---
I was grateful when the decision was taken away. Before
there had been a choice, an impossible choice.
He wasn’t stable yet, but they thought there was a chance that machines
could keep him alive. A chance that he would continue to breathe and moan, maybe
keep occasionally opening his eyes (so hurting, scared, comprehending?). With
luck, he might regain the ability to communicate. There might even be the
tenuous possibility of improving enough to go to an assisted
living/rehabilitation facility. A slow battle with terrible chances of success,
but a glimmer of hope was still there. The other choice was to stop. Stop the
cascade of interventions. Let the next time something failed be the end. The
end. The weight of finality.
I couldn’t chose. Don’t make me chose.
Don’t make me kill my father. Don’t make me selfishly chose
to not see him struggle and hurt like that, recovering from this crisis only to
have the diseases progress, to have this happen again.
I feel evil. Filthy. Unloving. Robotic. Broken.
Fly, he told me. Spread your wings, you don’t need to worry
about me, go explore the world for both of us. Don’t let me hold you back.
I hated when he said that, and still, I did it. But somewhere in there I
started to believe that he didn’t need me to be there for him anymore. That
living for both of us meant doing what I wanted without thinking of the
consequences for him. I was selfish. Self-absorbed. Human, I know, but somehow
that only slightly lessens the guilt.
Now the doctor said that the prospects were dimming, that
rehabilitation to any kind of functional level was looking unlikely. He would
be alive, in the sense that he would still be warm, still breathe with a
machine, still have my father’s edema-swollen features. He could stay like that
for a while, months, maybe.
But he wouldn’t be living. He wouldn’t get better.
The choice was still wrenching. I never understood that word
until that moment, “wrenching.” I called my mother, across the country,
divorced from my father for over 15 years. My step-dad had to listen to the
voicemail to extract the information I was trying to get across, she couldn’t stand
to listen to my heartbroken sobs as I tried to choke out my need for her help.
We “discontinued therapy.” A nice injection of morphine, turning
off the alarms on machines. The feeding tube snaked down his nose was hooked to
a regulator that kept methodically turning a half turn every minute. The positive-pressure
oxygen mask still pushed air into his lungs. His pulse still traced a wave on the
screen next to the bed. His arm was still warm under my fingers, retaining deep
pits from even the lightest sustained pressure, the weight of a fingertip. I
tried to be surreptitious as I distanced myself from reality, examining the
“pitting edema” that I’d read about in books. Somehow I don’t think my dad would
have minded that part at all, he always wanted me to learn.
When he died, it was like nothing had changed. I think we
all picture deaths happening surrounded by loved ones, hands held tenderly, maybe
a tear or a sniff betraying the emotion behind the bittersweet contemplation of
the end of a life well lived. Eyes close with a smile, the monitor sounds a
flat tone, tears flow and people hug.
My father died surrounded by people I didn’t know. I had no
conception of the power I had, to ask people to leave, to ask to say goodbye in
private or with the people I wanted around me. Most of that whole week is a
blur, a mentally censored box that still brings me to tears to write about,
even 3 years later. I was answering questions that someone was asking about my
work in the Peace Corps, some older woman who I don’t think I’d even recognize
if I saw her again, just churning through the rote script that I’d repeated a
dozen times to countless family members and strangers on airplanes alike.
Then I looked up, and he was gone. That expected flat-line
tone of a hundred medical dramas never materialized. Maybe it had just
happened. Maybe it had been while I was mindlessly trying to please this person
who also needed distraction from her grief. His arm still felt just as warm
under my fingertips, sunken gently into his skin. The oxygen mask was still
strapped on, making his chest gently rise and fall, 14 breaths per minute. But
he wasn’t there anymore.
Of all the events of that week, that’s the moment I just
can’t forgive myself for. Not being there for him when he died.
No comments:
Post a Comment