Sometimes, at night, my wife next to me dead asleep, our cats spread out like little feline drunks across the bed, alone with the darkness and only my thoughts, eventually, inevitably, I think of my father.
I think of other things first: My past; recovery and sobriety and AA; women I once dated; New York City; San Francisco; the profound, infernal wildness of my alcoholic years (17-27); all the places I’ve lived; books I’m reading and have read; writing; Substack; the mundaneness of life; the excitement of life; the mystery of it all; the unknown. Recently, because I’m reading his collected letters, I think of Vladimir Nabokov. (Selected Letters 1940-1977.)
But like I said: After all this; beyond all this; underneath the foundation of all this: Dad.
I wish I could say I think of the old days, me and Dad backpacking when I was a pre-teen in the mid-90s; road trips to Baja in the late 90s; Dad trying to learn to surf so he could hit the waves with me when I was in high school; all the bitter, intense political arguments; the awkward years through which we nevertheless managed to love each other, even if we didn’t understand one another or speak the same emotional language and sometimes didn’t speak for months at a time. I wish I pictured him young, in his late twenties with my mother before I was born, or playing tennis in his thirties, forties and fifties. Outside at their old house in Ojai drinking a Budweiser, grilling burgers or salmon.
But, no. My OCD brain doesn’t go there. It skips, bypasses all of those warm memories and goes instead to the 23 months of his sickness. Terminal cancer. Mostly, my mind zeroes in on the final six weeks, after he returned from three weeks in Cottage Hospital with parainfluenza, sepsis and two types of pneumonia (it’s a miracle he survived). Mom told me later that, after his oxygen levels went way down, and it was clear he wasn’t feeling well and that he had to go to the ER, he put on his shoes and tied them very slowly, and Mom looked at him and she knew he was thinking the same thing: I’m not coming home.
But he did come home, 21 days later. On permanent oxygen. In a wheelchair. Bedbound. Weak, drained, exhausted. For six weeks he lay in the bed, for the first couple weeks slowly getting up and using the bathroom with help from us. But in those final weeks he didn’t even do that. We’d stopped feeding him and were barely giving him water, per the hospice nurse’s orders. He wanted to die. We needed to help him. The cancer was eating him from the inside. He was heavily medicated. He lay there, sleeping on and off, becoming quieter and quieter, weaker and weaker every day. He’d retired, finally, officially, from work, a job he’d had for four decades. He’d said goodbye to me and my mom, my sister and brother-in-law and their kids. The financial stuff had been handled.
At the time I was writing every single day. It was cathartic for me; therapeutic. I needed to disgorge the contents of my spinning brain somehow, and splattering word vomit onto the blank white page somehow helped. Writing had always comforted me, transported me, guided me. Ever since I’d been a child, reading my mother’s classics, randomly pulled from the shelves of her luscious library. I recorded, accurately and as objectively as possible, the events of each day. Dad was more and more out of it; fading into the next world.
He had a way of gazing into the middle distance sometimes, as if already half in that other place. It made me wonder what death was “like,” which I knew was an oxymoron because it’s not “like” anything; when you’re dead, far as I can grasp, there is no more consciousness, aka there is no more “you.” No experience occurs because there’s no ”you” to experience it.
Sometimes Mom and I sat in our chairs in the room and just watched Dad as he slept, his stomach lightly moving up and down softly. Then we’d try to sleep, going to our respective rooms.
The day he died it was June 2nd. It was perfect out, another typical stunning sunny day in Santa Barbara. What an irony. For two days Dad had been heavily drugged up, his eyes scarily jutting up in his head; he looked like Jack Torrance in that last scene of The Shining, frozen and dead, eyes upturned. But my father was still breathing.
All day I was in and out of his room. He slept, or was just so drugged up that he seemed asleep but was sort of unconscious. We kept watching him, avoiding each other’s eyes. Around 3:30 in the afternoon I went downstairs and wrote on my laptop for a while on the table at the top of the stone stairs outside of the room I was using. I wrote about my father, how I felt, my mom, the strangeness of it all, the perfect sublime summer day contrasted with…our reality. I imagined all the things other people were doing in their normal worlds.
A minute or two before 4PM I heard my mom’s soft, lilting voice from upstairs on the balcony.
“Michael…”
“Yeah?” I said, pausing my typing.
“Michael?”
“Yeah!?”
“Can you come up?”
“Everything okay?”
“Just come up.”
I breathed heavily and pulled my laptop screen down. I swallowed. My heart was thudding in my chest. I felt a knot in my constricted throat. Coughing a few times, clearing my throat, I stepped slowly, as if in slow-motion, across the huge stone tiles into the room. I crossed the room, seeing everything as if for the first time. Then I walked tentatively up the stairs to the top floor. On each step there was a loud creak and each creak felt like an eternity. There was Mom, looking at me, standing in the center of the short, narrow hallway leading to Dad’s room.
“I think he passed,” Mom said.
I walked, silently, towards Mom. She turned and led the way. We entered the room. Dad’s head had turned slightly. He looked dead. Already his skin had a bluish tint to it. I walked around to his right side and watched his mouth; it did not move. His stomach was totally still. I felt his wrist. No pulse. His mouth was open a little. He appeared frozen. He looked like a mannequin; fake, made of wood or plastic. I touched his skin: He was cold, surprisingly cold.
“He’s dead,” I said.
Mom started crying uncontrollably. I came around to her side of the bed and hugged her tight. We wept into each other’s embrace. My mother’s eyes looked wild and feral, like an undomesticated horse’s, brown-black with fear, grief and loss. Terror might have been the word. Looking back at Dad’s plastic body, getting colder and bluer by the minute, I suddenly felt as if I were on LSD, or magic mushrooms; the room seemed to tilt and tint and go sideways for a second; everything seemed hallucinatory and unreal; things felt odd and bizarre and untrue. Life was off-kilter in that effervescent, scalding moment. I felt like tearing my hair out and screaming and yet laughing all at the same time. I was afraid and yet also fully aware of everything being alright.
We both cried for a while. Then we settled. We sat in disbelief. Mom got up to get some wine. I called Hospice to report the death and have them send someone. Alone in the room for a moment, I stood at the open side door of the bedroom. I looked at Dad, his rigor mortis body, cold and blue, his eyes half open, dead-marble, his flesh blue. Then I gazed outside, seeing a sliver of Pacific Ocean a couple miles down there, beyond downtown. Cars raced a mile away back and forth along Highway 101.
It was maybe 5:30PM. Summer. Lovely out. Just then some wind rushed through and tinkled the wind-chimes; they made the most beautiful sound, those little silver metal legs kicking into each other, creating splendid music, and in that moment I smiled, internally at least, and I knew that God or Higher Power or Dad’s spirit or something had come into me in the form of the wind. It was a moment which I shall never forget, lucid and plaintive in my mind as much now as it was right when it happened.
And then the Hospice nurse came and everything shifted.