On the 3rd anniversary of my Father's death... May 7, 2012

3 years and a few months ago, we were sitting in the unused meeting room of a senior care facility, in the area between the north end of San Rafael and the south end of Novato. It had been another trip where we’d visited our father, and found him a little bit further unmoored from himself. The tumor in his brain meant that he wasn’t really present, and save for his time as a child, the most he’d ever been a baffled passenger in this world – with a lifetime of memories leading up to some strange disconnect.

I was stuck in my own maelstrom of crazed emotions – mostly, I think I was somewhat drunk on a crazy heady brew of every single emotional nerve dialed open, and receiving data at full blast. It made everything hyper-real and totally detached. And weirdly enough, it was the best way to be around my father – as present as I could possibly be, and yet not at all sure how the fuck we got there. That day, Dad seemed closed down and sad, and I think that he was aware enough that he was slipping away, sad and scared and locked away. There would be trips afterwards where he’d be happier and more pleasant, and I think that’s because he was getting farther away from the world, and the realization that he was disconnecting from the pain in his body and the hurtful fact that his future with his new wife was so much shorter than either one of them had thought they might have.

So with all of this bombing around in our heads, we discussed the reality of the next few weeks, months, and years. Bringing Dad back home, hiring a nurse, and what the descending arc of the remainder of his life would be. And we were all trying to be so present to deal with the hard truths and tasks that were at hand, while dancing around the sharp edges of the reality of it, trying to avoid more cuts in our heart.

There was a stretch of road, heading north on 101, where you pass the offramps into downtown San Rafael, that I had driven thousands of times before – and they became part of the routine of misery. I’d work my week at work, getting pounded and punched and beaten and thrashed on the altar of office-politics sacrifice. I’d then take my weekend, where so many others would find ways to nourish their souls and do the things that celebrated life and joy and fun, and I’d go and watch my Father get sucked away by inches, feeling the utter horror walking inside that place, signing in, and feeling the utter dread as I waited for the elevator to arrive, a part of my wishing that it would never ever come (as if stairs, somehow, wouldn’t be available). And after all of that, after ever visit, somewhere in there I’d find a place to get home, sit down on the couch, and let my wife hold me while I cried and rocked back and forth, repeating “I can’t do this much longer” over and over again.

One day, I’d gone into the office to work through my day, slogging through as hard as I can. I signed out of my laptop, packed my gear up, and plugged into my iPod to listen to some podcast and walk to the transbay terminal. I made it just in time to catch the bus and head back across the bridge to Alameda. I reached in to fish my cell out of my bag, and saw the screen listing all the missed calls and voice mails from my sister Gwen. It turns out that Dad’s wife Nancy had called her, to let her know that Dad’s blood pressure had dropped precipitously low, and we had a decision to make… have him transferred to the local hospital and they could try and hammer and beat the life back into his body with all the tools at their disposal, or we could opt for palliative care… make the decision to let nature take its course, and have Dad slip away. It was the crossroads – as his loved ones, we had to take our love for our father and the need that all children have to keep the pillars of their parents holding up the sky in their hearts, or do we look at the suffering wracking his body and through the fog of his mind and decide to believe that Dad wants out and it’s time for us to let him go?

I’m sitting there, on a bus full of strangers, having this discussion with my sister Gwen, and realizing that it doesn’t matter what I saw around me – there was an entire dimension between me and everyone else on that bus. They could see and hear me but that moment and that choice and my heart being full of what felt like the entire world set me apart from them. They knew it and I knew it and there was no reason for me to feel even an atom of shame for saying loud and clear that yes, it was time to let our Father die – and I had to say it out loud and clear, because the enormity of it deserved it. A decision like that couldn’t be muttered secretly into a phone. Because it didn’t matter if it was for the best… I had just agreed to let him die. And I needed to say it with bravery.

