They were desperately trying to lose. It was nothing new. As long as I’d been watching them play, the Bengals have tried to lose more consistently than any other professional football team. Other teams that sucked continuously sucked because they lacked the talent. With the Bengals it’s never a question of talent; they lose in the grand tradition of the art of losing. Watching them play is like watching Greek Tragedy. So much hope. So many dreams. Every game I watch, I think about the time I went to watch the Bengals play in 1984. It was a home game against the Chicago Bears; this was back when they had Walter Peyton and Refrigerator Perry. That was the year they were unstoppable. The day of the game it snowed, and Dad took a thermos of hot chocolate. The Bengals were near the end of another bad year and everyone thought the game was done before it started. The Bengals won that game. Even though it was cold, my dad stood up and cheered – which was something he never did.
There was something in them … in their wiring … that seemed to propel them towards defeat. It wasn’t that they wanted to lose. They didn’t. In fact, the Bengals want to win more than any time in the NFL because hardly anyone every thinks they deserve it. Ever.
I was sipping on a beer and watching the offensive line crumble for no particular reason when my cell phone went off. It was a text message from Rhea, telling me to call her.
“Shit.”
“What’s wrong?” Maude was into the game as much as I was. I showed her my phone. “Rhea. She wants me to call.”
I called her back and she told me her grandmother was dying. Her mother’s mother. She’d been dying for a long time… years. Even before she got cancer from smoking cheap menthol cigarettes, she’d been dying. Eaten bit by bit over the years. Eaten by life. Back when I was married to Rhea’s mother and the dying woman was my mother-in-law she told me a story about how she died once before. She was on the operating table. You’ve heard those kinds of stories before, where the patient dies on the table and floats above everything and wanders into a bright light. She told me she was pulled back to life because her family couldn’t live without her. She said that sometimes when she thought about the heaven she’d been pulled away from, she was angry. Angry at her husband. Angry at her daughter. Angry at still being alive.
When Rhea had told me a year before the old woman was stopping the treatments and letting the cancer take its course, I knew why.
I called her back and asked her how she was handling things. Fine, she said. She said she was fine. It was a little weird. But fine. I asked about the dying woman’s condition. Mostly asleep and moaning, she said. On morphine, once every hour. I knew what that meant. She was all but gone. The odd moments of clarity becoming increasingly rare and short. Lucidity slipping away. All of who the woman had once been – slipping away. She’d been family once. Of course, when Rhea’s mother and I split up, the two of them went about attempting to destroy my life. Turned friends against me, trying to guilt me into “doing the right thing.” Used little baby Rhea against me, trying to compel me to fill the role of husband and father as they understood it – which of course meant handing over my balls in a silk purse. The marriage not working out was tragic enough. Rhea’s mother and I were both at fault for that. But trying to manipulate me into staying in miserable situation by turning me into a local pariah? That had the old woman’s bitter manipulating fingerprints all over it.
“How are you?” I asked Rhea. “How are you feeling?” I knew there wasn’t anything I could say about her grandmother. I couldn’t commiserate. I could sympathize in as much as I’d lost people I loved. But because people I loved had died, I knew there was no point in spouting all the usual bullshit people say when someone dies. The only person who feels better is the person spouting the bullshit… about how the dead person is out of pain / in a better place. That may or may not be true. But it’s also true that death after a long illness is a blessing for the people have had to sit and watch death take hold. At first, you feel guilty about feeling relieved. And then the guilt goes away and you just feel relief. But no one talks about that.
“I’m okay,” she said. I could almost hear her shrugging her shoulders over the phone.
“Is she saying anything?”
“Not really.”
I asked Rhea to describe her breathing, and knew from the description that it wouldn’t be long. Rhea told me she was going to stay home from school the following day. Then she said it would take anything from an hour to three days.
“Not three days,” I said. Nowhere near that long.
“I have to go back inside,” she said. Outside was the only quiet place left. Her house was filled with people who were sitting and waiting for the old woman to die. Family. Relatives. Thiers was always a large, unwieldy family. One I never felt comfortable with. Not really.
“Call me when something happens.”
“Ok.”
I told her I loved her. She hung up and I went back to watching the game. They were still trying to lose, even though they were three points ahead. The other team didn’t want to lose; but they didn’t have the talent to win the way they wanted to, either. The other team fumbled the ball and the Bengals turned it into a touchdown. If it had been a home game, the crowd would have gone cheered. Since it wasn’t, they jeered and booed. All they had to do at that point was play out the clock. Sometimes it’s not about scoring. Sometimes it’s about waiting for the clock to run out. A simple strategy that ends up being much more complicated than it should be.
About an hour after the game ended, the phone rang. It was Rhea. She was crying. Her grandmother was dead.
“She’s not in pain anymore,” I said, trying to console her.
“I know,” she answered through her tears.
I wanted to hug her. Words never help. Hugs do. She told me she had to make other phone calls and that she’d call me the following day.
