2006-09-06 - 10:23 p.m.
It seems that all the deaths of people significant or close to me were either sudden deaths, or far away ones, such as the girl in high school who always liked to sit next to me in class when she could, who died suddenly during back surgery, or my oldest and longest-known friend who had AIDS and suddenly died of pneumonia when I was in Europe working for three months, or all of my grandparents who lived in North Carolina, and, most recently my mother, who died last spring.
I had always thought that the sudden deaths were the more cruel ones. You never got to say "good-bye", and although you probably did say it enough times, you never really did have that one big chance to make sure they knew how much you loved them. They are suddenly snapped away from you and you are left with a gaping wound.
I had imagined that the long, drawn-out deaths were better, just so long as the loved one wasn't in any pain. You had the time and understanding to round out everything nicely and ultimately they would be able to drift off peacefully, secure in the knowledge of how loved they really were.
But now I know that all that is a romantic Hollywood fantasy.
I had been amazingly angry all last week at work, the first week that all the teachers were back. I truly did have an impossible amount of stuff to do and almost no time in which to do it. I felt horrendously abused. It was very hard to keep at bay a sense of the teachers being nothing but a huge irritant and an imposition. After all, I was supposed to help them, that was my job, and they really weren't being any more difficult than usual. Still, several of them remained in constant danger of getting their heads chewed off. Fortunately, I finally realized that the emotions I was having had nothing to do with them at all and I was able to treat them decently and, in fact, enjoy their presence.
What was eating away at me was fear, grief, and rage over whatever was going on with my father. Ever since our mother's death last spring, he has not been the same. To say that he went into a "decline" is an understatement. Something precious and vibrant in him died along with her and we were left with a man who was hardly "here" any more. Nothing significant of what had defined him before still remained.
He seemed to have no ability to deal with her death, himself. He fixated, somehow, on how he had "failed" her at the end by not waking up and tending to her the night she died (despite the fact that he had successfully taken care of her up to the day she died). He concluded that now she was "angry" at him (as if in her current state of consciousness anger could even exist in her being) for his failure and therefore there would never again be any communications between the two of them, either psychically, at night during the sleep state, in dreams, imaginatively, mythologically, symbolically, or even a reunion in an afterlife...just nothing.
It was so peculiar to see a man who had been so wise and so spiritually knowledgable all his life have absolutely nothing to draw on when he needed it the most. My brother said, "Well, this, now, is no longer supposition or conjecture, but the moment of truth and the time for really seeing what holds up and what doesn't." Well, nothing held up. All Dad could say now was that his only goal was to reach his 90th birthday. After that, he had no idea. And for all practical purposes, what he did was to take to his bed and wait for his 90th birthday.
Which was last Thursday, August 31, during this emotional week from hell.
We had some level of family contention over whether we "needed" to be there on his ACTUAL birthday or not. I felt that that was impossible for me. The one week when my job was the MOST important, and a week which more or less followed on the heels of 25 days off for vacation before all employees were told that we HAD to be back, I just couldn't see how I could reasonably skip what I had to do at work on that most crucial week.
And my father, himself, wasn't saying that he cared. This was something that he UNDERSTOOD. I asked him if the weekend right after his birthday was alright and he said "Absolutely." He knows about job responsibility. He worked hard all his life and met all of his obligations, no matter what. Without a doubt, he said that my being there that weekend was all he wanted.
My brother, particularly, did not agree and he insisted that HE, at least, and his wife, would be there ON Dad's 90th birthday, as one should. That he earns his living by a wedding photography and video business in which he has control over when he works and when he doesn't made it easy for him to be there for whatever day he chose (although he did admit that if he had already scheduled a conflicting wedding, there was no way in hell he was going to break the wedding appointment).
One sister does not work at all, so she, too, had perfect freedom to be there whenever she chose, so she scheduled her visit to start on Tuesday, and she was going to fly home Saturday morning.
My other sister teaches at a University and school hasn't started yet, so she, too, had perfect freedom to plan her schedule. However, she is the one who sees Dad every week, because she lives in the area, and she told me that the day doesn't matter to Dad at all, who never knows what day it is anyway and will forget whatever you plan. She suggested that I make it easy on myself and go up there during my vacation and simply tell Dad that it was his birthday, but I refused to lie to him. How could I celebrate this thing that hadn't happened yet; what was so bad about celebrating two days later?
