My first memory is riding on a bike with Dad. It was a yellow bike, later on, when my
sister and I were old enough to ride it, we called it the banana bike.
In my first memory, I’m about four, I think. Dad was pedaling, and I was in a kids’
seat behind him. I was laughing
and laughing at the feeling of being on a bike, of being in motion, feeling the
breeze on my face, and the neighborhood houses streaming by. I remember him continually turning
around to check on me, because my four-year-old laughter could sometimes sound
like screaming hysteria.
Dad was like that back then – continually befuddled by his
role as a father, even though it was something he absolutely wanted. He wanted us, but he wasn’t quite sure
what to do with us once we showed up, and left a lot to Mom. A classic story is him trying to dress
my older sister into some sleepsuit that had a zipper on it, and he got her
tummy pinched into the zipper. She
screamed bloody murder, Dad quickly gave her to Mom and never tried to dress
either of us ever again.
When I got The Call from Mom at the Zombie Run, while other
runners were screaming in the background as they were sliding down the water
slide, she told me that Dad, who had been in the hospital since Tuesday, was
not doing great, that it didn’t look good, and to “be prepared.”
Okay. Okay
fine. We knew this day was
coming. We knew it ever since the
Stage IV colon cancer diagnosis of last year. I sat on the ground and wiped tears from my eyes with a
towel I had brought to clean off the mud and water and zombie grime. If this is how it goes, then this is
how it goes. We had a year with
him, which is much more than we thought we would have last year. I thought we’d maybe have four months
last year.
So be prepared.
Okay. Okay, fine. I’m ready for action, I’m ready to book
flights, to fill out the Leave Of Absence forms at the Unnamed Movie
Studio. I just need someone to say
“Yes, go ahead.” Mom is saying Be
Prepared, but she’s not saying Come Home.
Dad’s supposed to be released on Tuesday, and we’ll know more after
that. But I am ready when she says
that.
I’m prepared.
But Tuesday comes, Dad goes home, I even talk to him on Thursday, and he
wants to see Argo, which he wants us to see together. So the plan is that I would book my ticket for next week,
and come home to spend time with him.
My sister Agatha is coming home too, so we’d be a family for a weekend
again.
That is our plan.
We book our tickets (the airline industry is a pit of unholy vipers for
charging more for last minute tickets and they will totally get theirs). We are prepared.
I am so prepared that when Mom calls the following Tuesday
to say that Dad’s back in the hospital, I don’t blink one bit. I don’t cry, I don’t panic. The tickets are already booked, and I’m
expecting that he’ll probably be released on Thursday when we get there, and
we’ll spend a very quiet weekend at home.
I call the producers of Violet Giraffe and Paisley Bunny to get rough
cuts of the movies so we’ve got something to watch. I am prepared.
So when Thursday comes, I meet up with Agatha at the airport
and we take a cab straight to the hospital. We figure out what room Dad’s in at the hospital, and take
our carry on suitcases to the fourth floor.
And once I walk into The Great Stoic Wonder’s room, things
become instantly clear.
This man is not leaving this room. This is the Final Spiral.
He’s incredibly thin, I think I weigh more than he
does. I think my carry on suitcase
weighs more than he does. His skin
is stretched tight over his skull.
How did he get this thin?
How did this happen? I last
saw him in June, he was walking, and talking and watching Jurassic Park on the
condo TV in the Bahamas. He was
fine. I talked to him on the phone
less than a week ago, we were going to see Argo in the theater. Now it’s an effort for him to
speak.
But he talks. “I’m so happy you’re here,” he says,
smiling. We hug him and sit by his
bedside. We chat for a little
while, I show him pictures on my laptop about the Zombie Race, though I don’t
blame him if he doesn’t get it.
The oncologist comes by later to examine him and to consult
with us, “He’s terminal. It’s a
matter of days.” She says outside
his hospital room (not unkindly, she’s actually very compassionate). He’s in a lot of pain and we can choose
to switch him from morphine to Dilaudid, which will stop the pain, but also put
him under until he slips away. But
if the choice is between him being conscious and in pain, or sleeping and not
in pain, everyone agrees on the second one. That’s what Dad tells the oncologist when she examines him,
that’s what we tell the oncologist when she’s talking to us.
So we file back into the room, and Mom sits by Dad’s bed,
“So, you’re not feeling great,” she says.
And then we all start crying.
We’re making this decision as a family, and I know this is more than
what a lot of families get. But my
God, it hurts.
We take turns hugging him and telling him we love him and
take turns wiping the tears from his face. And he tells us he loves us and he’s ready, by GOD he’s
ready for some new meds. If he had
his way, he’d take a rocket launcher of Dilaudid to zoom him off this earth,
that’s how ready he is.
