2007-01-23 - 11:20 p.m.

Yesterday I had what I afterwards found out was supposed to be my last conversation with my father. It wasn�t really a conversation, though.

At lunchtime, I got a call at work from my brother�s wife who suggested that now might be a good time to call my father, if I wanted. She said that Dad goes in and out of lucidity, but he is best in the afternoons. She reports from my brother, who is there taking care of my father, that Dad has all but stopped eating. He will sometimes take a spoonful of something if it is fed to him, but he really isn�t very interested. He�s not drinking much water, either, a small sip here and there. Essentially, he can�t really manage to make his needs known through speaking anymore. What he says that can be understood at all either makes no sense (things like �I wonder why I got more rivets�) or it is obvious that he is speaking to nobody that is actually present. Otherwise, it is just meaningless sounds, moans, and groans. It was the meaningless sounds that I got when I called him and I couldn�t really be sure that he had the slightest idea who it was who was talking to him, or even that he understood that he was on the phone. I tried my best to sound cheerful and loving, although I found it was nearly impossible to talk to somebody on the phone who gives no indication of hearing or understanding you. The only other time I had a phone conversation like that was talking to a friend who was dying of AIDS. Most AIDS deaths were pneumonia or kaposi�s sarcoma; a way distant third were cases in which the brain was affected into a dementia. This friend I tried to talk to on the phone had the dementia, and Dad sounded just like him.

To Dad, I said stupid things like, �I haven�t spoken to you in a while, but wanted to tell you I love you.� A weak babbling of gibberish from him followed. �We had snow the other day, if you can believe that; it hadn�t snowed down here for over twenty years!� More babbling and some groaning. �Well, the snow didn�t actually stay on the ground, but it could be seen covering the tops of cars.� Long, deep moaning. �Well, I just wanted to tell you that I love you. I am going to hang up now. ... Good-bye.� Then I silently put the phone down. I wondered how long it would take for somebody to hang up the phone. I wanted to call back and talk to my brother, but the phone was off the hook for ten minutes.

When I got my brother, he said that the doctor and a hospice nurse had now arrived, but he was glad that Dad had a chance to hear me. He�d call me back after the doctor left. I was sure that that next phone call would be the one in which he told me that Dad had finally died. I figured the doctor and nurse were there to administer that final IV of morphine.

Since it was lunchtime, I brought my cellphone downstairs with me. I almost always eat lunch in the office of my friend Patty, whose father died last year in the car in the driveway of the nursing home that they were taking him to, the nursing home that her father adamantly refused to go to. Boy, that man really meant it! He used to tell them, �Over my dead body!� Dad never wanted to go to a nursing home, either.

While we were eating, my phone rang and I could read my parents� name on the caller ID, so I knew it was my brother calling from there. Patty looked at me like she was going to cry (or expected me to), and I suddenly felt sorry that I was subjecting her to this, although I didn�t feel I would cry or even have much more emotion than I would if I were being given the traffic report. After all, we�ve been living with Dad�s dying ever since his 90th bithday on the last day of August, and all Christmas was for the family was checking on him every ten minutes to see if he had died, yet. Many times during that holiday we thought that he had. He would fall asleep slumped over anywhere--on the seat of his walker, sitting in the breakfast nook (that and his bed were his two chosen hang-outs), on the toilet, in the middle of feeding the cats or fixing himself a drink. So, he was sure doing a lot of sleeping, anywhere and everywhere, and that, alone, was disconcerting, but he was staying alive. However, we all agreed that dying was inevitable and the best thing all around, despite the fact that none of us WANTED it, and all were afraid to actually witness it. We would have a little mini-heart attack every time we�d catch him slumped over in some awkward position, and then we�d breathe a sigh of relieve when he would suddenly wake up and start talking again.

It made me wonder if Dad was holding on because we weren�t letting go. One time he adamantly said to us, very sharply and angrily, �I AM NOT GOING TO GET BETTER YOU KNOW, AND I DON�T WANT TO.� And he wouldn�t really cooperate in his care. He stopped taking all pills except his pain pills, and even those he fought you over, and basically he wasn�t taking them properly enough for them to do any good. He didn�t want any medical care at all, and was, in fact extremely suspicious of and combative with the visiting hospice nurses. Also, it looked to everybody that he needed 24/7 care, not just the four-hours-per-weekday care he was getting, which was all he would accept. It was actually embarrasing to me when neighbors or nurses came by, because it looked like we weren�t giving him what he needed, but we would give him anything he needed if he wanted it. But we weren�t going to violate his wishes if we could help it.

We had some concern when his care-giver took a two-week vacation during the holidays, but she was human, after all, with a family of her own. Various of us family members were there over the holidays, anyway, so Dad wasn�t alone until near the end of Christmas week. We had watched him carefully all throughout the holiday and it seemed that despite his falling asleep any and everywhere, he was otherwise able to function at at least a minimum but acceptable level. It seemed that really he ought to be okay if we set up a schedule of somebody coming in to check on him each day of the remaining days until the care-giver returned on Tuesday after New Years Day. So a sister would come see him on Thursday, a good neighbor on Friday, a hospice nurse on Saturday, a sister again on Sunday, a friend of Dad�s on Monday, and then the care-giver would be back on schedule on Tuesday.

However, how it worked out was that each and every time somebody went over there to check on him, they�d find him collapsed on the floor, such as face-down in the breakfast nook or behind the couch or any other peculiar place and position. And only once in all those times did he remember to call for help by pressing the emergency button that he wore on a bracelet on his wrist.

