The Second Year Without Pat

Pat and Dad at graduation (2005) and with Lib, Anne, and Dad in San Francisco 2000




Part 1:


Dear friends and family of Pat,

When I last wrote, Pat’s headstone was installed in April, and I was sharing some reflections on his death compared to my father’s. I hope you don’t mind if I revisit some of that territory. It’s hard to separate the two since they were so close in life and now in death. When I was visiting my father and watching him approach his last days, I remember making comparisons between Pat dying alone and my father dying with many people visiting even though he was barely able to sustain conversation longer than two or three sentences. There were awkward silences between his visiting friends and us because although we were trying to share my dad’s last days, he was, in reality, going it alone. The rest of us had the luxury of functioning. My dad did not. He could not drive, read, walk, or get to the bathroom without help. Most painful to him, a man who held the distinction of being UCLA’s first gastroenterologist in residence, a man who succeeded by the power of his intelligence, was that he could not think. The medication that barely kept pace with his pain, dulled his entire thought process. It prevented normal communication, but it did not spare him the clumsy blunders which resulted. Friends of thirty years ended up staring at the floor while trying to find words. Most conversations were light, and arriving at the moment of final good-byes was often not possible.

The last day I saw him, almost a year to the day after Pat died, I too, made light of his emotional good-bye. I was advised by the hospice doctor that he would still be alive by the time I could return. “I’ll be back, Dad,” I said, interrupting a long hug. It was February 4th. I would visit Lib in San Francisco and return to Connecticut on the 6th. As he quickly deteriorated, I tried to come back, but it was too late. He stopped eating about a week later. The medication was increased to extreme levels. By the morning of the 16th, he became agitated, uncomfortable. The hospice nurse and doctor were called. My stepmother, Anne, found herself in the impossible position of trying to know when to call, when to increase the meds, in other words, how to make life and death decisions. The pressure was exhausting. She comforted my father with every fiber of her being, stayed on top of his care better than anyone, and now it was ending. All her nursing, tending, listening, and trying was about to be over, and it wasn’t going as well as it should. My dad was clearly uncomfortable, agitated, and it took about eight hours to again increase the morphine so that he could die in peace. It was all he had asked, and it was the one thing that did not go according to plan. As much as they had prepared for that moment (and believe me, no human beings on the face of the earth could have planned better), even with every conceivable detail decided--the living trust, the cremation, the funeral, the reception including the jazz band he wanted, the post reception, the new bank accounts, who would help Anne--in spite of an entire year confronting every contingency, his extreme pain the last 24 hours could not be anticipated. It was not as smooth as they wanted.

Is there such a thing as a clean death?

It was a lonely trail for Dad in spite of the many people saying good-bye. We could not really share his burden. We could only watch how he did it, and hope that we ourselves didn’t have to face it soon. Call it courage. Call it surrender. We were spared, and he was not. The life force is fickle. It gives you one body, and when that one wears out, it’s busy creating new ones, looking elsewhere, being distracted from the life that’s ending by the billions of remaining lives. How can we savor the importance of one individual with so much competition? Maybe we should model a northern European society I recently heard about on NPR. It was said to be relatively happy, in part, because it reserved 20 minutes every day to think about the dead. I found that even as my father was slipping away, life was interrupting. I needed to get more plane tickets, get a room, plan a slide show, buy some black clothes that fit, get a substitute at school, and on and on. Dad was getting lost in all the preparation for Dad.

The struggle to think purely of the ones who aren’t here, to simply remember them is the present battle. His battle, Pat’s battle, and more recently, my cousin Stephanie in Cornwall, England, who is in the final stages of breast cancer, has given way to me, to us, to fight on our own. And it is an internal struggle in which I fail every day.