Sheila Martineau – “In The Dying Room”
“There is a coy tenderness to the way the author of ‘In The Dying Room’ offers her insights into her father’s passing, and her father’s life. A sort of shy reclamation of the man as his dying days bring him back to her life as a human, rather than the mythological figure he was before. The author’s sharp eyes zero in on the details that matter and dust away all the unnecessary excess. It’s hard to say no to the author’s strong voice; captivating, wistful and exciting all the same. A triumph of a nonfiction piece.”
(Comments by 2025 judge, Danny Ramadan)
In The Dying Room
HE WAS THE OLD MAN who sat in corner coffee shops and harassed young women. Who made sport of swiping their pens and papers and purses. Who spewed philosophical nonsense at anyone willing to listen. Who passed out photocopied pamphlets promoting his real, and imagined, and exaggerated achievements. Who announced himself not only a world-famous magician but, also, a mentor to the new young illusionists. And even, hocus-pocus, mentor to the greats who came before him, billing himself as ‘the legend behind the legends.’ Who hollered, “Don’t you know who I am?” before broadcasting his name for all to hear.
His boyhood idol had been Harry Houdini, the great escape artist and illusionist. He’d wanted to be Houdini. To be the greatest.
~
He was the old man the police brought into the hospital in arm and leg restraints. At age ninety, still a large man, still larger than life. And, for the record, a Public Nuisance. In a psychotic rage. He refused to undress, resisted x-rays and blood tests, tried to escape at every opportunity. The hospital kept him under twenty-four-hour guard for the first two weeks of what would be the final six weeks of his life. He called me on day three.
“Get me out of here! Right now!”
My father had always called once or twice a year to bluster and blame. I’d kept my distance for decades. But this call seemed different: a cry for help. Reluctant, I arrived the next morning, smack in the middle of one of his failed getaways as two security men strong-armed him down the hall and escorted him back to his room.
“Take a picture!” he shouted at me. “Look what they’re doing! Get it on film!”
I would not have known him behind the cruel distortions of rage, but for his outburst.
The bedbugs and cockroaches riding in on his street clothes had by then colonized the hospital room. Their invasion at last giving the medical staff legal license to strip down and bed their unruly patient against his will. While doctors examined him, and nurses treated him, and staff triple-bagged his clothes, I explained his erratic medical and mental history to the social worker across the hall.
~
I returned the next morning. More curious than concerned.
His mind and body, the doctors report, are riddled with disease. Multiple organ failure. The infirmities of old age, exacerbated by a punishing whirlpool of psychotic delusions and paranoid suspicions. His madness, fuelled by lack of insight; by which he denies fault, blames others, lacks empathy, refuses treatment.
Standing beside the guard outside his doorway, I look in from a safe distance. His blubbery, disobedient body sinking into its bed of resignation, even as his bones float to the surface. His skeletal silhouette rising from within its fleshy facade. The contour of his nose. Then, the curve of his hairline. Oh, there, the shape of his skull.
Is it him?
A body of flesh and bone. The unmistakable hands holding creativity and cruelty in equal measure: hands once teaching a little girl to draw a straight line without a ruler and, with passing years and sleight-of-hand, knuckled fists sucker-punching her in the face and leaving her bloodied on the floor. The still strong arms and legs once carrying a little girl to safety across rocky creek beds and, in a terrifying twist of time, iron manacles pinning her to the ground without cause or care or air.
Yes, it’s him.
~
The same menace of muscle and blood. He who calls my name now. He who called me names: crazy, stupid, tramp; useless, worthless, good-for-nothing. Not worth educating. Born to serve man. He who whipped and assaulted me, who violated and interrogated me.
~
His eyes both accusing me of holding him prisoner and pleading with me to help him escape.
“I’m in the dying room!” he thunders each time I come and go.
~
A week in, and the force-fed, anti-psychotic drugs begin to work their magic. The old man emerging from his never-ending nightmare is a stranger to me.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispers. “Can you forgive me?”
Not so fast, old man.
The incessant nastiness falling away, but his persistent narcissism holding on.
“The nurses don’t know who I am. Give them my brochure!” he demands. “Get more copies printed at London Drugs! Right now!”
Fat chance, old man.
Demands aside, he’s kind to me, and one uncertain day I dare to ask the doctor, “Is he becoming who he might have been?”
He hesitates. “We don’t know. We didn’t know him. Maybe.”
Maybe I would have adored him.
~
Every morning I sat at his bedside and every night I wondered how I could sit with a man who’d done so much harm to so many; not least to himself, to his family, to me. The talented, self-taught man who’d been a successful commercial artist and a celebrated professional magician. The old man whose talents needed no embellishment, who no longer knew he’d accomplished more than enough.
But I knew.
