DESCENT OF MAN
(written over a period of weeks)JANUARY 27, 2007
A friend of mine named Gary, who works mostly as a historian for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, told me a few years ago that, if I were smart, I’d take my digital video camera, several tapes and a tripod, and walk over to my parents’ house and get them to record their life stories—particularly their stories related to homesteading here in Alaska, Dad being a sort of pioneer dentist, what it was like to move so far away from family back in the cornfield country of Indiana, and as many of my Dad’s hunting and fishing stories as possible. “And you need to do it now,”
I was often too busy teaching school and helping Karen raise the kids, or Mom and Dad were too busy traveling for pleasure or medical appointments. Sometimes, I was too tired, or my Dad was. There were plenty of times when I charged up the batteries on the camera, gathered up my tapes, re-located my tripod and contemplated the myriad questions I wanted to ask … only to discover that Dad wasn’t feeling all that well or had really been tired lately … so I’d put things off, hoping for a better opportunity that never came.
There was another factor in my lack of accomplishment: the foreboding sense that, by asking my parents to record their stories, I was implying that I didn’t expect them to be around much longer, especially Dad, who had been dealing with prostate cancer (as of the end of 2006) at least 17 years—and then, in more recent years, diverticulitis, diabetes, pulmonary fibrosis, and an arrhythmia that required the installation of a pacemaker back in June, just a few days before Mom and Dad’s 50th wedding anniversary. I don’t actually know that they would have taken my request that way, but that’s how I felt.
Regardless, I didn’t get it done, and now the specific details of much of that history and all those stories are gone.
Pieces remain, of course. Mom’s still around, and she can relate countless details of their history together. Some of Dad’s old buddies are still around, but the operative word there is “old”; the ones who knew him best are all in their 80s. My siblings and I are still around, and we can, in aggregate, remember a lot of what we heard over the years, although checking with Dad for accuracy is now impossible.
If I simply DECIDE that I’m going to dedicate time—precious, elusive time—to preserving whatever I still can, I’ll end up with something. It’ll be less than I planned, less than I wished for, but I won’t lose it all.
Of course, I do have to pat myself on the back a little. I wasn’t completely negligent. When Dad turned 70 back in 2002, my siblings and I presented him with a photo book of his life. Of the at least 60 pages in the book—each featuring carefully scanned photographs and some explanatory text, I was personally responsible for about three-quarters of the content. Collecting all of these photos—without letting Dad know what I was up to---required plenty of subterfuge and time, but it was worth it. He was so appreciative of what we’d done that he showed the book off to nearly every visitor to drive the length of our old gravel road. Mom loved it, too, and so my sister and I hatched the notion of making one for her when she had her 70th birthday in 2005. Because she’d been culpable in the sneakiness employed in building Dad’s book, she was immediately suspicious as her 70th approached and as I began asking snoopy questions about her past. Although she’d enjoyed Dad’s book, she was well aware of all the hours we’d spent putting it together, and she said she didn’t want us “wasting” our time doing the same thing for her. I assuaged her fears, however, by telling her that I was making a still-picture video about her and Dad, and that I needed extra pictures of her to balance out those of Dad. She knew that I was taking a second video-making college course, and that, in the first one, I’d made a film about Dad’s desire to have a big shop of his own. I told her that the new video would be for their anniversary, which occurs 10 days after her birthday. That was partially true. The fuller truth was this: I was collecting pictures for her book, making a film for their anniversary, and making an additional film poking fun at the relationship between Mom and myself. In the end, Mom got her book—more than 80 pages’ worth—and she treasures it. The two books sit like companions, side by side, in their living room. And I ended up with three videos concerning my parents.
So I never got Mom and Dad to sit down for the lengthy interviews—the live footage and the detailed stories I’d hoped for—but I got something. And I got their stamp of approval for it all.
*******************************
There’s a theory that as long as people hold memories and stories of an individual in their hearts and minds, that individual never really dies. Perhaps all of my efforts at preserving the past are a shot at ensuring my father (and others) of some semblance of immortality.
*******************************
I suppose, in some small way, I’d been preparing myself for my father’s death for the last 17 years. Karen and I got married in June of 1989, near the same time that Dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Dad decided against surgical removal of the prostate, telling all of us that, from what he’d read, men who got their infected prostates removed didn’t live any longer, on average, than those who didn’t or those who opted for other means of treatment. And by other means, he wasn’t talking about chemotherapy or radiation bombardment. He was talking about using alternative medicine. He was talking about supplements and vitamins, chelation and I.V.’s, and sometimes unproven and perhaps unscientific methods of killing the cancer or at least keeping it at bay, stopping it from metastasizing into his lymph system, his bone marrow, or his other organs. And I would be pretty hard-pressed to say that he wasn’t successful. He lasted a long time. But it wasn’t an easy path….
