Just a Talk with Dad
by W. J. Coats
My father never thought much of astrology. He was born in 1924 on July 22, on the cusp, he said, right between Cancer and Leo. I remember that every day he read three newspapers, front to back, though, horoscopes and all. The morning papers had him as a Leo, he would regularly point out, but to the afternoon paper he was a Cancer. It was cancer, though (not Leo), that got him in the end.
Dad lived longer than some of us expected, given his two main vices: heavy drinking and cigarette smoking. Toward the end had a lot to deal with: increasing pain, physical dependency, lack of control of his body and his life, and, well, just plain old suffering. In November he was diagnosed with lung cancer. It was after that that he finally quit smoking and quit drinking. Maybe, facing something as certain as death, he could see that whether to smoke and whether to drink really were choices after all, and that he really did have the strength of will to choose against them. Maybe he just wanted to see the world around him clearly while he still had the chance. Eight months later he was dead.
Up until that November, there were a lot of things Dad just wouldn’t talk about—ever. Alcoholism and smoking, for instance, and the health and social consequences of both. But I never heard him talk about their pleasures, either: whether he enjoyed puffing on a Camel, or how he liked that feeling of warmth behind the ears when he took his first swallow of a vodka martini. He was a Navy veteran of World War II, Atlantic Theater, but until his last 6 months he didn’t talk much about that, either. An attorney for 45 years, but I didn’t hear him talk about cases or courts—maybe the occasional grateful and faithful client, but that was it.
Those last 6 months saw something of a turnaround, though. Sober, he apologized for a lot of the things he’d said and done when drunk that hurt the people near to him, things that we had assumed, by family tradition, that he really didn’t remember at all. I think he wanted to be at peace with the people he loved.
Recently it occurred to me that, now that Dad has been gone a few years, it might be a good time to have a talk with him that would include some of those things that used to be taboo. He probably wouldn’t clam up on me now, I thought, and he sure wouldn’t go off drinking. Probably be a pretty good listener, too. I could just ask my questions, I thought, and then do my best to conjure up the answers he might have made—had he be been sober and willing to talk—being as true as I could to what I remember of him.
So, here I am, sitting at the dinner table late at night. The house is quiet. My wife and kids are all off to bed. It’s a good time to begin. We’ll start off easy, with topics that Dad actually talked about with me in life.
* * * * * * * *
Me: When I walk in my front door some evenings, I think about you coming home from work, and how Mary and I would play “foot-ride” with you, or “I’ve got a lump in my chair” or “pop up the chimney.” When I think about it now, being a father myself, that must have been a huge amount of kid-energy to have unleashed on you when you walked in the door. How was that, coming home from work?
Dad: It was good to get home, very good to have you and Mary to play with, and before you, Barbie and Janie. Sometimes I was pretty tired—sometimes a hard day at work, but it was good to get home.
M: We always seemed to have the TV set on—even during meals. I guess the TV was a pretty novel thing; probably even the radio was fairly uncommon when you were growing up. Did you like to have the TV on so much, or would you rather have it switched off sometimes?
D: Well, I think your mother liked it more than I did. I always liked to read, and I would read in bed every night before I went to sleep. The TV news never seemed to be very thorough, but I liked the detective shows and some of the comedies. Most of them were pretty corny, but that’s the kind of thing I like. Your mother always liked Johnny Carson—I never much cared for him. Besides, he was on too late at night if I had work the next day.
M: And the night you brought home the big salmon—everyone was looking at the TV when you came in . . .
D: That wasn’t exactly the way I had imagined it would happen. I was on a cloud that night! Just getting the bite, just landing that fish! It was beautiful, so big and strong and smooth and alive. Four or five other men were fishing near there, under the bridge, and nobody caught anything like that. They grinned at me. They really envied me.
I landed that fish, clubbed it to kill it, and brought it back up to the car. It was really very heavy – 25 pounds at least – but I got it up just fine and laid it on newspapers in the back of the car. On the way home I kept looking in the rear-view mirror, smiling, just to admire it—even though I really couldn’t see it in the mirror. I was just happy knowing it was there.
Of course, when I think about it now, it was pretty late when I got home.
M: And when you were late getting home, we couldn’t be sure where you were or what you were doing—maybe drinking—so after a certain point we didn’t exactly look forward to your arrival.
D: Yes, I guess there was that. But for that whole drive home, I imagined . . . . I guess I imagined that I had a perfect family life, that I was the perfect Dad, and that everybody was going to be clapping for me and admiring me and loving me when I got home. And after a moment, everyone did. Or at least your mother did. She was really impressed with that salmon. And I think she saw it in my eyes; she saw what I needed; she saw I was confused, excited, worried, disappointed.
M: She led us in admiring you that night, got our attention, turned us away from the TV set.
