American Elegy

As I was writing an email to a friend yesterday it dawned on me that today (July 3) is the 8th anniversary of the day I lost my dad. Some days it seems like he's been gone forever. Other days I still expect to see him come rumbling into the room arms spread wide in an invitation to a rib-crushing bear hug, and singing some (usually awful) 1940's torch song in his horridly off-key voice (some of which I'm sure was a put-on... it had to be). Or maybe hear him making one of his trademark (atrocious) puns. (I inherited some of this arguably lamentable talent, but nobody approaches Dad's mastery of the art.) He had always been a vital man. A force of nature it seemed at times. The guy everybody said "has never been sick a day in his life". Then one day he was. Sick. Sicker than we knew. Sicker than even his doctors knew. And definitely sicker than he knew.

Dad didn't know how to be sick. Being sick -- even just as a concept -- was totally alien to him. He wasn't a Pollyanna about it, or even especially heroic. If he felt sick enough to visit the doctor, he did it, took the medicine they gave him and got on with life. As long as he wasn't going to spread whatever disease he was carrying, he moved through the world like he always had. He exercised, ate right, and took care of himself. He quit smoking his pipe when I was in middle school because the doctor told him he needed to get his blood pressure down. So the pipe was gone. Just like that. No agonizing over it, no bargaining over "just cutting down". It needed to be done, so it was done. He did everything that way. So when his platelet count started spiraling steadily down, all he wanted to know was how to fix it -- or if not fix it, work with it. And that's what he did for the next four years. Work with it. He gave it the consideration it was due in the context of everything else he needed to do. But no more. His "condition" (which nobody identified until it was far too late) didn't determine what he did in the course of his day. It might occasionally determine how he did it, but it never stopped him.

But it never improved either. Infusions of platelets might arrest the slide temporarily, but his body was destroying them faster than it was making them. Chemotherapy drugs couldn't stop the process, even a spleenectomy didn't help. Surgeries for other conditions, like a herniated disc, became problematic because his blood wouldn't clot properly. Toward the end -- perhaps three months before -- he suffered a hemorrhagic mini-stroke. And still he marched on, conducting the business of living his life with due diligence and deference to his disease that still had yet to be given a name. Finally, his platelet count dived so low that his blood vessels simply began to spring spontaneous leaks, and it was only a matter of time before one of these bleeds proved fatal.

My dad was fortunately able to die the way he lived. With dignity and on his own terms. He was doing all of the things he'd usually be doing -- quite literally -- right up until the time he went into the hospital for the last time. Within a few days, they told us the only thing they could really do for him was buy him a little more time -- maybe a month, probably less. Or, they told him, he could opt for Hospice and let things take their course which would take no more than a week or 10 days at the outside. He was still as sharp as ever, so he was able to make the "hard" decision for himself. And once he made it, the week or 10 days shrunk to something closer to 2. Dad always was ...ahem... thrifty and hospitals are expensive. Over those two days, he said his good-byes, then slipped into unconsciousness and finally into the next ... plane. I was with him and I felt it as his pulse slowed, weakened and finally went silent completely. It was peaceful, and they'd made sure he wasn't in pain (with a lot of really good drugs).

If I hadn't been holding his hand I might not have even realized he was gone. I don't know what I expected, but it seemed like there should have been more. There should have been some event that marked his passing from this world. Somebody should have rung a bell or sounded a trumpet or made some fucking kind of acknowledgment that the man had been here and was now gone. But there was only the ticking of the clock, and the gentle voice of the Hospice nurse saying, "We'll call time of death 9:50." It was almost as if she was asking my permission to make the pronouncement. I didn't know what to say, so I nodded. Just nodded. And I set about the business of getting my mom's things packed up so she could go home to her own bed. I did the Things That Are Done to tie up the loose ends. I shuffled the paperwork for mom, made phone calls, split up various duties with my brother and various relatives and wrote the eulogy I'd deliver at the funeral. But I never once cried. I came close. My eyes filled up, but they never spilled over. And in the eight years that have passed since then, I can't honestly say I've ever cried. Not over my dad. I may have. But I can't sit here and state with authority that this is the case. It isn't that I don't miss him. It isn't that I wasn't close to him. And it certainly isn't because I'm incapable of tears. I felt the loss, and still do sometimes. I've felt the grief, and the anger and the outrage.

But he was done. He was finished with whatever it was he had to do, and it was time. He was younger than you'd expect -- only 67 -- but he hadn't left anything incomplete. And no matter how much I hated saying good bye, I couldn't be sad about it because he'd accomplished what he came here for. He just got it right quicker than most of us. In his eulogy I wrote, "My dad wasn't just a great man. He was also a good man."

And I can't say that and cry at the same time.

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