My father started dying twenty years before he actually died. He had a heart attack and bypass surgery while I was still in college. From that point on, although my mother had three different cancers in the intervening years and a host of other medical problems, it was the specter of my father’s death that floated above us at all times, perhaps because he himself feared it so. He was an atheist; he was terrified of his own nothingness, the inevitable empty void that he could not rationalize away. And for years, as his child,I too felt that my father’s death was the thing I was most afraid of—until it wasn’t anymore, until the quality of his life, his unfathomable suffering, became the most frighteningly real of nightmares and then I had more pressing things to be afraid of: that he might, against all odds, continue to live.
 The last ten years of my father’s life were hard. The last five were horrific. It was during this long final phase, when his many illnesses became acute—swirling around in his body like some toxic, murky stew, leaving him virtually paralyzed and as mindless as any late-stage Alzheimer’s patient—that vowed to stay by his side, to help take care of him as long as he needed. I was married by then. I had first one, then two small children, a household to run, a career to manage, but my father had always stood by me, he’d loved me and cared for me my whole life, and in turn, I loved him without reservation.
So I made a pledge: “I will help him as long as he needs it.”
I remember the moment said this to myself outside his hospital-room door. It was a promise I lived to regret. |
