October, 2019
We watched it happen. My mother and my three siblings, we watched as my father quickly deteriorated. We watched over the course of hours as he rapidly lost comprehension of reality and slipped into some kind of in-between. And unless you've also seen it happen, there isn't a way to explain it except for that. He was still up and walking. Still talking. It wasn’t the quiet, laying in bed, waiting for death you’ve seen in movies. It wasn’t like that. We sat around in the dark and shared stories around him. We laughed so hard, we cried. And then, we just cried to cry. My brother, Wesley, and I stayed up all night and watched him struggle to breathe. We idly chatted, just to make noise and to keep his mind occupied. I shared with him his last glass of wine. Wes helped him change positions every few minutes. We held hands. I received his last ever kiss. We whispered things to him we really needed to say. We told each other hard truths about growing up that we never shared with each other before. Wes smelled like lavender and my dad smelled like...him.
Despite what anyone will tell you, there isn't anything to prepare you to lose a parent. There isn't another person who has gone through it who can tell you what it feels like, but they will understand. There isn't a little blue book on the planet, and the hospice nurses will kindly hand one over to you, that will make sense of what you are about to experience. There just is not. Because all the preparation in the world cannot make you ready for yours to completely crumble. And that's what it feels like.
I told myself I was ready. The days leading up to his death, my dad and I had several conversations about his final wishes. He told me what he wanted to wear. What kind of casket he wanted to be buried in. How he worried about my mom. How he worried about us kids. He gave me all his passwords and told me he hoped my mom knew how to navigate life insurance policies, because he hadn't a clue. He sat on their couch, in his usual spot, with his trusty German Shepherd beside him and told me stories of his life "before." Before his heart transplant, before he became sick, before he wasn't able to get out on his own. Before us kids, before my mom, before he was grown. Before, before, before.
And, during those days, the stories didn't fall right on me. Even just a few weeks ago, we were so wrapped up in my father's illness, it was hard to remember any time before he was frail and pale. But, the truth was, that wasn't my dad at all. My dad was strong and olive-skinned. He always wore a mustache and had a deep and booming voice. He was intimidatingly brilliant and made people around him nervous before he ever made them comfortable. Winning him over was a valiant accomplishment and I was always kind of relieved that I never had to do it. He flew airplanes and drove Porsches and Audis and hard-to-find Volkswagens. He taught every one of us kids to drive a stick shift and loved a good prank. He had Asian/Cherokee eyes that he inherited from his father, and when he laughed, they got really small and sparkly and watered like crazy. He was overly affectionate and loved a good time. He loved animals. Dogs. Llamas. Horses. His best friend when we were growing up was the small town veterinarian and my dad would help him deliver all the large animals in the surrounding communities. He loved camping and hunting. He loved history and artifacts. Arrowheads. Coins. Bones. Quilts. Cardigan sweaters. Tweed hats. The Gulf Coast. San Francisco. Bagpipes. The Moody Blues. John Sebastian. He used to make us mixed tapes when we "kids" were in high school and we loved them. He adored and was so proud of my mother, almost as much as they drove each other crazy.
He was hard on us. Too hard, sometimes. He was strict with us girls, more with me than my sister. He always said he could trust her more. But that he worried about me less. He could sum up any boy I brought home with an uncanny accuracy after the first meeting. "Probably a solid B-student. Smokes too much weed. Pretentious and probably an asshole. Thinks he's real cute by pulling that shit with me, but he's too lazy to be going out with you." He was popular with his peers and respected by nearly everyone who ever met him. I was so proud to be his daughter. I still am. Whenever I run into someone who knew him, it’s an inevitable, “Ahh, Doc. He taught me about [fill in the blank here]. He was amazing.” He was.
