A Year Of Pain: Dealing With Dad’s Death

The one-year anniversary of my father’s death now lies behind me. Although looking back, it seems to have passed quickly, it has proved the most difficult year of my life. But I do feel I have many awarenesses within me now that simply did not exist before.

I wrote a poem which I read at Dad’s funeral. I reread it before sitting down to write this morning. Halfway through I had to stop. One year. It hits me hardest when I experience memory flashes, hearing his voice as he said something long ago, or seeing his expressive face. I can still feel his strong hand in mine and pray I never lose that.

I regret that I didn’t watch him, or listen, closely enough. You get used to a person, expect them, take them for granted. Caught up in my own life, my own opinions, I wish now that I would have sat back more often and enjoyed the sight of him, the sound. I come upon questions regularly that will go unanswered forever. Still, this knowledge comes in time for me to change - though change takes steadfast determination - and learn to cherish each and every moment with the ones I love.

I watched my father make that change. He mellowed and became more rounded in his latter years. Once a man encased in macho, an armor formed by a Depression-era and fractured family childhood, he evolved into a loving elder, a listener, a hugger and kisser. I feel his cheek on mine.

Still, he never liked the personal. In conversation he always shied away from that, and also the philosophical. He saw things in black and white, no gray areas in which to vacillate, no in-between. What he understood most was hard work, honesty and devotion. He had a solid knowledge of the world he lived in.

Early occurrences in his life didn’t allow him to utilize a sports scholarship for college. He became a working man, a family man, instead.

And I don’t know whether it was the pressure of the career, of raising a family, the loss of a deserved dream, or an early-formed reputation for being Irish-wild, living on the edge, but he drank beer heavily and smoked harsh, unfiltered cigarettes.

My mother remembers them talking about it, and his usual comment, “We live our lives. What happens happens.”

He never missed a day of work in 35 years. Not one. I never saw him stumble. But he never gave up his beer and cigarettes.

At least not until he was 68 and diagnosed as having congestive heart failure. A valve in his heart (a congenital defect, doctors said) had gone bad. He had to sleep propped up on the couch. If he flattened out, he couldn’t breathe and would wake up gasping for air. Though it showed little, he was afraid. Almost as afraid as I had seen him once, when I was a kid, and my teenage sister hadn’t come home for a night. But that subsided quickly when she returned.

This other fear dragged out for days, weeks, until the operation. He approached it proudly, incredibly brave.

They cut open his heart and inserted a new, plastic valve. In the waiting room, I thought it might be my mother who would die. I am in awe, how people grow together.

In the recovery room his sedated eyes fluttered open and I asked him how he felt for the hundredth time in a week. His hand came up slowly in a gesture I won’t describe. Only on extremely rare occasions did my father communicate that way. Aiming for humor at a most unexpected juncture, he had hit it straight on. He was back.

He claimed to feel like a new man, decades younger. Now he knew that the fatigue he had felt for so long was not old age but an ever-weakening heart.

For three months, he had so much energy no one could keep up. And then he started to feel sick again.

The doctors said they doubted it was there all along, but maybe so, and they simply didn’t detect it; you don’t see the entire inner workings of a body when you operate on the heart.

Cancer filled my father’s lungs and liver. Some folks believe that when they opened him up the oxygen allowed the disease to bloom. Others say physical and mental stress from the operation made him vulnerable.

I suppose it might have been all of that, added to years of alcohol, smoke and stress. It shocked us all.

Dad had seen the storm of his illness through, done what they had told him must be done, and now the tornado was turning, coming back toward him. It wasn’t fair for this to happen, not to a man who had always fought as a soldier of fairness.

But I guess, in these matters, fairness will always remain an empty word. My father knew that. He never used that concept against his illness.

I asked him to seek alternative options, but again, he put his life in the hands of his doctor and wanted nothing to do with anything the doctor hadn’t prescribed. I tried to talk to the doctor about alternatives, but he quickly dismissed the idea. He never suggested to my father anything other than the standard American Medical Association protocols of chemotherapy and radiation.

I would have appreciated, knowing the rate at which these methods fail, if he’d have said to Dad, “I believe in these tools, but this is life or death. Go gather any and all tools you can.” This is no time for an inflated personal or professional ego.

Although at times it appeared these treatments were working, Dad continued to lose weight, feel sick, and 10 months later he fell deathly ill. Even though we lived states apart, I saw him, I thought, a lot. Now it seems terribly little.

One day I received a call from my sister who lived near him, saying she thought I should come. On the Fourth of July my now hairless and gaunt father was lying on the couch near a window, hoping to see some fireworks. He asked what the hell was I doing there.

Through those months of his illness I had hoped, waited and tried to talk with my father about life and death. I didn’t want him to go without us sharing our innermost thoughts and feelings.

But that wasn’t something he could or, maybe, wanted to do. It seemed like fear to me, but I don’t want that to sound judgmental.

