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It’s 11:10am. Sunday, May 21, 2023. I’m outside writing at the glass-topped table (originally my paternal grandfather’s from Malibu in the 1950s) on the deck seeing the gorgeous view of the city and the sea and the island (mostly shrouded in thick fog) and hearing the soft drone of Highway 101. Britney is sitting a few feet away, her reddish-purple North Face puffy jacket on, the hood over her hat, wearing shades looking like some sort of sexy E.T. She’s reading Crime and Punishment, which she’s been reading for about 1,000 years now. (She’s getting there slowly.)
Yesterday she arrived around 5:30pm. We hadn’t seen each other in the flesh in a week. I came down the side of the house and met her at the car. We hugged, holding each other for a minute, then kissed. I’d been really excited to see her. Lord I love that woman. I carried her heavy bag up the steep stone steps and we went into the house and put her stuff downstairs and then came back up and walked down the short hall into my father’s room. She said hello to my dad and we sat, along with my mother. We all chatted a bit.
After this Britney and I got into my car and we drove ten minutes via surface streets to the Whole Foods off upper State Street, near where I used to live. For some reason, things felt a little awkward with her. We bought food for the two of us and my mom and then headed back. It was nice to get out of the house for a little drive. But on the way home we remained silent the whole drive. It felt tense; strained. I felt myself getting frustrated, irritated, angry. I’m not sure why. Expectations, I guess; they’ll get you every time. I’d been hoping she’d ask me questions—as she’d been doing wonderfully every night when we spoke on the phone—but instead neither of us said a word. I somehow interpreted this silence as a lack of caring, or disinterest.
Home again, I felt annoyed. I struggled to put a plastic container of fruit we’d bought into the fridge; I fumbled it and the jar crashed to the floor, spilling juicy red watermelon chunks everywhere. In a rage I bent down, cursing ludicrously under my breath the way I do when I’m agitated and frustrated. My mom was in the kitchen and she said, It’s ok, it’s ok and started picking the chunks up and washing them off. I said I wouldn’t eat them. I felt childish, as I’m sure I came off to the two of them. Frowning, I walked off, going downstairs. I trotted out the side door of the lower floor of the house and sat down on the cold stone steps by the lower street-level brown iron gate. It was foggy and almost dark. I calmed down slowly. God, I thought. My father is dying, and now I have to deal with an unloving fiancée.
I was wrong, of course, as I often am. Eventually I came back into the downstairs room. Ten minutes later she came down the wooden stairs into the same room. There we clashed and talked it out. Turned out, as is often the case in relationships, she saw things differently. I immediately understood and knew she was right. From her point of view, she’d said, she hadn’t been sure what to say. What is there to say, really? It’s not easy, she reminded me, being there for me, as my father is dying. She didn’t always know what to say. (How could she? How could anybody?) She had thought, Well, if he’s silent there must be a good reason for that silence. In other words: She wanted to respect that silence, not sever it by her talk. She worried that questions would only annoy me, assuming that I just wanted to be quiet, that I was probably in a deep, soulful, ponderous, introspective mood.
Anyway, we talked it out. Neither of us had eaten so I went up stairs and heated up the salmon and fingerling potatoes we’d bought at Whole Foods, adding the cold Golden Beet salads to them. We ate in silence. Things were okay.
*
Before Britney came yesterday my sister showed up at the house. Not just my sister, and not just my sister and brother-in-law. Them, yes, but also my niece and nephew and my brother-in-law’s older brother visiting from New Zealand. Suddenly there were eight people, bursting Dad’s little room at the seams. This is what we’d wanted to avoid, but Dad seemed fine with it so we let it happen.
How did it go? Phew. Man. Where to even start. How to even describe it. From my father’s point of view: It went swimmingly; it was fantastic. And that’s really all that actually matters at the end of the day. So, from that vantage point we can call the experience a grand success. I’d been irritated with my mother the hours before they all came because she shaved my father’s chin and cheeks and had him put on a new, fresh shirt. It wasn’t because she made him do these things in itself; it was because once I realized it wasn’t his own desire to do so, I realized it was once more my mother doing her control thing.
