LET'S TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME

     One may wonder at the advisability of reading a memoir about death after someone close to you has died.  Of course that's the point of those kind of memoirs, to help us know we're not alone just at the time when we are sure we are.  But you don't read them when the death is fresh, when you're still so raw there's no words for what you're feeling, you're not even sure that you are feeling, there's just ache and void and the unimaginable stretch of life ahead forever without.



     I picked up Gail Caldwell's memoir of friendship, Let's Take The Long Way Home, before my father died.   Maybe I knew where this was headed before the call, the rush that would be ultimately useless the way those last-minute, 'he could die any minute' rushes always seem to be.  I don't know if I believe in precognition and even if there is such a thing, I'm not sure it matters.  We do what we do, even if we know it won't work, that we'll never make it, that somewhere along that ten-hour drive the phone will ring, the news will come, and a life will be over.

     I didn't read the book though, until I returned home, weeks after my father's death,  weeks after his funeral.  I suppose there are those who might question why I would read about the death of a friend, from cancer no less, so soon after my own father's passing from colon cancer.  I can't really tell you why I reached for the book, but it called and alone with my grief, no one really to turn to, no one experiencing this death as I was experiencing it, I turned to a book, this book.  Of course, if you knew me, you'd know I was, if not born bookish, raised bookish.  They were my friends, my most constant companions.  So in hindsight, why not a book?  What was the inscription over the door of the Library at Thebes?  Medicine for the Soul.

     I finished the book last night.  I could only read it in small doses or risk a flood of tears.  The beginning wasn't hard, even knowing how it would end.  The middle I could manage, knowing where I had been, where this was headed.  It was the ending that caught me, twisted me, turned me, brought me to tears at last, the tears that started and stopped and now flowed freely.  What got me was the talk of suffering, what we can know and what we can't and the relativity of such a word.  This is what hit me with my own father and the people who told me "at least he didn't suffer."  Who are we to say?  How can we know, what suffering is, how much is too much?  It's meant to console but such words cut me deeply.  For two weeks my father couldn't eat, fitfully slept.  He could not keep food down without intense vomiting.  He had endless bouts of uncontrollable diarrhea that required a diaper.  He experienced stomach pain that they tried to ease with heavy pain meds, so heavy he didn't wake during his last radiation treatment.  The last day, he had seizures that racked him.  Who's to say he didn't suffer, or that a short span was somehow less?

     Here is the passage that broke me open:
     That great heart - of course it took her a long time to die.  They had put in a central line of morphine within the first few days after the bleed, and so I want to believe that her pain was contained enough by the drug to let her float somewhere insouciant and free.  I cannot know this, any more than we can ever comprehend the next-door universe of the dying.  But the question was that haunted me most, then and for months after she was gone.  I do know that suffering witnessed is a cloudy and impotent world: The well, armed with consciousness, watch a scene they cannot really grasp or do much to alter.  Suffering is what changes the endgame, changes death's mantle from black to white.  It is a badly lit corridor outside of time, a place of crushing weariness, the only thing large enough to bully you into holding the door for death. (p. 143)


     Having watched my stepmother second guess the doctors, I understood this passage. The death was one thing but it was this question of suffering that haunted all of us, that made us decide to take him off life support, even when by the neurologist's reckoning my father was brain dead and beyond feeling any pain.  Stopped at the Mercey Hot Springs exit of I-5, trying to wrap my head around the fact my father was all but dead, I found myself sobbing, wondering, but it was the talk of suffering and ending his that decided me against prolonging good-bye.  He was already gone, so let the body go.  I would find my own way to say good-bye to my father.

     I knew how to let my father's body go.  I was less sure how to handle the loss of him.  Again Caldwell helps: I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder creatures.  Sometimes I think that the pain is what yields the solution.  Grief and memory create their own narrative: This is the shining truth at the heart of Freud and Neruda and every war story ever told.  The death mandates and gives rise to the story for the same reason that ancient tribes used to bury flowers with their dead.  We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of footfalls through the snow. (p. 182)


     Day by day I'm coming to my own particular understanding of grief, of loss, of death.  I know it takes us places in ourselves we would never go otherwise, beautiful, dangerous, wild country.  I know we can embrace the exploration, like Lewis and Clark, or keep to the familiar plot we call ourselves and pretend we are nothing more until at last we believe it.  For me the exploration, the wilds, the unknown.  This is my journey, T. S. Eliot's journey: "We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started... and know the place for the first time."

