December 10

Today is the four-year anniversary of the death of my father, from a massive aneurysm that stopped his heart and sent his spirit into the sweet hereafter.
This in a sense is what's true. In fact, he was found semiconscious in the toilet, by his wife. His heart stopped in the ambulance, and though he was resuscitated, he never regained consciousness. About 36 hours after the event, a team of doctors and nurses stopped his heart for good, so that the organs he was to donate could be removed in a state of viability. Exactly one week earlier he had a birthday. I thank God I remembered to send him a card that year. It was to be our last official contact.
Unofficially, I've seen him once or twice since he died.
I marked the anniversary this evening by baking a cake with my son, knocking back a couple of weak drinks and watching a film by my friend Dean called "Dropped On My Head." It's the story of the head injury he sustained ten years ago while shooting a television commercial. It seemed somehow appropos, to consider someone else's trauma -- something survived.
We decided after several consultations with a neurologist at Mercy Hospital that it would be better if my father did not continue with artificial life support. Their pastor was present; their children and grandchildren, all strangers to me due to the many long years of estrangement. I was at a distinct disadvantage and felt grateful at the time that we were all on the same page: the question of what was to be done.
Artifical life support. Because, if it had continued, he would have been living an artificial life. The doctors were doubtful that he could regain consciousness, more doubtful still that any semblance of personality or self-sufficiency would be apparent if he did. All of this might have been no help to me had I not seen him in intensive care -- hooked up to myriad tubes, a breathing machine, with his upper body elevated and his legs in pressurized cuffs. He looked small, a lifeless puppet, beyond consciousness. He looked as though he had already left. No longer a robust Germanic frame over six feet tall and always a little heavy -- he seemed less than half his normal mass. Emptied.
The 2am phone call and the cab ride out to Mercy in heavy snowfall had been a hellish time. My infant son was two months old, and I knew I could not bring him to the hospital with me -- the idea of bringing a healthy baby into a hospital seemed foolhardy. My husband had launched himself directly into a state of extreme denial when we got the call -- he was refusing to get out of bed, saying he intended to go to work that day and needed his sleep. So I'd had to phone my mother, my father's ex-wife with the news as well as the need for her to come over and watch the baby. This too was horrible, to bring this information to my mother -- I'd had to do it when her father died as well, when I was sixteen -- and I knew she still loved my father. I also knew she'd never go to the hospital, because that's how she is. But my stepfather had to drive her over to our place, and he took the opportunity to point out to me in my kitchen what an asshole my husband apparently could be. I remember I had to leave the kitchen for a moment, to gain the wherewithall to tell him simply that the timing of his critique was extremely poor. He felt very badly for Mom, felt she shouldn't have to babysit at a time like that, and of course he was right -- but the only alternative was for me to fail to attend my dying father's bedside. In this I was completely alone. Being alone was what made it truly hellish. I knew that when I got to the hospital, the only people I would see were my father's wife, a woman who had refused to let me into her house for more than 20 years; and the children they raised, who never knew me.
I can't remember ever feeling more alone.
So, the hours passed.
The medical information was processed and a tentative decision reached before I left the hospital three hours later, to return home to breastfeed my son. Later I received a phone message from my stepmother telling me that she and her children had said their last goodbyes, and that the time had been set. She asked when I spoke to her if I would be visiting with him one last time, and I said no. I don't think I explained myself, but it was because I knew he was already gone; and I couldn't face the mechanics of another trip out there. I knew some of his organs would be recovered, though I had to get the details from the intensive care nurse ultimately. A good friend who happens to work in the transplant business was able to tell me how and when his lungs and kidneys had been placed with the living. So a part of him lives still, somewhere, sustaining someone else's life. My father had not specified in any will or instrument that he would be a donor; again, it was a decision his survivors made by consensus, without effort, when we were asked. In retrospect the whole thing went very quickly.
I fear the ring of a telephone in the night.
Bad news travels a crooked path and always has. I'm as likely to be the bearer of it as to hear it from someone unexpected. When my mother's mother passed, six years or so behind her husband, it fell to me to call my mom's ten brothers and sisters with the news. When my sister was hospitalized with encephalitis at age 18, I don't know who made the call; when my father died I think it was his oldest son, phoning from the airport in Bloomington Indiana, who got through after my husband hung up on the hospital chaplain.
But everyone fears the phonecall in the night, once you've had one, so that's not news.
He came to me in a dream, my father, several months after he died.
He came as they do looking fit and 30-ish, at his peak of health and good looks maybe. He came without glasses, in brown slacks, a white button-down shirt and a brown vest. Maybe a tie. My father was a small business accountant and always dressed for work.
He walked toward me where I sat at the edge of a bed, out of a vague distance where clusters of people stood and talked as though at a party or gathering; he was smiling but calm, and silent. He spoke to me; he bent down and spoke to me, though I cannot recall the sight of his lips moving or the sound of his words. I cannot recall what he said to me, and could not when I awoke, though the memory of my response to his words stays with me. When he had said what he needed to say, he walked on -- he could not linger. In the continuing distance beyond me somewhere I knew his wife and children grieved and he had to comfort them as well. I remember he smiled again, a calm smile full of seriousness and meaning. And I felt like his daughter, felt my love for him and my desire to please him, and that was all.