A Thousand Sisters_ My Journey Into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman - Lisa Shannon [6]
We shoot lifestyle stock-photography, the kind of images you see on display in health food stores, dental brochures, and advertisements for online dating services. The beauty of the stock shot is that it can be used to sell anything. One aspiration fits all. A winning photograph will convey two things: perfection and genuine emotion. Correction: The illusion of genuine emotion, which, it turns out, can be manufactured with a few rounds of “One, two, three, yay!”
Ted shoots; I art direct and produce. I haul perfect size-2 models out to a cloudless beach or field of the greenest manicured grass and tell them to lift their arms to the sky like wings so we can capture pictures that will rise to the top of online image searches tagged with the keyword “freedom.”
We call it “image pollution,” just to be clear we’re in on the joke. At parties, Ted likes to say facetiously that we’ve sold our souls. For us, stock photography is strictly a means to an end. As though such things can be coaxed from the universe—or from hundred-dollar-an-hour models, for that matter—Ted often rocks back and forth as he shoots, chanting, “Happiness. More happiness.”
CHAPTER THREE
Sometimes Death is More Like a Labor
THE LABORED BREATHING starts late at night. They call it “the death rattle.” Though it is my job to stay near my dad in case he needs anything, I sleep through it as though it isn’t happening. My blankets and foam pad are piled on the dining room floor amid the chaos of oxygen tubes and pills, the hospital bed shoved in one corner, and the antique dish-cabinet in the other. I drift in and out of sleep, ignoring all the cues that this is his final night.
In the morning, my mom calls hospice. The nurse arrives and announces that he is now in the active dying process.
There is a grasping half-light in Dad’s eyes and his desperate breathing continues, increasing in intensity. The nurse warns us that this slow release of life could go on for days—that “sometimes death is more like a labor.” Hours pass. His blood steadily retreats up his arms and feet, leaving his skin bluish green and translucent. His pajamas are soaked with sweat. Someone grabs scissors and cuts them off, leaving his six-foot-four frame naked, swaddled in pink sheets.
Everyone leaves the room, so I sit down next to him and hold his hand. A Vedic prayer I learned in college comes to mind. I haven’t said it aloud for years. What the hell. We’re alone. I lean in close and sing the prayer.
He cranes his head toward me to listen. The nurse comes back, sees Dad fading, and corrals everyone into the room. “This is it!”
I sense panic and crying behind me, but I don’t look up. I continue the prayer until someone puts a hand on my arm and I hear, like sounds from a distant radio, “He’s gone.”
I step away, disconnected, like someone who slipped out to the restroom and missed a crucial point in a movie. I want to lean over to the nearest person and whisper, “What did I miss?” Instead, they cry, while I study his body. Sprawled on the hospital bed, my father looks like a giant, pale green frog. The nurse shuts off the oxygen pump.
After they roll Dad away in the burgundy velvet body bag, all that is left on his hospital bed is his outline on the pink sheets. I sit in the room for a long time, and again the next day, until the bed is broken down and taken away. The dining room table returns to host distant relatives who will eat from Chinese takeout boxes on the spot where he died.
SEVERAL CRISP FALL DAYS LATER, the sun in my eyes obscures the people who are scattered down the hillside of a modern, 1960s-era graveyard, its flat head-stones and manicured grass overlooking Portland’s Sunset Highway. I stare at the one-foot-square, simple wooden box of ashes with my mind locked on the impossibility of the math. How can my father, who was six-four and weighed 250 pounds, fit in that little container—even reduced to ashes?