The road from Kermanshah: how Parviz came to die.

My Uncle Parviz died of lung cancer at 9:50 in the morning on a beautiful December day. It was Tuesday. The sky was brilliant blue, the sun shining, atypical for this suburb of Los Angeles. It had been like that for some days. It was great hiking or sailing weather, or just for sitting around in the sun. I wanted very much to sit outside away from the house, perhaps in a cafe, and pretend to be on vacation.

The men came in two vans, about three hours after I called. "He is rather large. Are you sure he will fit?" I asked the businesslike but kind-faced men from the funeral home. "Oh yes, sir, don't worry. Last week we had a deceased who weighed four hundred pounds."

The night before we knew the end was near. His breathing had become more labored, "from the head," as the hospice nurse had told us. Lying on the bed, unshaven with his nails grown long, his skin turning mustardy yellow, his nose and forehead scarred from the disease and falls, and with his arm and leg muscles melted away, he looked very much like my grandfather, his father, who had died ten months earlier--one day less. His breathing had an echoey hollow sound like the rapid blowing and releasing of a small balloon with great, and thankfully unconscious, effort. His bedroom had the stale smell of disease and decline.

My cousin David, the younger of Parviz's two sons, and I sat on the living room carpet, playing a mediocre yet aggressive game of chess, drinking freezer-kept vodka, and running to the darkened bedroom every time we thought we couldn't hear breathing over the unreliable baby monitor. My mother, having arrived all the way from Tehran on Sunday, for the second time in as many months, sat quietly on a chair listening to Louise, Parviz's wife.

Louise was afraid of spending that night in the bedroom with Parviz. What if something went wrong? David usually went to his own house to sleep, a few blocks away. I volunteered to spend the night in the bed next to my uncle, but David decided that he would stay. I was thankful.

Louise also clung to something the hospice nurse had said about a patient lasting six weeks in order to see a loved one a final time. "Having him like this is better than not having him at all. Isn't it a shame for a strong man like him to go six feet under the ground?" she would say. True, Parviz had been a strong man with large and muscular features and darkly tanned skin, and also gentle with a soft warm voice and always a smile.

His breathing did deteriorate during the night, but in the morning I managed to convince Louise to go to work anyway. I felt this was the day, but what if he did last for another six weeks? She couldn't do much anyway. My mother staying home was trouble enough. I had already yelled at her once about interfering with our work. I had developed a sense of "ownership" of my uncle's dying process, as though we were partners in this. He would die, I would help and comfort, and be transformed. Perhaps this was my urgent attempt at repairing the strains in my relationship with Parviz that had developed as I grew older and asserted myself as an adult. I cannot say that we had less love for one another during the last few years, but less friendship, less intimacy.

I took a long shower that morning. Only last month Parviz had made fun of his older son and me for our long showers. "God forbid anybody wanting to go take a shower after you guys, no water left in the neighborhood." Breakfast was at the sunny dining table by the kitchen, interrupted often by runs to the bedroom to check my uncle's breathing. We could really do nothing if the breathing stopped; why was I running? He was in no pain; the hard part was over, for all of us.

"His breathing is not good at all," my mother called out to me. She had just come out of the shower, wearing a loose-fitting, flowery caftan-housedress she likes. It was true. His mouth was slightly open, blocked by his soft and bloated tongue. I placed an eyedropper of concentrated morphine under his tongue. "Parviz joon, this is Iraj. I am putting some painkiller under your tongue so you will be more comfortable. My mom is here also." She held his hand. They had told us that hearing is the last sense to go; perhaps he could hear me. Some of the morphine dribbled out from the corner of his mouth. Maybe some got absorbed, I thought.

His hearing was the last to go. Only the day before, when my mother sat beside his bed, sing-songing to him with her sad flowery Kermanshahi accent, "Did you see what happened to us, my little brother, my little beloved? May I die for you," he gathered up some strength, rolled his eyes toward her, no longer able even to tilt his head, and whispered, "God forbid." His typical sense of humor and verbal bantering had in fact lasted as late as Saturday, after the falls and the insertion of the bladder tube. That day, after that last humiliation, we had all gathered around him, sisters and wife, and children and niece and nephew, trying to convince him not to get off the bed, that he no longer needed to exert himself for the long walk to the bathroom, talking to him like a child with only half a mind. During a pause, he looked up severely, and with an angry-looking face said: "I want to go beteram." Seeing the confused look on all of our faces, he smiled and translated from Kurdish, which he spoke in addition to English and Persian, "you don't know what beteram means? It means I want to go fart," and quietly laughed at our expense, with his head down.

