Here’s what how I imagined it would happen.
I’m in Austin, minding my own business. I go to work in the morning, I come home in the evening. I’m working on one of my myriad projects — recording tracks for Eponymous 4, doing homework for C# class, writing a review for Musicwhore.org. Maybe I’m watching an episode of Good Eats for the umpteenth time.
Then I get a call. "Son, you need to come home." I get on a plane. I go to the funeral. I get back on a plane, and life resumes.
Intent and outcome are rarely coincident, Morpheus once said in The Sandman. The same, of course, applies to reality and fantasy.
One aspect of that last scenario came true — I did get a call, a few actually. And the message was simple: Dad doesn’t have much longer, and it would be good if you could see him before he went.
I had already bought a ticket home. I timed it for my mom’s birthday — and also the last day of C# class — and I wanted it to be a surprise. (Another example of intent and outcome being rarely coincident.)
But the conversations had turned urgent. At first, I spilled the beans about the surprise visit. That bought some time but not enough for my dad to hold out till December.
So I rescheduled the flight from Dec. 9 to Nov. 22, and I sent an e-mail to my office saying, You know That Call I said I might be getting at any time? Any time has become now.
Eleven hours and two-layovers later, I was back in Hawaiʻi.
Last year, my dad was mobile and responsive. He had a hard time moving around and an even harder time speaking, but he was a semblance of a person.
When I saw him lying in his bed two weeks ago, he was shell. He could communicate by squeezing your hand to a yes-or-no question, but really — he was mostly gone. In a physical sense, too — he had stopped eating weeks before I arrived, but the Parkinson’s was starving him for much longer.
The day after my arrival, we took him to the North Shore to watch the surf. I’m not sure how much of it he saw, but he said he wanted to go. The trip exhausted him, and he stayed in bed for the rest of the day.
He didn’t get out of the bed the next day either, and his responsiveness was wavering. By Thursday, he wasn’t replying to anyone.
He was running a fever, and the medicine that kept his shaking in check had long left his system. His shoulder jerked, and his panting sounded like snoring. It was difficult to tell when he was sleeping. My mom was hesitant to give him morphine because she knew the comfort the drug provided would also assist in his … departure.
I don’t know what turned her around, but she administered the first dose on Friday. Saturday passed without incident, but on Sunday morning at 2 a.m., I heard a knock on my door. One of my dad’s caregivers had stayed the night, and she told me my mom needed help.
I got up thinking she needed assistance turning him over to fix a pillow or change his clothes, but no help was needed. We were waken up to bid him goodbye.
Watching a man take his last breath is pretty mundane. Too many dramatic deaths in movies and television make it seem more momentous than it is. He breathed. He breathed some more. Then he stopped breathing. Then he stopped.
You think you know it happens when it happens. It took a number of seconds for me to be sure because in reality, it happened back there while I’m still here.
The disease robbed him of the ability to shut his jaw, so we held it shut till the nurse from the hospice arrived to make the declaration. His face still felt warm. I thought the moment you died, you turned to ice. (Stupid movies and TV.) The cold creeps from the feet up.
My gallows humor popped up when I felt the compulsion to move his jaw in pantomime with my voice. He looked like he was sleeping, like he would wake up at any moment. That illusion was pretty much shattered when two guys arrived to take his body away. They covered his head and wrapped his body in a blanket. Can’t wake up with a sheet covering your face.
We each kissed him goodbye — my mom, my brother and the one sister who wasn’t separated by miles of ocean and continent — and the cold had crept to his face.
In my imagination, I didn’t want to see him die. I just wanted to know when it happened and when I should show up to bury him. My imagination can’t compete with reality.