It feels silly now to think of how I first imagined my father’s death. I envisioned a tidy but gut-wrenching wrap up. I thought he would die having had the conversations and completions I imagined come with the territory of terminal illness. I thought I would watch him slowly check the boxes of long postponed to-dos. Maybe bury some hatchets. Trim up some loose ends. I thought our send off of him would feel sad but complete. But all of that would have required my dad to accept that an illness could be as terminal to him as to anyone else. There never was a moment of true reckoning. I don’t know if he ever really accepted his mortality or if he just lost the very last drop of will in him. One day he was determined to live forever and the next he was demanding to die.
I talk to him, still. Mostly while driving or when I’m alone in the house. I tell him I’m sorry for the way he died, for the dignity stripped from him at the very end. I tell him I don’t understand why he shut everyone out but I understand that it’s what he needed to do. I tell him I am wrecked from having watched him suffer in those last days. But I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. I am staring at the remains of this all, still utterly confused. I look at the life he lived; one of risk, rare accomplishment and love. And still, one so incomplete. That’s what is hard to swallow. Surviving him means that I am left holding everything yet undone, everything that’s still a mess.
But I am no longer angry. I spent years being pissed that we couldn’t speak frankly about his diagnosis or inevitable death. I quietly mocked his god-complex and sat in my resentment. Only in the last month of his life was I able to see that he was doing his best. And that he was just so heartbroken over what his best had become. I’m still confused but I will take that any day over the unbearable weight of anger.