In relation to his declining faculties over that last month, we had formed a rapid-news network, passing information on any and all aspects of his health, what was deteriorating, and how fast. He had started to become confused some time in November. He repeated questions. Sometimes he momentarily forgot basic information such as the fact that his older son was no longer dating but was married and expecting his first baby in March.

On Monday the week before his death, there was news from Los Angeles: Parviz is deteriorating rapidly, the hospice nurse says he has perhaps a week, and "he says two nights." My stomach contracted. Two nights? How does he know?

That very day I had resigned from a fairly abusive company. I had not lined up another job, wanting to take a risk. Two days later, as my sister and I flew to Los Angeles, I had no set plans to return to Houston. The beautiful yet deathly-yellow-colored hospice nurse asked me how long I'd be there. "I'm going to hang out for a while." She approved; that was what she liked to hear. There is no time schedule to this business of dying.

When we first saw Parviz on Thursday night, I thought that he looked better than expected. He was asleep, unshaven, had lost some weight, looking older than his fifty-nine years. But he appeared nowhere close to death, or someone who has "two nights." Actually, the two nights had already expired. He really doesn't look too bad, I thought. Even on Friday morning, in the light of day, he wasn't doing too badly to my eye. He was awake, in bed, and cried when he saw us.

He had been weeping often since his diagnosis. It was difficult to watch. My mother said: "What can he do? Condemned to death. He really doesn't want to die."

He seemed cognizant of who we were, and what was going on. The crying was the proof.

It reminded me of my distant cousin Marjan, who has been bedridden, paralyzed due to an epilepsy-related illness, for a good ten years. She was only eighteen when she became ill. By the time I saw her last, early in 1999, she had no physical function except for some eyelid movement. She is fed through a tube to her stomach, cannot speak; can she hear? Her exceptionally devoted parents have fashioned their entire lives around caring for her. They take turns staying with her. They lift her from the bed daily and exercise individual muscles. They talk to her. When my mother and I visited her room, her mother introduced us. "Marjan joon, this is Madam Doktor and her son, Iraj. You remember Madam Doktor's daughter? She used to come and tutor you when you were in high school?" My sister has hardly been able to bring herself to talk about Marjan for years, much less see her. With this introduction, Marjan's eyelid movements became faster, though not necessarily more deliberate, and you could see tears well up in her eyes. "She remembers, she recognizes you," both parents said with joy. I wish she didn't. Over her bed hung a large framed picture of a beautiful young teenager with a broad, dimply, sparkly smile.

Perhaps it is a wonderful human characteristic that we can lower our expectations. When my untrained, possibly untrainable, cats yawn or stretch, I get very mushy. "Yes sweetie, yawn for daddy, stretch for daddy," I say. Perhaps Marjan's expectations are sufficiently lowered, like those of her parents. Parviz told my mother, a month or so before his death, that he wished he could live even like that, sick, but knew it was not possible. That Marjan has been aware is unthinkable, even obscene.

Since the diagnosis in August, we had all become used to seeing Parviz cry. His low morale was a frequent topic of discussion. We were all united in thinking that improved morale would help him fight the disease and live longer. I, the acknowledged scientist of the family, quoted vague studies to this effect while others expressed surprise at his weakness. A cousin, exasperatedly and somewhat self-righteously, called him a crybaby. The story of when he, in his thirties or forties, had all his teeth pulled because he couldn't stand toothache was rehashed multiple times. I had decided that the solution was humor, and preached and practiced this often. His friends spent hours trying to cheer him up; consequently he had stopped taking most visitors. We all saw his low morale as moral weakness; he was surely not riding high into the sunset.

During Parviz's last few days, every time something went wrong, Louise would shake her head and mournfully say that even "this is a wedding party," meaning compared to what was to come next. One of the worst things about watching someone die is that there is nothing to look forward to. The patient is surely going to get worse, losing mental and physical functions gradually. As the body is slowly stripped of the soul, layer-by-layer, it becomes simply a mechanical collection of parts and resulting functions: eating, drinking, breathing, urinating, defecating. Painfully, even these are then taken, one by one, at which point there is nothing to declare but defeat. The battle has been lost, as was always clear intellectually, but obscured by love. This human, alive to begin with, has been reduced in stepwise fashion to a complex machine, and then a simple machine, and then an object. How much an object he becomes does not sink in until you see the body parts moved, manipulated, by the mortuary workers. Had you not known the person, or loved him, they might well have been struggling, out of breath, with a large sack of grain at the shipyard.

