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*Update. My father passed. He died at 4pm on the nose. I had literally just finished writing this post and was gazing out at the lawn and Mom said my name from the deck. I asked her what was going on and she said to come upstairs. I did and she said, “I think he’s gone.” I knew the moment I saw him: He was blue. Pale white and blue. He’s been turning that shade all day slowly but now he really was. We both stood on either side of his bed and wept. Then we sat on our chairs and talked and cried. I kept going over to him, touching his face, his head, feeling the coolness of his skin. His mouth was wide open. I closed his blue eyes with my fingers. I said, “Goodbye, dad, now you’re in peace.” Mom and I sat after that in silence for a while. Then Mom called my sister and brother-in-law and told them. And then she contacted the hospice nurse. He’s still up there now, in bed, cold and dead. Soon he’ll be taken away. It feels profoundly surreal, almost like I’m coming down off Magic Mushrooms or LSD. Unbelievable. But I feel immense relief, too. His suffering is finally over. He’s free.
**I left the post I’d written just before his death as-is.
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Well Dad wanted to be in an unconscious coma-like state and so, using the Morphine, we’ve done that. Since yesterday late morning after my sister and brother-in-law left, he’s looked more or less like a grotesque zombie. His eyes are rolled up into the back of his head, and never fully close. His face reminds me of a Halloween mask. It’s fairly scary and disturbing to look at, and yet all my mom and I have done it stare at it, at him, for hours and hours and hours.
His breathing is very fast and shallow. He’s still “with us” but for all intents and purposes he’s already gone. A shell of the man he used to be; not even a shell. And that’s okay; this is what he wanted; he wanted to go. He was suffering. So now the game is simply waiting for his breathing to stop, waiting for his heart to give out, and/or for his organs to shut down from the cancer. The hospice nurse told us several times he has a very strong heart.
It's a surreal experience. I woke up this morning at 6:30 and went straight to Dad’s room, half expecting him to be dead. Instead I found Mom there, sitting in the small mustard-colored chair, holding Dad’s lifeless, unconscious, mottled hand, crying. I sighed and left the room and made two cups of Irish Breakfast tea (double-fisting it, I like to joke) and came back to the room and sat across from Dad. Mom and I cried and held his hands and talked about how hard it all was, but also about how lucky we’ve been. All this time we’ve been given with my father, 23 months, the extremely slow, thin slicing of the layers of the onion, ever thinner as he gets closer and closer to death, until where we are now, which is there and somehow not there.
What a thing, to look at your father lying in bed, comatose, unconscious, basically gone, and yet his heart still thudding lightly in his chest. Precious and brutal. Harsh and unbelievably vulnerable.
I felt Dad’s vulnerability a few days ago, when he was still conscious. We had to help the hospice nurse pull the “chuck” (a pad he can pee on) under his body and so I had to pull his deadweight body towards me, and when I did that Dad’s body felt so weak in my arms, and his head flopped down a little and I cradled it and he said, “Don’t drop my head.” That almost broke me. It made me think, How many times has my father helped me out in my life, financially especially? The answer: Too many times to count. He’s always been there; a pillar; a rock. And now he’s gone. Mom and I have to live the rest of our lives without him. I’m honored to have known him my 40 years, and to have become gloriously close with him over these past two years.
Over the course of many hours—giving him more Morphine, meds, etc—Mom and I did various little tasks. My bank said my account was zero and I freaked out and called them and they said it happened to everyone and is an error and they’re fixing it and the money will be back by end-of-day. Phew. Thank God. Mom and I decided to wait on doing surgery for Mom’s dog, Romey, removing the non-cancerous mass; we’re going to get a second opinion. Mom discussed her consultation regarding her knee surgery coming up in July (bad timing; such is the nature of life). I tried to read a little more Rousseau and got a few pages. I took a walk and called Britney on her lunch break at work, around 11:30am.
