I hadn't prepared the girls well enough, I could see that immediately. Or perhaps the Irish in-home nurses hadn't done their job in making him presentable for our visit. Wherever the fault lay, Esme and Auden each found one of my thighs to wrap themselves around as we took our first look at my father, sitting on the love seat at the far end of his living room.
I couldn't afford to retreat like my daughters. "Dad!" It was hearty and cheery. The best I could manage at least. Inwardly, his appearance shocked me and my instinct was to slap a hand over a gaping mouth. Instead, I made sure my steps were swift and enthusiastic. He didn't get up, so I leaned over to press my cheek to the top of his head. My girls had stayed behind at the entrance of the living room.
Hadn't I seen my dad just six weeks earlier at his usual Boston haunt, the Charles Hotel? He had come from San Francisco to visit me and my family as my husband was getting ready to graduate from business school. He'd come often over the two years we were at school there -- too often, we felt sometimes -- and this last time we all said goodbye to Boston together. We were moving on to New York where he also had his regular hang out -- the Trump Hotel -- and we were sure it wouldn't be long till he visited us there.
But it was true that in Boston he had shown some signs that his two year battle with melanoma might finally be getting the best of him. Up until that point, he had traveled easily, retained much of his energy and steered clear of chemotherapy. But on that last trip to Boston, he fell asleep in his chair mid-conversation, perspired profusely and had to sit down for a rest during a simple walk across the business school campus. He was scheduled to continue on to Costa Rica to visit his girlfriend, a trip he had made many times, but he canceled this next leg of his journey and instead returned home to San Francisco.
Perhaps his defeat in the face of the Costa Rica trip should have signaled to me what grave condition he was in, but he had in fact flown across the country to see me and he continued his daily custom of dressing in a suit. That didn't seem to me to be the behavior of a man who was about to die. So it was with some bewilderment that I started receiving phone calls from my dad's housekeeper in San Francisco soon after we had settled ourselves in New York. She was concerned that he was overdosing on his pain medications, and that it was this over-medication that was causing him to sleep so much and lose his train of thought while talking. Over the next six weeks, I worked with my half-sister and my uncle to get a clearer picture of exactly what was going on. There was a fight about whether or not he should drive his car (family said no; he said yes). The Irish caretakers who had tended my grandmother on her deathbed were brought in to regulate my father's medication. Somehow, he always seemed to sneak a few pills past them and down his throat. He started confusing me with my sister and my mother when I'd speak to him on the phone. I realized he was slipping away, but no one was sure if his condition was due to his body shutting down or if we were simply witnessing the symptoms of over-medication.
Still, I was shocked when I finally flew to San Francisco myself to see what was going on. My dad was wearing merely a navy bathrobe which tied around the middle. Because his legs were propped up on a stool, the bathrobe fell to the floor well above his knees. The top of the bathrobe also exposed more skin than a sickly grown man should be comfortable with, but he didn't seem to notice or mind the immodesty. Perhaps he didn't realize how grotesque his legs looked to the uninitiated: edema from his medication had made his calves the size of tree trunks and his feet look like clown shoes. Another result of the edema was that his legs shone as if they were polished silver. My girls stared when they finally got up the courage to get closer, and I could tell that if they had been braver they would have poked a finger in his calf to see if it would explode.
His hair, also, was unkempt. The Irish girls knew we were arriving -- me and my little children. Couldn't they have at least brushed his hair? Instead, his comb-over of fine, white hair stood up as if he had just gotten out of bed. And perhaps he had. I quickly realized that getting out of bed and positioning himself on the living room love seat had been a labor of epic proportions. Two nurses were required, one under each arm, to hoist him from his bed and transfer his hands onto the walker. He inevitably yelled at them -- "I AM leaning forward. How incompetent are you people?" -- and indeed, one nurse had already quit in the weeks before I arrived.
As I distraction, I immediately went to work familiarizing myself with the situation around us: my dad at that point had around-the-clock care from the Irish girls, but there was no in-home hospice care. I made "Investigate hospice options" number one on my to-do list. My uncle had left me a list of my dad's medications and when they were to be administered, a schedule the Irish girls knew well but which my dad was constantly foiling with his kleptomaniacal habits. Grainne and Amy, the Irish girls, made paper flowers with my daughters in the living room and held my two-week-old baby.
Back in bed, my dad called me to his bedside. “Toodles,” he said, “We need to find some time this week to discuss a number of important things. First of all, can you put aside several hours to go through mail with me? I’m behind on my bills and I know there are piles of newspapers and magazines collecting on my desk. You could help me sort through all that.”
“Of course, Dad. That’s why I’m here. We can do that whenever you want. Do you want to do it now?”
“No, no. It’s a big project and I want us to be able to concentrate. There’s way too much going on right now with the kids. Can you find someone to take them?”
He hadn’t even held his newest granddaughter, but after producing three grandkids I knew babies didn’t hold much appeal to him.
“I’ll do my best, Dad. What else can I do for you?”
“Well, there are several things you need to know about. First of all, there’s a roll of $100 dollar bills in my side table here, as well as my credit cards. I want you to take them with you. You can never be too careful when you’ve got people snooping around in your house like this.”
“Dad, Grainne and Amy seem wonderful. I can’t imagine they’d steal from you.”
“Just take them. Don’t argue. I know how these things work. They’ll be in my computer looking up my passwords too if you don’t watch them.”
“Ok, fine. What else?"
“I want you to meet my lawyer.”
“I’ve already scheduled that, Dad. I’ve got a meeting with him later in the week.”