There was talk about having a big neighborhood party for him, like they gave Mom when she turned 80, and I was lobbying for that party to be on Saturday. This issue was, for me, a bone of contention, because the sister who planned Mom's 80th birthday simply picked a day for it that was convenient to her and did not consult with any of the others of us about the day. As it so happens, I had already committed to chaperone our school's annual Washington, D.C. trip and that conflicted with the day that my sister chose. So I was the only one NOT at that party. I did not want something like that to happen with Dad, too.
But my sister-in-law told me that there would absolutely not be any big party for Dad, that he did not want it, that he could not handle it, and that the very best thing for Dad would be for each of us to celebrate with him separately. Basically, she said that Dad can stand about an hour of company, and then he needs to go back to sleep. So I thought fine, I will ignore whatever plans THEY are making and scheduled my own visit with Dad on Saturday (driving up Friday after work) and maybe again on Sunday if he felt like it (as this was the three-day Labor Day weekend). I would need Monday, Labor Day, for driving back home again and going to work the next day for the first week of school for the kids.
I told Dad this plan and he loved the idea of it.
But still, I had no idea what I would see when I got up there. I was hoping for some kind of a healing and improvement for him, but I also feared that he would already be dead by the time I got up there. So I was an emotional wreck.
The day before I was going to go up there, I called Annie, Dad's caretaker and told her of my plans and asked if she thought that my idea of seeing him briefly Saturday morning, then letting him sleep, and then coming back that evening to celebrate with dinner, just the two of us, was something he could handle.
She said, "You aren't coming to the party?"
"Party?" I asked. "What party?"
"The big neighborhood party," she said. "Nineteen friends and neighbors are invited, it will be Friday night."
So they did it to me again.
"But what you scheduled," she said, "is perfect. He will love that, and he can handle it. I'm not sure how he will do with the party." She made me feel better, although I was quietly pissed off over the treachery concerning the party. Still, I kept telling myself that it wasn't about ME, it was about DAD. And what I planned was great with Dad. If he remained alive for me to get there.
So, Friday night while I was driving up to Petaluma from Los Angeles (from 4:00 P.M. to midnight), they and 19 friends and neighbors were celebrating Dad's 90th birthday (and not ON his 90th birthday). They JUST couldn't have waited one more day.
They, themselves, had had an interesting week, by the way. Instead of visiting with Dad, my brother and his wife and my sister from Idaho went with my other sister, the one who teaches at the college, to her lake house with her kids and her fiance and had, according to the sister who had flown in from Idaho, "the best time I had ever had in my life." They toured the lake countless times and water-skiied and partied and had a grand old time. This lasted for a couple of days, and then they returned to Dad's house late Thursday evening.
They found Dad crumpled up on the floor where he had fallen. He was calling for Annie to bring him some water and help him up, but Annie had left five hours ago. Nobody knows how long he had been lying there. They managed to get him back in bed, though.
The next morning (Friday), they discovered that Dad was all covered in urine and he was in excrutiating urogenital pain. They called the doctor (who makes house calls), and the doctor's examination revealed that the urine was now leaking out around the catheter that Dad has had to have for more than a year, now, due to his enlarged prostate (and he has prostate cancer).
The doctor asked Dad how long it had been since he changed the catheter, which was supposed to be changed every six weeks. Dad revealed that it hadn't been changed for eight months. He refused to change it, even though Mom had a Medicare nurse come to change hers every six weeks, and the same nurse could have changed Dad's at the same time. But Dad wouldn't allow it, saying that "catheters cost money". Mom told him that he would get a killer infection because of that "cheapness," but she couldn't make him change his mind. He felt fine with it, until, last Friday, he didn't.
But he paid the price for that. The doctor said the catheter was now clearly blocked and either he would have to take it out there at home, or Dad would have to be hospitalized. Dad opted for doing it there.
I don't know all the details of this catheter changing operation, but my brother says it was one of the worst things he had ever had to witness. The catheter was basically "stuck" in there by now, and getting it out was somewhat like extracting a tooth, with probably the same dimension of pain. While I believe that this could have been done privately with just the doctor and Dad (but I wasn't there, so I really don't know), instead Dad had to lie there naked on the bed, watched by two daughters, a daughter-in-law, and one son, while the doctor performed the horrendous task of pulling an infected and severely deformed catheter out of Dad's urethra, and then had to insert a fresh one.