From the moment my father saw his first card trick, magic captivated him. In elementary school he practiced daily in the boys’ basement, and in his teens he performed on school grounds and street corners, and on weekends he and his musician sweetheart performed together for special events. At age twenty-one, he enlisted in WWII. Assigned to the overseas Entertainment Corp for three years, he returned home a polished and innovative magician. In the years ahead, he toured and performed in nightclubs and ballrooms, at banquets and conventions, on television shows and cruise ships. In top hat, tails, and spats, he delighted audiences for decades; his flawless magic effects, comedic pantomime, and sleight-of-hand earning uproarious curtain calls. He enjoyed the accolades of his peers, won international awards for his ingenuity and showmanship, and received lifetime recognition of his achievements. A professional magician extraordinaire.
~
After a few weeks of medical care, and no longer under guard watch, he greets me each morning with “I’ve been thinking,” and I look forward to the ensuing capricious conversations. He imagines fanciful ocean cruises we might take. Plans a whimsical road trip to Vegas with me and his old cronies. Envisions an exquisite Egyptian casket I must import, swirling his arms and hands through the air as if carving its intricate designs and setting its precious jewels.
He tells hilarious jokes, and I dare to let myself laugh. A little at first, then a little more. He amuses the nurses by ordering coffee with cream in his intravenous drip.
“You forgot the cream!” he chastises.
One afternoon, wearing my usual black slacks and sweater, I’m sitting at the foot of his gurney, reading a book on my black tablet while he rests under a white sheet in the all-white hallway of x-ray rooms. The lab technician at last arrives in his white lab coat. The old man sits up, sudden and startled after nodding off, and declares, “Oh, no! I can only see black and white!” A moment of panic before one heluva gut-buster.
~
From a young age he never went without a workbench tucked into any nook or closet his mother could spare, where he built wood contraptions and magic thingamajigs. By high school he was selling his life-size movie posters on downtown street corners and to movie theatre managers. His talent for art and love of magic coalesced throughout his life. He opened an art studio and later a large display shop where he created signs and posters, marquees and displays, magic effects and apparatuses for his roster of biz and showbiz clients. He hand-lettered and illustrated his own and others’ books and booklets on magic effects, for which he became known early-on throughout the world of magic. He co-produced a children’s magic show for network television and co-led a creative design team in the production of large-scale special effects for major trade show, network television, and world’s fair clients. A commercial artist par excellence.
~
We compare notes on graffiti art, calligraphy, typefaces. He winds my neck scarves around his hands to feel their textures and admire their colours. We exchange snippets of ideas and theories and philosophies. He worries daily whether he’s going thumbs-up or thumbs-down when he dies. We spar: my naturalism versus his Catholicism.
“Well, your body’s going into the earth,” I insist. “There’s nowhere else to go.”
A few days later, he greets me with, “I’ve been thinking. I’m going to be recycled, aren’t I?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” he concedes, his fate settled.
Having settled the body’s demise, we discuss the mind’s fate. He holds to the promise of heaven; me, to the wonder of not knowing. It’s magic, I tease.
We differ in our philosophies to live by, too. His view holds to a skewed version of benevolence: “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine,” he asserts, unabashed.
And what is my view, he wonders? “Play the hand you’re dealt and play it well.”
A smile whispers across his face. “Cards?”
“Yes, cards.”
“Magic,” he muses. “It’s all I care about.”
~
He was the old man who woke up bewildered one morning; his dazed, watery eyes lost in a sea of long ago. Instead of welcoming me with ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he gestures me to sit on the edge of his bed.
A long silence ensues before he murmurs, “What happened to my career?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper, turning away to hide grief’s sudden face.
I am no longer able to tell him he destroyed his career years ago.
Though he married his high school sweetheart, and they built their dream house and raised four children, he was more at home on stage than off. His longing for ‘fame and fortune’ and her desire for ‘hearth and home’ became the battleground of their marriage. He lost his way amid the personal and professional tidal waves of ego and fury and, over time, the changing world of magic.
~
Born a beautiful and brilliant boy, more sensitive than aggressive, coddled by his mother and bullied by his father. A little boy both adored by and abused in the Catholic church and spellbound by its mysteries: priests wearing colourful capes and fancy hats and carrying carved canes; turning bread into body and wine into blood; praying to holy ghosts, guardian angels, heavenly fathers. Magic.
Ruined early, he turned wily bully. Learned he could fool people and people were easily fooled. Savoured the sense of superiority it gave him, even as the follies of one-upmanship riddled his hubris. Magic, his armour: both shield and sword. He functioned at the top of his game for over thirty years despite the swelling storms of disruption and indignation he unleashed on others. He took perverse pleasure in intimidating and manipulating people. Still, his charisma and ingenuity had long arms. Until the day his peers deemed him a madman.
An artist and a con-artist, he’d roar “I am the greatest!” to the rooftops. As if roaring made it so.
~
“She was my sweetheart,” he whimpers from the foot of his hospital bed. Though he can cry on a dime to feign remorse or sympathy, it’s true: my mother had been his one great love. Longing for her touch, her presence, he orders me to comb his hair.
“Get a comb from the nurse!”
“I don’t take orders.”
