodes of “Star Trek: Picard,” through and over which mortality and loss played like musical themes. The truth, I’ve sometimes had the nerve to tell someone who knows how much, in spite of everything, I loved my father, was that I had been grieving his loss since I was twelve years old; it was definitely easier the second time around. When I miss him, I find comfort—just as I did forty-four years ago, when he first left me behind—in his perfect, constant, undiminished presence in my imagination; his voice in my head, anytime I want it; his opinions, his jokes, his enthusiasms and vanities and lies. But sometimes, still, I wake up in the middle of the night, trapped in the broken elevator of insomnia, haunted by the cruelty of mercy and its logic, and by the pleading of the devil in the dark. ###
[Michael Chabon is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of fifteen books, including The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), Moonglow, (2016) and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007). Chabon attended Carnegie Mellon University (PA) for a year before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh (PA), where he received a BA (English writing) and afterwards he received an MFA (creative writing) from the University of California at Irvine.]
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