i had to get the whole story out. i’m sorry for everyone who will read this and hurt, but i needed to put it all out there for myself…
in the middle of december 2004, my dad and i got into a fight. not since i was in my mid teens had a fight included actually yelling and blood-coursing anger – this grown up fighting that we did was a wierd tango of logic and carefully worded variables. he had taken two weeks off of his job as a truck driver cuz he wanted to get some stuff done: truck maintenance, old paperwork, taxes from 2001. he spent those 2 weeks on the couch, with a pain in his ribs that carried through to his back. he had missed calling me for my birthday, cuz he had mostly been asleep. that wasn’t an issue, since he’d always been busy and forgetful of the current date and i had just assumed that it had unintentionally slipped his mind. i didn’t begrudge him that.
i said that he should go to the doctor. he had various reasons not to go: a previous back injury was just acting up and it would go away; the thought that he had no medical and would have to pay for the visit; now that he was awake and feeling better, he could get some work done. i told him that he would feel like an ass and i would think of him as one and never let him live it down if he had cracked a rib or something and it needed treatment and he ended up in more pain. so he went.
when he visited the walk in clinic, the doctor said that he didn’t hear or see anything out of the ordinary, but would send him for an xray, just in case. i believed that, at the time. he went a few days later. they told him that they would call him in about 3-5 days if any follow up was needed. they called him the next day.
something had been found. they didn’t tell him what and he had to go back to the clinic to get referred to a lung specialist. when he called me to tell me that something had been found, i said fuck a lot during the conversation. i cried for hours after hanging up and chain smoked and got as drunk as i possibly could without passing the point of regurgitation. i knew. and everyone that i talked to said that i had to think positively and that it was probably nothing or if it was something at least it was probably found early. HA. I KNEW.
by the time that a couple-few weeks had passed and the pain was making him take up to 8 tylenols an hour. my dad didn’t take pain medication, to the point that some of the tylenol he had kicking around was from one of my first migraines, when i was between 7 and 9. he went through1-3 bottles in a week and that’s how i knew how bad the pain was for him.
he underwent a procedure where, while awake, a surgeon threaded a scope down his throat and snipped off pieces of his lungs. he said it was his worst nightmare – being awake and aware of that procedure. another scary factor was that there was a risk of lung seepage – meaning a hole in his lung that could lead to it collapsing and ultimately, suffocation.
well, he made it through that and when he got home from the results appointment, i wanted to be subtle, and sensitive and let him tell me in his own time. and then something like 2 minutes passed after he had come in, taken off his watch and heated up some coffee and i couldn’t restrain the “WELL?!” and he looked back at me, because he had been sitting turned away, and then he turned back away and if i remember correctly made some comment about how i didn’t wanna hear it and then he said in a garbled voice “well, i have cancer.” he cried a little, but only after i cried. seeing my dad cry, at that point was the hardest thing that i had faced. i had only been witness to it twice before in my life.
and then he was prescribed some heavier medication, which helped for a short duration, until he would be sitting in the chair at the table and holding his ribs and rocking himself at 2 am, looking at the clock and knowing that he still had another hour or more to go until he could take another dose. and i couldn’t stand to see my big, strong daddy like that, but i did alot in those weeks.
flashforward to april, 2005 and they’ve removed the bottom half of one of his lungs. he was in the hospital overnight and that was the first time that jeremy stayed overnight with me since we had started being “friends” again, after our breakup the summer before. we, i guess, got back together a few months later, officially maybe when i failed the pregnancy test, and we’ve been glued, since.
that night, we got really high and drunk, and then his surgeon called to tell me that everything had gone fine and that they had removed an orange-sized amount of tumour from his lung. i had forgotten that the surgeon would call since it was such a high risk procedure, and maybe even a little bit why he wasn’t home because i was that fucked up, and when i got off the phone i said “he didn’t die!” and drank and smoked some more. we would find out later that they didn’t get all of it – and that basically, they had given it a liquified route into other body parts.