Because I Had To Stop For Death

     I always wondered about the oft quoted poem by Emily Dickinson, Because I Could Not Stop For Death.  It seemed to me that we didn't have much choice about it.  Death made us stop and take notice.  We waited on him, for him, not the other way around.  I was born old and possessed early on a rather stoic view of death and ends.  But I grew in midlife more hopeful, more sure, thinking ends might come when I was ready as opposed to when they must.  I thought all you needed was love, that it solved all things.  I think it was the combination of heart and hip and heart, that schooled me on the unpredictability of life, the inexorability of change, which gave life a preciousness made more so by our all too transitory natures.

     While we are all born to die, some deaths are unexpected -- a child's passing, a sudden end out of the blue, a man or woman in his or prime.  When cancer is diagnosed, especially inoperable colon cancer, death seems inevitable, sooner as opposed to the hoped and planned for later.  My dad wasn't young.  He was 76 and had already lived longer than any male in his family.  When they found the polyp during a colonoscopy, it had penetrated the muscle wall but not beyond.  The surgeon took it but best practices demanded he take most of my dad's colon, all of his rectum, leaving him with a colostomy bag for the rest of his days, something my dad just couldn't stomach.  The thing was, he had congestive heart failure and wouldn't, couldn't survive the operation.  So they chose radiation and chemo, promising my dad seven to ten more years when it was done.  "You'll more than likely die of something else," his surgeon assured him, laughing.  Not sure I see the humor in this but that could be the grief talking.

     Two weeks before the end of his treatment, the side effects began to negatively affect my dad.  He was still eating but food wasn't tasting good.  He had started to wear diapers because the radiation had so impacted his rectum that he could not control his bowels.  They assured him it was normal, expected.  About a week before the scheduled end of the treatments, the nausea increased to a point that my dad stopped eating and drinking.  My dad could be a stubborn man.  It makes no sense to refuse food and drink, and he knew it, and yet he did.  The doctors chided him, told him it was expected.  They never once considered ending the chemo until he stabilized.  The day he died, they wheeled him into radiation, unconscious.  I wonder if they even considered that he was failing or if they were too blinded by protocol to do anything but what was planned.

     It's not my intention to try to second guess what should or shouldn't have been done.  There's no changing things; dead is dead.  Whether my father's death was expected or unexpected, doesn't really matter.  I've started crying, at last, necessary for healing but I wonder every now and again, why.  I loved  my dad but we were not as close as we once had been when I was young, as we could have been if each of us had not been so stubbornly sure of ourselves and our rightness.  With a diagnosis of congestive heart failure and inoperable colon cancer, it was pretty clear that his end was going to be sooner as opposed to later, and he had outlived his parents and his siblings.  My dad's end was expected and I had been given time to prepare (as if there could ever be time enough) and yet I wasn't prepared, not at all.

     Grief is a funny thing.  Crying uncontrollably one day, I couldn't stop my tears, nor could I tell you the why of them, who was crying.  Was it the little girl in me who was the source of those tears, the one who watched her father leave 40+ years ago distraught, watching him leave yet again, this time with no visitations, no every-other weekend, this time gone and gone for good?  If so, then cry little girl, cry your eyes out, cry over that broken heart, cry as your mother never let you, grieve at last, as much as you need to for a father gone, never to return.  Was it the woman who always felt orphaned, no orphaned for real, at last, and realizing no one wants to be orphaned?  The order of life dictates we lose our parents, we become orphans, but nothing prepares us really for the day when we become the parents and are, ourselves, no longer parented.  That might be worth hours of tears, rebirthing ourselves from children to parents.  Was it the child/woman who has lost her loves, her first and this one, her true first, the man upon which all others are measured for good or ill?  I'm not sure it matters which part of me is the source of all these tears.  I suspect all of those parts of me will have their turn at weeping, as will the ones I haven't met yet.  And so it goes, has gone, will go, from the dawn of man to his sunset.

     Grief is a funny thing, with its own rhyme and reason, its own time and modes of expression, its particular season.  I suppose in a half-empty/half-full kind of way, Death stops for us.  Mostly though, we stop for Death, stop because there is no choice to do otherwise.  And maybe we find our place to equanimity, as Emily did.  Perhaps that's why we suffer so many deaths and ends and losses, so that when the time comes we will join Death in the carriage with civility riding toward eternity.  I don't know and so I go on because as much as that seems a betrayal in a way, it is what we do, hurt after hurt, go on.