D: Yes, she did. And of course she and I had to clean the fish, and cut it, and wrap it, and put it in the freezer. And she cooked it, too, bit by bit.
M: I love salmon now, but I remember getting really tired of it then. It seemed like it went on forever.
D: You got tired of it? You got tired of my fish? That beautiful salmon?
M: Look, I was a little kid. I didn’t know about fishing, or about fish. It was just the big pink meat thing that wasn’t a hamburger. I would rather have had hamburgers or Mom’s fried chicken just about any night. Or lasagna or goulash. But not lima beans or asparagus.
D: Oh, so there was something worse.
M: Asparagus was pretty weird.
D: I always thought your mother was a very good cook.
M: Oh, so did I. Her oven-fried chicken was about as good as it gets.
D: That’s the truth.
M: It must have been hard, toward the end, when you couldn’t eat much of anything.
D: It was awful. Drinking those little cans of chocolate muck. But there was so much that was more awful than that. I couldn’t go to the bathroom by myself. I could hardly see, so I could barely read anything, and for that I had to hold the book an inch away from my glasses. Then it got to where I was so weak I couldn’t even hold the book anymore.
M: Sometimes it seemed like you were really ready to give up.
D: Sometimes I really was. Sometimes I really was. It just started to feel so pointless after awhile, when I really didn’t believe I was going to get any better. I felt just awful.
M: One time, Mom called me on the phone, crying, saying you weren’t able to breathe and you refused to use the nebulizer to take your medicine. I drove over and kind of “talked you down.”
D: I didn’t want you to do that. I just wanted it to be over.
M: I told you about how I had had to use one like that at the doctor’s office, and how much better I felt afterwards. I told you that you wouldn’t feel so bad if you could breathe, that I had felt hopeless, too, when I couldn’t breathe. I told you Mom was crying, and that we were all trying our best to help, and that you needed to do your part, too.
D: And I did. But I didn’t want to. I just wanted it to be over.
M: A few weeks later, it was.
D: That’s right.
M: You had a doctor’s appointment that day, the day you died, so I was planning to come over anyway to drive you and Mom to the doctor’s office. But Mom called early and said you had taken a bad turn and that I should meet you two at the hospital, at the emergency room. So that’s what I did. They showed me right into the emergency room where you were lying on a gurney, and Mom was standing there beside you. I imagined you’d be off in a room by yourself, but it turned out to be one of those very big rooms with hospital curtains to divide it up.
D: I don’t really remember that, or not very well at least.
M: You didn’t seem to be awake at all, or aware of what was going on. Mostly you were breathing, slowly but with great effort. Just breathing seemed to be about as much as you could do, and that with a breathing mask.
D: A breathing mask? I remember there was something.
M: Yeah, you had a breathing mask, plus rubber tubes running into your nose, an I.V. into your hand, one of those light sensor things on the end of one finger, and all sorts of monitor wires taped onto your chest and arms. I was on your right, holding your hand, and Mom was on your left, holding your other hand. You were kind of cold, but so was the whole, huge room, which happened to be pretty empty at that time of the afternoon. Mom told me about what had happened, how you were having a lot of trouble breathing at home—she was afraid you would stop breathing—and she had called 911 and they sent the ambulance. We both stroked your hair and told you we were there, with you, that we loved you, that you could relax and rest.
D: I could hear you, but it sounded very far away—like when you’re half asleep and you hear something, but you really don’t want to open your eyes and wake up—you just want to rest, to sleep.
M: After awhile the ER doctor came in to check on you, and a woman was there too, the hospital chaplain, I think, and the nurse on duty, too. She’d been there all along, in and out. The doctor checked the monitors to see what they said, and he asked us about how you’d been doing. Mom and I gave him a sort of a general history: when you were diagnosed with cancer, how long you’d been smoking, what your symptoms had been before diagnosis.
D: Coughing, trouble breathing, fatigue . . .
M: Uh-huh. Then we talked about how you’d been more recently, your colon surgery and stoma, and about the cancerous tissue the surgeons found when they went in to take out part of your colon. I told him how you’d been having trouble lowering yourself into a chair; that your legs and arms would kind of give out halfway down to the chair. It’s just something I’d seen, and it seemed to be getting more severe. I don’t know what else we told him. But after awhile he told us a few things about the kind of cancer you seemed to have and the way it tended to progress. He said that since your liver and lungs were heavily involved with the cancer, it was probably in your brain, too – just because that’s the way that kind of cancer tends to spread. He said that seemed to fit with the trouble sitting down, and could be making some other symptoms, like breathing problems, that much worse. He said we could prolong things, but the most anyone could probably do at this point was to try to make you more comfortable.
