Moving Between
I wrote this a year ago. I'm putting it here so I can start telling the story fresh.
We leave the hospital for what he has decided will be the last time. It’s quiet in the car all the way home. The silence isn’t awkward, because it isn’t uncertain. There’s just nothing to say. We both know how this will play out. Or, we think we do.
I wake up to pitch black, sure my father is dead. I pad into the living room where he is asleep on the couch. I stand silently over him for long moments. He lays there, rigid and silent as a corpse, and it’s not until he takes a shallow breath that I realize I have been holding mine. He’s so thin now. It’s like the disease has been stealing him a piece at a time in the quiet night hours. I fall back asleep and in my dream I wake up to find three of his fingers missing. Not severed, just stolen, like any fat he’d had on his calves and arms.
When I awake for real, the early light is comforting. But it doesn’t chase away the visions of his fragmented hands. I push that aside. I look after my patient. He is surprisingly low maintenance.
Today, I made him a sandwich and he ate half of it. This is a victory. Yesterday I couldn’t get him to eat anything. I eat the other half. I don’t know that it’s the last thing I’ll ever cook for him. The last meal we’ll ever share. The last solid food he’ll ever eat, though he will live for weeks.
I load him into a wheelchair and roll him outside for a cigarette. The process of loading and unloading from the couch is physically arduous and getting harder for both of us. And he seems to be losing interest in smoking. This unsettles me more than his fading interest in food. He has always been thin. But every movie he took me to as a kid began and ended with a cigarette in the theater parking lot while I watched from the car. He didn’t want me exposed to the smoke
Mostly, he is content to lay on the couch and watch cable news. When he asks, I make him a tap water highball, on the rocks. This starts just after five and then they come back to back until he falls asleep. Even facing death he keeps this bit of decorum. If he asked for a drink at eight in the morning I’d make it without thinking twice. The man is dying, who could blame him? Who could blame me?
It’s hot that night, and I spend a long time laying in bed staring at nothing. Trying to think about nothing. At some point, I must have fallen asleep. When I wake up I can’t remember any of my dreams.
Today old friends have come to see him. They laugh and remember good times, ignoring the present. He doesn’t have the strength to talk much. When they leave, I put the news back on. It’s all he watches. I don’t understand it. How he could care at all about what’s on the news? Sometimes I want to scream. But old habits die hard and I’m not here to judge. What else are we going to do, sit around and talk about it?
He doesn’t eat all day. He drinks a little Gatorade and later, some whiskey. I take the plastic jug we keep by the couch, empty it into the toilet. The contents are brutally discolored, a purple like wine, tinged with orange. I try to act from mechanistic duty. To avoid thinking about what it means.
Before I go to bed I tell him I love him. I dream we are in a jungle gym a hundred feet tall and he is above me, climbing. I yell for him to slow down, to be careful, with the tone of a fond but concerned parent. When I finally catch up to him I hug him, and feel a love for him more powerful than I have ever felt awake. Pure, uncomplicated, inexhaustible. I wake up feeling good, but a little guilty.
I talk to him while I eat breakfast. I find ways to talk at length without mentioning the only thing in either of our lives that matters to me. Just because something matters doesn’t mean it’s worth talking about. A nurse comes to the house and suggests we get a hospital bed for the living room. It’d be more comfortable than the couch. She and I both know comfort and company are the best I can hope to offer. Our conversation ends awkwardly, her eyes tired and pitying and kind. I follow her out the door. Standing under the eaves I ask, “When?” The answer is simultaneously dire and frustratingly vague. I go back inside. I don’t mention it. Don’t consider mentioning it. Some strong intuition or conditioning says this just isn’t the kind of thing you talk about.
That night, I wake up late and I know something is wrong. I walk into the dark living room. He is not there. I know I should panic, but I’m just confused. He has not left the couch in days. I have felt the progressing weakness of his body with my own hands. The idea that he could leave this room unaided is miraculous, like a corpse rising to push aside a boulder.
I hear a wet gurgling moan, sick and ugly. I find him sprawled on the floor of the garage. Crawling painfully into a corner. Shuddering with the cold. He’s following every animal’s instinct to find a cool, quiet place to die. It’s not until I wake up that I realize it was a dream.
It’s late and raining when the hospital bed arrives. The guy who delivers it shows me how to assemble it in the garage, patiently, taking care to emphasize the most important steps. With the door rolled up we are open to the dark drenched street but warm and dry. The light that spills out can’t penetrate the first curtain of rain. When he’s done, he takes it apart and has me put it back together. He watches closely, making sure I understand, praising my execution. He helps me take the bed apart again. He looks after me in a way that I need very badly even if just for half an hour. When it’s time for him to leave, I want to hug him. I want to cry. I don’t, though. Obviously.
I lay in bed that night, listening to the patter of the rain coming down. I admit to myself for the first time what I’m doing here. The days are busy enough to ignore it, but this quiet sleepless night leaves me nowhere to hide.
He gets worse. He moans sharply with each breath. I ask if he is in pain. He whispers no, it’s just the hiccups. Whether or not I believe him is irrelevant because it sounds like pain and my brain cannot ignore it. I make myself believe him. I have to. If I don’t I will fall to pieces. Which I can’t.
We have a bottle of morphine in the kitchen. Though I dose him every four hours, the nurse instructed me to administer more as needed. So he has no reason to lie about pain. Or so I tell myself. It’s the sound that lies. But it is horrible. And it is constant.
That night, I am woken up again and again by the sounds of pain, and the gaps of sleep between are too short for dreams to form.
The next night, I smoke a joint in the backyard. When I come back into the house, I pull his socks up and the blanket down over his feet. I want him to be warm. I tell him I love him. That I’ll always love him, that he’ll always be my Dad wherever he goes next. I’m on the verge of tears. Weed is like that sometimes, I tell myself.
That night, I dream my ex-girlfriend and I are escaping armed men at the airport. It feels stressful until I wake up, relieved that my brain can still think about anything else.
The disease is indomitable as it takes and takes long after I thought there was nothing left to take. It continues to surprise me what a person can lose and still live. It is an ugly miracle that he is still alive. Death by Zeno’s paradox. He cannot move, he can no longer speak, he can barely breathe. And yet, he still gets worse. Every day. His body wasting away in invisible time. The life left is so threadbare you could see through it.
I’m administering the morphine and think, not for the first time, how easy it would be to end this. The nurse has given me a lot of leeway with the medication. She would not be suspicious. No one would be. I tell myself it would be a mercy. A kindness. But I know it would make me a murderer in my heart forever. Some part of me whispers “coward”.
One night, I dream that he is with me. Walking around and talking. I know he is dead. I know something is wrong but I’m not sure what. I’m confused. But part of me knows I should cherish this, wants to cherish this, the ultimate cheat. A few moments with a ghost. When I wake up, it has been four months since he died and my sense of time is screwed up all day.