I can remember the days just before his initial diagnosis. He had to drink an orange-flavored agent that would allow lab technicians to better view his insides, and I can still picture him at the dining room table, polishing off a pitcher of the stuff, looking vaguely nauseated the whole time, and knowing (if memory serves me correctly) that he still had to mix and consume a second pitcher after that. Once the diagnosis came, Dad also immediately began to look more like someone who was ill. As time went on, more of his conversations centered on his condition—his P.S.A. numbers, how long he was going to be around, what procedures he was going to try, what personal items he wanted each of us kids to have. (His medical plight was far from being the only focus of his conversation; however, anyone who has to deal with a chronic condition must find it central to his/her daily existence.) So, in 1996, when Mom and Dad’s 40th wedding anniversary rolled around, my siblings and I plotted secretly to throw our parents a surprise anniversary party at the Through the Seasons restaurant. I think each of us felt that Dad would be unlikely to celebrate a 50th, so we wanted to make their 40th something special—and it was. The dining area was packed with friends and relatives, and, once Mom and Dad relaxed and allowed everyone to fuss over them, they had a great time. (Of course, Dad surprised us all by lasting 10 more years.) I also remember thinking, back in the early 1990s, that Dad might die without ever seeing any grandchildren, but again I underestimated him. He was there for Olivia’s birth in 1994, Kelty’s in 1995, and Abby’s in 1999. He got to enjoy all three of them—and that’s all there’s likely to be. (He didn’t get to see Olivia officially become a teenager, but he came damn close.)
Along the way, during these past 17 years, each setback seemed to portend the end—or at least the beginning of the end. His up-and-down P.S.A. numbers and occasional “mystery” pains kept him guessing about the future, caused him to read extensively into the possibilities and to hypothesize his fate. His two colon surgeries weakened him tremendously. His diabetes diagnosis added yet another requirement to his lengthy, daily regimen regarding his health. His pulmonary scarring and the heart condition made him more frail, kept him more bound to the couch, didn’t allow him to sleep well. Back in December, only a couple weeks before he died, he looked at his thighs and marveled bleakly at how greatly they had atrophied. “My legs used to be the strongest part of my body,” he said, thinking, I’m sure, of all the mountains he’d climbed, all the moose meat he toted on his back, all of the salmon he’d chased upstream and down. Through most of my life, Dad (who stood only 5-foot-5) weighed between 155 and 165 pounds. By last Thanksgiving I’m guessing that he was down to about 125. Before the pacemaker, he struggled with light-headedness and occasional nausea. He no longer trusted himself to drive more than short distances. When I took him ice-fishing last winter, he could barely walk 50 yards without stopping to rest, appearing dizzy and disoriented out there in the path I had shuffled through the snow to ease his passage.
But the pacemaker—installed on June 8—seemed to miraculously increase his vitality. It seemed, barring some unforeseen setback, that he might last another 5 or 10 years. In September he began talking about going deer hunting again on Kodiak Island, and in October he and his long-time hunting buddy, Will Troyer, age 81, took the ferry ride for their final hunting trip together—a ten-day affair in which they shot some ducks but only one deer, had two bear encounters (one of them very much of the way-too-close-for-comfort variety), and enjoyed each other’s company as they had so many dozens of times over the last 40 years. (Lowell and I calculated roughly that no one, outside of our immediate family and Dad’s dental staff over the years, had spent as much time with Dad as Will had.) And then in November, Bob Shem talked Dad into a frigid duck-hunting trip across
*********************************************
On Dec.
1, 2006 , the outlook for Dad’s health took a decided turn toward
the worst. Mom called at about 10 p.m.
to tell me that Dad wasn’t feeling well, and she thought he should go in to the
hospital emergency room. Since she had just had cataract laser-surgery herself,
she was wearing a patch over one eye and was unable to drive at night; I drove
over and helped get Dad’s things together and then headed with him into town.
We were there until about 4:30
in the morning. (Actually, Dad ended up spending the night so that more tests could
be conducted and his regular physician, Dr. Bill Kelly, could be consulted.)
