I'd been crying for a week before this picture was taken, which is the day before he died. I cried knowing we'd had our last conversations, and that everything from now on would be quiet, tiny bits of talk. "Do you want some water?" "Are you cold?" and "Are you scared?" His words, tiny answers, "No," "No," and "Maybe a little."
"There's a huge hurricane brewing," I told him the day before he died. "Irma." He'd always loved weather watching.
How bravely we go about our daily business, which of course is anything but our daily business, in the company of death. Smiling at the people who work at Bethany House, chit-chatting about the weather. The day this picture was taken, we'd just moved him into another room because the door to his old room was broken. As if he could linger on for days, weeks, we wanted to be able to use the porch. My friend and I put all the pictures and get well cards back up on his new wall. "I like this room better! He can look out the window," I said, tacking up a photograph of an Eastern Indigo Snake.
Throughout the day he responded very little, with small whispery grunts, opening his eyes slightly. Mostly he slept. A nurse came in and cheerfully asked, "Do you need morphine?" and he said his last sentence, "Morphine's good stuff."
I did tease him a little, asked him, "You do know what we're all going to do now, right?" No answer. "We're all going to get snake tattoos." He smiled. His last smile. His last communication to me was humor. Lighthearted. A ribbing from me, a smile in response.
When I left him that night, the day before he died, there was an ominous feeling all around. It was the hurricane, and the knowing that Daddy was dying right in it.
In the morning, Sunday, Sept. 10, he was completely non-responsive, breathing heavily. Every exhale carried with it a slight moan. The nurses asked my permission to give him morphine in response to the moans, that the moans might possibly mean pain. I of course knew he was not in pain, but eagerly encouraged the nurses to give him as much morphine as they legally could to move us on the next stage, on to death. And as I gave these instructions, they were planning their day, because the hurricane was now posing a serious threat to our area. They had their own families to think about.
Bravely, bravely, I went into his room and held my father's hand. The day moved like the days do in hospice, some visitors came, sadness was now heavy on us all, the day stretched out to afternoon. "It could be anytime now," the nurse said, "now, or even days away."
Janie and I looked at each other. "Days?" We both sat up and ceased our death-bed hand-holding vigil. We checked messages on our phones. We had conversations about this or that, and tried to be brave. Later, it was just the two of us again, and we found quite without realizing it that we were back to the vigil, the hand-holding, listening to him breathing, watching his feet and hands grow mottled, waiting for a change.
Janie finally got up to get some fresh air. Her phone rang and I answered it, then went to the bathroom. When I came out, Daddy was still and quiet. 6:05 p.m. "Daddy?" I whispered, rushing to him and putting my hand on his chest. He breathed. One, two, three breaths, then an intake that stopped in his throat, a little hitch, a rise in his Adam's apple that did not fall. And that was it. In an instant he was dead, where just the very moment before he had been alive. I watched the life leave him, watched the infinitesimal steady movement of his living body stop and so suddenly, so suddenly it didn't seem like it could really happen that way, he was still. Still as a stone, still as a statue. How could those shallow breaths have made him so alive? Now I know the movement of the living, and the stillness of the dead. There is no stillness like that. What was the movement that so dramatically ceased when he died? I'd have told you he was so so still, death-like, just before he died, until he was as still as death. That slight pulsing of his living body now seemed like an ocean of movement.
And oh, the loneliness that crashed down then, in that moment when he left! He was gone! Already I missed him, the him that had been alive just one second before, missed holding his mottled hand, listening to him breathe. Missed even the terrible smell of his bedsore, missed his caved-in chest and sunken cheeks! There was the body, all those parts still there, but without that tiny river of life. I kissed him goodbye, but felt no fondness for his lifeless body, which the nurses propped into a formal pose I thought was silly. No comfort in the body, no comfort in the family afterwards, no comfort in the night, the next morning, the hurricane keeping us all at home, waiting for the lights to go out. Daddy was dead and I missed him, that's all. There would be no comfort, only the balm of time. I've done this before.
The storm didn't come. We did lose power, there was some rain and some wind, but nothing extreme. I put on my boots and walked outside after the danger had passed, and noticed a red flower in the yard I'd never seen before. And there it was, just as its name portended, blooming in the middle of the yard, two actually, and even more on the banks of the creek, a Hurricane Lily, the official flower of the afterlife.
