7/7/2020

On the Death of My Father

On July 5, 2020 I helped my Dad out of his bed to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I pulled off his soiled pajamas and underwear as he sat on the toilet. There was no way to do that without getting everything on his legs and feet.

I got my Mom’s old walker and helped him up. I held his arm while he shuffled toward the shower.

“This is shit,” he said.

“Yeah, I know it's hard.”

“I'm done with this. Call Hospice and tell them I'm ready to go and see if there's something they can do to speed this up and get it over with.”

That was my Dad... His way, his terms. Even death.

But not this time, Dad. You’re helpless for once, and I have the Hospice meds.

I showered him, dried him off, put an adult diaper on him like we’d been doing for my Mom for four years, and helped him into his bed. He never got out of it again.

It is 9:00pm, July 6.

Four years ago at this hour I gave my Dad his last doses of atropine and hydromorphone. He was barely conscious and struggling to breathe. His diseased heart, after 40 years of interventions, was irreparable. I trickled the drugs from an eyedropper into his cheek so he wouldn't choke.

He had asked me to call Hospice to get something to "speed this up and get this shit over with". I did not. Nor did I overdose him with his palliative care meds. I played by the book in spite of my conflicts roiling within me. My sister who was a nurse for over twenty years told me, “Dying of congestive heart failure is not pretty, you’re watching someone drown in their own fluids.” If it had been someone else lying there drowning and they asked me to end their suffering I believe I could do it with a clear conscience. But this was my Dad. I could not bring myself to give him his request as a final gift, be a "good son"on his terms, not so much out of morality or theology, but because of our "father/son issues". I loved my Dad, but I was his god now with his “painless death” in my hands. And I decided he needed to suffer, to know what he had put my Mom through for the past three years when he could have let her go peacefully. I wasn’t going to give him what he denied my Mom. He could control her life and death against her wishes but he could not control his own now. If I had anything to do with it, he would know what it was to be alive and suffering even if he wanted to die… And with two full bottles of drugs in my hands, I did have everything to do with it at that moment. He would do whatever his purgatorial suffering was to be by my decision. I let God be God, not out of faith but out of anger.

After I put him in bed he fell into a semi-coma. His breathing was fitful, shallow, choking. We knew his marriage bed would be his deathbed. My wife and I began to keep vigil early in the evening, taking turns reading the Psalter.

My Mom didn't know who the man dying in the bed next to her was. She had slowly forgotten who we were and who he was over the past three years. She would not grieve losing her husband of 67 years because she didn’t remember him. I knew that when the mortuary came to remove his body, thirty seconds after the door closed she would not remember that he had been in this room with her for five years nor that they had shared the now empty bed next to her. I grieved my Mom living more than my Dad dying. He had the privilege of dying with memories and the sense of loss and separation from what he loved. She had neither death nor memories.

At 11:00pm I finished reading a Psalm, "Let Thy lovingkindness O Lord, be upon us, according as we have set our hope on Thee." I looked up and he was dead. I sat beside him for an hour or so juggling the running chainsaws of relief, guilt and grief. I called the number Hospice had left for us.

The Hospice nurse showed up about 2:00am. “Busy night”, she said. I said, "He died 3 hours ago, on July 6." She said, "They aren't dead until we say they are. He died on July 7."

On this anniversary I still cannot say I miss living with him, but I can say I wouldn’t trade those seven years for another life. After four years I've slowly started to forgive both of us for all the things we did imperfectly as father and son. Things done out of dysfunctional obligation, love compromised by ego and resentments, and in the end we were just two old men dying together, him from heart disease, me from cancer, both in love with the woman who held us all together for 67 years... him not being able to let go of her, me wishing he would have let her go and be at rest.

Love is complicated. It’s more than just “no regrets” and fulfilling an obligation, though that is part of the complexity and sacrifice of it. It is sometimes doing the simple but hard thing so that, perhaps even years later, we may lay aside the things that made love an obligation and find that we had within us a seed of grace, the capacity for embracing the entirety of the universe that is another person and give yourself for the well-being of them.

So, I know that he (and Mom, whose third anniversary is in two weeks) now know better than I what forgiveness is. It is why the dead rest in peace. I am still weighing out my regrets and sacrifices, sins of omission and acts of mercy, selfish neglects and daily martyrdoms embraced and avoided.

But the memories of them all are more gray than black and white now. They are, within me, becoming less “events” and more a story, one that has at it's core, love. If nothing else, this is worth surviving cancer to bury my Father and Mother.

Memory eternal, Dad. See you later, Alligator...