Stephanie Young
Writer
My Mother Has Made Me a Valentine
14 February, 2023
My mother was escorted to 'activity afternoon' by Juliet, the supernaturally loving woman we've hired, in addition to the support in the residence, to spend five hours with her, every day, Monday to Friday.
My mother hates crafts. I thought she'd take one look at the glue and scissors, blanch, and walker-herself out of the room.
But she came back to her suite, an hour later, smiling. With two valentines. One for me, one for my sister.
And the debilitating poignance I thought I'd feel - my MOTHER, making CRAFTS, like a FOUR-YEAR OLD - just didn't happen. Because she'd had a good time and she didn't take it seriously and winked at us, saying, as we looked at the doilies, 'I made all those holes myself. Took forever.'
And the writing isn't bad because she's forgotten how to write. It's because she can't see and her hands can't hold a pen.
I'm trying not to look at it as a heartbreaking artifact, reversing our roles - I made her a thousand cards throughout my childhood, my adult life, and she ooohed and aaahed, every time - made me feel like the most transcendentally wonderful human ever to give a mother a thing - but as just a nice valentine.
It's hard.
Especially when I think of her making all those holes.
The Wind Above My Wings
A Death in Seven Parts
28 March 2022
My father, standing, second from left, with the 430 Fighter Squadron, Rabat, 1957
Part One
5 November 2021
My father has decided to die on or around 12th January 2022. He’s planned the last meal he wants to have with me, my sister and our sister-in-law.
‘Just the four of us,’ he said, apologetically. ‘If we have grandchildren and partners it will get out of hand. We don’t want a Flash mob.’
The menu includes salmon, potatoes. Steamed broccoli. Champagne.
I have flown back to Canada from London early for Christmas to try and change his mind.
Just about the dying.
Not about the dinner.
The dinner sounds great.
He’s been playing tag with the Grim Reaper for over six years having been diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis we thought was going to kill him in 2015. I flew back then, too, in a panic, to find him skeletal, ashen and hooked to an oxygen tank.
He hated that tank. Chucked it as soon as a nurse told him he didn’t seem to be breathing any better with it. And, as he said to his wife, ‘We just get used to the new normal.’
And, kind of miraculously, he did. New normal meant no air travel and less walking, but driving, river cruising. Grocery shopping, visits with family, meals for friends.
Everyone got used to him having to sit for five minutes and gasp as though he’d finished a decathlon before he could accept his glass of beer, but he always recovered.
Always had the beer.
A year to the day of his wife’s death, 12th August 2021, my father’s lung collapsed and he thinks that’s what’s doing him in.
I mean they fixed it, but he can’t move from the bed to the bureau without suffocating. He moans like a wounded dog when he walks. He’s six feet tall and weighs 123 lbs.
He is also practical. Not unemotional, just undramatic. He had a career in the military and liked its structure and routine. But he was a fighter pilot. So renegade.
They do things alone up there.
‘This is no quality of life,’ he has announced to us. Which seems very obvious.
What is also obvious is he’s not thinking about my quality of life without him.
The selfish bastard.
I’ve got nine and a-half weeks to make him think again.
6 November 2021
Well, I’ve changed my mind. I saw my dad, on the sofa, wrapped in layers of blankets meant to keep him warm having lowered the thermostat from 27C to a chilly 23C for my sake, gazed into his eyes and thought ‘Oh yeah. You’re outta here.’
I could see it. I haven’t been up close and personal with death that often, but, once it's in the room, you know it.
Like Thor.
Death is conspicuous.
I’d been Skyping him while still in London and it was 13 days ago he casually dropped into the conversation, the way you might a wrecking ball onto the roof of a straw house, ‘I’m thinking of January 12th for Medical Assistance in Dying. I’ve set the date at the 12th. It’s after Christmas and New Year’s. Seems like a good time. It will give a week before you fly back to help out your sister.
So.’
Beat.
