Recently, I watched my elderly father fall deeper into illness and die at the end of June. I'll be telling many stories that involve him and indeed, ones that he wrote, but let's begin his story at the end of his life.
He was and is one of those "larger than life" characters. Words don't do justice to the impact he had on me, even though I would immediately say that my mother was a greater emotional connection for me. I spent her final years drinking heavily and that clouded my ability to truly appreciate the depth of her love and help her reach out and not be held back by her own sadness. With my father, I enjoyed the clarity of sobriety and was able to form a strong relationship with him, so much so, that his loss has created a huge hole in my heart that I don't expect or even want to fill.
The funny thing about watching him succumb to illness was that it felt as if I were watching a movie. He had beaten bladder cancer for years, it almost as if by sheer will he survived it. So, it never really entered our reality to any great degree, although I'm sure he held it close.
Over the years, he continued to beat it and travel the world, going to Ireland, Spain, and Costa Rica for months at a time. He wasn't wealthy. He stayed in hostels, loving the connection with traveling young people. He was proud of living on the cheap, and focused more on the experience of travel, than the splendor. I travelled with him frequently, but we'll get to that in future entries.
So, keep in your mind this mental picture of a strong, wonderful-looking man who lived life out loud. Illness didn't really resonate, until last year, after he turned 85. Slowly, he became more forgetful, and didn't move as quickly. Time between trips became longer, and he stopped in whatever town I lived in less often or for longer than usual. I moved back to California after years on the East Coast to see him more frequently, remembering with great pain the overnight flight to see my dying mother. Flying into California to be at her bedside, only to come upon a woman numbed and silenced by morphine, whose eyes teared at my arrival, but who I could no longer hear say a word. I wasn't going to live that again.
Dad and I spent every weekend together. We watched "Walker, Texas Ranger". ate meals at our favorite cheap eats, went to bookstores, and the local drug store to wander the aisles. We drove the coast, listening to Willie Nelson, Waylon, and Johnny. We saw movies, but over time, his tolerance for violence or fantasy became horribly low and our choices were limited.
In the last year, things went downhill in slow motion but with determination. At first, the man who rode his bike the few miles from his apartment along the ocean to his favorite bakery could no longer do so. Diabetes put him at risk and in the hospital for a few months. Prior, the doctors had found a few lesions on his pancreas, but at his age, had discussed and ruled out procedures. Quickly, it became clear this was cancer although there was never a diagnosis. The bewildering part of this process was the end.
I thought I was perfectly poised to handle this - I had spent years working at a grief support program, albeit as a fundraiser, but deeply involved in the philosophy of the program. Immediately, I was faced with choices. At one point he would appear to be on death's door with hospice looming in the days ahead. The VA stopped giving him fluids as a sign that they were pretty much done with him, he was 86 now and clearly in the final stages. I, channeling Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment, insisted loudly that they give him fluids. Of course, he perked right up and our world was turned upside down again. We took him home and began the painful last weeks of his life.
Wild swings in blood sugars, coughing up blood which confused him, and a slow slip into morphine silence were our future. My heart ached with the fact that this man, so in control, was no longer so. Indeed, up until the end, he outwardly expressed that he wondered if this was a death sentence as a doctor at the VA had told him months earlier and when he would next go to Europe. He didn't talk in terms of finality.
Months before this, I sat in the office of a neuropsychologist at the VA with Dad. She was wonderful; she talked to him as a person, and seemed to intuitively know how he was thinking. She explained to me that Dad, as a prisoner of war in WWII, was suffering from PTSD and his entire life after that was shaped by that experience. The cold, distant father of my youth, and the loving but stoic man in front of me now, who would cry at memories of his dead brother or my mother, was a deep lake of feelings and motivations that I would likely never understand. I cried driving home, realizing that all these years, he was trapped by his own experience. He needed to maintain control in order to cope with the complete lack of control he had suffered in the war.
So, now at the end, we sat together and looked at pictures. In the final days, as the morphine really took hold, we found he couldn't swallow, which panicked him and me both. After I got the nurse at his assisted living to find an alternative to pills, I did something I had never done before. I sat at his bedside in a darkened room, held his hand and told him through choking tears how much I loved him, and how much he meant to me, and what a wonderful father he was. Without words, he tilted his head and softly punched me in the arm, as a sign he understood but was overwhelmed by the deliberate nature of my words. It was as close to an unfettered expression of goodbye as we had ever come and I am grateful to have made the choice to do it.
So, call your Dad, and your Mom, and tell how much you love them. Life is too short.
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