I remember the fall of 2003 so clearly, the new hope with which we started September, in Cook Forest all together, my dad so much healthier than he had been the year before. There was no indication of any kind that the weeks ahead would be so difficult, would involve that permanent letting go. Our last day at the cabin Dad and I fought, as we had been so prone to that year. Our falling out in February left me feeling angry and undervalued, and for a long time, it was as though he and I could agree on nothing. It was a stupid fight, in retrospect, mostly about being right no matter what about. He wanted a price list for the cabins and I said it wasn't necessary that I had one, but he wanted his own and I just snapped-- let him have it that I was the one making the decisions now, paying the bills, doing all of the sacrificing. I suspect when it was over Dad was much more hurt than he let on, but in the end he conceded and said nothing. My life was so frantic then-- the four kids, a rocky marriage, all of the care my parents already seemed to require, and me only twenty eight years old. My siblings had long ago left me stranded with our father, to care for him in the long late months of 2002,when he was ill enough to make us all think we were losing him already. I had no idea that it was to be our last trip to the Forest together, our last trip anywhere together as a matter of fact. I had always suspected that I would lose my father before I turned thirty, it was a matter I had settled with myself when I was only thirteen and he had his first heart attack. I understood that there would be parts of my life and myself that my father would never get the chance to know—I knew even then that my adulthood would have to come mostly without his support and advice. That said, my anger had clouded my thinking and I grew complacent with the idea that I had time to make it up, to let go of our differences and move past the anger between us and have things healed again before we lost each other for good. I did not know as much as I thought I did.
Back to Pittsburgh after Labor Day, Dad and I resumed the tenuous truce we had been living day to day. We cooked and cleaned together, played with the kids, loved them with the same sense of urgency, but remained disconnected from each other. During my long days at work I would muddle over the problem, wondering how and when we could resolve it, get back to the closeness we had always had and forget about the troubles between us.
I remember the last long months of 2003, the way days ran into nights and then finally weeks and months as I slowly watched my father slip away from us. When I consider that time I recall most of my days being filled with the business of caring for him, though I know in reality that I did many other things as well. I worked full-time at my job as a retail buyer, I mothered after four children aged 6 months to fifteen years. November alone brought with it pneumonia, chicken pox, two fractured knuckles and an inconvenient head lice infestation. I admonished my mother to take better care of herself, took over all of the household accounts, refinanced my mother's home and managed the inevitable schedule of home health care, sports practices, girl scout meetings and pediatrician appointments. I cooked and cleaned and listened nightly for long hours as my Dad fought again the battles of world war II through his intermittent delirium. I am certain there were places in which my care taking was unusually threadbare-- days the kids went to school uncombed and wrinkled, classroom treats bought last minute on the way to the bus stop, days when my own hair went unwashed as I rushed absently from one necessary to the next. For the most part, though, things got done, and well enough that the rest of the world rushing by on its way to some seemingly inconsequential place, had no reason to take notice of my slips.
Just as certainly, there were days when the world could not help but notice that my life was rapidly spinning out of my own control, my temper running high and quick with impatience whenever I had to deal with the less urgent needs of the outside world. I could be counted on at work for a fair amount of ranting, "unacceptable" outbursts at customers who had no way of knowing that their biggest fault was in not understanding that while they operated on the time of the rest of the world, my own life seemed to be ending just two miles away in a bedroom under my mother's watchful eye, during my hours at work. I was loath to leave him at all during those last three weeks, the anxiety unbearable during the hours I was away. My greatest fear was always not being there at that last moment, that I would spend his precious last seconds on earth waiting on some inconsiderate moron in a children's clothing store while the most important man in my life drifted away for good. As sometimes happens though, the world worked in my favor, allowing me the peace of being there with him at the very end. After nearly twelve weeks of unbearable vigil, he spoke his last words to my mother and I on a Friday night, slipping almost immediately afterward into the coma from which he would never recover, languishing through the day on Saturday until early in the evening when slipped away peacefully on a cloud of liquid morphine, lying in my arms with my mother's head resting on his chest as it slowed to motionless.