The end of his life, not mine, was near, and I understood that the thoughts and memories might be too much to confront.

But I knew that many cultures throughout the world believe death should not bring fear but a sense of opportunity; to fear it and refuse to talk and think of it is to miss the possibility of new realizations for oneself, one’s spirit.

I wanted to know how my father felt. I wanted to hear the learnings of the man who played the ultimate part in my life. I wanted anything and everything from him, and I wanted to give him whatever at all that I could in return.

But he couldn’t, and so finally I settled on writing a letter to him. I still don’t know exactly what I did wrong, but some of what I wrote hurt him, the opposite of my intention. It devastated me that at this late hour of my father’s life my attempt to have our last and greatest moments together had instead caused him suffering.

Fireworks popped in the air as I sat on the floor next to the couch and held his hand. His raspy breathing filled the silent spaces. We didn’t talk much about how sick he felt.

We all still had hope and focused on the idea that something the doctor could do would save him even though the doctor had admitted he had nothing more. It seemed he had kept Dad focused on his bag of tools until the bag emptied.

I experienced, that night, the depth of my father’s illness when he couldn’t rise from the couch. His legs no longer supported him. As my father had once helped me walk, I now helped him.

We took him to an appointment the next morning, and with one sideways glance the doctor admitted him. It all happened fast after that, and I think we entered altered states of consciousness.

For Dad it was distress. For the family it felt more like shock. Life had somehow shielded me from this experience thus far, and so everything seemed new to me. I tried to be alert, to watch over my mother and father. I don’t know what I would have done without my older brother and sister, who arranged almost everything.

They took my father into a room and bed. Quiet and private. The doctor had said he would do a test to see about some specific discomfort my father kept feeling.

We waited and waited. Dad wanted the test done now, so he could go home. That became his focus, going home. He wouldn’t stay in bed or lie still. Anxiety filled him to the point of desperation.

I think of it now, and I guess he knew, knew that his life was near the end.

And here lies the point of my greatest consternation. So many of us allow ourselves to be ushered into the halls of our last great drama like innocents at the scene of war - inexperienced, horrified, too overwhelmed to ask questions. And when it all becomes too much, our systems on override, the doctors - the ushers - see no other way than to sedate us.

They asked, in witness to my father’s unsettled state, if we thought he should be given a sedative, to calm him. It seemed obvious that he needed something. We said yes.

But in my state of mind, with my limited experience, I didn’t fully understand what we had said yes to, and in a matter of an hour my sedated father lapsed into a state of unconsciousness. The nurses said, “That’s better”; he was resting comfortably.

We all came down off the edge a little. I held my father’s hand, stroked his forehead, whispered to him in his “sleep.”

Soon it dawned on me that my father would never wake from that sedation. He had been delivered by his caretakers to the threshold of the gate, medicinally comatose.

I am angry that they didn’t clearly explain that to us before administering the drug. I would have liked, as a family, to have opportunity to discuss whether Dad should be eased out of this world in such a manner, to pass from this life loaded down with drugs. I would have liked for Dad to make that decision on his own.

Given the current process of health care in this country, doctors have more than a duty to administer physical treatment; they serve as our counselors as well. Death plays as much a part in their business as life.

At least offering to talk to a person, a family, through all that they know of the process must be a part of what they do.

I’m not referring to the spiritual context; they didn’t ask to be priests. But as my family, at the proper time, should have discussed the possibility of death, so should my father’s doctor.

Possibly, because of where we were, or weren’t, as a family, considering our lack of talk and preparation, the sedative was the best option. We, all of us living our own lives, need to take responsibility for not embracing the inevitability of death from the very beginning of life, for allowing ourselves to approach the final moments so ultimately unprepared and afraid.

I’m not certain what I feel about death, whether we radiate out to enrich the energy of the universe, or return to dust within our regulated concrete vaults, 6 feet under. Based on what I have heard from returned-from-death survivors, after my father’s last breath I held his hand and kissed him, looked up into the corners of the room and smiled. If he, while transitioning from one world to the next, looked down on us, I wanted him to know we were OK and that we would always look and listen for him. That wherever he went, I believed it would prove positive.

What am I certain of? Life is wondrous. All of it, from the first ray of sunlight through a windowpane, to the sweet taste of a kiss and the ache of a broken heart, to the act of closing our eyes for the last time. And I sense that one day, when I near my end, it will all seem like a dream; did I really do all that, see it, feel it?

Each moment is a flower, and life, a basket for gathering.

Before succumbing to the drug in his veins, my father settled himself, focusing his last energies, and gave me a breathtaking moment of pride. He thanked me for standing by him, for being “a good right-hand man.”

And then he entrusted me with the care of his lifelong partner, his wife, my mother. I know he knew how much that meant to us. My father thought endlessly of others.

MEMO: Patrick Michael Murphy is a free-lance writer who lives in Elk.