The waves of grief are sometimes unbearable. They come from nowhere...a song on the radio, a smell in the air. Sometimes, a simple memory will trigger me to choke on my own tears. I mourn for my mother, too, and the inability to understand the immense loneliness she must feel. It's just not something we were ready for, although it feels like we spent so much time preparing for it. I have so many pictures from the 18 hours leading up to his death. They are as comforting as they are painful. I love to look at them, and then I regret that I ever did. But, they help me to keep close all the memories of that night: the last time he addressed Eve. The last time he looked at me. The last time he laughed. The last time he made a smart-ass remark to my mother. The last time they held each other on the couch. The last time he stood with my mom, resting his head, eyes closed, on my much-larger brother’s chest. All of those, a mere fingerprint away...when I'm ready.
And, for the times I am not, I still hear him half-laugh and half-scoff at me with a "Damnit, Cate." (He never called me Catie. Cate or Catherine. That's it.) I can smell his beard and his vanilla tobacco. I can feel his breath on my cheek when he whispered something in my ear. I can hear him sing. I can feel the warmth of his leg when we'd sit together on couch. To date, it doesn’t feel like he’s gone yet.
July 27, 2020
Over ten months now, and I can't say that the pain has dulled much. Maybe it has a little; it doesn't burn so heavily in my chest and I'm not on the verge of tears with every word that comes out of my mouth. I love to talk about him and I mention him casually pretty often. My entire family does. We can joke about him not being here (like finding humor in my niece saying that Grandma had gone to Springfield, where he is buried, to see Grandad and bring him home.) My memories are good. They are pretty and frequent. They aren't so much of the last few hours before his death or the very unpleasant and ugly moments as he died, but of the really funny things he said or did; his quirky likes and dislikes, and the times he lost his temper about the most ridiculous things.
I found his leather tobacco pouch recently, just before Independence Day. He lost it at my house two years ago, along with (allegedly) a couple of tins of sardines. The sardines have yet to be recovered, but the tobacco pouch was tucked away in a galvanized mail sorter. Top compartment. Too high for me to have ever seen it. And it still smelled like him, sweet and earthy. I slept with it next to my bed for a few nights before I offered to give it back to my mom. In return, she gave me the quilt he died in; the one I bought him for Christmas a couple of years ago. It was a good trade. As I type this, it’s draped across me.
Recently, I worked in the adult ED for a shift, in the same room I sat with him for his last ER visit. The room where he told my mom with a smile that he was done fighting the inevitable. The same room I held his hand and talked to him about food while my mom and sister tried to process what he just said. I took a patient to the same ICU where I sat next to him after school for weeks in high school while he lay, asleep. Where I work, where I spend a lot of my nights, is crawling with memories of him, and not all good ones. It's the hardest part, sometimes, of trying to find the peace in his passing. Walking the halls of the hospital is like trying to avoid shards of glass sticking out from the walls, waiting to catch your clothes and cut into your skin. If I keep my attention just a few degrees out of focus, I can manage. If I pay too close attention, I see him everywhere.
Right now, there isn’t an escape from the grief. Or the memories. But I don’t hate it.
The Good
Eleven months now.
Today, I listened to someone read “The Tale-Tell Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe. Intentionally. With my eyes closed so I could remember being eight and sitting at my dad’s feet and listening to him read it. I love that story, always have. And he told it with the best crazed, inflection-filled intensity that had me on the edge of my seat and seconds from crawling out of my skin. I loved it. I must have heard it 100 times by now, 99 of which were read by him.
I miss him. I miss him all the time. And though it now does feel like he’s gone and I’ve forgotten what his beard smells like, I feel like I remember so much more of the regular Dad. The Dad who wasn’t sick.
And I’m certain he’s pumping his fists at the state of the world and thanking God he doesn’t have to be here right now.
I’m also becoming so keenly aware of how alike we are. How hot our tempers can blaze and extinguish. How deeply we can dig our heels in about something, how stubborn stubborn can be. How we possess the shared ability to make decisions quickly and not really process them until later. How annoyed we can get, and say nothing about it until our gaskets just blow, and how we like things just how we like them. Oysters on a chilled plate. The crouton on French onion soup. Coffee, thick, but tea to be weak. No sweet drinks, ever. Seafood. Japanese food. Scaring our kids. And feeling like we don’t owe anybody anything when we get in just the right mood.