‘How’s your day been?’
I was in shock and then I was enraged. How DARE you tell me this and then expect me to chat??? To CHIT-CHAT??
I stared at him and said ‘Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh….’
I looked off screen. He was now staring at my profile – hair and a nose. As I said
‘Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
hhhhhh…’
As my fury mounted I realised that a part of me never wanted to answer at all. Just moan this syllable at him for the remaining 50 minutes of our call. ‘I have to pretend to be okay? I’m not okay. I’m not pretending.’
‘Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…’
A Buddhist chant. A bad solo.
Uuuuuuuuuuuuh.
And then I realised what was happening.
I was punishing him. Punishing a man who has given me more hours of hilarity and tending, more focused love than almost anyone who has ever lived, because he wants out of his suffering.
I decided to stop.
I mentioned our weather, I asked about his.
He was relieved.
I won’t do that again.
7 November 2021
Seated together on the sofa of his 11th floor condo with commanding views of the Ottawa River, we are bingeing YouTube videos. He asked to see ‘Landing in Crosswinds’. We have watched half a dozen commercial aircraft try to fly, buffeted in all directions, heading for the landing strip. He explained what the pilots were doing.
(If you are interested in aeronautics, if you are interested in the fluency with which someone 88-years-old and suffering from end stage pulmonary fibrosis can speak or if you’re interested in my ability to type really fast while someone talks – see ) (You’ll also find out why Bette Midler – and apparently everyone who plays the song at funerals – is wrong about the wind beneath their wings.)
The really frightening thing is I have only been here 24 hours and he seems worse.
I was sitting at the dining room table, heard a noise and looked to my right to see a corpse gasping its way down the hall. Like the zombies had arrived. Too thin to last, too grey to live. These bones that belong to my father, lurching towards me. Eyes fixed so as not to fall.
He is stubborn to the point of insanity, not letting me help him. He leans on walls, counters, sometimes his walker. Not knowing if his next breath will be his last.
If he’d only sit still he’d suffer less.
He’d rather die than stay in bed all day.
And it looks like he could be dead within seven minutes so I guess it’s not something he should worry about.
Part Two
9 November 2021 - morning
It’s my father’s birthday. He has performed his daily creep-and-heave death march down the hall, today on the walker, shuffling to the chair by the balcony, where he always reads his newspaper. Not in bed, which I have suggested he try. Coffee in bed, paper in bed. Day in bed.
‘Oh no,’ he said, firmly. ‘Then I’d be a sickie.’
I was late preparing the electric blankets and heating pad for him and as he collapses into the chair he is shivering. Not even with cold. There is some inner tremor that takes over, he says. Starts at his neck and moves. Ribs, hips, knees.
I sit at his feet and tuck layers around his legs and ankles. He looks down at me, his eyes blue like thick ice. His face pale. When he catches his breath he speaks, between gasps.
‘Every day - I think - it can’t get worse - and every day - it gets worse. I had to rest today after I brushed my teeth.’
My heart is in the grip of great big hands that squeeze and squeeze. I have almost as much trouble breathing as he does.
Because I don’t have his glass of water and breakfast cereal ready for him, I spend the next six minutes dashing back and forth through the open-plan room to the kitchen at the far end, ice in the glass, more sugar on the cereal.
He is gracious, thankful. Resignation spreading in him, like a stain.
‘I was able to live alone two months ago. I couldn’t do anything you’ve just done for me.’ Darkly. ‘I am totally dependent.’
I think of January 2022. The twelfth. What he’s calling ‘his date with destiny’. And I remind him that it won’t last long. Not long now.
‘It can’t come soon enough,’ he tells me, simply.
I am beginning to agree.
Euthanasia, or Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID), has been legal in Canada since 2016. It is growing ever more humane in its practise and accessibility. After two interviews with caring and empathetic physicians my father, afraid for some reason he wouldn’t be eligible, was thrilled to hear he was a ‘Class 1 candidate’.
