My Dad Died

The twenty-four hours leading up to my dad’s passing is the worst day I can remember in my forty years. Likely it is not actually the worst because I have had a lot of bad nights in my time, but it is the worst I can remember now.

It was the moment I had rehearsed many times in my life, I think, because I knew it would change the very air I breathed one day. But it was always one day. Until this day.

We knew my dad’s MS was causing UTI’s repeatedly and that he had been in and out of the hospital and had sepsis in response to the recurring infection. The quickest sign to know he was taking a turn was that he had stopped eating. Suddenly he wasn’t asking for chicken biscuits, moon pies, and custard milkshakes anymore. When he stopped eating, it was understood that the sepsis was back.

This time he did not want to go back in the hospital. I am sure they could have given him IV antibiotics and saved him, but it was time for him to be free from that dying body of his. He knew it, and we all knew it. He was too young (sixty-seven), but it would only get worse from there. It felt like assisted suicide. I wondered when I first walked in and saw him and he could no longer communicate, if he had changed his mind and could not tell us. Did he want to go to the hospital after all? Did he want to stay longer even though his decline and crippling disease would only get worse? I had no way of knowing what he wanted in that moment.

He laid there seemingly stiff as a board. His legs had not bent in so long they looked almost wooden. His muscles suffered badly from atrophy and sunken in in places where his calves once were, the very calves I deemed at a young age to be the size of human heads. We were all in the living room, taking turns visiting him at the side of his hospice-provided bed. He had been in hospital beds like this for a few years now with low-thread-count sheets. I wondered if he had felt any physical comfort in years, even in his sheets. Why can they not at least get this man some better sheets? But I was never in the position to make those kinds of decisions.

Only in the last couple years had I even felt safe speaking up about anything I thought should happen with my dad or any part of his life. My dad’s inflexibility never left much room for thriving leadership or strong opinions in his home. He had, on more than one occasion, disclosed that “I did not know my head from the hole in my ass”, and I knew it was important that I remembered that every time I had interactions with him, even the ones coming from the intention to help him be more comfortable. It’s fine; have the low- thread-count sheets with your MS. Sounds like a bad combo to me.

When it was my turn to sit at his bedside, the first thing I noticed was my dad’s very chapped lips. After being given an ointment of sorts, I proceeded to squirt the cream onto his lips. My hands were in the way of my view of this medical procedure, and I put it in the wrong place. His mouth was wide open, and the muddled breathing of death had already begun. The cream went in.

For a moment I was a kid again, not holding a fishing pole correctly. There is a meme out that says, “You can’t hurt my feelings. I used to hold the fishing pole for my dad,” and I am pretty sure it is about my dad! I think I had a few “not holding the fishing pole right” moments in early life, and I know my half-brother did. I watched my dad rip him open one time when he was no more than six or seven for not following fishing pole instructions. Were we supposed to all be born knowing what to do with a damn fishing pole?

I messed up with this ointment! Why did they give it to me to put on him? Everyone knows I don’t do things right! Here I was killing my dad early with my inability to hold the chapstick correctly and squirt out an accurate amount.

I recovered from the incident, thank God, because I am forty and not seven. I cleaned up the mess before it could hit his tongue. He could not yell at me. He could not be angry with me. I wrapped up the fishing line and pole just in time.

My dad kept laying his head to one side and looking at me. I believed or wanted to believe or had rehearsed for many years that he was thinking about how much he loved me and how proud he was to make something so beautiful. Deep down I knew it was his goodbye.

At one point as he was looking out into the room at I don’t know what, I saw him smile a most genuine smile. I excitedly told everyone who was sitting at the kitchen table, while hoping it was his mother there. “Guys, he just smiled!”

“He probably farted,” my stepmom replied. This was actually funny, though my laugh could only be a low, polite one, in light of my dad dying in front of me. He had spent a lifetime of laughing at his own farts, and those were some of the moments that he wasn’t angry. The humor God gave my dad with his own farts had every intention of lightening him up in his life. It was successful sometimes, and I enjoyed my dad when it was. But I knew at that moment that his mom was there. She sits with me regularly, and I have the deepest love for her, even without ever getting to meet her in this life.