It was all very theatrical, which is how things roll in my family. Mom added some flowers and new photos to desks around Dad’s bed; shaved and re-shirted him; dressed up nicely herself. It was all part of the stage performance. Keep the outside looking good. Perception management. Even now, days or weeks before my father’s death. Wow. My mom even likes to complain that Dad “always looks good” when my sister comes therefore creating the “perception” that he’s “fine.” But my mom is the creator behind this image. It’s ironic, ludicrous and contradictory. Such is the nature of my insecure, narcissistic mother. (Who I also love dearly and who deserves a massive Blue Medal times 1,000 for being my father’s potent, patient caretaker these past two years.)
And boy: When my sister came. Wow.
She was all smiles, laughter, blouse-adjusting, grinning, talking about work and sports and the kids and how my niece is practicing for a triathlon, house prices, the stock market; basically anything other than the gargantuan elephant in the room. To my father’s great credit: He surprised us all by speaking several times, with visible tears in his eyes and trailing down his red-pink cheeks, saying he was tired and this was the right thing to do (euthanasia) and that he was ready. My sister, in her classic, clueless, uncanny manner, still seemed confused.
“But you seemed fine just two weeks ago,” she said.
“Yeah,” my brother-in-law added, “Just like ten days ago you seemed totally different.”
I broke in. “It’s a very different experience when you’re with him day to day.”
My dad explained again to my sister why he was going to end his own life. The lack of a quality of life, but also the physical discomfort, the exhaustion. Mom explained the breaking down of the lung tissue and of other major organs and how he’d likely soon be in pain. Not to mention the fact that we stopped feeding him.
I spoke again: “It’s been a hell of a journey, Dad. And we’ve been here with you every step of the way. You’ve been through so much, from brain surgery to radiation to chemo to blood transfusions to immunotherapy to ER visits, hospital stays, rehab, etc.”
I was trying to simultaneously say to my sister: Where were you? Where have you been these past 22 months?
My brother-in-law cried discreetly. My niece did. My nephew. Everyone but my sister. She kept that prize-winning grin on her face the whole time. To her semi-credit: She did hug my father tightly several times, once lying her cheek firmly against my father’s chest. At one point I went outside an was talking out there with my brother-in-law and nephew; my sister came out and snapped a photo of us. My face looks angry, frowning, etched with pain. Can you blame me?
They stayed for maybe an hour and a half; perhaps two hours. Ninety-seven percent of it was fake, superficial bullshit chatter. Three percent, maybe, was authentic discussion, coming almost exclusively from myself, my mother and my father. Stoicism and superficiality runs deep in our clan. That and gaslighting.
My mom walked them down the outside stairs to the car; I stayed with dad. I heard them vaguely out there. They all stayed down there for a while, probably a half an hour or longer. I’d asked Dad how he felt about the visit and he said it’d been great. He’d seemed happier and more energetic than I’d seen him in weeks. His family, rallying around him. He had always been a man of tradition, ritual, family. He and my brother-in-law even chatted about finances for a while, as if everything were just like normal. My mom told me after she came back in that they’d all stayed down there a while, talking, while my niece broke down sobbing. She hadn’t been able to hold it in.
I know. I am deeply emotional, intense, insecure and hyper-judgmental. Believe me: I have self-awareness about this. As a good sober buddy of mine recently reminded me: Everybody processes death (and things in general) differently, and one way isn’t necessarily “better” than any other. Who do I think I am, exactly, the Father of Feelings? Is my way “better” than my sister’s? Your view on this will probably vary depending on your own method of coping with hard things. One thing I know for sure is: It’s better, in my own personal experience, to face the tough feelings, to look fear in the face, to look death in the eyes, than to avoid it, to run away, to lie to yourself, to pretend, to smile when there’s nothing to smile about.