After this was finally done (Dad bled all that day, according to my sister-in-law), the doctor drew blood to send to the lab and declared that Dad now needed Hospice, which is a service provided by Medicare for those who are declared terminal by the physician. Twenty-four hours a day, Hospice will send nurses to the house within five minutes of receiving an emergency phone call. From now on, the ONLY number anybody is to call is the number for Hospice. If Dad needs his doctor, the Hospice nurses will call the doctor. If Dad needs an ambulance, the Hospice nurses will call the ambulance. When Dad dies, the Hospice nurses will call the funeral home to come get the body. What Hospice is for is to make his last days of life comfortable, but Dad had already filled out the paperwork requesting "no heroics", so "comfort" is all he will get.
And Hospice means business, too. It took all day for my brother to get that set up, forms to fill out, interviews to be held, instructions to be followed, and serious medications ordered to be had on hand.
One thing Hospice asked was were there any weapons in the house. Yes, there are, including a loaded gun that Dad has by his bed. They said that they would not come into the house if there was a loaded gun, which does make sense, a delirious terminal patient and a strange nurse appears in the house (they now have a key) that's a likely scenario for a shooting. So they told my brother to remove the bullets, but to not tell Dad. When I got there on Saturday morning, he asked me if I agreed with not telling Dad. I did, because I know that Dad would NOT allow the gun to be unloaded. He refused to unload it even when his grandson, Prescott, found the gun and both my mother and my sister begged him to keep the gun unloaded for Prescott's sake. But Dad was once upon a time a military man and he says it is a waste of time to have on hand a gun that is not loaded. His primary job was to protect his wife (our mother) and if Prescott can't handle leaving alone a loaded gun in the house, then Prescott shouldn't come into the house. (When Dad was younger than Prescott he already had his own gun and knew how to use it safely, so the "Prescott" argument held absolutely no water with him.)
At this point, I don't think Dad can even LIFT the gun, let alone shoot it if it were loaded, so if he needs to believe that it is loaded in order to feel protected, then let him feel that it is loaded. He needs Hospice more than he needs a working firearm.
So far, we have had to tell Dad only two lies, the one about the gun and another one about his van. He asked my brother to make sure that the batteries were charged and that the van was working and driveable. It isn't, it won't even start, but my brother told Dad that it is fixed. There is no way that Dad will ever drive it again. He couldn't even manage to climb up into the driver's seat. But he needs to feel that he's got it available.
Among the medication that Hospice ordered for us to have hidden in the house are pills to calm Dad down if he gets anxious and delirious (that only the Hospice nurses will administer), and a bottle of morphine. The morphine is if he begins to suffer intractable pain, the Hospice nurses will administer an IV of the morphine, which is, actually, enough to kill him. Basically, he would be given an overdose of morphine, which would get rid of the pain and he would die peacefully. So, I can't tell you how weird that is to have on the ready. But the doctor had warned that there was absolutely no hope, that Dad would NOT recover, that he had only minutes to days left to live. (But so far, it has now been five days since he said that.)
The blood test he had taken came back, though. It was a Prostate Specific Antigen Test, which is usually given to determine whether a man is in danger of getting prostate cancer, or maybe already has it. The threshhold reading is somewhere between 2 and 3, with 4 being extremely high. Dad's reading was 500. This astounded his doctor's nurse, who said the absolute highest reading she had ever seen was 20. So basically, Dad at this point is more cancer cell than he is normal cell.
That Friday was a pretty heavy day for Dad--the catheter changing, the signing up with Hospice and getting the "death" medications, and then the party with 19 friends and neighbors. Frankly, I'm glad I missed the party; socializing would have been about the last thing on Earth I would have felt like doing. I don't really know any of those people anyway (my mother's 80th birthday party might have been a good time to have gotten to know them, though). And Dad doesn't remember much about it except to complain about it because he had been so tired and all he wanted to do was sleep.
So in contrast, my own visit with him was pretty sedate and, perhaps, enjoyable enough. He was happy to sit out on the screened porch and drink beer. The weather was wonderfully warm and the view from there is magnificent. All of the houses on that street are million-dollar houses, although I doubt if Dad's house is worth that much (the house now actually belongs to the four of us kids; it was put into our names several years ago). Still, he has the best view on the street, which ought to be worth something.
We've got him pretty mobile, now. Since Dad now tends to fall, we got him using a wheeled walker (that our mother had used about 30 to 40 years ago), which, despite himself, he took to instantly.
