Switch by Natasha Singh

These are your instructions:

You must feed each other the lunch you brought

Person B must feed Person A

Person A must pretend they have ALS

Person A must not move their hands or legs once the exercise begins

Person A can speak only with their eyes

Switch

You have been assigned to work with a white woman who, for each day of this course, has worn a different flower in her hair. You meet her eyes, smile at the buttercup tucked behind her ear.

After the instructions are repeated, everyone in the group rushes towards the kitchen where they have been storing their bagged lunches. Today, for some regrettable reason, you have brought edamame, lightly salted and still in their pods. The thought of being fed this particular food, which can be done only by hand — and not with a fork or spoon — fills you with dread.

Reluctantly you rise, drag your backpack towards you, and head to the backyard where a manicured garden and large palm trees await. At the edge of the property, you spot two empty chairs near a jacaranda tree and walk towards them. After sinking into one of the chairs, you take out your bag of edamame, place it between your feet, and wait. When your assigned partner emerges, she is holding not a bagged lunch but a half jar of peanut butter. You see her looking around, and, before you can lift your hand to wave, she begins walking quickly in your direction. As she nears, the expression in her eyes becomes sheepish. “I’m sort of fasting,” she sighs, nodding at her jar. “I know. It looks a little weird.”

Laughing in relief, you hold up your edamame, “Me too.”

Mindful of the limited time you have, you both speak in hushed whispers about weird lunches and the benefits of semi-fasting. Though the exchange is brief, it engenders a new warmth all the same.

“I’ll go first,” flower girl offers. “You can feed me with this,” she says holding out her sticky spoon.

Dipping it into the jar, you scoop out a chunk. You don’t know much about flower girl other than that she is here to embark on the process of becoming a death midwife. Like you, she has remained quiet for the duration of this course, listening as others tearfully shared about their fears of death, or staring wide-eyed at the large TV monitor that has shown video after video of people dying inside hospitals, tubes inserted into their arms, tracheas down their throats. Though the instructor has not yet commented on these videos, you know that each of you is meant to consider the question that has been hovering in the air: What is it to die a good death?

As you gaze at the petite woman before you, likely the youngest in the group, it occurs to you that she could be mistaken for a child. Her eyes are large, her face pixie-like. Sweet. When she opens her mouth again, a smear of brown paste coats her tongue.

Hoping to connect with her, make her feel more at ease, you say, “It’s great that you’re here. Everyone should take a course like this when they’re young.”

When she appears to smile, you scoop out another thick chunk. Hoping you don’t sound patronizing, you add, “I mean, I wish I’d taken a course like this a long time ago.” As you continue feeding her—and she continues smiling—a familiar joy rises in you and floods your body. You used to experience this kind of joy when you fed your father in the weeks and months before his death. Each time he finished a few bites of watery dal or a bit of rice, you would murmur, “Good job!” And now, you find yourself repeating these same words. “Good job,” you tell her softly. “Good job.”

When it’s time to switch, and she is able to speak again, she tells you more about herself and why she is here. She says she has never lost anyone, not yet anyway. “It’s a miracle,” she says happily. “Both sets of my grandparents are still alive.” Then she glances at you, as if sensing you need something more. “I’m here for my mom,” she offers quickly. “She’s going to be really sad when her parents die.”

It is on the tip of your tongue to tell her about your father—and what his death did to you. But you don’t. For a moment, you consider telling her that you are worried about your partner, too. That death has become a fixture in the air of your shared home. It is the grey sky above you now. The new ground beneath your feet.

“You have to pretend you have ALS,” she reminds you breezily, like this exercise is a fun game. Bending forward, she reaches for your bag of edamame.

You don’t know a lot about ALS, but you do know that your job is to embody a kind of helplessness, an inability to move your limbs or do the most simple things for yourself. So, you lean back and let your arms and legs become heavy like you are made of the sea or stone. Invariably, your eyes dart to the bag of edamame in her hands. As she removes the first pod and places it near your lips, you lean forward, trying to help.