He always liked to excel.
Now, 15 minutes after finishing his breakfast, he dumps his collection of morning pills in his lap. Staring at them, inert, his breathing becomes almost normal.
‘Wouldn’t it be ironic if these were making me worse?’
He finds this actually funny.
‘They are calcium – to make my "bones stronger".’ He half rolls his eyes. ‘And this is, well, paracetamol to you.’
He pops them both. Looks at the two left in his palm.
‘This is B12’ - swallows it - ‘and this - this is for acid reflux.’
He examines it, small and red.
‘It’s preventative. I have no idea if it’s working.’ He looks at me. ‘You could take a pill to make sure elephants don’t stampede up to the 11th floor.’
He shrugs, takes the pill.
Glances around.
No elephants.
Smiles.
‘Maybe it’s working.’
9 November 2021 - evening
I am beginning to lose traction. Small motor skills abandon me. I can’t remember how to plug in a kettle and I couldn’t find soup he was asking for, the one I’d made the night before. He’d loved it.
He ate it.
A miracle.
I could feed it to him again and perhaps he’d gain a bit of weight and then perhaps he’d get better and then perhaps he wouldn’t want to die.
Just yet.
I stood in front of the wide fridge and open freezer door. Panicking. I couldn’t see it. I turned over plastic tubs, frozen meals, boxes of pizza.
‘Where’s the soup?’ I said out loud. Rifling now, like someone digging through rubble. A child trapped beneath.
‘Where’s the soup, where’s the soup, where is the fucking soup????’ I’d begun to howl, screaming at food. Weeping, weeping.
My father slept in the other room.
I wonder if I need a bit of a break.
Part Three
10 November 2021
He was lively and happy at his birthday party. Small, just family and a friend, but he’d loved the paper airplane fly-past I’d arranged – six of us flew them over his head as he sat at the dining table – and the enormous trifle my sister had made. His favourite dessert. The size of Mars.
He even had some.
But in the evening the tremors started again.
‘When company is here I try to stop,’ he said. ‘They come when I relax.’
We’ve got him on morphine and although he says it makes no difference we think it helps. It’s probably why he is sleeping now, on the sofa.
His first morning nap. Maybe ever.
His mouth is slightly open, his face drawn.
Hands moving slightly, on his midriff and beside his left upper thigh.
I kneel beside him and hold one of those hands. It’s warm. He jostles awake slightly, smiles at me, closes his eyes again, squeezes my fingers. I kiss his knuckles.
By the time I return to my chair, seconds later, he is weirdly alert.
‘Is the computer on?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would you go in and click on the Sonos icon, a little black box in the bottom right-hand corner. And beside it is Thunderbird. So you could check – ‘
Long pause. Breathing in –
‘..your email?’
‘Exactly.’
This mental acuity from someone who seemed to be in a coma.
I follow his instructions. No email. But when I come back to the living room we have Chopin. My father smiles, hearing the piano.
‘Ah, lovely,’ he says, looking and sounding really, almost, very normal.
Humming.
Hard to believe we’re killing him in seven weeks.
Which reminds me to ask him something he’ll be less able to answer then.
‘Dad, after you’ve kicked the bucket, where am I going to find you? In my imagination? I will go into my imagination and look for you. Where will you be?’
‘Oh. Let me see. Let me see.’ He likes games. He warms to the idea. ‘I have to think about this. I – will – be – on a bench. In a park. By a river. A nice park.’
‘Windsor Great Park?’
Beat.
‘I’d like a golf course.’
‘A golf course??’
‘Golf courses are beautiful.’
‘I had no idea. No idea you were so fond of a golf course.’
‘Love a nice golf course.’
‘Okay. On a bench, near a river, on a golf course.’
‘Except now I can play golf.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘I’m at the 9th hold. You’ll find me on a bench.’
‘Okay. Nice. What are you wearing?’
Looking at me. ‘Golf clothes.’