Mom and I accepted that, and we kept holding your hands, and looking at your face as you fought to breathe. There was a mask over your nose and mouth, and I asked the doctor if you’d be able to breathe without it. He gave me a roundabout answer, which boiled down to something like “He’d have a much harder time breathing without it.”
I thought, “If I had a choice when I was dying, I’d want to breathe my last breaths straight from the air into my nose and lungs, and not through a tube. If my family were with me, I’d want to have at least a chance to remember their smell, to know they were there.” I talked about it with Mom and we agreed to take off the mask.
Then I looked at the clear tube running into one of your nostrils and the piece of red rubber hose that was run into the other. I said, “Those tubes don’t look comfortable at all.” I asked Mom if it would be okay to take out the hoses, and she said yes.
The doctor nodded, and he asked the nurse to take out the tubes.
Then we turned off the monitors, so there weren’t any more beeps, and the nurse started unclipping the wires. Your face was clear to us now, without all that hardware, and we could hold your hands, just your hands, without any wires in the way. It began to feel more like we were a group of people together, more so than when we had all of those machines between us.
It just felt like you didn’t have much time left, and you should be as comfortable and feel as loved as you could for that short time.
Mom and I kept talking with you, stroking your hair, holding your hands.
You were fighting hard for each breath, all of your body’s energy going into just lifting your chest to inflate your lungs. The doctor offered to give you some morphine, to help you relax. I wondered whether you’d want that, since you’d been worried that maybe you’d hallucinated from morphine after your surgery, but in the end we said that would be alright, and he ran some morphine from a syringe into your I.V.
You began to relax, breathing a little less often. It seemed like each breath was a struggle, like the lift of an eyelid for a person so tired he just couldn’t stay awake any longer.
Your breaths came further and further apart, and after a time the doctor said “He’s passing now.” I thought about how he knew, how many people he had seen pass, what signs he saw that told him you were coming near the end. You tried another breath, your whole body shook, almost rattled, as if trying one last effort but really wanting to relax at last, and then you did. You relaxed. And we could feel your passing. And I could see how much work it can be just to stay alive, just to breathe, just to move, just to open your eyes, when you get to be so tired. I thought how much of a relief it must be for you, just to be able to let go. Because you were done; there was nothing left to do.
Mom and I still stood there on either side of you, each of us with one hand holding one of your hands, one hand on your head, stroking your hair. I remembered hearing about near-death experiences, people talking about how they drifted up above their body and looked down on the room, so I looked up to say good-bye. I looked up to where I thought you might be, looking back down, and said good-bye, and told you I love you. I said the prayer that I say when someone or something dies: “May you see things as they really are, and may you not be afraid of what you see.”
We stayed with you. After awhile the chaplain came and talked with us again. She told us we’d been brave, and that we’d been merciful and caring to let you go when it was your time.
She told us it would be a good idea to remove any jewelry you had on, just because, well, things could go missing otherwise. Mom tried to get your wedding ring off, but it was stuck pretty fast. I don’t think you took it off much. I lent a hand and managed to ease it off, and then I gave it to Mom. We unclipped a cross you had around your neck. That was all the jewelry you were wearing, I think.
That’s about all I remember. I don’t know whether I drove Mom home—I think she drove herself, with me following behind. It must have been sometime in the afternoon, on one of those long summer days. Just a week and a half before your birthday.
D: Well, thank you.
M: What?
D: Thank you. You did the right thing. I don’t know if I would have been able to do that. I don’t know whether your mother would have been able to do that without you. I’m grateful that you were there to help. And I’m proud that you could help in that way. I’m sure you’ve wondered whether you did the right thing, or could have done better, but I think you did just fine. It was a strange feeling to let go, and it’s true that you die alone, but it helped me to have you and your mother with me.
M: Well, thank you. That’s very kind. I’ve had all kinds of feelings about that day. I guess that writing this down is a way that I’m dealing with those feelings, working them through. I worked with Jane on your obituary, but that certainly didn’t go into the details of your last hours and minutes. Thank you for helping me to work through it all. And thanks for everything else, too. I think we’ll be talking again, soon—there’s certainly more to say. For now, though, I’d better get myself to bed so I can get up for work again tomorrow. Life goes on. Goodnight, Dad.
D: Goodnight, Jim.
* * * * * * * *
It’s great to be able to say goodnight to Dad and know it really means “goodnight.” When I was a kid, sometimes it would mean exactly that, but other times it might mean, “See you in a few hours, when you come back from the bar and sit on the end of my bed to ramble on and on incoherently for the rest of the night.” But the thing is, you could never really tell which it was going to be. "Goodnight." You say the word, and you hope it means what you want it to mean. Sometimes precise language just isn’t enough, though, especially when it’s language that attempts to foretell the future. “Goodnight” can be a wildly optimistic prediction, depending on circumstances.
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