he came home a couple days later, stiffer and in more pain, but with better meds and i made him crepes with strawberry sauce and whipped creme and got him his coffee. i told him the scar looked like he’d been attacked by a shark in a surfing accident and had lived to tell the tale, which made him laugh and wince.
they sent him for radiation in the summer of 2005, just to be safe. that didn’t do much, we learned, because by October, it had spread to his kidney, though those tumours weren’t growing rapidly. and a little later, it spread to his shoulder, too.
by winter, he was on really heavy morphine and nerve blocker meds and they gave him the shakes…he ended up in the palliative care ward of the local hospital to try to adjust his medication so that it would work more effectively, but they couldn’t find the perfect cocktail. he spent christmas there and jeremy and i visited him on christmas day. he was his usual bright, laughing, no-one-knows-what-they’re-doing self. in the past year, his beard had gone grey and his hair had lost it’s shininess, but it was hard to tell he was sick, most of the time.
he came home in mid january, was home for a few weeks, and then ended up in the same ward because the shakiness had led to lack of muscle control and he had fallen down and couldn’t get up. we made a lot of jokes about this – especially when it was being discussed that we should get one of those alarms from the commercial where the old lady says “help, i’ve fallen and i can’t get up”. we joked about a lot of things that most people would have thought inappropriate or morbid. i think it made it less serious and real and the two of us were truly cut from the same cheesy cloth.
so again, he came home after a bit, for a few weeks then was back in the hospital, again. for falling. also, for a conflict with his medication, that was causing him to feel “frapped” as he put it – totally high and with confusion towards reality. he was scared to call an ambulance, even though he knew he had to go to the hospital, because part of him had to convince the other part that they were not crazed nazis that would try to kill him. logic conquered. but it scared him a lot. they did an immediate detailed MRI and found 6 tumours in his brain.
this brings us up to march of this year. i took a taxi home with him from the hospital, so that he could grab some clothes and paper and pens and stuff. he read his mail – his driver’s license had been suspended due to the brain tumours. i think that knocked him down a little more than anything really had, yet. we talked about how he had seen people in the ward of the hospital die. that likely the day would come when he would be fine, and then one day, he’d get pneumonia and not wake up again. this was foreshadowing by definition, but seemed so far away that i tucked it in my head f
or filing. and when leaving the front of the house to return to the hospital via taxi, he slid down the steps, me half catching him by his coat collar and him landing on his ass. i think that’s the only reason he wasn’t knocked out by it. we didn’t tell the nurses at the hospital, since we didn’t want them to not let him go home again.
they told him that it was likely that when he went home this time, if he fell again, they would send him to the local hospice, instead of him coming back there. i really believed that it had something to do with lack of bed space and them planning way ahead. he helped to paint that picture and he let me believe it. i made comments to other people about wanting him to make it to july, to his 50th birthday and to meeting the baby and i mostly took for granted that he would. i kept forgetting to bring him copies of the ultrasound pictures. he never saw them.
he was sent for further radiation because they were concerned about a risk for seizures due to the location of the brain tumours. they said that he might have some headaches and some alzheimer-like symptoms and that he might lose his hair. and then they sent him home – to potential migraines and burning down the house, i thought at the time. he called me the day that his hair started falling out, “guess what? i’m losing all my hair!” and we made jokes about him saving money on shampoo and that if it grew back in, maybe it would be really red, like mine is in the summer.
i visited him that week and took what would be the last picture of him “for prosperity.” prosperity was supposed to mean in regards to his bald head, as he had always resembled a skinny biker/hippy/jesus/kenny loggins and it was hilarious to see him looking then like a cross between gollum and robert pickton. we also laughed about that a lot. he said he should stay away from the vancouver court house, in case someone thought he was pickton and tried some vigilante shit. propserity ended up meaning that i would pick up my developed pictures the day that he had died, having remembered he was on the roll and needing to see his face, again – and i would see it, and think of how it was taken less than a month before.
