I was late to my father’s death. I could have gone to the hospital directly from the airport, but it was late–10:00 pm–and I hoped to get a good sleep for the long week of caretaking and hospital visits ahead. The last time I saw him was at our family home. We spent a week together. I knew my mom was relieved to have the support because she left frequently. For the first time, she took advantage of the break, rather than desiring to spend as much time with me as possible. Which left me home, alone with my father. I remember trimming his toenails on the porch of their house. Our intimate companionship over coffee at Starbuck’s while a folksy, familiar tune played that we both loved—how it left us with tears in our eyes. And our walk back from the lake when he asked me how we had met.
A month ago, Doug, my twin brother, and my sister helped move him into the memory care unit. I felt relieved and guilty that it wasn’t my turn to help out. His words “roll me out onto a railroad track before you put me in a nursing home” were the mini soundtrack that had kept him in the house while our mother was simultaneously overwhelmed and increasingly chaotic.
The doctor was standing by my dad’s room, near the mini nurse’s station positioned at the door. I remember thinking how nice of him to greet us, knowing that we were going for a sonogram test to assess the state of my father’s heart, simultaneously forgetting all of my own years as a therapist in a hospital setting. He looked kind and slightly overwrought, medium build, dark hair and skin, Indian surname. He said my mom should sit down, as if he had watched too many shows with empathetic doctors. It was obviously bad news. Did a part of me freeze inside when he said that? Did my mind slow down? Did I look from him to my mother? I think I tried to help her into her chair, perhaps. Strangely, I thought there was some sad diagnosis that he had to tell us about, a test that came back unexpectedly, something “devastating” but not as finite as death. As if there was something between the advancing state of my dad’s Alzheimer’s that had landed him in the hospital after he broke his nose banging his head against a wall in the middle of the night, trying to get the “bad” out and the mini heart attack he had, after he arrived. As if there was something between that and Death. It didn’t occur to me until the doctor said it. What did he say? “I’m so sorry, but Mr. Welch died. Mr. Welch is dead (probably not that). I’m sorry, Dr. Welch has passed away.” My dad hated that last term, found it weak, ignorantly euphemistic. He would have appreciated the Doctor salutation, though.
I use it now. Passed away, that is.
“He passed away.” “He died.” It depends on the day, the person, the moment. He died in his sleep, so I tell myself that “passed away” is not inappropriate, as if Dad’s approval for the well applied use of vocabulary is still an issue. I guess it is. For me. In death. Is this what we mean when we say “respect the dead”?We bury them the way they want, sing songs they loved, speak and pray in the ways that they may approve. Or how our cultures ordain.
We had the funeral at Grace Episcopal Church and a part of me wishes the cumbersome tonality of the organ chords had been a Baptist choir, belting out the hymns of his childhood, his youth, his young adult years in seminary, when religion was a passion for him instead of just intellectual fun. They played his favorite, Amazing Grace, but without voices, its sound was dismal and sad, not fit for grief, at least not mine.
*
At the reception, I greeted people I had not seen in years, some I had never met. But these were the people he sat with, argued with and sometimes harassed. Forty years’ worth. They surrounded us the day of his funeral. His community. There is something to that. Tom, the rabid Trump supporter who cajoled and supported Dad in his later years, whose politics my father ignored in exchange for his kindness, something that would not have happened when he was younger.
His Baylor friends, though not from our Church, came to be with us from all over the country. They helped him love school, learning, maybe himself, though he would not have said the latter. Ted, good looking even at eighty, like a slimmer Brian Dennehy, whose eulogy was true, funny and not altogether kind. Harrison, a retired district attorney, whose steely litigator skills were often overwhelmed by my father’s intensity and dogmatism. Bob and John gone. Bob’s dementia began after my father’s and progressed rapidly and John died of cancer years earlier.
Gill, a church member since before my parents joined in the eighties, was largely the same. Her matron haircut– a shock of white rather than brown–Christmas themed sweaters, pursed lips and dry humor were soothingly familiar. She rather adored my Dad—was shocked as she watched his decline and visited him during his three weeks at the memory care facility. She knew grief, having lost her husband recently and her youngest son (one of my high-school crushes) over twenty years ago. It perversely comforted me and I felt an unexpected kinship with her.
George and Mary came despite George’s disdain for the Waspy mores of our church. George–a friend from the pastor community–argued ferociously with my father, who called him his best friend in his emotional final years. Mary was calm and clear. Before my father’s deepest decline, she and my mom commiserated in silence as the men let loose their opinions, stated like facts. I remember the slight bow of George’s head and Mary’s half-smile as they walked past our pew at the memorial–gestures solidified as dignified and kind.
Roz pulled me aside and told me how much she cared for my dad. I was grateful that I finally met her, this woman I knew my father admired. She joked about having her funeral at Grace, instead of the small, solo synagogue in town, where she worshipped. Small blessings amidst the missteps, the unfailing humanity. I wonder now if it’s more terrifying to see a peer, a friend, a comrade decline than a father.
This community surrounded the distilled version of his body, made into ash. The six foot-ness of him on a stand inside an urn. I winced when I saw it. My son gagged. He knew Granddaddy as a kindred spirit with a wicked sense of humor. He was the man who played “monster” and knew no limits when it came to ice cream. Their twin blue eyes crackled and voices bounded with laughter when they were together. In the end, there was confusion, as Dad forgot when to let go in “tug-of-war”.
