my father is dying

Deathbeds and Live Blogging


Four in the morning and it’s probably the most peaceful the house has been in days. I haven’t had much sleep in the last few days. Since Thursday it’s felt like time is standing still at a hurtling pace and though that makes no sense at all, it is what the last days and hours are like. Periods of total normal puncuated by long moments that seem as though one has lived them already. Deja vu stalks me because  of me – because of Will – and yet not. There are cystalline moments that belong just to this experience and just to Dad. 

I am the only one awake right now which is not surprising since I was the first one to go to bed last night. Driven by the noise of all things. Between the constant hiss and rattle of the oyzgen machine and the need to flee my younger brother’s anger, my sister’s grief and my mother’s helpless resignation.

There was not so much noise when Will died. I outlasted it until it was simply he and I.

Yesterday tried my patience with my youngest siblings. BabySis is too simple-minded to process what she sees and her mental defects are jarring in the harsh light Dad’s dying has thrown on them. She has been so annoying over the last twenty-five years that I was able to skip over the fact that she is borderline mentally disabled. Functional but vulnerable. And I want to be able to feel some for her but I just want to put distance between us. I am tired of her neediness and for once happy that LawnMower Man came back into her life because he seems genuinely concerned and protective of her. 

I haven’t seen LawnMower Man in over twenty years. Not since right before he knocked her up and then split for the West Coast. He is a tiny man. Skin so tight that he looks plastic. HIs clothes seemed painted on. He had Ken doll hair. Molded to his head and lips that seem stretched too tight.

“He looks like an old lesbian,” I told Rob who didn’t disagree and probably shouldn’t have laughed but his own siblings look like trailer park inhabitants too, so he knows exactly what I mean.

And then there is CB. He was drunk most of Friday to varying degrees. There is irony. He more than any of us suffered most from Dad’s drinking and hated its effects on the family unit, yet there he was at 3:30 in the morning, hammered, sitting watch. 

“He is very vulnerable,” Mom kept telling us.

And he is but I don’t care right now. Perhaps I will again at some point this week, but last night I gave in to my body’s need to sleep to get away from the rage that radiates off him.

Whatever lie I have to tell him to get him back on a plane for Tahoe will be told. He isn’t staying here with my mom. 

DNOS is alternates between in charge and distraught. She wishes us gone as much as she wished us here. She doesn’t like having to share her dad with the rest of us in his final hours. 

At one point last evening, when Dad was caught in a cycle of coughing, trying to swim free of the mucous that is swamping his lungs, she ordered us all out of the room. 

“It’s been just the three of us all along and it should end with just the three of us,” she said through the tears.

I forced CB, BabySis and Nephew out of the room. I silenced their indignation with the force of my will – which is considerable – and allowed DNOS, Mom and Dad to be alone. I remember clearly my own mute frustration at the end of Will’s last weekend when all the family and friends, who’d basically forgotten about him and us, came scurrying to the hospice. Despite the fact that it had been just he, BabyD and I for nearly three years, they laid claims based on longevity that had nothing to do with love as I know it. So I cleared the room for my sister and kept it cleared the rest of the night.

He’s still alive. Gurgling and surprisingly warm. I laid my hand on his chest and felt the heart pumping too hard. Death rattling in his chest and throat. How many times did I listen to someone in their last hours as I walked the hallway to Will’s hospice room? Even BabyD could recognize the sound by the end of his long stay.

“That person is going to die tonight, right Mom?” she would say as we walked past and heard the wet breath.

I wish Dad would just die. I wished the same thing about Will at that time nearly three years ago now. There comes a time when it is past time.

Getting into the Spirit of Dying


I spent a bit of the morning Friday placating DNOS and our mother. It seems that the first official visit from the hospice nurse was not a rousing success. Mainly because Dad refuses to die peacefully and without being irritating.

Oh, did that sound cold? Here’s something colder yet then, as I listened to first my sister and then my mom describe the nurse’s visit and the ensuing argument it caused between my folks, so much so that when the nurse left DNOS lectured them on decorum, I realized for the first time really just how incredibly annoying and oblivious to the world I had been myself back in the care-giving and early widowhood days.