For some unknown reason, I took to the caring of my uncle like an avid apprentice. He was already weak and confused. On Friday morning, we had to help him sit up on the edge of the queen-size bed, and gently coax him to eat, drink, and take his medication. Though they had a hospital bed with motorized, inclining back, he had refused to use it. When the hospice had brought it in, he said: "How quickly I have reached this stage." His first wife had taken nearly a year to die of the same illness.

Sitting on the edge of the bed that Friday morning, he held his hand palm up, resting on his thigh, waiting for his pills. He could no longer discuss the pills, as he used to: "So now I take two blue ones, and one yellow one, right?" "No, dear, the yellow is to help you sleep at night." Now he had only energy to sit, waiting for his pills. He then brought up his cupped hand rapidly, hurling the pills into the back of his throat, as people do. Some pills dropped, and they rolled down his undershirt, on his thighs, and into the bed's crannies. "Parviz joon, I am Iraj. You missed a couple of the pills. May I put them on your tongue?" I asked. "What ever you would like, I will do gladly," he answered earnestly and with a low voice, his provincial accent magnified and harder to understand without his false teeth. His tone was that of a man determined to cooperate; in a way he was our captive. Being Jewish in Iran had trained him well, and many others of his generation, in this kind of deferential tone.

Our conversations "with" him that day would continue to center around medication, food, water, and his beloved overly sweetened iced tea. His answers, progressively more abbreviated, were reduced at times to up or down nods. He seemed to enjoy his iced tea and a small piece of cake that I fed him slowly, in place of a proper meal, which he could no longer swallow. I theorized, optimistically, that as long as there is joy, even of the minutest nature, life is worth living and preserving. This simple joy would not last long, of course, as on the next day, a tiny speck of sweet from his provincial birthplace of Kermanshah, just flown over eight thousand miles by my mother, would be his last food. I could not help remembering all the times we, as children, had excitedly opened boxes of this delicacy which he would bring for us, and the pleasure of stuffing too many into our mouths at one time, hardly able to chew, puffing sugar powder, and having to wait until the heat and saliva melted them all.

He could still walk a little that Friday morning, and had fallen a couple of times earlier in the week. That morning, I was summoned by my sister's calm yet forceful voice after hearing a soft thump. He had fallen into the bathtub as he turned to enter the toilet. He looked like a bad, oversized, cubist painting, partly sitting up, turned sideways, with legs bent and upward, in all directions, as if crumpled like a paper bag. He looked in a daze, not in pain. By the time I pulled him out of the tub, both of us on our knees, I was out of breath. He was such a large man, even so sick. I could not lift him any more.

A friend asked why I am writing this story. The answer is not clear, even to myself. Perhaps I am drawn to death. I have long thought of death as a most significant event in life, where, with incomprehensible suddenness, all accumulated knowledge, experience, memories, thoughts, and feelings disappear, as though they never existed. Perhaps I am drawn to the subject simply because I was born in a country infatuated with death, where holidays mark the passing of historical and religious figures--not their birth--where fabled fathers unknowingly kill their sons in battle, where mythological kings feed skulls of their subjects to snakes growing on their shoulders, and where fairy-tale love stories all end in suicide.

Why am I writing this story? Is it to put these memories on paper before I forget the exact sound of Parviz's voice, the feel of his meaty and powerfully large hands, and his humor? I have already begun to forget the look and sound of his laughter. Am I trying to close the book on the pain of watching him decline or to remind myself of what he meant to me when I was a child? So many of my fondest childhood memories involve him: when he came to Tehran on business and stayed with us, or when we went to Kermanshah for month-long summer holidays.

Kermanshah was a happy refuge. It was a small town at the foot of jaggedly muscular mountains in western Iran with sunny summer days and wonderfully cool nights. My uncle and his family shared a traditional two-story house with my grandparents in a small, just recently paved alley. Men wearing traditional loose-fitting Kurdish clothes delivered fresh vegetables and fruits and dairy every day on donkey-back from the surrounding villages. Most days, we played games in the streets or by the fishpond in the back yard, and explored the narrow maze-like alleyways with newfound friends.