In these last moments I stared at my dad’s hands. They laid across his chest as if he were in peace and already passed away in a coffin. They were so frail and like a ninety year-old man with blue veiny spots and sunken in between the knuckles. But my dad was still a handsome young sixty-seven. These were the same hands that tied bait to fishing poles, picked me up and threw me in the pool when I was five, and pointed directly in my face when telling me to “use my noodle”. The same ones that bunched up my shirt in anger in front of my friends, held four million cigarettes to that mouth, and touched my mother. I had rarely touched his hands in my life, and it felt foreign to be close to them right now. I could touch them! He is on morphine; he will likely not know. I did. I rubbed them and a bit of the hair on his arm above them. I wanted my hands to be the five year-old’s again and for him to enclose them with his, but he was too weak, and I am not five. We have years of little to no touch, and now I have years to figure out why.

This was my dad’s last full night alive on earth, and all I began to think about over the hours of taking turns at his bedside was my lack of sleep. And then all I could think about was my guilt for thinking about needing sleep on my dad’s last day living. We knew this would be it for him any moment now. I wondered how much longer one body could take. If this was punishment for his harshness in life, this punishment has gone on long enough. Set him free already!

I prayed, or at least I intended to pray, but had entered the no-sleep twilight zone stage. I had found a spot on one of the chairs in the living room with an ottoman that kept slipping and leaving my hips to fall to the floor. Every moment of that night was physically uncomfortable and reminded me that while my dad was almost between worlds, I was forty and needed sleep. The reminder made me hate myself that night. Why did I need sleep? Why could I not sit beside my dad and give him every bit of my life in those moments?

Somewhere in the haze I was imagining all the different versions of my dad. My older sister, Kendall, seems to be much more in touch with his younger years, his hippie days. Pictures I have seen of him look like a combination of Brad Pitt, Richard Gere, and Benicio del Toro. I wondered if he knew the power of his appearance or if he even knew how handsome he was at all. What did he think of his own looks? It dawned on me that I never discussed my dad’s self-esteem with him to know where his stood. Just because someone is a narcissist does not mean he or she has self-esteem, I would say. It could mean the opposite – that they are rotting from the inside with self-loathing.

My dad often would ask me in his later years, which were filled with reflection and staring at walls, what I thought about “all of this”. The question would usually pertain to his having MS. He needed these conversations like he needed the affirmations from time to time that he was a good father. I would always answer these types of queries with “I know you are going through a lot, Dad” and “Yes, Dad, you are a great father.” What else was I supposed to say? There were only a few answers that would not make my dad cry again or leave me with guilt for having needed more than the life that he provided. I had to cushion his emotions because he did not know what to do with them, and they were falling out everywhere in his wall-staring years after MS took his mobility.

I wanted to ask him, as I watched him clinging to his last night of life, what did he think of all this?

We left the next day in the early afternoon with the plan to come back the next morning, but I knew it would be the last time I would see my dad alive. My human needs took over again, and I needed my own bed to cry and sleep in. I needed my own house to cradle me, not the house I had such a love/hate relationship with for so many years. That would not do for this kind of suffering. Coming back the next day and seeing him again still dying in that deflated body meant that he would have to suffer another night like that. I did not want that for him.

I prayed for his release. I begged my grandmother, his mother, to take him. I touched his humbled hands once more, told him I loved him and that I would see him the next day. I don’t know which is more painful, holding on or letting go. I was doing both at the same time.

I walked with Kendall to our respective cars with the relief that I was spending this moment with the only other person on the planet who knows what it is like to be Carson Heath’s daughter. We both silently understood that our lives were about to change forever and that we would spend the rest of them dissecting this soul we chose. Kendall always told me that – that we choose souls to be with us in our lifetimes. So I suppose I chose him.

He died that night a couple hours after I got home. Our half-brother called, and I let out a small roar sound, I believe. The cry felt like it got stuck, so I had to kind of push it out. It was too big for my airways. I think I said “Okay” over five times followed by a “thanks for calling.” My dad died.

The next morning and many more mornings after that– “My dad died.” It has meant something different to me each day. Some days that line feels simplistically matter-of-fact like “Yeah, my mortgage check just bounced.” Other days the words fill a stone that sits on my chest and takes my breath away. And more often lately, they feel like an invitation to find him and to find me, too.

I know where part of him is. He’s in the water on the east coast. Not just because we dumped some of him on the Pawley’s Island, SC inlet, but because he left pieces of himself there many years ago. My sister and I are going back there, to those coastlines to find our father and to pick up the pieces of ourselves we also left behind.