At one point as I reassured Mom for the tenth time in as many minutes that she was indeed relevant and important, I wondered if I had sounded that shrill and peevish and if people were rolling their eyes at me as I poured out my frustration over the phone to them.

Well okay, not eye rolling, but certainly more than one person had to have wondered if I would ever be a sane member of society again.

From this distance I can see all sides to the slow disintegration that is taking place. Mom is feeling overlooked as caregivers often do. She has needs as real as Dad’s and she thinks no one cares. Dad is feeling pushed to the grave, which is absolutely not what is happening, but I can see where his resistance is coming from. A couple of weeks ago he was dying someday and now he is dying sometime really soon. It is an adjustment and he feels the loss of autonomy more keenly than he has since he was banned from driving last spring. This is his passing and he is going to give the orders. He isn’t thinking about Mom too much right now and she is hurt by this. DNOS then is in the uncomfortable position of mediating their struggles.

My parents have never been stellar communicators. Fifty-two years has brought them great insight into each other but no great wisdom as to what to do with the information beyond tormenting each other. My sister would rather be peeled like a grape than involve herself in confrontation. Her modus operandi is too simply tell the parental units what they will be doing.

“And you are going to back me up,” she ordered as we spoke, “don’t you tell either one of them anything different.”

Four times I assured her that I was in total agreement. I don’t think she  heard me anymore than Mom did when I spoke with her later.

God, I must have been just the most awful person to run into back in the day old days. If I was even a tenth as deaf or petulant, I can imagine that my number was constantly being screened on phones everywhere.

And I know this is all just a phase. Eventually a person comes back.

Dad is probably the most even keeled of the three. He is driving DNOS crazy with his impromptu dictations of funeral arrangements. So far he has had her write out a list of personal items to be given to certain people, informed her that he would not have individuals eulogizing him at his service nor did he want any sort of digital picture display. DNOS has had to take down the pallbearer list, not the funeral home that Dad prefers above all others and be told that picking out the casket was her job.

Last evening she got to take the two of them to the wake of my Uncle Erv’s wife who passed away last weekend. I don’t like my uncle at all. He was a sharp tongued guy with no inner censor who looked me up and down when I was about fourteen and told me,

“I can’t believe how fat you are.”

Still, I felt badly for him when Mom mentioned how incredibly lost he was when she and my Dear Auntie visited him the day after his wife died. She had taken care of all the details in their life. He couldn’t even find their checkbook. They were married for sixty some years.

When I mentioned that I was surprised that she was driving them to the wake, I got,

“Well who else is going to do it?” rather peevishly.

I had actually suggested to Mom that they skip the wake and just go on Saturday with Dear Auntie, but wakes are huge social events. There was no way that either of my parents would miss an opportunity to mingle.

The only good news that came out of the phone at me today was that Dad was stable. The fluid is building but slowly, so there is no need for me to fly down right now. I can’t say that this disappoints me at all, but DNOS is clearly desperate for me to come, judging from her tone, though Mom knows perfectly well that my arrival is not going to let her off the hook as far as caregiving. I won’t do that again for her.*

Rage against the dying of the light, isn’t it? We have that done, I think.

*About six weeks after Will died, Dad had some surgery. He had a growth in his rectum and they thought it might be cancer – it wasn’t – but I was required to come as it was my spring break. Never-mind that I had a thesis due on the 1st of May and comps to write. There were complications and Dad ended up in ICU (ironically right next door to his brother’s dying wife – fun times) and I was the one doing hospital duty while Mom worked and DNOS went about her life. It was unfair of them to stick that on me. It will not happen again.

No More Hump Day Hmming for a While


The muse of hmming, Julie, is recovering and regrouping after Ike and so it may be some time before I inflict introduce another Hump Day Hmm for consideration. However, it has been a day or two since I put up a fresh blog piece and my life has not been that static, so I have decided to provide a bit of an update.

I am still working on the short story known as Kumari. It has garnered 4 reviews on the critiquing site and although not a single one of them had any idea what the story was really about (my bad totally, I know, and I am working on clarification), I did get some advice that was useful and have employed it to the betterment of the story.