‘Right. And where are we? In the United States? Florida?’
‘No! A Canadian golf course.’
‘Okay. Got it.’
I can’t think of a single Canadian golf course.
‘And I’ve stopped, I’m about to do the next nine holes and I’m on a break. Having lunch.’
‘I can bring lunch!’
‘Excellent.’
‘What are we having for lunch?’
I think ‘Salmon sandwiches.’
He says ‘Salmon sandwiches.’
‘That’s what I just thought!!’
‘Salmon salad sandwiches. With lots of mayo, celery - ‘
‘Cream cheese?’
‘Why not?? And olives.’
‘What’s for dessert?’
Not missing a beat.
‘TRIFLE.’
We take a moment to praise Catherine’s superlative offering.
‘Marvellous. And it was her first.’
‘I’ve never had better,’ I say. ‘And what are we drinking?’
‘Champaaagne,’ he says, deliciously.
And we stay for a moment on the bench near the river on our golf course, having salmon salad sandwiches. With cream cheese. Why not.
Chopin reaches his final cadence. Now ‘Ode to Joy’ rages out of the speaker.
I look across the room at my father enjoying the music the way you enjoy water after a long, dry walk and say,
‘I love you, Dad.'
My throat full. Now aware. Looking at him I know. He has started dying. He may not need medical assistance. I feel he is between the worlds, as I have these precious moments alone with him, Beethoven serenading.
‘Oh, I love you, too, sweetheart. More than you could ever possibly know or imagine. I have been so lucky.’
It is now extremely beautiful in this room.
Part Four
12 November 2021
We’re moving the date up. I’ve left messages with MAID. He can’t live like this until January. He is reduced to hunching over, his chest parallel with his lap, gasping ‘Oh god, oh god, make it stop’, a man who lived for 40 years with neck pain and impaired movement caused by pulling G while straining over his shoulder to look for enemy air craft. Even more heart-breaking is the talk he gives himself before the inevitable hunching and gasping.
‘Okay, okay. You can do this. You can do this. You’ve got to move, okay, just an inch now. Okay.’
He doesn’t know he is speaking out loud.
He is changing his will to reflect the death of his wife - something he planned to do leisurely over two months - in the course of three days. My nephew is that unicorn in the family, a chartered professional accountant with a lawyer’s training, and, tall, grounded, laconic, has left work on the first available train to travel five hours and sit on the sofa with my propped-up father, advising him on wording and legalities.
My father hasn’t moved for an hour, he’s relieved to be working on the will and we’ve upped his dose of morphine. His mood improves by the moment.
‘So,’ Keith says from an armchair angled towards my father, ‘we’d have to think about what would happen if I were to pass away first.’
My father winces. ‘“Pass away”? You mean “die”. “Pass away”. It’s a euphemism. I hate euphemisms. What’s wrong with “die”? Just say “die”’.
My nephew continues.
Keith: …or if Catherine were to pass away -
Father: Just say ‘die’.
Keith: - or if Stephanie were to pass away –
Father (raising his hand a la Che Guevara): DIE!
Keith says ‘I’m not stopping’. My father laughs.
I write it down.
I also write to the lawyer. I now understand these respites are brief and the moaning will start at the least exertion. Moving a pillow, reaching for water.
My father is physically viable in phrases. Like music.
They are getting shorter and shorter.
As if to prove my point, from across the room I can see the juddering has started again. I reach over and tuck in blankets around his feet. For once he doesn’t notice. And I realise what has inspired his good spirits. He can die when his will is done.
‘Dear my-father’s-lawyer. Can you come as soon as possible? Can you come before Monday? Can you come on the weekend?’
Keith steps away to inspect documents. My father’s chin drops then jerks up as he gags for air, trying desperately to fill the broken windbag in his chest.
It’s Friday and by Tuesday my father wants to be dead.
We want that, too.