And that same separation between me and the world-away bus-mates made me not care at all that I laid my head down on the back of the seat in front of me and just rained tears out of my eyes without even sobbing. Just… tears pushing out of me like a plunger in my head.

On the next visit out there, one of those crazed moments that tells you the Universe operates on some grand plan that we can only guess at the patterns of occurred. I walked out of the room to get my Dad a glass of water, and ran into my kindergarten teacher, who was also a patient there. She recognized me immediately, and although I swear I could not tell you her name now, or on that day when I walked in, I remembered it there and we conversed. I walked away with the water, with a high-dose of unreality washing through my bloodstream and somehow making that visit more bearable for having been that much stranger.

The last day I saw my Father alive, he was already almost completely gone. My brother in law John stood outside the care facility, looking visibly shaken. He alone amongst us had arrived first, and had to walk into that room completely unprepared to see Dad moaning and thrashing like a zombie, locked away in a morphine haze. What was left in his mind was walled off by drugs, and all that was on the surface was his body fighting to survive its own failure. So John waited outside for us, to warn us, to cushion the blow. Had he not done that… I’m not sure how it would have taken me. It still was a punch to the gut, because suddenly I understood the genesis behind every shambling zombie archetype, and exactly how horrifying and terrible the familiar could be. Because he was sighing and slightly kicking and waving his arms, his body clearly shutting down and fighting its very own orders to let go. And all I could remember was making the decision that no matter what I felt, all that was going to come out of my mouth, my body, and through every single action I made, was love. Because I wanted Dad, wherever he was deep down inside all of that, to know that we were there. We knew that Dad was going away, so I made arrangements with work to take a leave of absence to deal with things, and said that I would be on deck the next day to relieve Nancy so she could have a day off, and I would spend the day bedside with Dad.

Before we left, I walked back into the room, and kissed Dad on the forehead. Still radiating nothing but love, I talked to him just as if he was right there, letting him know that I would be back tomorrow and we would be hanging out. And then, I told him that he had always done right by me, that anything he felt like he might need to apologize for… well, it didn’t matter, because I felt that I was exactly who I was supposed to be, and I was proud of the me that stood before him. And if he wanted to let go, it was okay.

By now, I had bend over and was whispering all of this in his ear, still doing everything I could to radiate nothing but love and pure joy at being there with him. I told him I loved him. And then I caught up with everyone and we left.

The next morning, Miska woke me up, tears in her eyes, holding a phone. And she didn’t have to say it – I knew that Dad was completely gone now.

If you’ve followed me this far and read all of this, first of all, thank you. I know it’s not easy. But I want to explain why I wrote this, why I chose to dwell on those awful dark days. I do it, because I haven’t been.

I’m not thinking about it as a form of self-punishment or self-flagellation. I’m writing about it because I’m choosing to. Because, during those days, when I knew my Dad was leaving us bit by bit, being stolen by  inches, I wondered how I would ever find a place where I wasn’t living in the crazy self-reflecting memories of loss and terror and sadness and hurt. And three years out…

The thing is, people will say over the loss of loved ones that you will get over it. For me, and I suspect for many others, you don’t. Because you never really do – and the hurting actually never really stops. But what does happen is that in your head and your heart, you grow enough to make a space for it, so it’s still a part of you, yet still apart from you. You can find it and visit it when you need to, but it’s not so huge that its wearing your heart like a skin coat. You find that place, and you can feel loss, but you can also look back on the other memories from the rest of your life leading up to that. And sure, they’re slightly colored by the loss, but it’s not the defining moment. You can see pictures of your loved ones who are gone and feel the joy, even as you feel the loss.

It’s been three years. And as I do crazy adult things in my life like going house shopping with my wife today, I wish, oh fucking hell do I wish I could talk to him again and catch up. But I can also hear his voice and live with the memories of the bad, and comfort myself with the memories of the wonderful and the good.

I love you Dad. I miss you Dad. I can’t believe its only been 3 years. I have so much to share with you. And I’m happy I can remember you as yourself.