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December 10, 2008
Written in 1998
Did you know that my father died?
Yeah, he did.
I didn';t have the best relationship with him. In fact, I hardly knew him. I spent much of my youth pretending I knew him.
When, in my adult life, I was actually in a position of getting to know him, it was too late. He was a withered and angry old man. You see, he had been drinking for years and years (since he was 15, smoking since 14) and he was quite satisfied with his lifestyle.
My brother Scott told me that dad once said, "I like to celebrate."
This celebration could be looked at in one of two ways. First, he lived his life the way he wanted, and died a happy man. Or second, he was an addict, and this forced him into a lifestyle, one that he justified by saying he "liked to celebrate", and that ultimately made him die alone.
That last statement isn't quite true, he didn't die alone. He made a good friend in his last years... a friend that would help him, take care of him, and chide him for hurting himself. This person became a friend of mine as well. He did those same things for me (except for the health part).
Anyway, the interesting part was watching him die. I had visited him in the hospital the day before, and he smiled when I walked in. His health was bad, he wasn't able to talk, and he was hanging on by a thread. But he recognized me. I spent some time with him, beside the bed. I touched his hand, cold. I watched him, and I tried to conjure up any feelings that I had. I felt on the spot, as his friends were there, expecting (?) that I would fall apart. I didn't. In truth, I felt very little. I felt duty. I knew what I had to do. I needed to help him die. I told the doctors to remove life support (something that I thought would be more difficult than it was, being in Costa Rica), and they agreed.
I returned the next day, walking into the hospital a nurse ran down the hall, grabbed my arm and in broken English said, "Not long. Not long." I walked into the room, he was gasping, had shallow breathing. His skin was cold to the touch. He moved, just a bit. And then he died.
The timing was weird (a Costa Rican woman told me it was a miracle that he waited until I arrived), the situation was weird, being in a third world country, everybody crossing themselves in the way that Catholics do. I still didn't know how I should react. I was still looking for feelings to come up. The moment was here, I should feel something, shouldn't I? What did I feel?
Well, are you sure you want to know?
I felt relief. I felt good. I felt amazed at the friendliness and generosity of the Costa Rican people who helped me through it. I felt duty. I felt responsibility, I felt good in making the decisions that I did.
Most of all, I felt like an adult. At the time of this writing, I'm 28, and I made my first real adult decision/choices. Yeah, yeah, I moved across the country, my career goes well, I live with someone I love, those too are adult themes, I'm not trying to minimize the importance of those. But, I realized that the facing of death, the death of someone that was so fictionalized, so foreign to me, forced me to come to terms more finite. There was a beginning and an end. And I made that choice to accelerate the end. Now how often do you get to make that kind of choice?
[What I've neglected to mention: how Jenny helped me, how my immediate family helped me, how Rosie, the outgoing and helpful pharmacist helped me, etc. etc.]
Posted by tdotjay at December 10, 2008 9:56 PM
