My Dad’s Last Day: April 23, 1991

My intention with these narratives — there will be three of them — is to tell the story of each of my family members’ last day. I’m doing this to feel like I was there in some way, because I wasn’t with them when they died. This is on my mind more than ever during the time of COVID-19, when so many people are dying alone. I have a lot of questions that can never be answered about my father’s, brother’s and mother’s last days, but I’m weaving what I do know with what I hope or, if I’m being honest, fear might have happened. I yearn to put myself into those spaces, yet I only have the reference point of where I was when I got the calls telling me they had died. With my dad and brother, many hours had passed from them leaving this life until I heard the news. There’s so much sharpness in that moment when you find out someone is gone, even if you’ve been waiting to hear the words for years. It’s like a star exploding — the person you were when you picked up the phone to say, “Hello?” tumbles into the vacuum. Your brain registers the word “died” coming from the other end of the line, and you are forever changed. Those moments are pierced into me like invisible-ink tattoos. I’m digging deep into those memories as I write my memoir, and this exercise will weave into that larger story at some point. What I really needed from these imaginings was a way to insert myself more tangibly into the day they left. I’d been drawn to this idea as more of my friends lost a parent and shared their stories of being there, physically, at the moment of death. For some, it was peaceful and beautiful to be there, a gift. For others, the experience haunts them. Writing the stories of those three days has been both haunting and a gift I’ve given myself. It’s the best I’m ever going to get in trying to know the unknowable.

The private ICU room is dark. A thin strip of dimmed light above the hospital bed casts a faint glow upwards. The ever-present whir of machines and soft, rhythmic beeps create a white noise backdrop in the small space. You, my father, are intubated, not breathing on your own. The slow-and-steady, in-and-out suction of the ventilator breathing for you might be calming, like a yogi you’d want to mirror your breath after, if it wasn’t a reminder that you’re dying. In the past weeks, you’ve ripped out the tube from your throat several times, creating strife for the nurses on many levels. It’s their job to keep you alive. Your stubbornness is doing their job for them because you won’t give in to death, but that same stubbornness makes you a difficult patient. You want to breathe on your own, damnit, and I’m certain the thought ‘get this fucking thing out of my throat’ was going through your mind every time you tore at the cords. The connection point is so fragile, at that soft spot in the hollow of your neck, but it’s all that’s keeping you alive at this point.

The road leading to this day has been Sisyphean. Nearly three years battling hepatitis with diet and medication. Not one, but two liver transplants. An emergency, 140-mile flight for life helicopter transport. Eight months in the hospital, bouncing from room to room depending on the stage and severity of your prognosis. Pre-op rooms, post-op recovery rooms, normal rooms when we thought you were well enough to come home, emergency rooms, ICU beds simply curtained off from each other and actual intensive care rooms complete with walls and a door. That’s how I knew things were really bad, when you ended up in one of those rooms. It’s where you are now. Your skin is battered, bruised and scarred from 236 days’ worth of needle sticks, incisions, staples, stiches, bed sores, tape residue that won’t come off. Your face is skeletal, cheekbones hollow. You don’t wear your glasses or have your dentures in — what’s the point when you can’t eat anyway? — making the lower half of your face sink in even more. You were once a healthy, dark-skinned Italian man with bushy eyebrows and an aquiline nose (my nose,) thick black hair and dark chocolate eyes that would pierce right through me when you were angry or crinkle with laughter as you told a bawdy joke (your specialty.) Now, lying in this hospital bed, you are a copy of a copy of your original self. The thin hair you have left has gone gray. Your diminished body— a lump under the thin, scratchy blanket — makes this twin bed seem bigger than it is.

You’ve been unconscious for a few days now. Mom conferred with the doctors; there’s nothing more to try, to fix, to heal. Tomorrow, they decided, the machines keeping you alive will be turned off. They don’t know how long you’ll live without life support. You’ve survived in this state for so long because your heart is very strong. [Do I have your heart — strong, fierce, unyielding? Or my mother’s — soft, meek, prone to attacks? In the game of genetic roulette, I can only hope for the former. And be sure to do my cardio.]

Mom calls and gives me an update; I feel resigned. I am fifteen years old and hundreds of miles away, being fostered by my godmother and her two children. Al, my older brother by six years, is struggling. He hasn’t been able to deal with any of this. He’s lived in Milwaukee since before you were first hospitalized there; he comes to say goodbye to you but doesn’t stay long. Mom holds him as he breaks down in the hallway outside the ICU. Pulling away abruptly, he says, “Fuck. I’ve got to get out of here,” in a gruff voice, rubbing both hands on his face as he walks away, looking up at the ceiling to stop the tears from spilling again.

