Breaking Radio Silence--On Losing My Dad

I've been seriously absent, both from this blog and from my goals, basically since I set them back at the first of the year. I have a good reason, Life seriously interfered with me this time around.

On Christmas Eve, I found out that some persistent health problems my dad had been experiencing after he had replacement stent surgery for his heart In November were, in fact, cancer. That started a tidal wave of bad news, where every phone call was another ratcheting down of hope until there was nothing left.

Do you want to hear a dirty joke?

It was cancer, not just a bleeding hemorrhoid.

It had metastasized, but the doctor had a plan.

It was inoperable because he was in kidney failure.

He had three weeks or so to live.

Every phone call filled me with dread. Every visit, he was a little less with it. He started calling his current wife my mother. He confused me with her too, toward the end.

It turned out he made it a little over four weeks, but the last week was basically sitting a vigil with a person who didn't seem to know anyone was there. In that week, he moved to hospice, which was a blessing I cannot describe. If you have to die, and it won't be in your sleep after a long full life, find a way to do it in a hospice.

In a fairer world, my dad could have taken a handful of painkillers with a tumbler of fine Scotch and gone out on his own terms, before that last week of incoherent, pain-filled confusion and agitation. In other, more civilized countries, this would have been an obvious choice.

As I have worked to process this. To understand what it's going to mean to be a woman without a father anymore, I have realized there were a couple of things that I wanted to write down, to be sure that I would never forget.

Cargo shorts, Teva sandals, and a huge sense of the absurd.

First, my dad had named me to be his decisionmaker for his durable power of attorney. He worried that his wife couldn't do it for language reasons and for temperament reasons. She's Russian and very high strung by nature. I think he was right. I don't think she would have been able to do it. I was barely able to do it. After his stent surgery, but before the worst of the news had come down, I was talking to my dad about Christmas presents. Since I became an adult, the usual gift was cash, and he was making sure that cash would again be okay. I was telling him we had just dropped 500.00 that month on vet bills and that cash would be terrific. My cat was 17 years old, with a new thyroid medicine and a new regimen of weekly fluid treatments.

I could tell something about this was making him uneasy. He asked me if I was sure it wasn't time to let the kitty go. I think he thought I was being overly sentimental about it. I told him that her quality of life was good, and I didn't think anything we were doing was unreasonable to maintain that for her. I think he was worried that he had just declared a person who could be made irrational by the threat of loss as his health care decisionmaker.

I hope I reassured him, and I hope I fulfilled my duties to him. All he asked was to be kept as pain-free as possible, and I took that as my charge for the days he was in the hospice.

Clearly feeling mellow here. Cheers, Dad.

Second, as his time at home with a hospice service was winding down, there was a day that I had to sit down at his bedside with his hospice case manager to try to get him to accept more help in the form of a hospital bed in the house, or a move to an inpatient hospice facility. He was pretty fuzzy from the painkillers, and he didn't want to accept more help at that point. He wanted to be home as long as he could. He still thought he was fine. I thought that was up for debate, but he was able to articulate it clearly--though sleepily--so I relented. I said we'd talk about it again in a few days.

I leaned in to kiss his forehead, and he thanked me for my kiss, all drowsy and sweet.

Thanked me for loving him, basically.

I miss him terribly. I loved him so, so much. These are things that I don't think will ever change, but I don't want them to fade to the broad outlines of my life, either. I want to remember the little details. The phone calls. The sleepy 'thank you.' The cranky way he left voicemails he knew I probably wouldn't listen to before I called him back.

I have two voicemails from him saved on Google Voice. I'm not sure I will ever be able to delete them.