That’s the way E.R.’s are: hurry up and wait, especially if you don’t have a real emergency. Dad endured extensive Q
& A (which was always a problem for him because he was so hard of hearing),
several blood-draws, a urinalysis, a C-T scan, etc., to learn that he had air
in his insides where air shouldn’t be. By process of elimination, doctors
determined that Dad had a perforation in either his esophagus (potentially a
very dangerous condition) or one of his lungs; later, they decided it was a
lung problem. It may have developed via coughing (they worried that he might
actually have had a mild case of pneumonia), via his body’s reaction to some
medication, or via whatever, and should heal on its own, with rest. So Dad
returned reluctantly to the couch and waited to feel better again.
For a while, it appeared that Dad was going to turn the corner. His energy began to return. He started getting back outside a little more. But on the night of Dec. 16, at the end of our first full day of Christmas vacation, Mom called again. It was about
This time Mom went with us. It would be the last time Dad ever left home. And he would never return.
The E.R. time had an eerie familiarity about it. Once Dad had been checked into a room in the regular part of the hospital—after the usual exhausting battery of tests, and Dad, true to his character, worried more about the “inconvenience” to us than his own personal welfare—I took Mom home at about 10 a.m. and slept for a while before returning to the hospital that evening. By that time, the doctors had determined that Dad’s gall bladder contained stones or some thick crud that was not allowing it to function normally. It would have to be removed. Surgery was scheduled for Monday. The doctor was young and relatively inexperienced, but the process was fairly routine. In 99 cases out of 100, according to the doctors, a laparoscope and other instruments could be inserted through small incisions, allowing the bladder to be drained safely, the bile duct to be mended, and all the material to be extracted with minimal risk of infection. Dad’s case was not one of the 99. According to the surgeon, too much scar tissue from previous surgeries, and maybe the condition of the gall bladder itself (it was apparently filled with a viscous, oily goo), called for the laparoscopy to stop and for a more invasive surgery to begin. The surgeon, afterwards, told us that he felt confident that everything had gone well, that everything had been cleaned up properly and completely. But, honestly, we’ll never really know. (My brother, particularly, was angry about this, but I have decided to let it go. Whether this young doctor made a mistake or not is, to me, irrelevant. The final result is the same and cannot be changed.) For post-op care, the hospital kept Dad, because of his frail condition, in the I.C.U. through Tuesday. On Wednesday, he was placed in a regular room, where nurses tried to get him up and moving around (with some success), tried to get him to eat (also with some success), tried to get his bowels moving again (with no success at all). Most of all, his lungs just wouldn’t clear completely, most likely because of the scarring left behind by his pulmonary fibrosis. All the while, he fretted that he wouldn’t be home in time for Christmas, then five days away. Coming out of anesthesia and the I.C.U., he had lost track of the days; he had thought Christmas was still nearly 10 days off, and he panicked briefly that he might be hospitalized that much longer. He seemed relieved, by contrast, that he should be home in less than a week.
By the next day, however, his condition had worsened. The doctors had returned him to the I.C.U. There, he had to wear a nose-and-mouth oxygen mask that made his face feel hot. There, he began to show signs of fever and the doctors began to worry that he might go septic—compromised by infection, possibly as a result of his surgery. There, they removed his hearing aids because the batteries interfered with the straps on the oxygen mask. There, he spoke his final words to me before they made me leave and ran a breathing tube back down his throat. I don’t honestly know what Dad’s last words to me were—I was the last family member he spoke to, though. (Mom, I believe, had gone back home for the evening and didn’t even know that Dad was to be reintubated.) But I do know that he wasn’t supposed to talk and he kept talking anyway. He thought I was bored, thought I should be at home with my family. He told me to find something I wanted to watch on the television. I found a college basketball game—one of his favorite things to watch—but I couldn’t focus on the game and neither could he. The last thing I remember him saying was this: He pulled the mask away from his mouth and looked at me and said, “Don’t get sick,
The next time I saw Dad, he was descending into a sleep from which he never fully emerged again—the deep sleep of medical sedation.
(There in the hospital, a woman I’d graduated from high school with—Julie Wheeler—was also tending a vigil for her father, who was dying of emphysema. She and her three siblings and their mother were our frequent, tearful companions in the hallway lobbies and hospital cafeteria. Within 10 days, both families had lost their patriarchs.)
Janeice showed up the next day, I believe, along with Dave and Abby. And I think I picked up
We made an effort to enjoy Christmas the next day, but the effort, ultimately, was hollow. Dad’s absence was clearly felt, particularly at dinner when he typically said grace and sat at the head of the table, and at the opening of the presents, but we went through the motions anyway because, as Mom said, that’s what Dad would have wanted us to do. He’d’ve wanted us to spend time as a family and enjoy each other’s company, especially for the sake of the kids.