this time, he was home for maybe a week, when he fell again and laid on the floor for a day, unable to do much more than grab food from the fridge beside him, before his home care nurse came and got him back to the hospital. they found that tumours had spread so extensively throughout his spine that a piece of column had broken down and was now lodged in his cord. if he fell again, it was likely to cause paralysis and so he was put into a wheelchair to avoid the potential fall. they told him that he wouldn’t be living at home again – he explained it as a lack of mobility with a wheelchair, since the house was off of the ground and had steep, slippery steps and narrow hallways. after a week or so, he was supposed to go and take a tour of the hospice, but ended up being transferred there, immediately.
i visited him 4 days after he moved in there. he wanted to go home and pick up some stuff, but i repeatedly told him that i was uncomfortable and worried about taking him home alone, since i was not in peak physical performance to be able to catch him if he fell or anything. he understood in a saddened way. jeremy and i returned on sunday and brought him home in a taxi with a wheelchair lift for the day. he joked about feeling cool, being chauffeured while sitting in the back – in the king’s throne, if you will.
i didn’t talk to him that week. normally, i would call every couple of days, just to see what was up. i procrastinated till wednesday and when i called his room at the hospice, i got no answer. i figured he must have been out smoking or getting coffee from the kitchen or something, so i would call back in a day or two.
two days later, it was friday night and jeremy and i were making plans over msn for my friend sara to come over and spend the night cuz she was having a really bad day. she was going to call when she left her house, around 8:15 pm. the phone rang and i answered it in a singsongy voice. it was the hospice calling to let me know of the change in my dad’s condition. i said, “what condition?” as tears were already streaming down my face. they said that on thursday night, he had been complaining of a cough and had asked for some cough syrup and had gone to bed. since that afternoon, he had been difficult to rouse. i naively asked “what does that mean?” and they said that it meant that they couldn’t wake him up and he was sleeping and not very responsive.
the nurse suggested that i come to see him, just in case i didn’t get another chance to. being friday night, jeremy took a quick shower to sober up while i chainsmoked and cried. then we waited on the corner for a taxi for what seemed a million minutes. finally we were on our way there, with a driver that didn’t know where he was going. it was frustrating, but i didn’t lose it on him since i didn’t want my grief or panic to be the ultimate reason.
i spent the next two days awake, the majority of them within a 5 foot distance from his bed. i went for a lot of smoke breaks and i didn’t eat very much, but did drink a lot of tea. jeremy slept occassionally in a chair that unfolded into the most uncomfortable futon ever, and tried to convince me to eat more and sleep. for those 2 days, i felt like i was just waiting for him to go. i didn’t know what would happen or when. i just knew it would.
i couldn’t leave him. a few nurses suggested that i say my goodbyes and then not stay any longer and that they would call me when there was a change. that most people did that. but i couldn’t leave him for longer than 10 mintues at a time. i didn’t want him to be lonely. or actually, i didn’t want him to be alone. there was a finite difference.
at this point, he would occassionally open his eyes and look around for up to 5 seconds. and when the nurses would come to give him medication, he would open his eyes and respond to their question of whether he was in pain or wanted his head moved or things like that. he nodded or shook his head slightly. normally, he just shook his head. i couldn’t leave him, mostly, because sometimes, when he opened his eyes, it seemed like he saw me and wanted to say, “hi, what are you doing here?” but couldn’t and so i was panicked at the thought of him opening his eyes one last time and NOT seeing me there.
he kicked off his blankets a lot, or rolled onto his side and then back onto his back. there was a term for this, something like terminal restlessness or something, but i don’t quite remember it. he sometimes made noises – little groans of pain is what i heard them as. he sometimes tried to talk, but it was impossible to tell what he was saying.
i counted the seconds between his breaths. i cried when they got longer. i cried when he made a face that seemed filled with pain. i cried when he didn’t respond to me holding his hand. i cried when people asked me if i was okay. i cried when i thought about why i was crying. basically, i cried, smoked and drank tea for 48 hours straight. once, a nurse told him that i was there and he looked at her and asked “who?” that made me cry, too.