*
I sat with him for two hours, thirty minutes after his death. That was the space of time I missed saying goodbye to him. Thirty minutes. He died at 7:30 am. We arrived at 8. His body still had residues of life in it. His color had not forsaken him (or us) yet, though as I sat, his ruddiness drained and became more and more yellow and grey. I sat with him and afterward wondered if he were really dead. Had they checked thoroughly enough? Was the distraught young cardiologist capable enough to even check? I touched his skin and there was a fine layer of perspiration on his forehead. Clammy. That is what clammy is. Was that from the heart attack or is that something that happens after a body has stopped, shut down? I kissed his forehead before the nurses came in, ready to zip him up like my wedding gown going for dry cleaning. I remember dancing with him to Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” at the reception, his full-bodied joy bouncing him up and down in a giant shrug, his index finger pointing as he shout/sang to me “Don’t worry, ‘bout a thing. Every little thing’s gonna be alright.”
I feel far away from him now, the details of his death less potent, a memory less charged. I miss it, the way the images resided with me, his face with his mouth open, as if in mid-yawn, the thickness of his yellowed teeth more apparent, the years of obsessive coffee drinking marked upon the ridges of them. Dead. His teeth were never really alive, so what was it to look at him, his teeth within an increasingly lifeless face, the body taking its time to acknowledge its ending? Purple, red mottling reached around his neck and ears, which the mortician later told us was typical with heart attacks, and increases as death more fully resides within the body. Being with him those two hours would be the last memory I have of him and it felt both wrong to sit longer and wrong to leave him.
Should I have left before the nurses came to tag him? A new nurse was being trained in the protocols of dead bodies—those that were once patients and then become unwieldy, uncomfortable objects. Apparently, the tag is meant to go on the right toe, which the more experienced nurse explained. I saw my dad’s long, thin, big toe, his foot seeming both gruesome and beautiful, grey to blue, his thick toenail overgrown. I was grateful that I groomed his nails on my last trip. In three months, his toenails grew out and started to curl over. He was easy for me to mother in the end.
As I write, I wish I had groomed them in his death. I envy people, cultures, religions their death rituals because now I know—or imagine– that they are there to stem the tide of little regrets, ease the fears of how a soul passes. I wonder if true atheists have a moment of doubt. I wonder if my dad, the Baptist /Episcopal agnostic, had a last pray or if that’s what a last breath is anyways. Goodbye, goodnight, which way do I go now?
The younger nurse asked me and the more experienced nurse if we had seen the show “Jane Doe”? Did I shake my head “no” or sit there stunned? I think it was the former, but memory is changeable. She proceeded to tell us what a great show it was and how this reminded her of it, as they tagged and turned my dead dad’s body. I felt him slip away from me then, but maybe I just turned cold inside and could no longer sense him, appalled at the gallows humor that I understood but had never been experienced as a family member. As if I were one of them. I am a family member, a daughter. That is my father. Appalled at my speechlessness. A part of me thought my dad would have laughed—loud and openmouthed, his red face ruddier as his cool blue eyes lit with mirth. Either way, another part of me is grateful that I was with him, then. If I couldn’t stand up for him in my shock (or my general conflict avoidance) at least I was there. If different cultures are right about the soul staying close to the body for a few days, he had me nearby–for a short bit.
I walked to the morgue with him on a stretcher as the two nurses wheeled him. Was it awkward, the elevator ride down? When I worked in the hospital, I escorted family members down with the body. I had become the family member. I remember standing outside the door and the young man inside the morgue saying I couldn’t enter. I remember my panic later, wondering if I had left him too soon, wondering if he was truly dead. I remember asking Meb, the sweet, strange wife of his brilliant, strange friend, Doc, if that was a normal fear and her kind response “I imagine that’s why there are so many movies about zombies.”
Even in death, the living tugged at me, guided my behavior. I thought about my mom and sister waiting in the cafeteria. I imagined the impatience of the staff as they delayed the paperwork, willing me to get on with the tasks of the living. Because that was what I was. Living. And my father dead. I’m not sure if those are part of the small regrets I hold or rather if they are small comforts—the fact that things go on. A death certificate, not unlike a birth certificate, the fatigue and slight boredom that comes with lingering by an unconscious—no dead–body, even one dear to me.
Was it the pull toward the living that caused me to not visit his body at the mortuary? To let a sacred period pass that I realized only later? Perhaps. More likely, it was the same impulses around death that are with me always—an impatience once a certain time has passed, a desire to please others, even those who don’t know me and will remember my father as merely another old man past his due date, a desire to not deal with the untidy business of endings.
*
My mind flashes to the young man at the nurse’s station who rose from his seat as my Mom and I came out of the elevator to visit my dad. I thought it peculiar and then remembered I was in the South and small courtesies were still afforded. To some, anyway. I smiled and he looked disconcerted. I can’t remember much about that man now—ethnicity, race, size, age, although I think he was youngish. I just remember him standing up from his seat. Perhaps he hoped to warn the doctor of our arrival. Perhaps the doctor asked to be warned when my mom showed up. There was a kindness in his rising, even if that was not his intent. I remember that and the unwitting peace in not yet knowing my dad had passed.