At some point before this the pharmacy called Mom. She let it go to voicemail. It was about the Death Med. Ironically, we’d waited all this time for the med but, since Dad had been suffering and wanted to slip out of consciousness, we’d upped his Morphine doses after consulting the hospice doctor who runs the hospice company we’re using. Mom and I discussed it for ten minutes and agreed that the Death Med is no longer an option. Dad isn’t competent to give himself the drug anymore, and he legally has to be the one to self-administer. It doesn’t matter at this point anyway: The hospice doctor confirmed Dad’s recent reactions—terrible gurgling, “terminal agitation,” confusion, etc—were a clear and obvious sign of being in the very final phase. The doctor said he’s got a few days, a week at the very most. So we’re letting him go this way instead of the Death Med. Mom called back and let the pharmacist know. We thought this would be the way to end things, but life had other plans. We hadn’t known when the med would actually come—we assumed Monday or Tuesday—and Dad wanted release from his body. So we did what we had to do.
Finally, sometime around 1pm-ish, I decided I couldn’t sit there and stare at Dad’s corpse-like face and still body. I decided to take the dogs for a walk. Not in the neighborhood. I collared them up and told Mom and got my sun-hat and my shades and some water and we went down the stairs and got into the Leaf and I drove us five minutes away, down the hill and north of the Santa Barbara Bowl. I parked and we walked for maybe 35-40 minutes, up to the Mission and the Rose Garden. I stood there eyeing the garden and the mission and the gorgeous hills beyond for ten minutes and then I walked back.
Instead of going home right away, though, I headed north along Highway 192 at Los Olivos, towards my old apartment. I pulled off onto my old road, passing my old studio, seeing the second-floor balcony I’d sat outside on so many times last year. It felt comforting being in my old hood: I thought of all the runs and walks and dog-walks I’d done, and thought back to all the nights I’d returned home after a long day seeing Dad in the hospital or after having dinner and watching Real Time with Bill Maher with the folks. I thought about the times Britney had stayed there in that studio with me, when we’d first started dating in August of last year. I’d left New York City in June, 2021, just to visit—so I thought—and my dad was diagnosed the first week of July, 2021. Stage four Melanoma. Boom. Tough luck, kid.
I ended up parking in the lot of a little coffee and tea shop I used to frequent when I lived in my old studio, called Vices and Spices. I rolled the windows down and went inside and got a chai tea latte, my favorite. I waited for it and watched the people around me, smiling and laughing, enjoying their lives. I’ll get back to that place. I’m just not there now. I know I am incredibly un-unique. And yet. I got back into the car and played The 5th Column and rolled all the windows down and rolled up the hill on Ontare Street, a street I used to walk and run all the time last year, and then I hooked a right onto 192 and started heading back to it. It meaning Dad. Meaning death. Meaning sorrow and suffering and tears. Meaning waiting. Waiting for the man’s heart to finally give out.
I took the long way back, heading straight at Los Olivos instead of going right like usual, passing the S.B. Tennis Club and the ranger station. This would me around and up to Las Alturas, where I’ve been taking my steep-hill walks lately. Then slowly down, down down, winding, twisting around and around and around, seeing the spectacular, revelatory views of the city below, and the cool, calm light blue ocean, and the Spanish-style red-tile roofs.
Finally I was home. I pulled into the short driveway. The dogs leapt out, exhausted. I walked up the familiar steep stone steps. I set their collars down and they started lapping up water from the bowl by the side door. I stepped down the hallway and entered Dad’s room. Mom was crying, listening to her audiobook alone, the one she and Dad had been listening to up until a few days ago. She said, “I don’t know if he can hear it but I had to.”
That cracked me open. She knows he’s gone. He can’t hear a thing. And even if he could hear, there’s no way he’s in any way conscious. Not now. Not after all the Morphine. Then she said she’d played “their song,” the song that had been theirs for fifty years (well, fifty years this October). I sighed again. I’ve been doing a lot of sighing. I sat down on my familiar orange chair. We both looked at Dad, at his twisted, zombie-like corpse-face. Mom dried her eyes. I sat motionless. The dogs came in and did their thing. I opened the bedroom side door. A nice, cool breeze blew through the room. Dad didn’t stir. Neither did we.
At last, I broke the silence by saying, “I’m going to go write.”
I am grateful he is free. I honor his life and legacy.
My heart is still and will be with you all as the grief changes shape.
I hope you feel immense pride to be his son. I hope you find pockets of comfort in the heavy coat of grief.
With great affection,
H.C.B.