My father is dying.
We die, all of us, eventually. Sickness; accidents; suicide; apathy; time; assure we will eventually breathe in and exhale for the very last time. And yet that doesn’t make it easier to accept. My father is dying, but not in the sense of “we’re all dying” that lives in that little room in our minds where we lock away our unpleasant thoughts, only bringing them out occasionally to ground us in reality or to experience an emotion and invoke a memory. My father is dying now. He currently exists in an indescribable, but very familiar state—he isn’t dead, but he isn’t really alive either. I have come to his home to see him in the hospital bed, to hear the moan of the machines, to smell the antiseptic and sickness, to see his grimace at the slightest provocation and the way his features soften as another half-milliliter of Morphine is squirted into his mouth. His breathing looks labored but it doesn’t seem to bother him. He’s so quiet I catch myself looking to the many layers of blankets that cover his failing body to assure that his chest still rises and falls. Cheyne-Stokes Respiration, they call it. The description reads more complicated than what actually occurs. Technical details aside, in the words of former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, you “know it when [you] see it.” The fact that I can still prompt him to react unpleasantly by moving his head or rolling him over is, in a certain sense, comforting. I spent nights alone with my mother in Hospice and was holding her hand when she died, yet I had seen nary a reaction from her in the preceding weeks. She was already gone and we were waiting for her heart to stop. Dying isn’t a black and white thing, as one would think. That in-between space where you’re not actually dead but certainly not alive is a philosophical gray area. Medically, of course, this is a stupid proclamation, but clinical terms can’t encompass the gravity of sitting in the same room with the people who are solely responsible for your existence as they leave their bodies, and then their lives with a whisper.
My father is dying, and no matter how much I know he has to I don’t want him to; I don’t want to make him stay either, though.