So for those weeks, Almost three months in total, I learned the skills. I wrapped my writer's brain around the details necessary to bathe my father in his bed, to squeeze hours of needed sleep into just minutes—thirty or forty five. I, who had never professed to care for the chores of domesticity, cooked three meals a day and other things in between because my own helplessness was simply unbearable. I bargained daily with a God that I don't believe in (and didn't then) to spare myself and my kids from the loss of the one person our world seemed to revolve around. I promised to be and do better, to no longer complain about long hours and unappreciated work, to work harder at my already failing marriage. I promised to forgive him, my Dad I mean, for the few ways he had failed me, and the time I had wasted agonizing over the meaning of those failures. All the while I watched my siblings, four of the five anyway, come and go so infrequently, stopping by only when we called to emphasize that this heart attack was one he was not likely to recover from. They would drop in in large groups-- three or more at a time, with the grandchildren and their significant others in tow, as though there were some safety in numbers that would protect them from his dying. Visits stayed short, a few hours one or two evenings with my mother and I scrambling to fill the other twenty two hours each day with things to make his days worth waking for. I often wonder what they thought during those visits, and perhaps more importantly on the ride home afterward. Did they console themselves with platitudes about how good he looked, how many, many times he had defied the odds in the past fifteen years? I don't know. I only know that as we watched him each day, my little family, my mother and I, there was no denying that this time was different—that the end was lurking somewhere nearby.
I remember so clearly the anger. I was angry at everyone in those days. Strangers who moved through their lives so unknowingly, unaware of the ways in which my life was falling apart. My siblings, the five of them wrapped so carefully in their blankets of denial, so certain that Dad would always pull through, never really be lost to us. I was even angry at my mother, who labored beside me each day to care for Dad. Together we bathed and turned and fed him, kept careful watch over his oxygen, his fluid intake, the medications that kept him comfortable and not afraid—gasping for air as his cells begged for the oxygen his heart simply could not provide any longer. Still, she got her share of my anger as well, though certainly not a reasonable portion. I was angry at her for marrying a man so many years her senior, for giving me this wonderful father, when it seemed I had been doomed from the start to lose him years before I was ready. So truth be told I was angry at everyone, myself not least of all.
Throughout the month of October especially, I had hours to spend considering things. I thought about the ways in which I may have disappointed my Dad, the many ways in which I may have fallen short over my twenty seven years as his daughter. During the long night hours I spent by his side, watching his chest rise and fall with each breath I had time to consider all of the decisions I had made as an adult, my children, my marriage, the one man my father often held out as being the one I should have waited for. I thought of all of those things and so many others, turning them over and over again in my mind as I wondered too about my father's regrets—seventy eight years worth. When I had free hours and they were few, I spent them pouring over photographs dating back to my own childhood and that of my father, right up through the ones I was still taking so avidly, trying to not let a second slip by undocumented. I sought comfort in those pictures that there might be some slim shard of him left when everything was over. It is only now that I have realized how very inadequate a substitute those photos have been despite the great comfort they provide me on the days when I am unable to see his face quite clearly in my mind's eye. Those are days that come more frequently as the time between dad and I yawns wider with each passing year.
2003 was a year of loss for all of those close to me. My nieces lost two fathers, one to sudden medical emergency, one to suicide, my mother's closest friend lost her mother and her confidante to murder one Thursday early in May. My own dad drifted away slowly that fall following his worst and final heart attack. And then the following summer brought the passing of my Mom's oldest sister to lung cancer. As a family, that year, we just gave and gave and gave of ourselves and our loved ones until their was nearly nothing left to hold onto.
So here it is another new year begun, I have spent a few years wallowing in it all, one ignoring it completely, and this will be the second that I have tried to find my own way again. I want to rebuild what I have lost into something new and satisfying, something that doesn't leave me feeling achy and wistful. There must be some way to throw myself back into life again. If I have ever had any chance at finding it, I think that this will be the year. My life is full of wonderful things this year-- this brilliant man I am in love with, new time to spend with the kids and my own space at long last. . I want to worry less about money and loss and soak in the all the progress these last six months have brought. That said, I am still wistful, still wanting one last holiday season with my Dad, and yet knowing that one more would never be enough. I just wish there was some way he could see how things are finally turning out, the love I finally have in my life and how very happy it makes me.