People were assuming that he was FALLING, and he might have been, but I think that instead he was just falling asleep and ending up on the floor. But, either way, it was clear that he no longer COULD be left alone.

Instead of us hiring more care-givers, my brother volunteered to move in there to take care of Dad. My brother is trying to transition out of the business he is doing into a new one he wants to start, and said that he could work on that planning just as well in Dad�s house. But he could only devote two months to being away from home like this. I told him that I couldn�t imagine that it would take two months (but already half that time has been used up already and Dad is still alive), but if it went beyond that, then for sure Dad would have to go into a nursing home whether he wanted it or not.

After my brother had been there a couple of weeks, I called him to see how it was going, and, remembering back to my frequent one-on-one visits with Dad every month since August, I said, �Well, I hope you are at least having an enjoyable time with Dad, just the two of you.� But he said all he is doing is wiping his butt and injecting 3ml of morphine under Dad�s tongue (as instructed by hospice) when Dad is in too much pain; otherwise, Dad just sleeps while my brother listens to his breathing on a monitor while he works in one of the bedrooms. �It�s so wierd,� my brother explained, �all the time it sounds like his breathing has stopped, and I would wait a while, get worried, and finally put my ear up close to the monitor speaker, and then I�d hear the breathing again and think, thank God, he�s still alive--while at the same time, knowing it would be better for him to die.�

�But Dad,� I say, �she COMES TO THE HOUSE.�

�I don�t care,� Dad would shout back, �my barber only charges $10.00 and even that is too much for a haircut.�

�How are you going to get there to him?� I�d say.

�I�ll drive there, of course,� explains Dad belligerently, �I can damn well still drive, you know.�

So of course, his hair isn�t getting cut. No matter, he doesn�t shave or shower anymore, either.

But I saw this tired, shrunken, exhausted form so sadly and forlornly asleep there, as helpless and innocent as a baby--in fact, his mind is at the level of a three or two year old now and his disentombed-Egyptian-mummy-looking body somehow looks child-like now, too--and my heart just broke completely. I almost felt like vomiting. Okay, I get it, I thought to myself. He really does need to die. Let him go and let�s get this show on the road.

After my completely lame phone call to Dad, and then when my brother did call me back after the doctor left, my brother told me that the hospice nurse estimates that Dad will be dead in no longer than a week but that there is no point in any of us travelling up there to see him. Dad now no longer knows who we are and nothing would be gained by such a visit other than meaningless heartache for us. But she suggested that we might make that final phone call, if we wanted, for closure. �Did you know that�s what it was?� my brother asked me, but I said �No,� his wife hadn�t explained that when she called me. But I figured it out DURING the phone call. I wasn�t really talking to anybody who understood me, and anything I had ever wanted to say, I had already been saying to him during all these past months.

Talking to my lunch friend Patty today, I said I wonder if I had known that that was my final phone call and if I had prepared myself for it, if I could have done something more, such as given him some kind of �Buddhist Book of the Dead� whispered in the ear instructions as to how to find his way into the next world, or do the aural equivalent of what Jungian psychologist and story-teller Clarissa Pinkola Estes referred to as �tapping them on their crown chakra and saying �here is the doorway out, you can go now where they are all waiting for you��, but I guess I wouldn�t have been able to bring myself to actually do something like that and I don�t know where the doorway is, anyway. After Dad�s exemplary mastery of life, I think he�s in better shape to find that doorway than I am, so I�ll just have to let him work his own way through that labyrinth and maybe Mom (or somebody) is reaching down for him from the other side with magnetic fingers of light.

So I�m not really heavily emotional about what is soon to come after seemingly so long; I am more worried about my brother who will be right there when it happens (although it might be Dad�s care-giver who actually makes the final discovery). I said I�d go up there to be with HIM, but he says he will be okay. He has his wife whom he can get on the phone at any moment and so he is just doing what needs to be done, like a coroner or an undertaker, performing a necessary task without much debilitating emotion. But when it actually does happen, who knows how he will feel. Or how I will.

That evening as I was driving home, I had forgotten to watch my car�s digital odometer, which was only a few miles away from 100,000 miles, something I obviously wanted to catch as it turned over. I had wanted to see that 99999 and then the movement to the next number. I didn�t know if it would start over at 1, i.e.,show �00001�, or would it somehow add another digit.

Well, I missed the 99999, but something made me look just as the �100000� appeared, and that was exactly how it looked, too, a seemingly GIGANTIC row of numbers about two-inches wide. Huge, as huge as the car itself. Like 100000 is where it BELONGED to be, what it was made for. That ended up the better way to see it, because instead of watching the transformation, what I saw was the greater new dimension that suddenly appeared, and it was WONDERFUL! Instead of being way too old, now, it now seemed like the car was VENERABLE! And I am so glad that the digits will continue on counting upward instead of starting over back at a small beginning. Instead, it is starting over at a BIGGER beginning.

And that must be how I will experience Dad�s death. Not the worn out end of a lifetime, like a car that should be junked and crushed up into a scrap metal block (which I have no intention of doing to my car that isn�t anywhere near ready for that anyway), but the beginning of a much more exalted one.

Venerable. My car at 100000 miles in bright green numbers glowing two inches wide. My father on the other side of the doorway, back home in the realm of light, exalted.

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