Six days into the New Year…
Been thinking of my dad these past few days, just four days short of the anniversary of his death.
Perhaps explaining why I've been feeling 'blue' since Monday. Woke up with the feeling of something missing…a quiet and unnerving sense of groundless-ness, listless-ness even, which I haven't been visited by for some time.
Writing late into this morning to finally put some thoughts down. And to reflect on what has gone on this past year.
At this time last year I was either sleeping at the Sunset Inn or the Palliative Care Unit of St. Paul's Hospital. That is, if I was able to sleep at all.
At this time last year my father was fighting – and losing – a third round of aspiration pneumonia brought on by complications from Parkinson's Disease.
What this means is at the developed stage of his Parkinson's, it became an increasing challenge for my father to properly swallow many foods, especially fluids. On occasion, matter would descend down the wrong side of his windpipe and lodge in his lungs, bringing about the onset of infection.
He fought – and won – roughly twelve or thirteen bouts before this last, and severe infection overpowered him.
But there's more to that story. Definitely more than I can write here in one sitting – which has to do with all his life up to the point he entered the Geriatric Ward of the hospital in early November of 2009, ostensibly due to a fall, and also for in-care monitoring of his vast battery of prescription drugs.
The story involves fifteen years of living (as bravely as he could) under the sentence of a degenerative condition he was well equipped to grasp the terrible import of, as a medical physician himself. However, the real import, and the struggle, came in the living itself, and the precognition of what would be coming further down the pipe.
But this story also very much involves not only my father – and the gradual as well as increasing loss of his capabilities (and to some degree, faculties) – but the whole warp and woof of his corresponding society…his family, his friends, relative strangers, and the 'professional' 'care' he had to appeal to, depend upon, and sometimes unwillingly be subjected to.
A year ago on this date I knew my father was losing the fight. He'd been slipping, and recovering, for three months. There had been an earlier period of recovery when not only myself, but he too believed he might pull through. And then – a few days before he was gone – came the moment when I knew – and he knew – he was not to be here much longer.
I can't write all of that experience here, though I plan to. Whether to one day be released to the world or extinguished by bic lighter I don't yet know.
What I do know is that I do miss my dad. But also that I can't think of what's 'fair' or not 'fair' in this experience of living anymore.
Last year could be termed a year of losses…my father in January, my grandmother just a few months after. Personally, it's been going on four years of losses of one kind or another – of a major life partner, and then a withering depression that witnessed the loss of not only any semblance of joyful or pleasurable experience, but of a notionally worthy 'self' and even of any sense of meaning. But I don't know either if anything can be properly summarized, described or quantified in those terms either…as if life could be claimed to revolve around 'gains' and 'losses'.
I held my father's hands as he was dying. His system was failing fast. I'd been on the line to my kid brother in Montreal when the nurse alerted me. Looking back at the difficult, irreversible, inevitable, approaching moment of his last breath…is like fading to a gradual burn to white-out on film. Which is not to say I don't remember…it's just that memory, time, everything gets extinguished.
When my father's life ebbed something in me ebbed out too…the end of an illusion. I can't say there's any such thing as a dividing line between 'life' and 'death', in which one is 'alive' on one side and 'not alive' on the other. If I were to think of life/death (which I wouldn't choose to describe as 'not life'…just some'thing' un-knowable, and in-describable) as a shoreline, then whatever it was that was the energy or animating spirit of my father 'alive' in this world, was withdrawn like seawater receding from sand. Even withdrawn quickly (which it wasn't), something remains in the material form as the fluid draws out, but less and less so – almost imperceptibly – til it is indeed apparently 'gone', or without trace.
I'm hesitant even to describe it that way…or to use what seems like a potentially arbitrary and indulgently 'poetic' turn of phrase. What happened was that I held my father's hands and looked into his eyes and spoke to him as he struggled to breathe, and I could see in his eyes that he knew he was going, and moving beyond language, but not beyond love, and I was telling him his wife – my mom – would be there soon, though she never made it on time and I was both the lone witness and alone when the warmth started to slowly, very slowly recede from his hands.
I also know he didn't want to die, and there was fear, but he couldn't stay. I know that as long as I held on to his hands he would not go in so much fear, or that the fear would be less, and the love would be stronger, even though there was something painful mixed in this light. I know that even with almost all his strength gone from him that the final two tears spilling from his eyes were – oh fuck – both his regret at leaving the world and the welling up of love for those he was leaving behind, and himself too, who would be left behind in the form he had taken here.
At the age of seventy-four, I feel my dad still had a lot of living to do. There were some things that didn't need to happen which led – in one way or another – to his dying there and then, in that room, in that ward, and in that hospital. I don't say this with post-facto rage against any perceived 'senseless-ness' of dying. I say this because of the potentially avoidable circumstances, and practices and behaviours which expose some of the most vulnerable among us to neglect, abuse, manipulation, dis-empowerment, and dis-humanization.
I haven't become angrier since my dad died. Or, I should say I'm 'angry' or roused at times in a different way. There are some things I just don't want to let pass anymore or accept as 'reasonable' and fixed as the 'way things are'. But there are also many more things I'm no longer as bothered by, or recognize as less worthy – even delusional – to agonize over.
So here I am, this 6th of January of the 'baby' year…not having intended when I sat down at the console to move into or relate that experience, but realising how deeply it's been informing my present frame of mind.
I'm feeling a kind of restlessness with myself which I would pin as an inner directive to 'get real' (yeah, Doctor Phil colonized that one…and which 'real', anyhow?)…a term I'm not fond of but by which I mean – to get closer to the wheel of this experience, and to pass through those barriers which lead us to dwell in possibly gilded cages of 'un-examined life'.
And also, I miss my dad.
K
