by Patti
One year ago today, my father died.
I had been by his side day and night for 9 days, afraid to leave because I wanted to be there with him when he let go of life. But on the day he was to finally give up his fight, I had insisted to my mother that she let me drive her home so she could shower and change her clothes. She, too, had been by his side for 9 days and nights. She hadn’t changed clothes in days or slept in a bed for over a week, or even slept at all, really.
It seemed safe to go. His breathing was still mostly regular, though there had been some moments over the past couple of days where the pauses between breaths told us this was it. But on this day, he was calm; his breathing was regular; he didn’t, for once, seem to be in any kind of pain. So I finally convinced her to let me take her home – just for an hour or so, we’d be right back - and we left my father there; still breathing, still warm, still alive.
When we returned a couple of hours later, he was dead.
During my father’s stay in hospice, the nurses were surprised every morning they returned to find him still with us. “He is a strong one,” they would marvel.
We knew he was dying; it wasn’t a surprise. We just didn’t know it would be so soon. By the time the cancer was discovered, it had progressed to Stage 4; yet, it was still contained, “still manageable”, they told us. My father always said that if he ever got cancer, he would refuse treatment. But when the theoretical became reality, the desperation to live overrode his earlier belief. Suddenly, he wanted to do whatever it took to live. He drank herbal concoctions and tortured his body with radiation and chemo. He lost so much weight, it was a wonder he could even walk. The pain was at times unbearable for him, but he kept hoping.
Like the nurses said, he was a strong one.
So the night that he went to the emergency room with stomach pains - pains he had been tolerating for over a month now; pains, he was told, that were only the nasty side effects of “the cure”, nothing more - we expected he would be home again, just like every other time.
But he never came home again. Instead, somebody was finally honest and told him that the cancer that “was contained” was all over his body. And that he was going to die within weeks. He broke down, sobbing like a baby. The picture of his grandchildren that he always kept in his wallet was in his hands. It was time to say goodbye.
After that moment, the father I knew disappeared. The pain was so intense, he had to be drugged to the point of making him unrecognizable. After one night’s stay in the hospital, he was transported to hospice: the place people go to die. It was more real than ever.
The day he was admitted, he came in screaming, hallucinating, delirious. The doctors immediately adjusted their original prediction of “weeks” to “days”, and knowing this, we never left his side. Watching him die was the worst thing I had ever experienced. He wasn’t himself; he was already lost to us. He spoke in a different language, and vacillated between knowing us and wondering who we were. He called out incessantly for his dead mother, begging her to comfort him. He wrestled with the sheets, with the I.V., with what was coming.
Friends and family came to reminisce, to pray over him, to say their goodbyes; then they would leave. My mother and I stayed. Waiting. And on the day we finally decided it would be okay to leave for just a little while, my father stopped fighting.
When we returned, I walked into the room first, and even from the doorway I knew. His face looked different. I rushed to the bed, my heart in my mouth, and stood over him. He was still. The room was still. The world was still. My father was dead.
My mother let out a cry and rushed to her husband of 42 years; she put her hand to his forehead and stroked his face. I went out to get the nurse. How strange that in that moment I felt it was inappropriate to make a scene; that I felt I should whisper so that others wouldn’t hear. “Please come,” I said, politely. The nurse immediately rose from her chair and came around the desk. She strode past me into the room; she went to the bed and leaned in. She touched his wrist. She looked at the clock. She nodded at us.
I understood.
And I didn’t.
Why now? Why not at any time during the past 9 days, when we would play his favorite music, and sing in his ear, and hug him, and swab his lips with water, and just sit by his side, whispering to him that it was all right to go? My aunt had even come all the way from Chile to rub special calming oils into his temples. My father's twin had flown in to be with him in death, just as he had been with him in birth. Instead, when it finally came, death, my father was alone. Did he know he was alone? Was he afraid? Was he ready? Was he angry that we had left him; did he feel that we had just let go of him when we did leave him?
As the numbness that came over me after his death began to wear off, and the clarity of the truth set in, I began to understand more why it happened the way it did. At one point during his days of delirium, he called out to nobody in particular, “I am overwhelmed.” Even in that state, he understood. All of that pain, that fighting, that fear, that sickness; it was enough. Now I know that he waited for my mother and I to leave. Because he knew we had witnessed it all; that it had changed not just him, but all of us. In his mind, by letting go when we let go, he would not only set himself free, he would set us all free.
