It’s all right.

I woke up in the dark this morning.

I was, unexpectedly, grateful to hear the alarm go off.  I’d been dreaming that I’d gone downstairs, and Dad was in his chair, and I was horrified to realize that I had thought he was dead, but he was alive, how could I have made such a hideous mistake?

I put on my scrubs and poured coffee in my travel mug and picked up the heavy backpack with all my gear in it for a day on call, and – in the dark –  headed south.

***

It was dark when I finally made it home last December, a frantic rush from eastern Washington where Jo and I were scheduled to teach a class the following day.  Jo drove me to the tiny airport as I booked a ticket back to Seattle on the app on my phone.  The flight in the rain and the wind, finding the car in the chaos that is perpetually SeaTac, the long long drive home in rush hour traffic.

I had texted Dad from the hotel parking lot, just as we pulled in.  He had started his final “Hail Mary” medication just a week prior, a last ditch attempt to see if anything would slow his metastatic prostate cancer.

How are you doing?   

A moment later, he wrote, Not well.  The medication was making him profoundly ill, and terribly fatigued.

Do you need me to come home?

A much longer moment.

I think I do.

My father had spent his life trying not to inconvenience other people, to be the one they could lean on, instead of leaning on them.  

Every alarm bell in my head went off.

***

When I finally got in the house, hours later, Dad was in his chair.  I pulled up the rocking chair next to his, and hugged him.  We sat together in silence for a little while.

Then he reached out his hand for mine.

I knew what he was about to say.  I’m not ready I’m not ready I’m not ready.

With tears in his eyes, he said, “No more medicine.  No more treatment.”

And I said, “I know.  And it’s all right.”

***

I sat in the office in Everett, waiting for my pager to go off, sorting through the thousands of digital photographs my father had meticulously scanned into his laptop in the past ten years.  Photos from his childhood, Mom’s childhood, high school, college, the wedding, all of us.  All the adventures and twisting paths that branch from the central artery of a life fully lived.

I needed to upload the photos of Dad so that my uncle could work on the slideshow for Dad’s Celebration of Life.

There are the photos of their road trip to the Rio Grande.  That must have been….1973?  1974?  Dad swam across the river, stepped into Mexico, and then swam back.  Pretty different world.  Who is sitting at the picnic table with him?  That’s Mom…..that might be…?

Dad had told me of their Rio Grande road trip a dozen times.  I knew the story.  The swim across the river, the car breaking down, the sketchy tow truck, an unexpected stay in Alpine, Texas.  He’d told me who he had traveled with.  But the names were gone now, and the faces in the photographs were strangers.

I listened to the story, but I never heard the story, not fully.  Because….because I wasn’t supposed to.  I was just being present for Dad, allowing him to re-live the memories of that trip, that adventure.  The stories we tell, the memories we share, they are always vastly more entertaining in our head.  Funnier.  More vivid.  More heartbreaking.

There is always something lost in the re-telling, simply by its nature.  I wasn’t there.  No matter how meticulous and magically the story is woven together, it is never the same as when it was lived.  

I would never experience the Rio Grande as they had during that hot summer in the 1970s.

I was never meant to.

I was meant to be present, and engaged, and in doing so I allowed him to experience it once again.  

That is the gift of the audience to the storyteller.  

A chance to remember.

***

My pager app beeped.  The ED triage nurse was on the phone.

“Can you come in?  We have a physical assault case.  He was jumped this morning.  They stomped on his head until he lost consciousness.”

At the patient’s bedside a short time later, I took photographs of the marks on his face, marks left by the soles of the stomping boots.  We could almost tell what brand they were.

And his sisters and I held his hands as he cried, remembering the moment, just before he lost consciousness, when he thought he was going to die.

***

I drove Dad to the Emergency Department on the Monday before he died.

He was so sick.  Dehydrated, in pain.  I’d come down the stairs in the morning, and realized his right eye was swollen.  

“I can’t see out of this eye.  I can’t make it focus.”

“When did that start?”

“Three days ago.”

The ED doctor had him scanned from the top of his head all the way down to his knees.  This was the first imaging he’d had since December, since the PET scan that showed us the cancer had moved into his spine.

His phone dinged; the CT scan results were available on the hospital digital portal.  He handed me the phone.  “I can’t focus this eye enough to read.  Tell me what it says.”

I had to read it twice.  I understood every word I read, and yet somehow it didn’t make any sense.

Get your fucking shit together, Phillips.

“There’s a metastasis on the inside of your skull.  On the right temporal bone.  It’s pushing on the lateral rectus muscle of the eye, which is why that eye is swollen, and why you can’t make it focus.”

He nodded, and closed his eyes.  And after a moment, he opened them again, and reached out his hand for mine.

I knew what he was about to say.  I’m not ready I’m not ready I’m not ready.

“Go call your brothers home.  It’s time.”

And I said, “I know.  And it’s all right.”

***

After I finished the forensic photographs, his sisters helped wash the blood off his face, and the doctor placed packing in his broken nose, trying to get the slow bleed to finally stop.  I gave his family all the contact information for the intervention center, and told them to call us for support, for legal help, for whatever they needed.

Just before I left to head to my next call, I said, “Does he have somewhere safe to go tonight?”

The older sister nodded.  “He’s coming home with me.”

From the gurney, the patient said, with a muffled, stuffy voice, tinged with humor, “I am?”

She glared at him.  “Yes, he is.  He doesn’t have a fucking choice.”

***

Dad had a choice.

I am wholly, profoundly thankful that he had a choice.

But handing him that cup with the drug cocktail was, by far, the hardest thing I have ever done in my entire life.

We stayed with him as he fell asleep.

I curled up by his side as we waited for the rest of the medication to take effect.  I found my thoughts drifting, floating, disconnected from reality, strangely calm as the sun poured in through his bedroom windows.

I found myself unconsciously counting the seconds between his breaths.  Fifteen.  Then twenty.  Forty-five.

Then sixty.

I turned my head slightly towards him, and squeezed his hand.  “Are you gone?”  I whispered.

And my Dad, somehow embracing the humor and the laughter so inherent in his life, right up to the very end, chose that moment to take his final breath.

I actually laughed.

“You little shit,” I said.

And then I fell apart.

***

He and I had talked together quietly the previous afternoon.  There were specific things that needed to be done prior to taking the cocktail, certain timelines to be followed.

I was walking him through the different stages.  “Eight hours before, no more food, only clear liquids.  One hour before, a bunch of nausea medications.  Then —“

I looked up and he was crying.  He reached out his hand for mine.

“I’m sorry you have to do this.  It’s so hard on you,” he said.

I took his hand, holding it close.

“You have given me my whole life.

And it’s all right.”