on sunday, he woke up for a few moments. long enough for me to ask him if he was okay, to which he shook his head. if he was in pain, to which he shook his head. to whether it was that he couldn’t breathe, to which he nodded. to whether he was scared. he nodded. i cried more in that moment than the 2 days leading up to it – because my dad…he didn’t get scared, he thought through anything that might scare him and he rationalized it. the fact that he admitted it nearly drove me running out of the hospice. it was too much. everything else was so much like a movie i was watching and that last nod had made it real. there was no way to pretend anymore.
i went down and spoke to the nurses and asked them to sedate him. to make sur
e that he wasn’t in any pain and that, honestly, he was too fucked up on medication to be aware of the breathing problems that were scaring him. it took me being ultra emotional and explaining that he had acknowledged fear for his nurse to change his medication schedule from every 4 hours with a breakthrough every couple, to every two hours with a breakthrough every half hour. they had already gotten to know him well, and they knew that he wasn’t someone to express being scared, if he felt it. he was a TROOPER.
they also put him on ativan every hour. i wish they’d really listened when i said that ativan doesn’t do anything for anyone in our family – it’s the equivalent of children’s tylenol. if you took enough, maybe the combined near-lethal dose and psychosomatic effects would do something, but not really. but i have to imagine that it did do something for him. i’ll never really know. after a few hours of this new schedule, he didn’t move as much and he didn’t open his eyes without being talked to. he seemed more at peace.
we decided that we needed to go home and feed our cat and take showers and just generally a break. actually, jeremy suggested it and i finally gave in, because i was getting to the stressed point of thinking that i needed to run away from there and that i couldn’t take it anymore – but i knew if i left and didn’t go back, i would think about that and regret it for the rest of my life. so i gave in. but first i had to say goodbye, just in case. and i had to let jeremy say it, or i thought even maybe force him to if he was hesitant, since he would regret it later if he didn’t take the chance.
“Daddy?” i said and he opened his eyes. and he looked at me, right at me. and then he looked down and i said that i had to talk to him and he looked back at me. i said to him “you know you’re sick?” and he might have nodded but he might not have. and i told him that he wasn’t going to get better. and he started to close his eyes. and i said that jeremy and i were leaving for a bit but that i was so proud of him for fighting so hard for the last 2 days and that he didn’t have to fight anymore if he was tired of fighting and that i would understand if he just wanted to sleep when we were gone. i didn’t understand it and i really wanted him to keep fighting and make it through and wake up so that i could say “listen to this cough you gave me, you fucker” and joke with him – but i knew it wasn’t going to happen and so i said those words. i told him i loved him, goodbye and i kissed his forehead and then gave jeremy some time alone with him and then i kissed him again and whispered that we’d be back soon. i must have told the shift’s nurse 6 times to call me if anything changed; i confirmed that she had our phone number and made her write it down again. i worried that we’d get home to a voicemail or they’d call when we were on our way back and we’d miss it.
we got home after another really upsetting taxi ride. jeremy was pissed off about it to a level rarely seen, but i just went through the motions of taking a shower and getting us some different clothes and food to take back with us. i felt guilty for leaving him. in the shower, i had 2 lines from the song he wrote me when i was a baby looping through my mind and i cried somemore when i realized that i hadn’t ever gotten around to asking him to write it all out for me. that song would be lost. i combed my hair and left it down and long and straight, the way that he liked it. and after jeremy’s shower, we went back. it was a break that was needed, because i came back into that place with a bigger sense of peace than i’d had previously.
that night, i got some sleep. about 3 hours. his breathing started to change and he stopped waking up at all or moving. he occassionally still tried to turn over, but didn’t seem to have the strength and would give up quickly. then he stopped trying at all. he changed in front of my eyes.
there had been moments during the past few days when i had told jeremy that he didn’t have to stay – that i understood if he was uncomfortable or if he couldn’t handle it. he told me that he wasn’t leaving me. i think that if he had i would have resented him because i really did need him there with me to protect me, but because he didn’t i have a new reason to cherish him even more than i ever thought i could have. i asked him at some point if he was getting tired of sitting and waiting and seeing and watching. and he had said something sarcastic, telling me to shut up because he wasn’t leaving. to not worry about him.