The next day, Tuesday, Dad’s condition continued to worsen. That evening, he was loaded onto a medical helicopter and flown through the frosty air across
On Wednesday, I drove to
********************************
For those five days I was in
I solved endless crossword puzzles and read three books in order to keep my mind occupied in the waiting room or in the A.C.C.U. Talking much could mean crying a lot. At Janeice’s house, I had a room to myself—except for the one night that Karen brought the kids up to see me—and in there I half-heartedly read, wrote Christmas letters, watched movies on a tiny TV screen next to some workout equipment, and fitfully slept. When I wasn’t in the room with the door closed, I was eating or speaking with Dave and Janeice. Since Dave is a nurse, our conversations tended to be medical, which I found enlightening but distressing. Despite being there with family, it was one of my loneliest times in recent memory. I wanted to be at home. I didn’t know what to do with myself.
I arranged for a substitute teacher to take my classes all that next week. I wrote lesson plans in my sister’s office. I wandered through Barnes & Noble. I people-watched in the hospital cafeteria. But ultimately I wanted to sleep in my own bed, play with my kids, plow the snow from the roads, catch up on my emails, go snowshoeing with my buddy, keep myself more physically occupied. Instead, I couldn’t muster the energy even for short walks around town.
Meanwhile, each day brought an inevitable end. Dad’s legs began to look mottled as his body began to shut down its extremities to protect its core. The tube had been down his throat for more than a week, and his lips were dry. He was hooked to I.V.’s and heart monitors, chest tubes, cleaning valves, a respirator—all sorts of shit humming away, beeping, pulsing—a constant reminder that the machines were keeping him alive. Two of the toes on his right foot and the thumb on his left hand began to turn purple, and the doctors quietly began to hint at the possible need for amputation if Dad should pull out of this. And it was at this point that I began, truly, to feel that Dad would not want to survive. If he couldn’t walk, if he couldn’t get outside and mosey down the road, if he couldn’t build things with his hands—if his life was going to be relegated to being alive but basically bed-ridden and incapacitated—I knew he’d rather be dead. When the lead physician, Dr. Clark, began to talk gently over the weekend about what steps we might want to take if Dad’s condition continued to decline, Mom and I were certain: If it came to that point, he should be unplugged.
On Sunday, he crashed, but the doctors got him going again. On Monday morning, he seemed a little better, but by early afternoon his heart was beating erratically and he was setting off monitoring alarms with great frequency. For Janeice and Lowell, I know the decision was harder than it was for me and Mom, but in the end we decided to let him go. Dr. Clark said that once Dad was disconnected, the end would come very quickly—within just a few minutes. After all the medical orders had been authorized, the proper personnel was in place, a minister had been brought in, and all the family had gathered in Dad’s room, the doctors and nurses came in for the final procedure. He was given a strong shot or two to eliminate any pain from the process. A strong magnet was placed over his heart to prevent the pacemaker from working. The tube was extracted from his throat, and his mouth was wiped clean. All of the monitors were shut off. All of the feeding tubes and I.V.’s were stopped. I remember looking at him exposed there, and thinking how unlike my dad he seemed at that moment—his chin bristling with stubble, his complexion yellowish, his face somehow shrunken and more shriveled.
As all of us cried—or tried not to cry—around him, he took a few small gasping breaths, like a trout that he might have pulled from a stream and left up on the bank to die, and then he stopped. After a few minutes, a nurse tactfully slipped in to take his vitals and confirm that he had died. It was the first time in my life that I had seen a dead person.
After that, we each had a few moments alone with Dad. I was first. To be honest, I didn’t know what the hell to do. I know that some people weep over the graves of their beloved—talk to them, even. I know that people have “conversations” with loved ones who have died in their presence. But I couldn’t do that. What did I have to say that Dad didn’t already know, or that I didn’t already know? I stood for a few minutes by the window in the back corner of the small room, eyeballing my father now so small and quiet in the center of the bed. I waited—I think because I didn’t want to come out of the room too soon, didn’t want to give the “wrong” impression, despite the fact that at that moment that hospital room was the last place in the world I wanted to be—and then I put my hand on my dad’s forehead and said, “You know I love you,” and walked out, trying not to look anyone in the eye.
****************************************
Early the next morning, I drove home. Only a half-hour into the drive, I’d already seen nearly 10 moose, and my first thought was that that was information my dad would’ve liked to hear. And that made my cry.