Part Five
13 November 2021 - morning.
THANK GOD for oxygen!! Oh holy air!! Dr Vesey, a palliative care doctor who liaises with MAID, arrived yesterday afternoon about 12:40pm.
Small, red-headed, gowned and masked, his response to my father suggesting that nothing the medical profession offered ever assuaged his symptoms was,
‘Oh, I have a few tricks up my sleeve.'
And it’s true.
Because last evening, about 8:10pm, Natasha and Dave arrived with a little device redolent of R2D2 and tubes, and within a minute of the hose being inserted up his nose after Natasha asked ‘And how do you feel?’ for the first time in over a week my father said ‘Better.’
I cried.
**
He didn’t wake until after 8:00 this morning. Maybe it is all the oxygen. He opened his eyes, blinked, and saw me next to him on the bed.
‘Oh, hi sweetie.’
‘Hello. How is the best father in the world?’
He laughed: amused, pleased, dismissive all at once.
And looking at him, with more colour, tubes draped delicately over his ears, I dared to ask ‘How are you?’
‘Fine. I slept well. Only up once. I went right back to sleep.’
My heart rose and Catherine arrived with tea. She scaled the bed, and to talk there together about the dolls' houses he'd built us in 1971 (mine with real electric lighting, hers with a pulley-operated lift) that we had loved almost to the point of disintegration was as much fun as if he weren't dying. Weren't about to be done in. The same as it ever was. Maybe life is always the same until it isn't. And then that becomes life.
We asked if we could give him a bath in bed. He shocked me by agreeing to it. Even being eager. Why hadn't we done this last week?
He took off his t-shirt. I used a flannel and two bowls of water, Catherine brought out some lotion. She noticed he might be getting cold after I had washed down his arms – ‘There’s not much meat there,’ he observed; ‘You look pretty darn good, Dad’ - so brought in a blanket to cover his torso while I sponged his legs.
‘Oh, wonderful. I should have tried this before.’
I looked at this body that had been the landscape of all my early stories – the legs he would cross, one ankle resting on a knee, that I’d crawl up within as he drank a glass of beer on the back deck with an unidentified man, the chest I would lean against as he read aloud.
And nobody knows (Tiddely pom),
How cold my toes (Tiddely pom)
Are growing.
The smell of Brylcream and frozen air when I’d leap at him in his sealskin winter coat – that he still has, having bought it in Winnipeg in 1965 for $85.00 – coming in from the snow. So broad, so tall. I think everyone in their mind has a big, strong father.
I really did.
My head, my father, my sister and my brother. Okanagan Valley, Canada, 1965
And here was the version of those legs, that chest, those shoulders. Fifty-five years on. I felt such love, such appreciation for the shrunk shank, the bony back. I saw the ghost of his unconscious strength. Still, today, some vitality.
I gave him a low dose of morphine, as we are meeting the lawyer at 1pm.
And he’s agreed to stay in bed.
**
I was clearing away space for four chairs in my father’s bedroom – lawyer, witness, executor, Keith – and picked up a big empty box labelled ‘My historical documents’.
‘Dad,’ said Catherine. ‘What was this box for?’
‘It says "My historical documents",’ I added.
‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘then I would think there is pretty strong evidence that it contained historical documents.’
‘I’m glad you’ll be dead next week,’ I said. ‘We won’t have to deal with that.’
13 November 2021 - afternoon.
The lawyer is here. We thanked him in the hallway for coming on a Saturday and asked him what family event we’d dragged him from.
‘Painting my aunt’s basement. I’d rather be doing this.’
He’s thrown us all out of my dad’s room.
I’m not sure but I think I hear laughing.
**
‘How did the meeting go?’ I ask.
We are in my father’s bedroom, my sister and I and a nurse called Anne, a youthful mother of three with maroon hair.
She is preparing new meds for my dad. Midazolam, the name of which none of us can ever remember and end up calling ‘marzipan’ (even Anne when she returns the next day, ‘Oh yes, you can give him marzipan every 30 minutes’) - using his ridiculously high bed as a table.