Then after we got the electric wheelchair fixed (had to buy new batteries for it), we graduated him to one of Mom's electric wheelchairs. This one was actually a new one bought for her about ten years ago, but she didn't like it, so never used it (she preferred to use an electric scooter). But he drives it (with its joystick) like a race-car driver. The "engineer" still lives in that body.
When Dad is awake, you can talk with him although he no longer exists on any but the most basic level. He seems to exhibit very little emotion and no intellectualism, now. He will vaguely listen to whatever we are talking about and every once in a while will ask us to repeat a word he didn't get. My brother was asking me about health insurance plans and Dad asked me over and over again to repeat the word "co-pay", which no amount of repeating or spelling ever got him to understand, either in word or concept.
One time during our conversation, I asked him if he had any words of wisdom for us, and he just chuckled a little and finally said, "There is nothing. Everything I ever read was just words. When you die, it's over, there is nothing else. It is the end."
I tried to tell him how wonderful he was and what a great life he had lived and how much we appreciated him. I kept thanking him for this thing he had done and that thing he had done. On the birthday card I gave him, I had carefully written a lot of loving stuff, including something along the lines of "some men spent 90 years doing nothing but sitting on the porch getting drunk or playing poker with their friends or watching sports on TV. Other men spent 90 years doing evil and hurting people. But YOU spent 90 years building, fixing, designing, inventing, teaching, nursing, loving", etc. I was trying to say all those things that you don't get to say to those who have the sudden death, but it wasn't getting through. He was more interested in the card itself, which was a silly humorous one showing on the front a "gang" of bald, toothless oldsters on motorcycles wearing leather jackets emblazened with "Old as Hell Angels". It said on the front, "It's twelve miles to the next rest stop, let's roll." Inside, it said something about having a good time, making a pun on the word "Harley", but I forget what the pun was. He studied that aspect of the card and asked me how long it took me to find it, as if I had had in mind THAT specific card and had to look far and wide for it. Actually, it was just something on the rack at the grocery store, it had taken less than five minutes. But all his life, he had loved silly humorous birthday cards. With my pouring my heart out and telling him how wonderful he was, all he could say was, "Well, I hope so." Then he'd ask about a piece of lint or fluff of cat hair that he could see under the chair across from him. "What is that? It looks like a hearing aid that somebody dropped." I'd have to pick it up and show it to him before he would agree that it was just lint.
Eight deer came onto the property and blended almost invisibly into the fawn-colored summer wheatgrass and my sister pointed them out, but Dad could see only seven of them, so all he did the whole time the deer were there was try to find the eighth deer.
More than ever before, Dad is concerned about the tiniest detail and placement of everything. He asked me where the van key was. I told him the keys were "in the green tray" which is where he and Mom kept all their keys. He asked me to show it to him, so I went and got it and showed it to him. "Yes, that is the van key," he agreed. "Where was it?"
"In the green tray," I answered (speaking as generically as I was specifically).
"No," he said, "that's not where it is supposed to be."
"Okay," I said, "it was actually one inch outside of but NEXT to the green tray [as if it had spilled out], sitting on the table."
"That's where it is supposed to be," he said, "so I can find it. I can't find it in the green tray."
The two cats remaining alive now get to sleep with him in his bed (Mom wouldn't allow them in the bedroom at night), but they HAVE to sleep in a certain place on the bed and ONLY there. The white cat is supposed to sleep on the pillow above his head, and the black cat is supposed to sleep to the right of his head. One night while I was there, the black cat started to lie down where the white cat is supposed to sleep, and he picked her up and angrily shouted at her and it looked like he was going to throw her across the room (which is NOT like him at all), but he relented and put her back down, and she settled into the exact spot she was supposed to inhabit.
My sister says that if someone puts something down in the wrong spot, he will never be able to find it again, so that is why he is being so specific.
Annie, the woman my mother hired to take care of him really loves him, and although I am glad she cares, I am surprised, because he is not who he was or anything like it. I almost said to her "I WISH you knew him the way he was," but then I realized that it was better this way. What does it matter to her what he was like before, her involvement is with him the way he is now. Anyway, she is used to dying people (it's her job) and loving them THIS way is where her compassion lies.