Grieving: Silence

     There were alone times the past few weeks, but this is the first in my space, the first time in the life I’ve built, the only place I truly settle.  It permeates everything, that quiet.  I could sit here, in just this spot, all day, without moving, doing nothing, and the world would go on around me.  An overwhelming sense of relief washes over me and I don’t know whether to cry or just sit and be, because at last I can, because for this time it won’t matter which, and I won’t have to be too strong or too feeling or too anything.  You forget how much peace there is in a void. In my forties life was full, to the brim, overflowing. My fifties are teaching me a hunger for fallow fields, for dark, for the quiet stir of nothing.  I’m finding peace and patience are not hard lessons after all and silence is a gift, a space, full of possibility, empty of expectation.

     I don’t cry in the silence, which frankly surprises me.  Instead I write, not sure what will flow from my fingers, not sure if there are words yet for what I feel or all I don’t.  My father died.  He had colon cancer and yet I would insist his passing was sudden and unexpected.  They seemed so sure he would survive the poisoning through pills and radiation.  And maybe they have to be that sure.  Perhaps they have to sell a slim chance at more life with the fervor of P.T. Barnum, and so they hide Vegas odds behind white coats and advanced degrees, specialties and best practices.  You spin the wheel and the house wins, always, sooner or later, usually sooner.  Of course, that’s probably the grief talking but it doesn’t make it any less true.

     My father died of the congestive heart failure he lived with and the side effects of the treatment that was supposed to save him.  The cancer didn’t kill him but the medicine did.  Even his last days, nothing staying in or down, they kept up with the chemo, kept on with the radiation.  Three more days to go, Mr. Cross.  We wouldn’t want the cancer to come back in a couple of years.  His last day, they took him to radiation so heavily sedated he never woke.  In fact, he was never truly conscious again.  He never recognized his wife or my brother and his wife, not even the little grandson he so delighted in.  He never knew I was speeding down I-5 trying to get there in time, though even now God knows what I thought I’d be in time for. You don’t think life or death, at least I didn’t.  All I knew is I had to get there and a 10-hour drive loomed before me as an impossible barrier. 

     After, of course, there are days spent in second-guessing, in what ifs and if onlys.   We need to know we did everything we could have done.  It gives us a kind-of absolution, the kind you need when someone dies unexpectedly and frankly, most of us die unexpectedly, even with a diagnosis of cancer or congestive heart failure or any of the myriad other death sentences which force us past if to when.  If you are of a philosophical bent, then you might just say that birth is a death sentence and you’d be right.  I would argue though, that no one seems much interested in philosophy and philosophers at times like this.  Even if Socrates or Seneca would have found their way to our house of grieving, little comfort would have been found in their company.  While most would have believed in an after-life and that my dad had led a good enough life to achieve it, Socratic questioning would have pointed out our failings of logic but would not once have soothed a sorrowful heart.  Seneca’s “why not” when we railed against the unfairness of a good life cut down, “why him,” “why now,” frankly would have pissed us off and more than likely guaranteed that the famous Stoic would never have been admitted to the house again.  The consolations of philosophy I suspect come only with time and healing comes, when it comes, one person at a time.

     Another silence, two days later, as the house sleeps and the day, graced with Delta breezes and a marine layer from the Bay, stays dim and cool so the neighborhood sleeps too, later than they might have, burrowing deeper in covers against the chill, burrowing deeper into dreams against the vagaries of life.  I sit, as quiet as my quiet house, and I still don’t know whether to cry or not, whether I have words or not, what I feel, if I feel.  I write because that’s what I do, because I don’t know any other way to get a handle on things, thoughts feelings, especially feelings.  My father is dead.  My daddy is dead too.  All the facets of this man who brought me into being, who walked with me in the garden, who cast me out as father’s sometimes do, have to so we will make our own way, our own lives, this man who loved me but could never find ways when I grew into womanhood to show it, all those faces and sides and pieces of him are gone., and I don’t know what to with that.  Maybe I never will.  Perhaps I learn in this silence that’s a gift, a space, full of possibility, empty of expectation.  Maybe I can be that circle drawn by Shisui as his death poem, the essence of all things, void and enlightenment.

Grieving: The Story of a Heart

I made this card a week before my father's death.  I didn't know he was dying.  He had been diagnosed with Colon Cancer but the tumor had been removed and the treatment was supposed to give him 7 to 10 more good years.  "You won't die of cancer, Mr Cross," was what the surgeon said, the oncologist too.  And they were right.  He died of his treatment.  It was curing that killed him.  There is a lesson in that but right now I'm not quite ready to go there.  This blog is going to follow the path of grieving.  I'm a writer.  I have to write and hopefully along the way, I'll find some peace with my father's passing.

The Story of a Heart