“You can’t move your body,” she reminds you sternly.

As soon as you open your mouth, she pushes the pod in, and you think this must be the closest you have come to feeling or looking like a baby bird. She tells you that her grandmother was a paraplegic and that she grew up taking care of her, but this information does not settle you, for you are concentrating on the pod, which you must moisten with your saliva before attempting to loosen the beans with your teeth. Somehow, you manage to get two beans into your mouth, but when she pushes more of the pod in, you cringe. You have been tracking whether her fingers will need to make contact with your saliva and mouth, a collision that seems unavoidable. You decide to eat only the first bean of each pod, so she doesn’t have to touch your saliva, but she seems not to have gotten the memo.

“Go on!” she cries after you shake her head. “Eat the whole thing. There’s just one left!” Reluctantly, you do as she asks but instantly regret it when you see her delicately wiping her fingers on her skirt. That’s my saliva, you think. She had to touch my saliva. And that’s when your body breaks into a sweat.

Your paranoia about the possibility of her disgust is a fitting punishment, you think. You, who have always been a fastidious eater. You, who have long struggled with sitting at the same table with people who chew noisily or eat with their mouths open. You, who can barely sit next to your mother who eats with her hands. Even when you were as young as three, and your mother burped loudly or used her fingers — covered in dal and grains of rice — to touch your plate, you would burst into tears or rush from the table to brush your teeth, as if this ritualized act of cleansing could make up for the feeling of revulsion that flooded you.

As flower girl continues talking, you curse yourself for your history of revulsion. You curse yourself for having brought edamame for lunch. You curse yourself for being — and feeling — so utterly helpless.

Giving

Feeding

Caring for

These are the qualities that came so easily to you during your father’s last months. These are the qualities that come easily to you most of the time. But as flower girl feeds you, chattering away in seemingly happy oblivion, it occurs to you that you’d thought only of how joyous it felt for you to be giving to your father. How privileged you felt to be permitted the kind of intimacies he’d never permitted throughout your life, when he could still walk and do things for himself. You remember the many times you changed his diaper during his last year, the many times you’d held him, cradling him like a baby in your arms. You remember, too, the way he’d raised his trembling hands into a namaste after each of these moments. Back then, you’d found this gesture immensely dignified. Beautiful. But not once had it occurred to you to consider — really consider — what he must have felt like inside his dying body. What he must have felt each time he surrendered to the care being offered him. What he must have felt when his memory and independence began leaving him like a river flowing east.

One afternoon, when the setting sun streamed in through his bedroom window, bathing his body in soft pink light, you’d come upon him lying on his hospital bed, his leg miraculously lifted high in the air. Grabbing hold of the loose skin of his once muscular thigh, he was calling out, “Come back! Please come back! Please come back to me.” Hitting at his leg like it was a locked door.

As you’d gazed at him, you knew he was trying to summon his life force, will it to return to him. “Come back,” he kept crying throughout the day until his voice weakened. Come back.

“You still have a ways to go,” flower girl tells you, her voice cutting through you like a ray of something bright, her words like a switch. But you shake your head, abruptly ending the exercise.

“I just can’t,” you say. “I can’t eat anymore.” And with that, your eyes fill.

“My dad,” you say haltingly. “I don’t think I ever realized how helpless he must have felt.” But even as you say these words, you know your father was able to do something you couldn’t — still can’t. He’d been able to eat from someone else’s hand, and he’d been able to do it with grace. With each spoon of food, each diaper change, each bath, and each act of being tended to, he’d folded his hands together and somehow managed to raise them into the air. Sometimes he’d manage to say the words; other times he just let his hands do the talking.

Namaste, he or his hands said each time. Namaste.

Even in his dying, he was trying to teach you how to live.

Image Source: Jessica Cross / Flickr Creative Commons