on monday morning, he told me that he had lied and that he was tired. and that it was killing him seeing me like this, so sad and heartbroken and seeing my dad, so unlike Jim. I once again told him that he could leave, but he said no and so i told him that maybe it would be easier for him if instead of being strong for me, he let out whatever he was feeling. he said he was okay. he was fine.
i told him i wasn’t stupid and that if he really was fine he wouldn’t be tired. he wouldn’t be affected. and that if i really thought he was fine, i would be insulted because i thought that my dad had meant something a lot more than that to him. that i thought he wasn’t just upset because i was in pain, but that he was going through his own. and then he let it go. and then, i loved him even more. and i let jeremy know that it was for the best (which i believed about 94%) and that i didn’t think we’d be staying another night, that he’d be gone before then, and that hopefully, he would go with the sunlight on his face. we agreed that we would take breaks more often, even just for air – to try to minimize the stress we were both feeling.
we went for a 20 minute walk that afternoon to buy some smokes. this was after meeting with a doctor who told us the honest truth. the whole truth. everyone had been so tactful to that point, but not completely honest. they seemed to think i would know exactly the questions to ask and that i didn’t need to know exactly what was going to happen. but i did. and that doctor made it all the more real, but in a very sensitive way and she hugged me when i cried and she told me that i was doing the right thing, waiting and sedating him.
when we got back, the nurses had turned him onto his side, facing the window and the sunshine was falling on his face. they had left him there for a long time because he’d seemed comfortable, but his colouring was showing it, so i casually mentioned it to the shift nurses who were going to give him a bath and turn him anyways. usually we would have left, to give him some privacy, but we didn’t that time.
after moving him, his breathing immediately sped up and became more laboured. the nurses watched this for a few minutes to see if it tapered off while i panicked some more and lost more salt water and waited for them to do something, to FIX IT, and then they moved him back to where he had been. the nurse said nicely but too honestly that moving him had probably kicked off the lead up to the end. that he had all of the other signs. his breathing never became what it was though he did get more relaxed after being moved into the original position.
at 5 pm, his breathing changed again, after a peaceful few hours. i had been sitting with him for the majority of the time since they had moved him, rubbing his chest in what i hoped was relaxing circles and holding his hand. jeremy suddenly got up from the chair and said he was getting some coffee, did i want anything? i said no, but could he let the nurses know that his breathing had changed again? i looked down and decided that maybe this was it.
i said “shhh” when he tried really hard to breathe and i told him that i loved him and that it was all going to be okay. that he could go. and he opened his eyes for a tiny moment and he
raised his eyebrows, the first movement in over 12 hours. and then he took his last big breath and relaxed. i burst into tears and said “Daddy?” like the 5 year old i felt like, and pushed the emergency call button, while trying to not move my hand from his. jeremy got to the door a moment later and i waved him to hurry up and then the nurses came and waited for him to take his last breath and then he was gone. the sunlight was shining on his face, as i’d hoped.
he died, officially, at 5:05 on monday, may the 8th. i continued bawling and stroking his forehead and jeremy cried and practically yelled that it wasnt fucking fair, Jim and for the first time that i had seen, touched him, just really gently rubbed the back of his neck. that caring gesture made me even more emotional and then we just held each other and cried together for the next minute.
even though i had said my goodbyes before we left on sunday, and i had said everything important in the year-plus leading up to it, and i knew that he had died knowing how important and wonderful he was for me, i still laid down with him afterwards and cuddled him, like he used to with me when i was sick and told him everything all over again.
i told him how proud i was to have known him and that he had done such a good job with me that i thought he was going to be the one responsible for making me a good mommy and that i was so sorry but that he would have been the best grandpa, ever. i told him that i would try to take care of everything that i could and that i knew i’d do things differently than he would have, but that i would try to make him proud of me. i told him a million times and not enough that i loved him and i hugged him and i kissed his forehead and cheek.
and then i said good bye for the last time.
i couldn’t say it out loud at the funeral, because i’d already said it so much. but i hope and kind of know that he heard me every single time.