It doesn’t happen that fast, however. The Dilaudid arrives after an hour or
so, and they start him off with 1 mg/hour. When we get there the next day, he’s conscious, but still in
pain, and not talking a lot. They
increase the dosage by .5 mg. every six hours or so, and I think it was around
2 mg/hour when he started sleeping and stopped talking.
The next few days are a numbing blur of sameness. We wake up, we go to the hospital. We sit by his bed and read stories from
the paper and what I can find on the internet to him, even though he’s not
awake. We hold his hand, we smooth
his hair. We ask Mom questions
about how they met, their initial courtship, when she knew she was in love with
him. Questions that she might not
have answered in such degree had Dad been awake. But now she’s a fountain of details – he proposed in the
car, without a ring, so that they could go pick one out together. The car was named Bessie, she named it
(so I’m not the only one who names my cars). She went to his parents’ place in Pittsburgh for
Thanksgiving, but his parents mailed her parents a handwritten invitation so
they knew she was invited, and that Mom and Dad weren’t running off together.
Nurses keep bringing food trays that nobody eats (and I
can’t imagine how good pureed waffle would taste anyway). Other nurses keep asking us if we need
anything, keep letting us know when there’s a fresh pot of coffee made, as
though this was a hotel.
I’m sure Dad would agree that those last few days weren’t
necessary. And I often felt like
God was not in those days, that He had taken a backseat to pure biology, as the
hours kept adding on, adding on, marked by nothing more than Dad’s breaths, his
chest rising and falling as we all waited and waited and waited.
The past thirteen months have been marked by no less than
five deaths of my dogsitting clients: Ginger Puppy, Pembleton, Basil Diva Dog,
Hickory, and most recently Babs the cocker spaniel are gone. (Before you say that I’m some Angel of
Dog Death, know that four of them passed from old age.)
And when I was there taking care of those elderly dogs, I
would continually watch them sleep, and sometimes stretch a hand out to touch
their side, to make sure they were breathing, that they didn’t suddenly go, and
I hadn’t seen it. And the breaths
would keep coming, sometimes with a longer space in between than I would like,
and I’d freak out, and wake the dog client up, and the dog client would look at
me all bewildered, huh?
What? What happened?
I have had quite enough of death for awhile.
Dad passed on Election Day morning, so he was spared the
endless exit polling reports. He
never got to see the rough cuts of Violet Giraffe and Paisley Bunny, though I’m
sure he can see them now (he believed in God and Jesus, so the basics were
covered.) We stood by Mom as she
appeared to shrink more and more into her coat and red head scarf, as we
shepherded her through the paperwork at the hospital, at the funeral home, at
the cemetery, as the cards, and calls and food started coming in, as the parade
of kind-hearted Southern people with thick Southern accents started up, “I’m so
sawwwwwwrrrreeee for your lawsssssss.”
The trees in Alabama are showing off their glorious fall
colors, and on Saturday, I decided I was going on a bike ride. Dad had bought a bike a few months ago,
as he was getting agitated that he wasn’t getting enough exercise.
One of my favorite pictures of Dad is on a bike, ironically enough, back during the Disney cruise of 2009. He wanted to go ride a bike, which was unusual for him, but I was game and we both rode bikes all around Disney's Castaway Key island, and I took this picture of him one handed AND steering my bike.
The bike that's in the garage now is a red bike.
The tires could use some air, but Mom and I couldn’t figure out how to
use the compressor to fill them up (Dad would’ve just shook his head in
dismay), so I did without.
And Mom watched me in her coat and red head scarf as I
pedaled down the driveway and down the street. Passing by the same houses that I did when I was four and
Dad was driving. Some of the
people have moved, some of the houses have new additions on them, but they all
basically look the same as they always did.
I was talking on the phone with Miss Eunice the day that Dad
passed, and as I’m babbling about Dad and how I don’t understand those useless last
few days we had to go through to get to the end, she says, somewhere in the
middle of it, “I have a quote for you.”
It’s Miranda from The Tempest, and it comes toward the end
of the play, Shakespeare’s last play.
And it’s this quote that I keep thinking about, as I pedal
down the street of my first memory, looking at the fall leaves, seeing my Dad
in front of me on the bike, continually looking back at me, making sure I’m
okay.
O,
wonder!
How many goodly creatures
are there here!
How beauteous
mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
O, wonder, o, wonder, o, wonder. O Brave New World and O, Wonder.
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I’m going to be taking a few weeks off from the blog. I will try to come back at the
beginning of December. Here’s
hoping.
