April 24th was my father's birthday. He died in 2016. He was killed by a cancer we didn't know he had until three days before it killed him; he died within hours of being transferred from the hospital to a hospice. I was at his right hand when he died, and alone marked his shuddering last breath; my mother and some of their old friends were too engaged in pleasant conversation and reminiscence to notice. I said nothing at all, for I think that the mind lingers a while even after the breathing stops, and I wanted his last moments to dwell on the peaceful sounds of voices, his wife's and her friends.
It's hard now that some people can't be with their fathers when they die, but it's hard being there too. The memory haunts me, knowing he was dying and taking no steps to save him. It was what he wanted, and I knew my duty, and I did it. He was a volunteer fire fighter who ran many, many medical calls to the homes of people who were dying. They could be revived with great pain and effort, and kept alive a little longer, suffering all the time. He knew that wasn't what he wanted, and he made his mind up early not to die that way. He told me that when he was hale, and often, so I knew that he meant it when he was not.
When his time came he decided. I was angry to see how much pain he was in, until suddenly it came over me that the pain was a great gift as from on high: because the pain took away all his fear. He did not experience the existential dread at the border of extinction, but set his course straight for death. I heard him say of his own death, refusing treatment and electing hospice care, "Let's get this show on the road."
He was the grandson of a farmer, and the son of a welder and body repairman who ended up owning a service station for long-haul truckers on I-75. I wrote about my grandfather, and my father, in one of my favorite pieces. My grandmother, his mother, had a good heart morally but a bad one physically; she took nitroglycerin and hard liquor from her 40s, in an age and a place when most women didn't drink. She outlived her husband by a decade or so all the same.
God love you, old man. I did too. I'd pray for him, and sometimes have, but I suspect his soul is in a far better case than mine.
7 comments:
Has it really been four years? How time does fly.
A somber marker, and an important one. Our parents, if we are fortunate, are the cornerstones of our universe. Your foundation was well set and sturdy by all appearances. Thank you for sharing a little of him with us.
I am sorry for your loss. I lost my mother a few years ago and am aware of the effect the loss of a parent can have. My prayers are with you and yours on this sad anniversary.
You and your family are in my thoughts and prayers this day, Grim.
I watched my mother's last breaths in 2000. It wasn't pretty, but it was brief. My stepfather resented that I was there instead of him, I think - as if it were a great honor denied him.
Well, maybe it is an honor.
I had not thought of pain as a gift that distracts us from other difficulties.
It is good to remember. I framed and hung a picture of my father yesterday, he is standing on a low ridge, looking across an Arctic river valley to the Brooks Range beyond. One of his favorite places and where his ashes rest.
Like so many of our fathers, he grew up in the depression, married, went to war, came home and built a life, one step at a time from the bottom up.
Frame you life like how you want to leave it. Your dad did that as have you. It is, when you've reached the end and their is no hope of getting better, merely breathing a little longer in pain or agony, that the exit looks like a fairly nice place. I got that for the physical pain. I haven't quite grasped it yet for the mental pain but I / we haven't traveled that road and with luck, won't.
As I read it, I grasped right away that you chose wisely, as you dad almost certainly would have asked for. Well done.
My grandmother, his mother, had a good heart morally but a bad one physically; she took nitroglycerin and hard liquor from her 40s, in an age and a place when most women didn't drink. She outlived her husband by a decade or so all the same.
It was said of my grandmother that she had been dying for 50 years. My aunt told me one time that my grandmother didn't have long to go- two decades before my grandmother died at age 95.
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