My sister? She can’t face any of this. She can’t look. It’s too scary; too painful. Rather than risk the grotesquerie of being “weak” or vulnerable, of being seen as soft and sensitive and human, she flinches and looks away; she slaps on that sadistic smile and plays a psychological game wherein she shifts as far away as possible emotionally from The Pain. She mostly avoided my eyes, I noticed. Because I was In It. I still am In It. I’ve been here, dealing with this from Day One. And from Day One she’s been ignoring, denying, rejecting, casting aside, revising, writing her own inner dialogue, crafting her own inner narrative story. In her story she is the hero: She’s the mature, sophisticated adult with two kids, multimillion-dollar home, fulltime conventional job, etc, and I’m the weirdo-loser-overly-emotional black sheep brother who has a chip on his shoulder. She doesn’t have to say these things to me: Every syllable drips with her irony and sarcasm; every averted gaze; every dumb existential smile.
I wish I could say it doesn’t bother me, that I don’t care, but that would be a lie and, unlike my sister, I’m not so comfortable with lying, either to others or to myself. I have nothing to run away from or hide behind. I am naked, right there in the light, exposed.
I’m probably being too hard and uncharitable to my sister. I am partially a selfish asshole myself. What do I know? My thinking isn’t totally clear right now anyway. My father is going to end his own life—probably with my mother and me holding his hands at his side—in less than two weeks, if he makes it that long. But I did feel like we had a metaphorical clean white rug before my sister and the rest of them came and after they left I sensed wet, dirty boot marks all over that priceless rug. A wave of energy lay in their wake and that energy seemed to say, This doesn’t make sense; he was fine just a week and a half ago, this is all so odd. That sense again of disbelief, the idea that my mother and I are biased, impartial observers who are drama-queens and have been saying he’s “going to die” every five seconds for the past year.
My thought-response to that energy was and is: Fuck you. You weren’t there. You haven’t been there. You aren’t really there even now.
*
Britney and I last night laid in bed and chatted until she fell asleep and then I cracked a new book I’ve been reading and enjoying, which I highly recommend, especially if you like to read deep-thinking free-thinker contrarians who upend cultural assumptions (particularly leftist assumptions): Lionel Shriver’s new 2022 essay collection, Abominations: Selected Essays from a Career of Courting Self-Destruction. (Harper-Collins.) Two essays last night made me feel totally seen and heard and understood about my sister and all of that madness. I’ll post the photos of the pages with highlights and little brief pen notes. They gave me a lovely calm and I fell into a deep sleep. The pages are pulled from three essays: Terminal Friendship from The Guardian 2010, My Teenage Diary from The Guardian 2015, and The Big Story from the Financial Times 2013.
For now, my dad is stable. No more food. Very little water. Morphine for anxiety and discomfort. He’s been crying and chatting a lot with us, which is great. Looking at old photos on the digital picture frame Britney bought them. Listening to the chapter on consciousness on the book Psych by Paul Bloom (2023.) Talking about spreading his ashes in Matilija Canyon a la a backpacking trip me and Britney will do; my father and I backpacked there for decades. Telling old funny stories. Remembering animals and family myths, recollecting good movies we’d seen from the past, recalling the houses we’d lived in, etc. It’s a joyful and sad time. Liberation is coming for Dad soon. Not much longer now.
I am such a messy, emotional human being. I’m so glad I get to be here with my father as he goes down this path. And for my mother, too. I realized last night that very soon my mother and I will hold this man’s hands as he takes the euthanasia drug and we’ll say our final words to him, our final goodbyes, and then there’ll be a very last final moment and then he’ll peacefully and permanently expire. Those will be the last words we ever say to this man while he’s alive. To my father. To my mother’s husband of fifty years.
Lord what a shocking, delicate thought that is. Cuts you right down to the bone, doesn’t it? It’s beautiful, made for a gorgeous novel. And yet it’s also hopelessly tragic. Stunningly painful.
We’re almost there. I wonder how my father feels right now in this very instant. Where his mind takes him. Where his soul is. What he wants more than anything in the world.
What do I want? Nothing more than to be right here, where I am. At his side.
those "dirty boot marks" -- not outright lies, but the willful avoidance and lack of truth. Ugh. I know what you mean.
Reading your work. You're doing it.