After my Dad's Death

I don’t know what or how to write about my father’s death. The fact of it still hums in my bones & enervated muscles & sunken spirit. I still don’t sleep through the night, awakening dozens of times thinking he needs morphine or lorazepam, or that he’s stirring just perceptibly, or that I’m next to him in his room still. I see a picture of him alive, smiling, holding my son, & I can’t seem to reconcile all of his vibrancy & love & life with the body he left behind, comatose for days & then white & ashen. Can’t seem to remember him laying there as him at all, in the end. His body. The departed. 

As far as dying goes these days, I recognize that we were beyond fortunate to have him in his home, lucid & very much himself mentally for over a week before his body began to shut all the way down. We had feared a goodbye over an ipad, with Dad in a hospital room & all of us crouched around a tiny screen straining to hear & wishing him comfort. So many people in this pandemic undergo that excruciating & unthinkable devastation from opposite sides of an insurmountable wall. So we are lucky that we had every conversation we wanted to have, cried all our tears, laughed at old stories & were able to send him off knowing how much he was loved & to find ourselves yet there, knowing how much he loved us. It was a gift. & nonetheless, I am reconstituting myself in its wake, bodily, mentally, in every conceivable way. 

The last words my dad said to me were “tsetse fly? Yeah, that’s it, tsetse fly.” He had risen out of his deep sleep for a last few seconds of consciousness with the name of that creature on his tongue, a fly that puts people in comas, oddly enough. He had emerged before to tell us briefly about out of body experiences that were surreal, to tell us he could’ve sworn he was eating a cherry pie. He came to with details of a dream in which I was driving him down an old dirt road, how his breath was fogging up the glass as he sat in the rear, looking wistfully out the window. He shocked awake to tell us we resembled a military tribunal, to ask us how we were able to take the notebook this afternoon. He said he had found the Sound of Music. He thought there was a painting of a cow brain on the wall. Heartbreakingly, with an urgency subdued by listlessness, he said he was stuck to the bed. “Unstick me,” he pleaded. He seemed to disconnect & skitter about in time, impressionistic memories the warp & fantastical elements of imagination or vision from beyond the veil the weft, all wound in brief spells undulating with sleep, punctuated with these bewildering insights. He sunk from us, & then he slept. 

I thought of how an out of body experience must be such rich reprieve from that broken vessel. & then when he passed I thought how much lighter he might feel. I imagined him running vigorously again, smiling ear to ear, almost dancing. He had told Mom to meet him at a favorite hiking trail, that he would wait for her. He had told my daughter that every time she saw a rainbow he would be looking out for her. He tried so hard to be certain we would all be okay. 

The night he died I sat beside him reading & kept thinking in that half light I would see an eyebrow raise or his mouth move. Sometimes I had to hunt for his breath when it would stutter & pause for long, anxious stretches. He made one sound during the three hours I sat there, & I wonder now if it was his last breath. When Jason came up at four in the morning, I kissed my father’s forehead & walked downstairs to sleep. One minute later Jason let me know he was gone. The mattress upon which he lay constantly pushed air around to relieve the pain of being bedridden. Those slight waves of forced air had tricked me-- I thought I had seen breath where instead there was only the machination of the mattress. Maybe I hadn’t permitted myself that realization, I don’t know. 

After they covered him & carried him out the door, we started furiously gathering all of the medical equipment that had filled the house & preparing for its collective exit. The oxygen tanks that had hissed & sounded like ghosts whispering, the bipap bleating out its warnings of ever-weakening lungs, the airvo that sounded like a slow leak. We carted his powerchairs, lift toilets, walkers, pads-- everything we could find that was remnant & reminder of the cocktail of maladies that struck him down for so many years, exiled to the garage, beyond our seeing. But then it was an emptier house, with emptier rooms, & we were left the tangible & scattered totems of who he had been. In every stillness we found him again, & wept, & were leveled. & then I flew back to my own family, to father my kids, to hold my wife, to weep into an air he hadn’t breathed. 

Now I pack for our own move, back to Alaska. We are ever journeying, all of us. Some among us cast about in adumbrated query, pleading for something to tell us we have meant something, we have done something meaningful. Others are luckier. We are told that very thing by our father, lovingly, through a smile that hides from us all the pain of his prior years. We are loved, & go on loving. Go on living. & remember.