Dad is now very small, by the way, weighing 110 pounds and has a yellowish cast to his skin. His arms are just tiny bones with pale white skin wrapped around them. He looks like a mummy or perhaps a shrunken head from the Amazon rain forest. There is something weird going on with his mouth that makes him almost unrecognizable. He also strikes me as being like one of those dolls that when you lie them down, their eyes close, but when you sit them up, their eyes open. With him, it's not the eyelids opening and closing, but a light within his eyes that flashes on or off.
My sister who lives in Idaho (who left the Saturday I got there) had a terrible good-bye with him. She had to say that she knew this was the last time they would ever see each other and so they hugged each other and cried.
I just couldn't do that, and my not being able to do that kept me there all the way up to Monday morning, even though I really wanted to leave on Sunday. However, when the time came, I figured out what to say. He was back in bed after breakfast, getting ready to go to sleep. When I walked into the bedroom to tell him that I was leaving, even though his eyes were open, he was in "eyes closed" mode. I said, "I'm leaving now, and I'm not sure when the next time will be when I will get to see you, but I am looking forward to it." As far as I was concerned, that next time could be in Heaven...but I wasn't closing off any possibility. His eyes (like the doll's) "flashed open" and suddenly he was light-filled. This was the perfect leave-taking, so I bent down and hugged and kissed him and it was good.
The drive home was pretty miserable. I thought I was more or less "healed" of my mother's death, but all this brings it back up. It is like we have to grieve three entities, our mother, our father, and our mother and father as a unit. And I was grieving them all on the way back home.
Sooner or later, Hospice will have to be called for that last phone call and the call will probably be made by Annie. She sure won't like it. She was already crying bitterly when she was told about him falling and lying crumpled on the floor calling her for water. She told my brother's wife that she didn't realize she was so attached to him until that moment. Dad is still very sweet (in a sort of flat way, but you can still see the traces of it) and a little of his humor shines through. He touches everybody though. One of the nights I wasn't there, they had ordered Chinese food to be delivered and the delivery man cried about Dad. His only contact was delivering this food every once in a while, spending no more than ten or fifteen minutes in Dad's presence each time. And yet, it was enough to be touched by him.
Mom said Dad's equal-opportunity friendliness drove her crazy whenever somebody came to the front door. She would be stuck in bed, dying to know who was here, but she couldn't tell by the way Dad talked to them. "He sounds the same whether it is one of you kids, a neighbor, the mailman, the UPS man, the Chinese food delivery man, a salesman, or any of the cats."
Any one of us visiting can go to the grocery store and buy food with one of his checks. All the checkers know him by name. They, too, will miss him and, well, must already, as he no longer leaves the house.
Unlike my mother, it will not be a relief when he dies, because unlike her, he is not really in any pain and he hasn't suffered half a lifetime of disability. He is just old, VERY old, and yes, he has cancer, and yes it has spread (relatively recently), yes, he is no longer really here, but all of this is still new to us. It doesn't really make sense to our hearts. So the phone ringing kills me. If any of us call each other, we have to quickly start out the conversation by saying "Dad is still alive" so that everybody can breathe a sigh of relief and calm down for the moment. I wouldn't wish this on anybody, except for perhaps the demonic woman who keeps calling my cell phone about 20 times a day and has been doing so for months, now. She has an "unknown" number and doesn't speak English. I have told her over and over again "You have the wrong number" but that doesn't stop her. I will tell her she has the wrong number and she will call me immediately after I hang up, and then seven more times immediately after that. These calls have been extremely painful this week, so finally I screamed at her, "YOU FUCKING BITCH, YOU HAVE THE WRONG NUMBER, YOU HAVE THE WRONG NUMBER, YOU HAVE THE WRONG NUMBER, STOP CALLING ME, STOP CALLING, STOP, STOP STOP!" If this freak didn't understand my words, she surely understood my tone. But, even after my shouting, she called me immediately after and since then, I've received about 20 more calls. She is making me hate my phone's ringtone. I told a friend of mine at work that if I had some kind of device that would burst out her eardrums, I would use it. Frankly, I don't care if this woman dies, or how it happens. The friend told me to loudly blow a WHISTLE into the phone the next time she calls. BRILLIANT IDEA! I have the whistle that I use for lunch duty and that just might HURT. It is so loud! So next time that bitch calls (it's all just pure harrassment from an extremely simple-minded and evil person, there is no other reason), she's really going to get it. That won't help the situation with my father, but at least I won't jump out of my skin every time I hear the Pink Panther Theme (my cell phone's ringtone).
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