And I can see how his relationship with my mother was remarkable, and how selfless she was when it came to him. And how his relationships with my siblings, ones I used to envy, were just different than ours. They were uniquely theirs. They have their own stories to tell, their own memories.
Wes’s connection to my dad is through medicine and politics.
Mine is through our tastes in life and music.
Colleen’s is through aviation and food.
And Thomas’s through cars and random knowledge.
He understood and connected to all of us differently. Deeply. Inherently ours.
We have since been able to share things we never knew about our own father, and that’s something incredible. I spend more time with my family. I spend less time fighting with them. We’re brutally honest with each other. Our language is raw and we’ve accepted each other exactly as we are. We laugh more than we have in a long, long time.
The grief isn’t pretty, but it’s breathtaking. It changes you. It doesn’t seem to go away, at least not yet. You learn to live with it, to incorporate it. I don’t hate it, but I miss him. I love the cemetery in which he’s buried. It’s the most peaceful place on earth. I love the dreams I’ve had about him and how they’ve compared to my sister’s.
The good. There is always good. All the time, in all things.
The Bagpipes
The first time we almost lost my dad, he technically did die. Seven times. And, seven times, he was brought back. During that time, he had a very vivid near-death experience/dream in which a bagpiper (who he later believed to have been his great-grandfather) approached him on an Irish shoreline. Saying nothing, he beckoned my dad to follow. The way he described it was the most peaceful and beautiful feeling he had ever experienced. But after following the man and the music, he remembered the life he was leaving, and stopped walking. The bagpiper stopped, too, and turned to look at him. My father told him he couldn’t go yet, that he had a wife and four children and that he just wasn't ready. The bagpiper nodded, still silent.
And we got our dad back, for nearly 22 years.
Fast forward to September of last year. An hour or two before he died, my dad was sitting at the edge of his bed, laughing and talking with someone. Sitting across from him, I leaned in to try to hear him better. “Who are you talking to, Dad?” And he chuckled. Took a swig of coffee from a mug that wasn’t there, his eyes fixed on something in the distance, and said, “I’ll be damned. He came back for me.”
And that day, the bagpiper took him, and my heart broke into a million pieces. And I miss him every single day. Every one. And he took with him the parts of me that only he knew, the memories of me that only he had. And that realization makes me impossibly sad.
The Now
Tomorrow will be September, and that's a hard month to be in, but it's happening whether I like it or not. He's gone, whether I like it or not. And the dates in the next few weeks are going to sting and burn and make me really sad and angry at the same time. The day we rushed him to the hospital, the day he opted to go on hospice, the day we met with the hospice coordinator, the same day my mother insisted it was too soon. The day he came home. Our last Tuesday together. The day I cut his hair, not knowing it was the last time it'd ever be cut. The night we stayed up with him, and the day we said goodbye. The days we dressed up and greeted rooms full of people, even though we were numb on the inside, and the day we buried him.
I hate it all. I miss him terribly. But I'm so grateful for a lifetime of memories, for all the happiness he gave me, for the immense loss I feel now. And if he were able to read this, I'd tell him that. And that we talk about him all the time. That Eve, though two-and-a-half at the time of his death, can still point him out in a picture. She still knows who he is. That she once laughed at some debaucherous thing she did and said, "Grandad told me I should stop doing that." I'd tell him how we think of him every time we see a cardinal, and that the boys fired up his miniature steam engine last week. I'd tell him I want to get rid of his old desk, but I don't know what to do with it. I'd tell him about that time a couple of months ago I heard him say "hello" as clear as day, so much so that I turned my head toward the sound, and then cried into my hands when I realized I was mistaken. I'd thank him for listening to my rambling-ons at his gravesite, and tell him that Hatch thinks it's pretty awesome now how his name came to be. I’d tell him that Thomas and Wes take pretty good care of my mom and that Colleen and I spend as much time with her as possible. And that there was some trial and error, but she figured out the insurance stuff. I’d tell him she also changed his passwords. I'd tell him we miss him. And that we love him like crazy. And that this year has been tough, but we're all doing alright. And that we’re all going to be okay. And I think he’d like that.