The main complaint I received about Kumari is that the character isn’t likable. Not even a little bit. And hurray! That is what I wanted them to think but apparently the main character has to be likable or at least redeemable in order for the reader to want to read at all. I discussed it with my writing group last night and was reminded that I am the author and I need to stay true to my character. She is not likable but how could she be? She was raised to be indifferent and callous. Further, the point of the story is to do more than entertain but to make a reader think.

Thinking is asking a lot of readers these days. We are a society that expects to be entertained as passively as possible. No deep thoughts allowed. But I don’t think that sci-fi/fantasy should be mindless. It is a genre that was meant to allow authors to explore bigger issues and moral questions. 

So I am focusing on clarifying and beefing up existing content and we’ll see what happens next. One reviewer thought there was potential for a very dark story. Perhaps this is my Apex submission after all, eh?

Speaking of Apex, they are having their annual Halloween flash fiction contest and I am entering. The theme is “election horror” and I have a nice little piece that I tried out on the writing group last night which they liked. Of course, they are Canadians and it isn’t hard for anyone native to here to imagine the U.S. as a den of evil and conspiracy.

I have also been occupied with monitoring the condition of the family down south these last two weeks. And if we had a color code system we would be orange-ish.

CB had another mini-meltdown and I spent numerous hours on the phone trying to talk him off the paranoia ledges he sometimes talks himself up onto. He apparently spent a few days harassing our folks to the point that Dad had a breathing episode and Mom was in tears. I think I may have put a spot to that for the time being.

DNOS has informed me that when Dad dies, CB and Mom are my responsibility. She will handle the arrangements and BabySis. In other words she will take the easy stuff and I will be left to deal with crazy and exploding. It’s a good thing I used to teach public school. That was a typical day for me once.

That was a while ago and Dad has failed quite a bit even since we last saw him in June. He can barely exert himself physically without bringing on severe shortness of breath due to the demands movement place on his body. 

And I can hear the disinterest in life now in his voice. He told DNOS recently that he is “tired of making decisions”. 

My Dad, the ultimate Virgo, is tired of being the boss? That is so not good.

Rob has asked if I need to go down there now. I am playing a wait and see on a daily basis. If you had asked me even last year if I wanted to be there for the end, I would have said no – thank you  – but no. Deathbed vigils are hellish in an out of body experience way. The days or weeks leading up are torture because it seems like every fiber of your being is on red alert with sirens blaring.

But now, I feel a bit differently. Mom and DNOS are ostriches. They will not see or ask or do unless someone points it out to them. The truth is that I am the only one in my family who morphs into Action Girl when it is crunch time. I was born with the crisis management gene. I might fall apart but not in the middle and not when it counts. I always come through when it counts.

Now here is the kicker, the evil selfish daughter in me doesn’t want to put my life on hold to go down. I have things falling into routine now. I am starting my first writing course at University in two weeks. I just got elected to the board of directors of one of my writing groups. I am auditioning for another contributing writer gig at a women’s group blog I read. I have a couple of firm writing deadlines coming up – one for a workshop with real publishers who are reading and giving mini-interviews and critiques.

It’s not a convenient time for my Dad to decide to die in other words.

I am such an awful person for even thinking it, let alone writing it down. But my Dad would get it. When he was traveling back and forth from Des Moines every week to help me take care of my late husband, he confided to me that he would help as long as he was needed but he felt he was missing out on his life and the things that were important to him as a person. Not dad or a father in law. A person.

I talked with Dad this morning. It was the kind of distracted conversation I used to have with my late husband when the dementia was starting to set in for real. The voice was weak and breathy and gurgled with phlegm. My late husband finally succumbed to pneumonia. There are more painful ways to die but suffocating has to be one of the most terrifying and I am speaking from my experience watching my late husband and from my own dealings with asthma.

Once you’ve watched someone die, you can’t undo it. Erase the images. Ignore the truth. Pretend that it isn’t coming and there are things that need to be done in advance.

I took a long walk today. About 4 miles down and back from J-berg to the gymkana fields. No one was burning trash or leaves today and I didn’t encounter dogs. I have come to the sad conclusion that I can no longer run. Having just recovered from a painful bout of achilles tendonitis in both ankles, I just can’t risk damage. Power walking with the occasional jog and yoga it is. I don’t experience the same sense of freedom though and I will miss that.

And that’s all folks.