Tomorrow marks three years since my Dad passed away. I won't lie, the last three years have been some of the best of my life. But I can't imagine how much better they would've been if my Dad were still around. This is the second part in a three part piece I wrote about the process of losing him. Part One: Backpacking was published one year after he passed. I miss my Dad everyday. I think about him all the time. But I am ok. Losing a parent is hard and I'm sure that there are people who can relate to this story. It ends on a sad note, but remember it is part of a larger story, so I hope it doesn't leave any one feeling really down.
Part 2: The Hospital
I had seen my Dad in the hospital once before. It was right after he had his hip replaced, and I was 18 years old at the time. He was awake, and totally coherent, not in any pain or distress, mostly just resting after the surgery. I came into the room, saw his smiling face, and blacked out. No shit. He was completely fine, but I think that seeing him in that situation just freaked me out or something because I remember my vision slowly fading out and my breathing becoming shallow and hustling to the bathroom in the room and sitting on the toilet gasping for air and waiting for my vision to become clear. My Mom was calling me back out into the room because someone was there visiting and she didn’t want me to be rude. I could hardly stand, but I wobbled back into the room and sat down, and watched people move through brown spotty vision. There is something about seeing your parent in a situation that they shouldn’t be in that really gets to you. As a child you are used to your parents being caretakers and being in control of the situation and fixing things when they go wrong. Seeing them in a vulnerable position feels wrong.
Anyway, I was really hoping not to black out. We limped into the hospital and met Sarah and Mom in the waiting room. Mom explained everything that was going on, what machines and tubes he was hooked up to and such. Everything was very factual and straightforward as we talked. Eventually I said I was ready to go in. We walked into Dad’s room and I didn’t blackout. I felt a slight success because of that. I looked at my Dad and I cried. I cried because he was hooked up to tubes and lying there and that seemed very wrong. We went back to the waiting room. I pushed the images out of my head and calmed down. For some reason I felt no hope. People were texting me and telling me and I was also thinking that I needed to be really positive and hope for a recovery and send Dad good healing vibes, but all I could think was that he wasn’t going to wake up. Aunt Lori showed up and I went home to change my clothes. We spent most of that day at the hospital.
I hate hospitals. During the three years that I was with Tim, we spent a lot of time at the hospital. I grew to have such a strong aversion to them and everything associated with them, that I started feeling nauseous and panicky whenever there was a prospect that I might go in one. But I always tried to keep that hidden, to be supportive of those inside. The rest of my family spent all day, each day at the hospital, from the time they woke up until they went to sleep. I tried to want to do that, but I couldn’t. I slept in as late as I could, I dawdled around the house, took the dogs on walks, delayed my departure for as long as possible. I felt awful. I felt like I should be there. But I couldn’t motivate myself to sit there in that room and be helpless. To watch as the doctors shook my Dad’s arms and legs, and peeled back his eyelids to reveal big gray eyes that stared blankly ahead. It was not my Dad lying there in that hospital bed. It was a body that used to belong to him. Everything was gone from his eyes, the usual sparkle was not there, the gentle smile had left his face. Just as bad was watching my uncle and grandpa come into the room, to see the weight of their grief sagging on their bodies. A father should not have to see his son like this. A man should not have to see his little brother like this. While I was at the hospital I spent a little time in the room, and most of my time in the waiting room or the outside garden. When I felt like I had been there at least a somewhat respectable amount of time I would leave under the excuse that I was going to go feed or let out the dogs.
Each day the doctors came in and did tests and each day they said that we should be seeing improvement at this point. Each day that passed was another day that my Dad didn’t wake up. After a few days it became devastatingly clear that he wasn’t going to get better. We could prolong his life by putting him in a long term care facility and keeping him on life support, but we all knew that he wouldn’t want that. A team of doctors came to talk to us about “letting him go.” What this meant is taking him off life support and providing him with pain killers so he could die comfortably.
I think it's probably natural to assume that your parents will die before you, but it isn't really something you think about when your dad is 57. I never pictured or imagined what it would be like when my dad died, because it was something so far off into the future that it made no sense to. I actually thought that maybe I would die in a climbing accident or get eaten by a bear or something and get to skip the whole bit where you have to watch your parents leave the world.
Deciding to 'unplug' my dad felt very weird and fucked up. It was like talking about putting a dog to sleep or something and we had to choose a day to do it, we had to schedule my dad to die. I woke up on the chosen day knowing that it would be the last time I woke up with a dad. I went to the hospital and we all gathered around and told him all the things we wanted him to know, not very sure that he could hear us, and inwardly pretty sure that he couldn't. I read him a letter, typed up to make sure I didn't miss anything. Of course it was impossible to say everything, I could have spoken my gratitude for years and still not be done. I told him how when I was out on the trail, I imagined going on a backpacking trip with him and started planning a trip on the Tahoe Rim Trail together later that summer. I told him that I would trade places with him if I could. How he was not done in this world, there was so much left for him to do. The world deserved a person as special as my dad to be there, it needed people like my dad.
I think there is a romanticized notion about being by someone's side as they die. There's an image of holding them as they take their last peaceful breath and fade away. It's not like that. As least not in this case. When we turned off the machines that were helping my dad breathe, his damaged brain tried its best to tell his body what to do, what it had been doing naturally all by itself since the day he was born. But it couldn't. He gasped and fought for air; drowning. I could not bear to watch and I ran out of the room. I prayed for it to be over quickly, but he kept hanging on. The doctors said it could be minutes, or it could even be days. I was torn, feeling that I should be there holding his hand, but simultaneously wanting to be anywhere in the world but there. 'This is fucked up. This is so fucked up' I thought over and over. I never imagined that I would have to wish for my dad to die so I didn't have to sit there and watch his life drag on. I went in and out of the room until finally I had to leave. I didn't want my last memories of my dad to be this struggle.
I went back to my mom's house and curled up in bed. A few hours later, my aunt knocked on the door. "Your daddy passed away Laura," she said. I couldn't really say anything back. She and my mom were headed back to the hospital. I stayed in bed. I realized that I was being a pitiful excuse of a daughter, but I couldn't bear the thought of returning to the hospital to see my dead dad. I turned over and went to sleep, fatherless.