Like he’s Henry VIIIth, this bed. It takes someone preternaturally tall to sit on the edge and touch the floor at the same time.
‘Ah. The lawyer,’ my father said. ‘Well. He pointed out that you lot were a bunch of money-grubbing low lifes and that I should give everything to him.’
Catherine looked at me and raised an eyebrow. She turned to Anne and told her that this euthanasia for my father is something we’d been wanting for years.
‘Yes,’ said Dad. ‘My kids have come up with this medical assistance in dying. I only wanted a bottle of Nyquil.’
After pausing in her syringe-labeling to ask my father if he were a comedian, Anne, seeing his good colour, his high spirits, his sound mind, said,
‘When, exactly, are you having the MAID procedure?'
‘Tuesday,’ Dad said. ‘We hope.’
‘Tuesday? This Tuesday? Four days?’
‘Yup.’
‘Oh. Right’ She seems trained not to look surprised. I appreciate this.
‘Yeah,’ Catherine said. ‘MAID on Tuesday. We’ve just been telling him it’s the cleaners. He’s going to be surprised when they don’t show up with buckets.’
Anne had a list of questions for my father.
‘Do you have an appetite?’
‘No.’
‘Moving your bowels?’
‘Not really. But nothing’s going in so nothing comes out.’
‘Sleeping at night?’
‘Yes, pretty well.’
‘How is your health, generally?’
My father looked at her. ‘They’re killing me on Tuesday but otherwise I’m fine.’
‘I don’t make the questions. And besides, I have three teenagers at home. I don’t feel sorry for you.’
‘Three teenagers…’ My father shook his head.
‘I know. Can I join you on Tuesday?’
We fall in with love Anne.
She asks her final question.
‘Anxious?’ She looked at him and glanced at us. Shrugged. ‘You don’t seem anxious…’
14 November 2021
My father had a bad night. He got up to pee and the oxygen tube fell out of his nose. The exertion of standing and then getting back into bed nearly killed him and it wasn’t until we heard him call, two hours later, that he got more morphine and oxygen, this time in his mouth. His nose is too sore.
It’s now just after 7am and he wants to try to pee again. I am going in to hand him the bottle.
**
Well, that was one of the most horrific moments of my life. Worse as I re-live it now. Maybe things don’t become horrific until later.
I had handed my father his urinal bottle as he sat on the edge of his stupid-high bed. My sister and I turned our backs to give him the semblance of privacy, although I watched him over my shoulder.
And he was doing fine. Curved back but sitting up. Aiming things. In control.
Mission accomplished.
I went to relieve him of the bottle.
He made to hand it to me.
And then, while I stood directly in front of him, he slowly - although it seemed suddenly - keeled to left and down, slamming into the bedside table and heading for the floor.
Part Six
14 November 2021
...continued.
And then, while I stood directly in front of him, he slowly - although it seemed suddenly - keeled to left and down, slamming into the bedside table and heading for the floor.
I grabbed his torso but he was too tall for me to support and the rest of him crumpled to the ground, his eyes vacant, his breathing cacophonous.
There was liquid everywhere. He had dropped the pee bottle and knocked over a glass of water.
Now my emaciated father, in t-shirt and underpants, lies in a two-foot space between the wall and the bed, his thighs flat on the floor, his knees bent like straws, in a puddle of urine and water. I scrambled to pull him to comfort, putting pillows under his head then drying off the floor while my sister called the palliative care doctor. He told her to call 911 for medics who could pick him up.
He was moaning with the panic of not being able to breathe, his eyes fixed. I rubbed his chest, asked him if he could hear me, was in he in pain.
‘Just my back,’ he said.
‘It’s uncomfortable?’
‘Yes.’
I pulled him by the shoulders out of the water, two pillows beneath his head and he called out in discomfort. I think his skin must have rubbed against the floor.
