My Own Man – Chapter Twelve

Closing Act

Once again, I was summoned, though this time not so much by you as for you. I’d driven to my apartment for a quick shower, and I was drying off when they called to say you’d died. After four days of vigil—catching bits of sleep on the couch in the Hillview nursing home lounge, tag-teaming with my cousin to make sure that someone was always in the room or nearby—you timed things pretty much the way you’d lived them: your way.

The closing act of your life consisted of three scenes, and my cue to enter each of them was a phone call.

Scene one opened on a night in autumn 2006, when you fell in your kitchen and broke your hip. I was setting up to chair an AA meeting in another town when the medical alert dispatcher called. She said you’d insisted that no ambulance be sent, and that she should tell me, in your words, to “take your time.”

I held off on the ambulance call but ignored the “take your time” part. I started the coffee brewing in the big urn, handed the keys to the first person who showed up for the meeting, and sped down into La Crosse to find you still on the kitchen floor, with the cats gathered around you.

You told me you’d toppled over trying to pick up a dropped inhaler. The inhaler was on the floor about three feet from where you lay on your side, so I guess that’s plausible. But given the late hour, I’m sure the day’s accumulation of whiskey didn’t help.

Over the next few weeks after the fall, you underwent surgery for your broken hip, contracted your second pneumonia in two months, and suffered a collapsed lung, all while in the hospital or at the nursing home. During the collapsed-lung episode, after they’d re-inflated you and you were coming out of anesthesia, you tried to climb out of your gated hospital bed, demanding that I take you home “right now, goddammit!” And when I tried to explain how that wasn’t even close to being possible, you accused me of collaborating with the nurse on duty to kill you and steal your money.

“I’m on to you fuckers,” you growled with a glare that shook me to my soul.

That’s the first time I asked the doctor pointedly if he thought you might be dying. I called him up from the waiting room a few minutes after you went off on me. I confess at this point it was wishful thinking, and I’m sure the doctor sensed this too, because he tried to equivocate what must have seemed like my obvious hope by telling me that I was “just tired.”

Of course, he was right. I was exhausted. But it wasn’t just this latest episode that fatigued me. In fact, there had been many dress rehearsals of your passing by this time. After mom died in 2003, you staged a string of near-death scenarios, almost as if you were testing my reactions. The most convincing performance was the time you took to bed for days, and you had me so convinced you were teetering at the lip of the grave that I brought Dylan along to see you one last time. The experience devastated him. But then, a day or two later, your “recovery” came on like something out of a Bible story and you were up and out of bed—visiting your haunts once again and lighting cigarettes with the oxygen tube still in your nose, joking how you liked to “live dangerously.”

***

My cue for scene two came on a Sunday afternoon. I was at a Barnes and Noble café working on a novel manuscript when a call came from the nurse at Hillview nursing home. It was the dark-haired woman that you liked. Her voice shook a bit, but she’d been through this type of call so many times before with patients and their families, I imagine, that her ability to compartmentalize held the day. They had to call an ambulance to take you to emergency, she said. You couldn’t breathe. She wasn’t sure how things would go from here—code for “prepare for the worst”—but she asked me to call when I could to let them know. They were hoping for the best. You were one of their favorites. You always could charm people when you wanted to.

I hung up and called Dylan, told him I’d swing by his apartment to get him along the way. He asked that I instead pick him up at the bar down the street from his place. Never great with confronting hospital situations, and no doubt still traumatized over the last time I dragged him to what I thought was his grandfather’s death bed, he claimed to require a bracer before going. At this stage of his drinking life, a bracer meant nine or ten tap beers, but since I was long past arguing details with the two active alcoholics that sandwiched me in my paternal line, I said “sure.”

So, on the way down, I stopped at the bar. He came out as promised, and we headed for the hospital.

You were on a gurney in the ER when we got there, conscious but sedated. They’d stabilized you, hooked you up to oxygen. But the x-rays showed that you had pneumonia once again. Your third onset in two months. 

While Dylan stayed in the room with you, I stepped out in the hallway to seek the ER physician working on your case, an older man. I steeled myself and asked him if we might consider withholding medication and letting the pneumonia take its mortal course, given your already deteriorated condition and quality of life. The doctor, for reasons I can only guess at, was not willing to sign off on such a course of action. There are effective means of treatment, he’d said. They could bring you back from this.

When he walked away to attend to other matters, I spied two younger docs in the main room and decided a second opinion was in order.

***

Later that evening, back at the nursing home, you woke up to find me sitting at the foot of your bed. You’d been out since they returned you from the hospital. You asked what time it was, inquired why I was still there. Why hadn’t I gone back to my apartment for the night?

I hadn’t expected you to come to like that, and in my surprise I stumbled to come up with a reply.

Then you asked: “Are you worried about me?”

That was a hard one to answer. You were my dad. Despite the crap that went on between us over forty-three years, you were there for me more often than you weren’t. A lot more. I loved you. No life event or accumulation of life events could ever erase that. But there was all the other stuff as well. And that too was indelible.

“Yes,” I replied, not quite meeting your gaze.

You didn’t know, and I could not bring myself to tell you, that not only had I sought the first ER doctor’s approval to withhold life-prolonging medicine, but after he’d refused, I’d pressed my case to those younger docs. I didn’t want you to suffer any longer, I told them. The COPD had left you with barely any lung capacity, I told them. You’d lost your wife three years before, I said, and had spent the days since then expressing a wish for your own death, telling me time and again that you were ready to go.

All of this was true, these things I told the young physicians who ultimately agreed and affixed their signatures to the order to withhold treatment. I did not lie to them.

But another truth, unspoken but no less truthful, existed as well: I too was ready for you to go. After all these years, it had come to that.

I’d seen my chance, and I took it.