Certain days my dad made life easy for his doctors, nurses, and attendants. More often, he fought them like a tiger. A man with a lifelong need for control, most of all he resisted his powerful drugs. Although he very much liked his nurses, he loathed their daily injections.
“Goddamn you,” he said before almost every shot, “every time I turn around you’re trying to stick me with that thing. Why are you sons of bitches giving me this shit? Do you want me so drugged up that I can’t fight back? Jesus Christ!”
I took hope from my father’s cantankerous outbursts. As long as he stayed defiant, it was hard not to feel he might somehow pull through. What’s more, at that point my father was still intent on making his family feel secure, believing he must stay strong if the rest of us were not to lose our nerve. Still, I don’t think it was all show. For all of his sickness and pain, my dad still seemed to appreciate his life. That May he would sit up in bed and look out his window and say, “What a lovely morning.” He asked me all about Lornee, the man I was dating and my father’s favorite backgammon partner. He questioned Marisa and Ethan on how they were doing at school. He still pointed to politicians on his TV: “Will you look at that son of a bitch? He’s been telling the same lies so long, by now he believes them too!” What was funny about it then, the politician might be a Republican! When the cancer permitted, my father could still laugh and make others feel good, could still see the lightness in life.
Everything changed the first week of June. My father turned suddenly nervous and inward, his eyes darting and jumping at any movement or noise. That entire week, he could not focus for long on anyone or anything outside his own sick self. He even stopped hollering at his nurses. When they came in now with their Demerol and their morphine, they were no longer sons of bitches. Instead, he merely half-turned on his side and complied with their needles and pills. It broke my heart, and beneath their professional smiles I could see the nurses’ hearts breaking too.
Up until this time, my father was still taking his daily walks, dragging his IV rack up and down the ninth-floor hall. Beneath his gown and USC cap, he had shrunk to little more than flesh and bone, and yet he still climbed from his bed every day for his three or four minutes, encouraging other patients, needling the nurses beside him, strolling just a little further, just a while longer on the strong days. One terrible morning his walks began shortening. A few days later, my father said he would take no walk at all.
“I’m just so fatigued,” he explained, and I felt a great sadness and coldness. The following day, my father did not walk again and I knew he was ready to leave.
But the cancer wasn’t willing to let him go. It would retreat for a day, perhaps two, and his doctors would issue more tests. On May 29, after X rays showed his intestines were almost entirely blocked, the doctors began him on intravenous morphine. After that, my father mostly floated. Late one afternoon I sat at his bedside, my father’s mind drifting freely through time and place. With his eyes open wide, he said he had just returned from a wonderful parade. He said he marched in the middle of many majestic horses, and the drummers drummed and the streets were lined by children. I moved in closer to see if he was dreaming. No, his eyes stayed open. As he had more visions the following days, I was shocked that any drug on earth held the power to do this to my father. But at least the visions he nursed were always peaceful, and at least the morphine was keeping him warm.
As the morphine took hold, I also understood that a line had been crossed. Because for all the strides we’d made the past five years, emotional walls had sprung back up between us these final weeks. I wanted what I believed were simple things, and I wanted them intensely: to take him in my arms and tell my father I’d never forget him. That I hated that I could not help him. That he shouldn’t worry, I would keep an eye on Marisa when he was gone. That I would lose all of this weight, and take care of myself again. So many things I needed to say.
And I wanted my father, as well, to confide in me, to admit he was scared of death, to tell me where it hurt, to ask would I please try and ease his suffering. None of this happened, because I knew he would not allow it, and because he was still my father. How he confronted his death could be his choice alone.
And yet still it all seemed so crazy. My father was dying and we were talking small talk. And then he was under the morphine, and then our time had run out.
So we never had that real talk, that sweet, sad summing up, and I never cried for my father where he could see me. One night close to the end, my girlfriend Debbie drove up from Newport Beach and we left UCLA for a nearby bar and a darkened booth and the numbing effects of a couple of drinks. Or so I had imagined.
“It will take your mind off things for a while,” my old friend said, but after one glass of wine I felt my cheeks turning red and my throat closing up. Because Debbie would let me, because I couldn’t stop, I cried and cried in the dark in her arms.