Back in your room, Mom sits in the dark, holding your hand covered in tubes and tape. The nurses have told her you can hear her, so she tries to find the words to say. It’s too hard, after all these years of illness and months of being at your bedside, so she just says, “I love you.” She’s exhausted. Splitting time between Marinette, where her home, her job, her friends and her daughter are, and Milwaukee, where she’s been living with your cousin, sitting in hospital rooms, trying but failing to help your son navigate this horrible situation, has made her numb. There’s nothing left to do, and she’s just so tired. A nurse comes in to check on the two of you. “I think I’m going to get some sleep in a real bed,” Mom says. The nurse replies, “That’s a good idea. We’ll take care of him for you.” This small kindness makes her eyes well with tears. The nurse hugs her, and then your wife of twenty-two years makes the long walk through a labyrinth of too-bright hallways. It’s nearly 10:00 at night, but inside the windowless corridors, time is irrelevant.

You are alone in your room. All is still as the ventilator’s lullaby continues in the darkness. The beeps of the machines have been silenced to give you some rest. In the dark, your heart beats one last time. The line on the heart monitor is flat…flat…flat. The oxygen pushing into your lungs can’t bring you back. Your nurse comes in, calmly. She checks the screen, and then checks for herself, gently placing her fingers on your rough skin. Taking note of the time––11:01 p.m.––she turns the ventilator and other miscellaneous equipment off. The air reverberates from an echo of the silenced hum. She looks down at you: a 45-year-old husband and father, leaving behind a mother who has now outlived her only child. You look like you’re 70, unrecognizable to anyone who knew you in your prime. The nurse looks at your sunken face, your closed eyes, your withered body. She rests her hand on your shoulder and wishes you peace, at last.

She stays here for a minute, knowing she needs to get the paperwork process going and — the hardest part — call your wife. But after the fight you waged, she feels you are owed a moment of quiet, of acknowledgement. She has gotten to know our family well over the past months of caring for you. In a week’s time, she and two of her fellow nurses will make the three-hour drive north to your funeral. But right now, she closes her eyes, exhales a silent prayer and quietly walks out of the room, closing the door behind her. It doesn’t make a sound.

Footnote:
Both my brother and my mom have made themselves very “known” to me in the years since they died, very strongly in the months after they left. Less so as the years have passed, but still present. With Al, he’s spoken to me through Lynyrd Skynyrd music, race car puzzles, robins, and car locks. Mom says “hello” most often through cars: Saturns, vintage yellow VW bug convertibles, and Corvettes. My dad, not so much. His spirit seemed to have taken off pretty immediately to a very distant realm, with no visits that struck me as “him” other than two vivid dreams I had many years ago.

Two years ago, I attended a writing retreat in Montana, where I wrote the first draft of the story above. Upon arriving at the retreat, I walked into the kitchen to introduce myself to the chef, a young woman who radiated warmth. My eyes caught on the stainless-steel industrial stove hood, and my breath caught in my throat: a large “Ansul” logo was stamped into the metal. My dad was a chemical engineer; early in their marriage, he and my mom moved to Marinette, WI for a job at Ansul. I never come across Ansul fire extinguishers on the west coast, so seeing that logo at a ranch in the middle of nowhere floored me. I know many people will read this account and chalk it up to coincidence, but I have more faith in the magic of the Universe than that. I can’t prove it to you with science, but my heart knows it’s not a fluke. The instruction plaque near the stove hood in that kitchen even had “Marinette, WI” etched on it. My little northern Wisconsin hometown noted there in Columbia Falls, Montana…what are the odds?

When I got home from the writing retreat, I was looking for a photo, any photo, of my dad, mom, brother and me taken at the state campground where we spent countless summer weekends when I was a kid. I had written a poem about our time spent camping there and wanted to pair it with a photo. I flipped through stacks of old photos — all I have left of those days fits perfectly in two shoeboxes — and wasn’t having any luck finding one with all of us. Two or three of us in different configurations, yes, but nothing that captured our whole family. Finally, I found one. In it, we’re all wearing matching gray hoodies with…get this…the Ansul logo in black type prominently displayed on the front. Again, my breath caught. I didn’t even remember that we had those matching sweatshirts until I came upon this photo, but of course, we did. My dad was so proud of his job title and role as family provider, it was totally him to have gotten us all matching sweatshirts emblazoned with his company’s logo. That this was the only photo I could find of the four of us at Wells State Park did not feel like a coincidence. After decades of my dad being silent from the other side, he was making himself known loud and clear. It felt like a gift that got lost in the mail for years and had finally arrived.