If it was the cancer, I’d be devastated, still, but not living with this dripping open wound. When someone is so stubborn, it’s nearly impossible to change their behavior. Maybe entirely impossible. But still, his cause of death does not sit right with my heart, and it certainly didn’t sit right with his.
With a pacemaker put in just a week or so prior, and a box not set up properly by the rehab home that was supposed to notify the hospital in case of any problems, and a man alone with no one to help him, screaming deliriously into the night. How fast did they go to him? What happened in his last hours? He called my mother and told her how frightened he was, they were taking him on a ship. She told him to go to sleep, he was just having a bad dream. It wasn’t a bad dream. It was the worst dream. The end dream.
In my own deliriousness just a week after having my son and pumping all hours night and day to keep my milk supply alive I received a call at midnight—a few moments after going to sleep for my needed hour—that my father was dead.
All the calls and trying to coordinate doctors and convince him to accept treatment when he wasn’t in the right state of mind and beg him to eat a god damn banana to increase his potassium levels were useless or maybe caused more harm than good. I was the one who recommended the rehab by his mother’s home—I should have instead pushed for one closest to a hospital.
And yet rehab was a joke in that he was not being rehabilitated. His heart was failing. He couldn’t stand up without his blood pressure dropping to dangerous levels. I couldn’t go see him in my third trimester. I knew the end was near but did not think it was quite so near as his cancer was not spreading so fast and maybe we at least had a few months left—some time to say goodbye.
He pushed himself too hard in physical therapy to stand and no one stopped him. The last video of him my mother sent was him standing and smiling and taking a few steps. He thought he was getting better. Getting out. Maybe that’s a good thing. But if he hadn’t pushed himself so hard that day… if it wasn’t a Friday and then the weekend with less staff… if the rehab wasn’t in the middle of a big move to an entirely new building distracting the workers from their other duties… if we pushed to figure out how to get him seen by a specialist even though insurance wouldn’t cover medical transport and he couldn’t sit up… if we had yelled at the specialists to see him now not in a month and yes we know they are busy but this is an emergency… if we listened to him about not trusting the doctor at the rehab who was changing his blood pressure mediations… if he ever had a primary care doctor instead of only cancer specialists… if only healthcare wasn’t so disjointed and managed as if our bodies were one connected system instead of parts to be managed by specialists who don’t speak to each other… if only doctors at hospitals who changed out on shifts understood what the doctor on the prior shift said or recommended. It only there was some consistency and sanity in all of it.
He was a very sick, dying man. No one would question that. In his delirium his worst cake out—and the nurses and doctors did their jobs as they do, but their empathy if they had any drained with their patience. But after all of that… from the first day in the hospital in June until his passing in August and my body aching with third trimester pains and heart aching wondering if I’d ever see him again and if he’d ever meet his grandchild then breaking when I was told at midnight that horrible night that he never would… I’m a mess of a human. Crippled, more than before. It’s not like I had such a perfect relationship with my father, but I felt a responsibility to him, to hear him, to help him, to ensure he had the most peaceful death possible when it had to happen, and I achieved none of that.
Some nights he shows up in my dreams. I don’t believe in an afterlife, they are just dreams. But still, they are so real. He is there with my son and they are so happy together. And then I wake up and I remember reality. My mind slips to imaging his corpse, nearly two years buried, and the moment at his funeral I saw him dead, though I shouldn’t have, as it isn’t something Jews do, but my mother had to identify the body and my non Jewish aunt recommended I put something of my sons in his casket to bury him with. So I put the frog hat that I took my son home from the hospital in on his shoulder and looked at him dead for a few seconds but those seconds etched themselves into my mind for a lifetime and I see them each time I awake from these all-too-frequent dreams.
But death impacts all of us and we all lose our parents sooner or later. And other loved ones. And ourselves. So I try to lift myself out of this broken state and use it to fuel a drive to make the most out of every moment. I’m trying. But failing. Maybe now, nearly a year and a half later, I’m starting to truly dig out of it. To accept he’s really not coming back. That time is never enough. That memories fade no matter how hard you try to cling to them. And no matter what freezes your heart, life moves on, cold and emotionless. It doesn’t wait for you or anyone.
life with interest 