“Good. Look, you’ve got to try this concoction my night nurse Maureen makes up: jello mixed with ice cream. It’s the only thing that tastes good to me. Go in the kitchen and have the girls make some up for you. You’ve never tasted anything better. They keep trying to feed me that Ensure stuff and it’s just the pits. Who wants to drink that old people stuff when you can have jello and ice cream? I think there’s some still in there... Go get Amy to fix you a cup!”
He was absolutely delighted I had come. And that first day, I decided what my role was going to be in whatever drama was about to play out in the next weeks, months, years that he went on in this invalid state: I was going to be my dad’s ally. This was a natural extension of the role I had always played: like so many others in his life, I had been tempted to retreat from his caustic temperment, cut off ties, take a break from speaking to him. I had made it a point of honor over the past twenty years to always speak to my father and be available to him. Now, he had enough doctors, nurses and family members telling him he was taking too many pills, not eating enough, not exercising enough, not trying hard enough to live, to survive. To heck with that, I decided. He would be happiest if he had complete control of the way he left this life, even if it means overdosing himself to death. That’s the way he had lived his life -- cultivating complete control -- and that was how he wanted to die. If he wanted to eat jello and ice cream all day long till he eats no longer, let him. He was feeling threatened, incapacitated in bed with the Irish nurses snooping through his computer passwords and whatever other paranoia he dreamed up, and it was going to be my job to make sure he didn’t feel like a victim trapped in his own home.
On the other hand, he felt like a king. His apartment, for years so untouched and unvisited it felt like some resplendent but abandoned musuem, was bustling with activity. And not just any activity: young Irish girls, young granddaughters and his own daughter. Ladies, ladies and more ladies! What could be better? Well, how about a visit from the president of the American College of Surgeons? He got that too. His best friend from elementary school put aside his doctor’s coat to make a social call. As he left my dad’s apartment, the renown doctor stopped me in the hall. “You know, I thought your dad was going to be President of the United States when we grew up.” he said. “He was the smartest man I ever knew.”
The night before my girls and I left San Francisco, I sought all afternoon for an opportunity to say goodbye to my dad in private. Despite serious lapses in his mental awareness and obvious manifestations of pain, I remained convinced that I would be back again for another goodbye visit. Perhaps there would be several goodbye visits. After all, my grandmother had lived in an invalid state for years with almost no mental acuity before her body finally gave up. Who knew how long my dad could survive on jello and ice cream?
Nonetheless, it felt wrong to leave without at least treating this goodbye as if it would be the last. And yet it was hard to get him alone. It was a particularly busy day: hospice had just been initiated, the Irish girls were mixing up Ensure in the kitchen and my girls were playing with one or two other visitors in the living room. Finally, I simply closed the door to his bedroom, shutting out the distractions. He was propped upright in his electric hospital bed, but his eyes were closed as they were most of the time now. The US Open played on the TV. Federer vs. Nadal. He was missing it.
“Dad? I’m leaving now.”
His eyes opened and he looked at me.
“Ok. I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
“No, Dad. The girls and I are going back to New York in the morning.”
“But it hasn’t been a week! You’ve only been here a few days. You told me you were staying a whole week.”
“It has been a week. But you know, you’ve been sleeping a lot recently so maybe it doesn’t feel like it’s been that long. I’m sorry, I know you’d like me to stay, but Esme needs to start kindergarten next week. Besides, we’ll be back before you know it! You’ve going to be around for a long time, you'll see!”
I was sitting on the edge of the chair beside his bed. The beige chair beside the beige bedside table next to the beige bed. His ashen skin faded right into the neutral background. His eyes were so small even they didn’t make much of an impression against the washed out scene. I held his hand as we talked. His nails, which he kept long anyway, were in bad need of a trim and he held my hand loosely, limply. The only color were the bits of red jello flaking from the corners of his dry lips.
“I don’t know about that, lovey.” He closed his eyes again and focused on his breathing which had become extremely labored and slow over the course of my week-long stay. “But I’m happy to know you’ve got all my affairs under control." A long pause for a breath. "That makes me very happy.”
“Absolutely. Listen, I forwarded all of your mail to me and I have your checkbook. I will stay on top of all of your bills and you don’t have to worry about anything, ok? I have power of attorney now and the medical directive and everything will be totally fine. Don’t even give it a second thought.”
“That’s wonderful,” he exhaled. “But you still have to get my stuff out of storage and ship it to you and work with those people at the banks on my estate.”
“It’ll be fine, Dad. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything. And I’ll come back out whenever you want me. You just let me know.”
I knew I was blathering on -- what do you say when you have to leave your father in that condition and fly back across the country? -- but I did the best I could. The wrap-up seemed feeble coming out, sincere but not at all the great rush of emotion such a scene might have in a movie or play:
“I love you, Dad. I am so grateful for everything you have done for me. You have been completely devoted to me and I know that you've done what's best for me. Thank you.”
“I love you, too. But don’t let those crooks take advantage of you.”
I look back now on the last words my dad ever said to me -- “Don’t let those crooks take advantage of you.” -- and the pain of that last encounter dissolves into a laugh. What a perfect last line for a man who would instruct me till his dying day. But the first thing I thought the next day when my husband greeted me at JFK Airport with the news that my father had died while I was on the airplane coming home was, What was the last thing he heard me say? I love you. Thank you. It was all there. It hadn’t always been easy to tell my dad I genuinely loved him -- a lot of times I hadn’t -- but sitting there by his bed I had felt it. Maybe it was seeing the lion of a man humbled by the ravages of cancer and I finally felt like I worked from a position of strength in the relationship, but the admission had come easily. Almost naturally. I love you, Dad. That’s what he took with him.