I scrambled over the fucking hugely high bed – it’s absurd, you need a pole to vault into it - found a blanket and, on my stomach leaning over, put it under him.
‘I’m cold. It’s draughty. I’m cold.’
He had no idea he was on the floor.
Thirteen minutes later two men in blue uniforms, brisk, strong and casual, were making his acquaintance.
‘Hello, Mr Young. We can see you’ve had a fall.’
‘Yes. I just found that out.’
They positioned themselves at his hips and at his shoulders and pulled him up.
‘This bed is high,’ one of them points out.
I feel affirmed. Meaninglessly. Like. My father wouldn’t have fainted if the bed had been closer to the ground?
They discovered his oxygen level was at 60.
Normal is 95 to 100.
With almost balletic ease they checked his vitals, adjusted his machine, fitted a mask with a small plastic bag and, as long as the mask was held in place – my father is blessed with a commanding proboscis –they were satisfied, even cautiously pleased, with the results.
Oxygen level up to 98.
His colour returned, his fingers became warm.
We cleaned, dried and dressed him – the medics stopping me before I tried to cut him out of his wet t-shirt suggesting, calmly, that they just slip it over his head - and, less than an hour after I thought I was holding my dying father in a pool of his own urine, the ambulance drove away and Anne arrived, early for her appointment, suggesting an ointment for the sore in his nose, upping his meds and putting a catheter in.
We returned to the room to see a neat bag hanging from a chair beside his bed, my dad cheerful.
‘Give him marzipan every 30 minutes if you need to,’ she said, then informed us of how she’d used a relaxant before she had inserted the tube up his penis. (The relaxant maybe helped the cheerful.)
‘Say again?’ my father asked.
I shouted, ‘She gave you a relaxant before she inserted the tube up your penis, Dad.’
‘Oh, lovely,’ he murmured. ‘So few women bother.’
**
Now, 5:30 on Sunday evening, he and I have had a pacific two hours together in the twilight.
Fake candles glow (no open flame around oxygen) and a CD plays beautiful all-time-hits: Claire de Lune, Pachelbel’s Cannon, Pier Gynt Suite.
My father rouses.
‘That’s nice music,’ he whispers.
I lean in.
'Are you comfortable, Dad?'
He smiles.
'Yes.'
Oh good, I think. Comfortable, in bed, at home.
'I'm in Winnipeg,’ he says.
'Oh.'
'Walking by the river.'
'Is it nice?'
'Very nice.'
'Who is with you?'
'Oh, I'm alone. But there are lots of people around.'
'How old are you?'
'Twenty-six.'
'Are you flying in the evening?'
'Oh not yet. Haven't started yet.'
My sister comes in, sees the lights, hears the music, looks at him in such ease, puts her hands to her chest, palms together.
‘Remember this,’ she says. ‘This is what he wanted. I didn’t want him to die that way this morning. On the floor, not conscious. This is what he wanted. Peaceful. On his own terms.’
We just have to decide when to break it to him that the earliest the MAID team can come for him is Wednesday evening. Maybe even as late as Thursday morning.
It’s Sunday night.
God, let us stay peaceful until then.
Part Seven
November 14, 2021
It did stay peaceful. My father sleeping, chatting with his grand-daughters. Even drinking soup. More dozing and very quiet. When we asked he told us he was ‘very, very, very comfortable’.
Until 10pm.
I was beside him on the bed, Catherine on her phone in the room, when, with a violent surge of energy he announced, in a perfectly loud and articulated voice, ‘I have to get out of here’. Then, with the strength of a 30-year-old man, he pushed against me, heaving himself up, swinging his legs over and trying to stand.
Catherine ran, immediately, to the other side to help me control him but he just pushed at both of us.
‘God damn it, let me get out of here!’
Catherine was wonderful.
‘No, no, Dad, stay in bed. You’re safe here, you’re with us. You’re safe, you’re home, you’re with us’ and both of us thought My god. He’s leaving.