Those cool summer nights, we all slept on the large second-floor balcony, with mattresses laid side-by-side on the ground to cover the entire length, and sheets on the rails so "neighbors wouldn't see us naked." The kids, who were never ready to sleep, would invariably begin pillow fighting or ganging up on grown-ups, and Parviz joined in as usual, until my grandfather, lying down on his own separate wooden platform bed on the other side of the balcony, would tell us to pipe down and go to sleep. I can still feel the chilly night air and the warmth of the thick homemade comforters, under which we hid completely, ignoring the worried calls from our parents: "You will suffocate like that. Stick your head out from under."

Many mornings, instead of playing in the street, I got up early and went to work with my grandfather and uncle. Their truck-parts store was near the edge of town, where all the repair shops and auto parts stores were, by the big highway going past the refinery and out of the city. The store was a wonder and a playground. There were vice grips and ball bearings, and large springs and red-colored jacks of different sizes. The wooden counter at the front, where the grips and the jacks were, had a movable top that you could lift to get in or, in my case, just crawl under. The bearings came in colorful dusty boxes with German or English writing, and I used to read these out loud, trying to get the exotic words and accents perfectly right. The back was dark and musty, full of large unfamiliar metal pieces and parts, and everything you touched was wonderfully covered with dusty grease. My uncle and I threw darts at the wooden ceiling beams--how did we get the darts down?--and I would climb up and down the ladder to the inside terrace by the back of the store, where more mysterious equipment was stored--patiently waiting for a child's exploration. I used to marvel at the dexterity and strength of my uncle running, actually running, up and down the flimsy wooden ladder with both hands piled full of merchandise.

At noontime, we would go home for lunch, sometimes walking to pick up hot sangak bread at the bakery midway from the house. We ate in the middle of the windowy second-floor living room on a large throw cloth around which we all gathered and talked and argued and sometimes even fought. Sometimes the children had eating contests, often losing to Parviz who would playfully join in, and then we were admonished when the inevitable stomachache arrived.

It was around this very throw cloth that the lore of the family would be recounted again and again, until both the truths and the embellishments were ingrained. It was here that my grandfather talked about his World War I days and when he swam the width of the Karoon River, "two kilometers," with his clothes on his head so they wouldn't get wet. Or the time his truck tipped over in an ice storm and crushed his left arm, which was out the window, and how he finally grabbed a jack and freed himself using his good arm. And the time Parviz bought two government army-surplus tanks to salvage for parts in a town fifty or so kilometers to the north, tied them together with chains, and rode them down the highway toward Kermanshah, shaking the road with their thunder, until stopped by sirened police cars, asking if he was "going to war."

I am not sure if these stories were all true, but we believed them, and later back in the big city, recounted them to our not-so-fortunate friends with our own twists and embellishments. And so Parviz's lighthearted claim that he could drive blindfolded from Kermanshah to the neighboring mountainous town became my claim that he had already done so. And my city friends' skepticism did not bother me, because the drive had happened for sure, at least in my mind.

Like many in my family, Parviz was a great raconteur. His tales were joyful and juicy, and made you want to follow him around and do as he did. He had a wonderful provincial accent, with all the "wrong" vowels and unexpected extra consonants, which made the simplest word mysterious to my ears and his tales fun to hear for even the tenth time. I remember a story from his army days when a friend took him for lunch to his father's village estate, and the father, a Khan, ordered a feast by his river under the trees which included a whole sheep grilled, and they cut chunks of meat with large knives right from the fire, and ate just like that with their hands, "with a lot of salt, a lot of pepper."

Once every few months Parviz came to Tehran to buy parts, and he stayed with us. I remember these visits vividly. On his time off, he and I would go to the movies or have lunch, and sometimes I tagged along and went to the southern parts of the city, where the bazaar and all the merchants were, normally off-limits to me, and watched him bargain and buy. Some days he would volunteer to cook for us the only dish he seemed to know, "something that will make you want to eat your fingers." It was an amalgam of eggplant, tomato, chicken, salt and pepper eaten with lots of bread--the kind of dish you imagine men learn to make as bachelors or when in the army.

I have noticed, happily, that after writing about painful experiences, the act of writing itself becomes incorporated into the original story. The unpleasant childhood memory of my parents' fight becomes the pleasurable memory of a narrative well written, losing the old hold on my mind. Perhaps with writing about Parviz, not only his death but also his life, I am attempting to transform the pain of his loss into something better, something comfortable. Could it be that death, then, really is not closing the book after all?

Reflecting on those--my uncle's--last few days, I find myself more at peace with the idea of death. Having observed, or rather participated in, the process once, it is no longer an unknown to fear. The decline may take long, and may well be painful, uncomfortable, and even lonely, but at least I have seen it and know what to expect.

