January 13th, 2003

Six years ago, January 13th was Monday. And it had not been a good weekend.

Friday night, January 10th, my dad got a blockage in his small intestine and was in terrible pain. He went to the emergency room, knowing that this wasn't just one of many minor blockages he'd had over the years since colon cancer had lost him his large intestine. Those blockages, while causing him pain and making him violently ill, were nothing to this one. Something was really wrong and he needed help. After waiting for his doctor to arrive, he was taken into surgery, where the doctors tried to repair the damage from all those blockages and the very serious damage from this latest blockage—a blockage so bad that the pressure from it had caused his intestine to burst that night while he waited for his doctor.

The doctors assured my mother that the surgery had gone well. They thought they had contained all the leaking matter from his intestine. He would recover. Then they said, as the weekend passed and he didn't come out of his coma, you may want to call your family together so they can see him—I guess so that each of his seven children could look at this body lying in a bed in the ICU and wonder if it would turn into our father again.

I’m the one who stayed with him the last night of his life. I had flown in from California late Sunday night. Alyce wasn’t there yet—I think she spent that night in an airport somewhere—but the rest of my family had been there most of the day and needed to go, needed to try to get some sleep. So I stayed. And my brother-in-law Jeff stayed, too.

I could write this and say that it was the most important night of my life. I could say that I earned my mother a night of sleep when she wouldn't have had one without me, that I poured my soul out to my nearly-lifeless father and reconnected with him just in time. I could say that I learned about dads and daughters, about life and death, and what my father means to me.

But that's not how it really went. Sure, my mom got to leave there and rest, but who are we kidding? Did anyone really think my mother would sleep that night?

And I wanted, tried to pour my soul out to him, and found that I had very little to say. Somewhere in my idealistic mind I probably thought that maybe, if I could say the right thing, he might come out of his coma or at least find the will and strength to fight back to life from this. But I had nothing. Small talk. With my own father. Strange isn’t it? How many times in the last six years have I wanted to call him and talk with him about something? But that night—

So I don’t remember anything of what I said to him, but I do remember singing to him. Hymns, mostly—when I could maintain my composure, when I didn’t let embarrassment stop me. And Jeff and I took turns rubbing his feet. They were so cold.

Most of the night, I just held my father’s hand. I held his left hand in mine and it, too, was cold and not quite right—too puffy, swollen from all the fluids being pumped into him.

And we kept our eyes on the numbers on those monitors. Heart rate, blood pressure, potassium levels. We knew it was all wrong. I looked at his face and wondered all night and the next morning if he was there. If there was any point in pretending this was my dad any more.

It never got better. My last night with him hadn’t made the difference, hadn’t made any difference. He died Monday afternoon. I never saw my father come to and look around at us. I never heard him speaking to us, telling us he had heard us talking to him and singing to him, that our voices and embraces had brought him through. I never felt his hand squeeze mine back. None of us did.

We just had to go on without him.