Watching someone die is like giving birth. One of those profound, overwhelming, life-changing experiences that is also absolutely ordinary. Everyone is born, everyone dies. Everyone has lost someone they love.
My dad died a month and two days ago, on October 3. I've learned: death dates are like birth dates. Just like with new babies, you constantly keep track. The baby is a week old. Ten days old. Three weeks old. A month. Four and a half months, 18 months, 26 months. At some point, you begin to feel foolish. You change your unit of measure from hours to days, from days to weeks, from weeks to months, and finally, from months to years. And while you might forget your own age, you never forget your child's.
So, it's been a month and two days. On Saturday, it was four weeks. On Tuesday, one month exactly. My dad has missed three Michigan games, one Halloween (Sam's first without a costume), the pleasure of comparing this November (sunny, highs in the 70s) with last (frigid at 15 degrees, with a warm winter coat shortage at the mall). Buddy's lame knee, and the decision about a new furnace. He missed some important family events, too, like his memorial service, and the spreading of his ashes. We kept waiting for him to come in off the deck, or out of the bathroom, or in from the garage.
But of course, that's ridiculous. People don't attend their own funerals.
Death stories are like birth stories. I remember the first time I was pregnant, mothers were constantly accosting me with their stories. Not having been through it myself, I found the stories - waters breaking in strange places, pushing in taxicabs, home births gone awry, anesthesia plans out the window, Lamaze forgotten - bleak and disturbing, like movies rated R for violence and language. After I went through it myself, I understood the impulse to tell and retell, seeking out young mothers to whisper the bloody details. Vomiting every 15 minutes. Six stitches. Eight hours of pushing (or was it ten?). Bruising. Somehow, the telling lays the experience to rest like a macabre Appalachian song-and-verse lulls the baby to sleep.
Just like with a birth, when you have witnessed - participated in - a deathbed scene, you want to tell the story again and again. Suddenly you are aware of the brotherhood and sisterhood of people who have lost a parent. You exchange stories. For a little while, perhaps, you were God. You refused the ventilator, or you chose it. You ordered morphine, or administered it, or refused it. You doled it out in small quantities, or you hastened the end with frequent doses. You whispered that it was time to let go, and everything would be okay, or you let your teardrops fall on the closed eyes and mottled skin, whispering "Don't go. I need you."
Alone, or with your brother or child or in-laws or mother or friend or spouse, you listened as your loved one's breathing slowed, listened as the death rattle, that mucos soughing, became more pronounced. You might have watched the seconds pass on a hospital clock, or on your wristwatch, wondering if another breath would come. You might have reared in shock when, after 58 seconds or a minute-and-a-half, you began to relax into the knowledge that he - or she - was gone, only to be startled by another stuttering breath. After a while, you probably got used to that, too.
And perhaps you looked away, or told a joke, or sent a text, or ran to the bathroom, or noticed the sliver of the moon, or ate a granola bar kindly brought by the hospital staff, remembering that you had not eaten since noon. Maybe you laid your head on your arms on the edge of the bed, noticing that the still hand you held was a little cool, wondering if a warm blanket would help. Maybe someone told a story, reminiscing, and you laughed. And then, perhaps, you noticed the quiet from the bed. Death rattle gone. Soul slipped quietly away.
At 4 pm that last afternoon, the surgeon finally told us that my father had cancer throughout his system. This, after a week in the hospital, after being told each day, in contradiction to common sense and the evidence of our eyes and hearts, that all would be fine. Every day for a week, we heard that everything that was wrong with him could heal.
In the end, our eyes and hearts were right. He was dying.
"Ow," my father said, hardly able to lift his head, when the surgeon told him the news. "Ow."
"What hurts?" I asked, brushing my hand through his fine hair, turned gray this year with the cancer treatments.
"My feelings," he said, and asked, for the last time, to move from the chair to the bed.
And so we unhooked all the machinery - all those tubes and tapes and needles and clamps - all those beepers and buzzers and flashers and squeezers - all that beige and gray and plastic and metal - and let my father lie peacefully in bed, like the complete, intact, complicated, hopeful, stoic human being he was.
My father died at 10:45 pm on October 3, 2015. Love you, Dad.
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