This blog wasn't intended to center around the death of my father. It was just the timing. Even when it was happening, it was hard to write about this death for the simple reason that it's just so normal. When your parents get old, they die. He was 85, lived a good life, and he died. So banal. Everyone goes through this. But as I started to write, and also listened to people talk about their own experiences, I found comfort in our solidarity. We are all tending to the details like a hidden tribe, cult rites, we know how to keep up with and administer all those prescriptions, we know that sweet comfort when the Hospice people come and get rid of them all, we understand the strange calm of the quiet between small talk, and how well we will always remember the odd smells of hospitals and age. No one really wants to hear about it until they're in it. But for those of us in it, now or past, there's a strange reassurance hearing how others reacted to the same passage. Or at least there has been for me.
I don't know if I'm done with this blog. But if so, there are things I don't want to forget.
Like seeing the eclipse. For at least five years, I'd been waiting for the total solar eclipse in August, but once that date was near, it didn't seem likely I'd be leaving his side. I didn't see how I could possibly make a two night trip up to Tennessee. I wasn't so much worried that he would die while I was gone, or that he'd need something. I just didn't want to be away from him. It was primal. As anxious as he was when I wasn't around, I was as anxious not being there. Daughter Emma was having none of it, and arranged hour by hour care and promised me he would not be alone. Emma would stay back and share solar eclipse glasses with the Hospice staff and lie out on the lawn outside Papa's room and watch the partial solar eclipse herself.
I went up to Tennessee and saw the total solar eclipse, and it was as magical as anything I've ever imagined or seen in my life. The next day I went straight to Bethany House to tell my dad about it, made a four hour beeline. He was still quietly conversant. "I saw the total eclipse!" I said, and described the minute the sun slipped behind the moon and the bright silken sheets of the corona appeared.
He listened, closed his eyes, smiled. "I saw one once, in Korea," he said. "Didn't know it was going to happen, but when it did, we knew what it was. Beautiful!" Is this true, I wondered? I can't find any total solar eclipse that would have been visible in Korea during the time he was there. But had he seen one some other time or place? So many things were mixing up in his head.
He'd begun to talk about things he'd never talked about before. His grandmother Iris. His favorite dog, who turned out to be Scrappy, not my own childhood dog Bowzer, but his. He chatted with the dead, and seemed at first amazed and then accepting that his friends were always on the TV, and there was no convincing him otherwise. He talked a lot about his time in Korea, in small bits.
There are things I don't want to forget.
I don't want to forget his crazy hallucinations, which began in January when he went into the ICU with pneumonia, before he broke his hip in May, before he broke it again in July, before he went to Bethany House in August, before he quit talking in September.
That very first day, January 1, 2017, he lay in the bed in the ICU and told me about this publication which had kept him up all night. He read about all his friends in it, about me, Joe, Janie, Husky, the Babishes (his words for his grands and great grands), everyone! "It was supposed to put you to sleep, but it kept me up all night long!" he said. He was laughing about it. He was pretty much a straight shooter; I'd never heard him say anything fanciful before. It scared me, especially when he began thumbing through an imaginary book, saying, "Page after page after page!" The doctor assured me it was not anything to worry about.
Later that day when we got moved into a regular hospital room, he confessed, "Mary, I'm convinced you were right. I was having hallucinations." I smiled. Admitting he was wrong was not his strong suit. But then I saw his eyes focus on something over my head, something obviously beyond the veil.
"Look at that," he said, pointing to the ceiling, and naming the scientific name of all the baby turtles he saw hatching.
Sometimes it was turtles, sometimes alligators. He saw so many things on the ceiling. Snake of course. In and out of hospital visits, all through the nine month decline, he'd drift in and out of his hallucinatory fun house. A nurse offered to give him something that would stop the visions. "Oh no," we said, "we're all enjoying them!"
"You see that?" he asked me one evening, pointing up. "There's a frog on the ceiling."
"Daddy, we're in the hospital. How would a frog even get on the ceiling? That's just a stain."
"Well. Okay, you're right."
The next day, the first thing he did was call me to his bed and pointed up again. "Remember yesterday you said that was a stain? Well it's not. It's a frog. A flattened-out frog."
"Daddy how would a flattened-out frog get on the ceiling?"
"Flattened-out frogs can fly," he said, and because he was the eminent herpetologist of the Southeast, he of course had the last word.
One night he drifted into another world and gave a 20 minute lecture on natural selection. It was like someone just pushed a button on a tape recorder. Every inflection, every pause was just exactly the way he'd delivered it in the classroom 30 years earlier.
All these things I don't want to forget. Of course I want to remember him in his prime, a thousand details about him, and how alive he was. I don't worry much about losing those memories. I'll write them down someday. Good healthy brains, however, tend to repress traumatic memories. That's why I keep writing about the death.
Today is exactly one year since he died. That night, just after he died, we went to eat at a Mexican restaurant. Tonight we're going back to the same one to raise a glass and mark a day that marks a year.
Last year I came home from the restaurant and waited for Hurricane Irma. Just sat in a chair, waiting on a storm, feeling the weight of death and the calm. This year Hurricane Florence is bearing down on the East Coast, a category 4 storm threatening to make landfall. Our vacation to Edisto in South Carolina had to be called off, and the governor's called a mandatory evacuation of the whole coastline of that state. Waiting on storms.
It's 5:58 pm as I write these words. In eight minutes it really will be exactly one year ago that I saw him take his last breath. I'm a hopeless dreamer, making connections like a crazy spider where connections don't really exist. Maybe something will change tonight at 6:06. Maybe I'll take off this silver snake ring I've been wearing for a year. Maybe nothing will change. Maybe I'll stop writing about that year.
Maybe I'll decide I'm just getting started. There are so many things I want to remember.