Dad and I had gotten into the habit of sharing outdoor stories and observations. I frequently told him where I’d hiked, what I’d seen, whom I’d gone with. We’d compare notes on places if he’d been there before, too. I liked to impress him with my experiences—partly, I think, because for most of my life he had been so, so difficult to impress—much more than my mother. Even now, when I return from snowshoeing or skiing or hiking, I feel a little at a loss because there’s no one to share my adventures with. Sure, I tell Karen and the kids, but it’s not the same. Dad knew this country around here. As an environmentalist and a conservationist, he never saw his appreciation wane for what’s out there. And as his physical strength did wane, and he found himself less and less able to get out into the mountains or down to the river or out to the lakes as much as he wished, I think he very much appreciated hearing about my time out there. I won’t go so far as to say that he was living vicariously through me. I don’t believe that. But I do believe that he greatly appreciated the fact that his strong belief in the value of the outdoors had been passed on to his children, maybe (particularly) his bull-headed oldest child.
****************************************
The memorial service was
Dad was cremated later in the week. Mom wanted his body, in a closed casket, to be at the service.
One of the pallbearers was a man named George Pollard, over 80 and a dear friend of my folks. Only a few weeks earlier, George’s wife, Ruth, had died after suffering for nearly 20 years with Alzheimer’s disease. Dad had felt too ill to attend her memorial service, and it was both ironic and comforting to see George there for Dad’s.
Other pallbearers included Jack Hummel, who (with his wife, Kathy) extended his vacation a couple extra days to attend, and whose youngest daughter, Judy, was one of Dad’s nurses while he was in the Soldotna hospital; Will Troyer, Dad’s hunting partner for more than 40 years, who flew with his wife, LaRue, up from Arizona to be here; Drew O’Brien, one of my hiking buddies who, when he first came to this area, was taken out into the country by my dad; Bob Shem, my sister’s boyfriend throughout most of the 1990s, who loved my dad and took him on his last hunting trip—that frigid duck hunt in November.
The service was very well attended—somewhere between 250 and 300 people, I’d guess.
There were two aspects of the service I’ll probably never forget.
First, as the grieving family we were asked to enter last and to move into the front row of the pews, closest to the bluegrass band. We lined up to prepare for our entrance, and the band was signaled to begin: The selection was “Ashoken Farewell,” which caught me completely off-guard. Back when I made my first video—the one about my dad’s life and his desire for a big shop of his own—I selected that exact same piece of music for the background. (I had heard the music when I watched Ken Burns’s PBS series The Civil War, and had been particularly attracted to its combination of great beauty and mournful nature. Since making the video, I had associated the music directly with my father. Its use at this moment seemed beyond eerie. I’d been steeling myself for our entrance, but the music made tears well in my eyes.)
Second, ever since hearing that the funeral was going to be on the evening preceding my first day back at school—where the school staff and hundreds of teen-agers were going to know why I’d been gone and would make me an object of attention with understandable questions and concerns—I had been dreading the receiving line immediately following the ceremony. I figured that I could grit my teeth and endure the oratory, the hymns, the presentation of the flag (to commemorate Dad’s service in the Army), etc., but the receiving line would be this “naked” experience—our family in a line, waiting, as dozens of well-wishers and sympathizers formed a queue and passed along our length. I thought I would feel the most vulnerable at this point, and I was tired of crying, especially in front of others. But I was wrong. It was actually the best part of the service for me. All the hugs and words and looks in the eye and quick snatches of memory made me feel better, strengthened me somehow. Maybe all those connections helped me to process the moment more effectively. I don’t know, but, by the time the line ran its course, I actually wished it was longer.
And then we went home to what I’m still having a tough time calling simply “Mom’s house.” There, some of our family’s closest friends reunited for a few more hours over food and conversation. I think many of them stayed until
Not only had I missed the previous week of school; I was returning for the final week of the first semester. That meant that grades for all my students were on the line. That meant I needed to write final exams, give those finals, grade those finals, enter all those grades into our online grading system, and on and on. That meant that I also had to prepare for my new classes to start the second semester. That meant I had to hear what my sub had done, or failed to do. That meant I needed to make exceptions, juggle things as I had never juggled them before. That meant that I was going to be on survival mode.
And, finally, that meant that, despite everything, life was going to go on, whether I was ready for it or not.
***************************************
FEBRUARY 10, 2012
It took the passage of five years since my father’s death for me to be able to read again what I’d written here. Reading it again today brought it all back, maybe with less intensity, maybe with fewer tears, but with enough power to let me know that my father’s pulse is still welling in my veins, and with enough clarity to convince me that immortality is still a possibility.
No comments:
Post a Comment