And we spent the next four hours watching him struggle and moan and resist, saying ‘I can’t do this’ and ‘I don’t want to do this’, the next minute announcing ‘Oh, this is going to be great’ and ‘This is going to be fantastic.’
His eyes were open and fixed, the air punctuated by tortured breathing, an echoey chest-cavity sound, and distress. Bah-ha-ha. Bah-ha-ha.
I asked him,
‘Dad, are you in pain?’
He shook his head ‘No’.
‘Are you in distress?’
Nodded his head ‘yes’.
He wanted to go home. I told him he could, he could go home. It was time. He could go home.
He was relieved. He relaxed.
‘Okay,’ he said.
And tried to get out of bed.
Wherever home was, it wasn’t here.
We stroked his chest, his arms and told him what a great dad he was. How beautifully he had raised us. I told him how much I loved him and that I knew he loved me, too.
Very clearly, he said ‘You have no idea of how phenomenally much.’
We were running out of meds. Catherine and I conferred in the bathroom. If he was dying we wanted him to be as comfortable as possible. At 2:45 am she left the room to call the doctor and the nursing team.
I positioned myself on his right, keeping watch. The moment we were alone he rose on his elbow.
‘Where are you going??’ I shouted, afraid of another bolt. He looked at me, quizzically.
‘I’m just turning over.’
He settled into his new position, half-smiled and promptly fell asleep.
No gasping, breathing quietly.
At ease.
At 3:19 am a new nurse walked into the room – masked, petite, efficient – and my father woke up, bright and coherent.
‘What time is it?’ he said, glancing around for clues.
‘It’s 3:19 in the morning, Dad,’ I said.
‘Three-nineteen in the morning??’ He looked up and regarded the nurse.
‘What are you doing awake at this hour, young lady?’
Completely belying our protestations that he was half-dead. Alive and aware.
And when he woke up this morning, Monday, 15th November, happy and relaxed, he told us he’d had a ‘wonderful sleep’.
We sang French Canadian drinking songs to celebrate.
(Instead of choosing 'la plus belle' of the young ladies, my father chooses 'le poubelle'. An understandable but unfortunate confusion.)
16 November 2021
At 3:21 this morning – ‘Three, two, one, lift off,’ my sister-in-law Kathleen said – 36 hours before they were due to come in with the needle and drip, my father died.
He didn't pass away.
He would never knowingly engage in a euphemism.
He re-performed the death-rehearsal of the night before, attended by Kathleen and my sister, but for only ninety minutes.
At 3:15 he was quiet. His eyes closed.
On the small portable stereo The Messiah had just finished Handel’s version of His triumphant return.
They heard a gurgle breath.
Kathleen’s head was bent, resting on her forearms resting on the bed. She snorted.
‘Ha. He’s been fooling me all day, pretending to go.’
She looked up to see Catherine, staring. His chest was still.
He’d gone with the laugh.
* * * * * * *
Exactly seven days and 19 hours earlier he is explaining those aeronautics to me.
He’d seemed weak, frail and incapacitated 30 minutes earlier, gasping and crumpling into his armchair. His face the colour of an overcast sky. Now his voice is clear. The newspaper set aside. Years melting from him. Channelling that rare life, spinning 17,000 pounds of metal in the blue above cloud cover, sometimes wing-to-wing with one, two, three other pilots - barely adults, unified, acrobatic.
‘The lift,’ he says, legs crossed at the knee, posture erect (for all the atrophy and compression of 88 years), speaking to me as his equal – as he did all our lives to all three of us, my brother and sister and me - ‘The lift,’ he tells me, ‘the thing that keeps the airplane in the air, is not, as the song says, the wind beneath my wings; it is not pushed up from the bottom. It is pulled up, from the top.’
Which, given how I see him now, feels apt.
I realised as I made this card the next day I would be taking it home with me.
I made it anyway.