Each day he begs, each day a little sweeter. “Please, honey?”
The intimacy and vulnerability of his pleas are unnerving. I give in and manage first one and then two strokes of the comb to the back of his head. From a distance.
He sits on one side of the bed, his back to me; I stand on the other side, my arm reaching across the abyss. He loves the comb’s cool, tingly rake across his ancient scalp. Each day he pleads, and each day I add another stroke.
Approaching his room one morning, I overhear him scolding the nurse:
“Don’t touch my hair! My daughter’s coming!”
~
Everyone on his floor must endure his belly-aching on Christmas Day as he rants at the hospital’s kitchen staff for “having the gall to serve turkey dinner without cranberry sauce!”
~
A month in, and back in his room after an exhausting round of x-rays, he motions me to move closer. I shift in slow-motion from my chair by the window to the edge of his deathbed while he fumbles through the scavenged padlocks and stained notebooks buried deep inside the stained cloth bag he keeps hooked over his headboard. Finding what he’s after, he heaves his bulk to face me.
“Promise me you’ll write my memoirs. Publishers are clamouring for them. I’m world famous, you know. People are lined up! You’ll make millions. You’ll have a nice life.”
I’d heard it all before. This time he places a ring of keys in my hand. “I have a beautiful penthouse. You should live there. You’ll love it. It’s filled with treasures.”
His wistful, watery blue eyes drift skyward, as if gazing upon a gold-leafed fresco painted high upon the walls of a magic castle. His long-ago penthouse turned gilded mirage.
~
The ring of keys in hand, I meet with the manager of his independent-living building to update her on his status and gain access to his apartment. She insists I come back prepared, and I return the next afternoon in rubber boots. She encases my arms, legs, and torso in heavy-duty, black plastic garbage bags, and I don the dust mask, shower cap, and latex gloves the hospital nurses provided.
Encased to face the uncharted, I ride the elevator, unlock the door, and step inside.
A surge of rot and stench flood the air I gasp. A soul-shuddering chaos of micro-organisms flee in all directions as the door closes behind me. Spooked, I wait for the commotion to settle and, Hazmat head to foot, inch my way through a narrow gully.
Feces of invasive vermin, black as volcanic ash, coat every surface. I survey the eye-level topography of filth and trash with equal parts repulsion and fascination. Search for documents half-hidden in the haphazard heaps of rubbish. Lift a stack of encrusted file folders and, in a quick change of mind, lower the splotched clump intact so as not to disturb its feckless squatters. Steel myself to stay calm in his domain of decay and disarray. My mind and body moving deeper into a swamp of madness, into the festering wound engulfing him.
I’m in the dying room.
~
He was the old man who lived in squalor, who mapped out a daily circuit of free church lunches and stockpiled cartons of canned goods from the food bank where he volunteered. Who interred his leftover take-outs in a fridge insulated with black mould. Who rummaged through back-alley trash cans and brought home bagsful of homeless critters and abandoned objects. Who contaminated the hallways and stairwells he shared with his unlucky neighbours.
The junk team refuses to enter the unit until it’s been fumigated. The bug squad heat-bombs it three times; not enough, they decree, but adequate. In the end yet to come, a construction crew will peel the place to wall studs and floorboards. Strip it to its bare bones.
How many years did it take, how many raids by armies of red ants and ravenous pests, to chew his original artworks to sawdust? For gluttonous swarms to nibble his magic memorabilia down to rubble? For hungry hordes to devour and defecate the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of index cards on which he had catalogued a career of club dates and magic effects and comedic routines? As insects hunted his physical world, so insanity haunted his emotional world. As he, too, foraged the untold worlds of others.
Insanity is insatiable.
It took everything from him.
Took him from me.
Eaten alive, peeled back, stripped down.
~
Buried amongst the strata of debris are dozens of dirty, damaged, discarded containers—lidded cookie tins, cigar cartons, and shoe boxes; zippered shaving, cosmetic, and manicure kits. I peek inside a few of these lidded vessels and, mystified, ask the junk team to handle such containers with care and to set them aside so I can examine their curious contents later. At day’s end, I settle on a cleared patch of floor and open a few kits to study the three-dimensional compositions inside. An astonishing arsenal of art assemblages. Imperfect little puzzles; found objects, his puzzle pieces: encased, nestled, and intact beneath the litters of bugs and insects laying lifeless in their accidental coffins.
He was the old man who sat alone in his infested massage chair night after night with the television blaring; searching through the treasure trove he’d mined from trash and sorted in the large glass candy jars he’d shelved within arm’s reach—a grimy gibberish of orbs, beads, blocks, dice, knobs, corks, bolts, marbles, lids, buttons, bulbs, spools, thimbles.
What’s yours is mine.
How many hundreds of hours had he spent assembling his found objects? Trying to make the pieces fit? Trying to make sense of things?
The day he lay dying I read poetry to him and combed his long white hair. So he would hear a voice and know it was me. So he would feel a touch and know I was there.
~