Neither do I fear inexistence quite so much, though this may have less to do with Parviz than many other lessons learned as I approach middle age. That there will be a world after me, that the earth and sun and the stars will rotate and shine, and that people, individuals and societies, friends and relatives or even complete strangers will continue, is no longer intolerable.

In fact, I imagine that, if I should live a very long life, as my grandfather did, nearly to the age of ninety-nine, with my body slowing, friends dying, memories fading, and no longer having an appetite for new ventures, the expectation of death may be a comfort, and achieving it a fitting and thankfully inevitable end. I think if one has had a life long enough, or better yet, lived it to fullness, with intensity and peace, learning and achievement, rest and work, kindness and pain, anger and sorrow, and happiness and regret, all the emotions, a suit case filled with desires and another with fulfillment, then death should not draw pity, but perhaps admiration, as in looking at the autograph on the bottom corner of an inspired painting.

Acouple of days before dying, Parviz's urine bag came open as we tried to re-adjust him, and poured urine down my knee and leg. I laughed. There is a story about my first trip as a baby to Kermanshah. My mother had just cleaned me and before putting a fresh diaper on, brought me out naked to show to my aunt and uncle who were in bed. As she held me up by my underarms in front of them, it appears I decided that further release was in order, right on my aunt and uncle. All three adults present always tell the rest of the story accompanied with wild flailing arm motions and gargling drowning sounds, and laughter. Now, feeling the warm dark yellow-and-rust-color urine on my leg, I also laughed. I had urinated on Parviz early in my life, and in his own humorous fashion, he had paid me back at the end of his.

Early on the afternoon of that Tuesday, the two men slowly rolled Parviz's tightly wrapped body, with the outline of his hands placed on his chest visible, out through the garage and into one of the vans. Passing through the darkened garage, seeing us all standing around, one facing the gurney, another Parviz's wood working bench and tools, yet a third looking at his beloved Chevy Blazer, as always meticulously clean, and another facing the empty wall looking at nothing at all, one of the men paused for a moment, looked down, and said gently: "Please don't worry. We'll take good care of him."

The next morning, I sat at one of two limping outdoor metal tables at a coffee-and-bagel shop, shifting my tailbone from side to side on the narrow uncomfortable chair, a sagging paper cup in hand. It was only two blocks from where Parviz and his wife and their two small boys had settled twenty years earlier after immigrating to the United States. The tables were placed on a narrow concrete strip of a sidewalk flush against the window. The lined parking spots in front, only feet from my face, were nearly full, with one rusted old car idling, spewing smoke. In reality, it was a beautiful Wednesday. The sky was shiny blue with only one or two cottony white clouds at a distance by the mountains, the same mountains that had reminded us many times of the jagged peaks of Kermanshah. But I couldn't really sense the beauty, sitting there, alone, staring at the old car and the pebbles and bits of bagel and bread on the ground.

Two hungry sparrows flew all about, from table to chair, in circles through the single naked three nearby and over the concrete-potted grass patch, playing and eating. I noticed a middle-aged Middle Eastern-looking couple stepping out of separate Mercedeses, wearing matching jumpers. They walked into the shop, and emerged moments later vigorously shaking dry-sounding bagels out of wax paper, spraying crumbs onto the cracked concrete by the door. Seeing this, the two sparrows hopped onto the new feast--bypassing me and my unsteady table and (by now) cold cup of coffee--taking note neither of the pebbles nor the car noise and the cloud of smoke, and sang joyously as they ate.

What remains of a man, dead?

Sensations remain, of the feel of the skin, its roughness and temperature, in a handshake or an embrace, of the inflection of the voice or the cracking of laughter, of the childhood joy of a surprise visitor from a far-off town. Objects remain. Photographs, handcrafts, a favorite chair, or a zucchini patch planted years ago. There will be memories of events and of stories told. We will repeat these memories until they are ingrained into our children's consciousness, even as they are diluted with every retelling, like genes passed through generations. With time, objects are recalled less intensely, sensations fade, and favorite tales take up a different voice, the new voice of the living, and no longer that of the loved one lost. But perhaps also in time, these memories simply embed themselves so deeply into our minds and our flesh that we no longer notice them as external. They become one with us and our children, integrated and comfortable. And so we might be excused for believing that the loved one remains with us after all.

But at first, there is sorrow.

Iraj Isaac Rahmim, a writer and consultant based in Texas, is currently working on a book of essays on the making of a Jewish Iranian American. He holds a PhD in chemical engineering from Columbia University.