It feels like the end might be coming finally for my father, and the truth is, I hope it is. I came home yesterday for a visit, and found that my father has taken a huge turn for the worse. His legs are gone. Watching him try to walk last night was horrible. When he can even stand, he does not know how to move his legs and feet. His legs are bowed like the oldest of cripples, and he tips to the side so you have to lean him up, and sometimes he marches in place as if he thinks he is going somewhere, and it makes you cry to watch.
I sat with him and told him all about the girls. I can see that he is listening, but sentences are few and far between. He smiled at Elisabeth's ballet, and laughed outright at the idea of Alexandra and three-year-olds in tap shoes. But when he tries to speak, it fails, and he turns away, and somtimes he cries a bit because he cannot say whatever it is. Oddly, I still find that he can do the odd quip or quick response. He can get even a full sentence out when it is not thought out. His face has sagged a bit, and he has his mother's lips now, flat and soft. Sometimes when he is tired he closes one eye and looks around with a squint like a pirate. We tell him to open his eye, and he does. I teased that Mom's hair was such a mess last night, maybe he had the eye closed on purpose to make it look better. He laughed, and then he made a silly face, purposefully closing one eye and sticking out his tongue. It was so sweet to see, and then gone again. Sometimes all he can do is watch you. At least he still knows us, and still knows we are here with him, and there is still love in him. He sometimes hugs us, or reaches out for a hand. We are here. But it is painful, so painful, and these moments are not enough anymore to justify this lingering, and I just wish it were over for him.
It was a sleepless night with many wakings to hear him yelling for help. Although these calls were always followed immediately by the soft voice of his night caregiver, they are hard to bear. It's not a child's or a wife's wish ever to hear these cries. It's not physical, it's the voices and the people he sees in the room and the tasks he thinks he needs to do haunting, haunting, haunting him. When they come, sometimes he still knows us, and sometimes then he does not. There is no sleep. And this morning, there is no peace after the storm, and something is different. Usually he falls asleep eventually, sleeping through the morning. But today he does not. He is restless, reaching and grasping in the bed, clutching and crumpling and smoothing the blanket, trying to get up and falling back. Sometimes he speaks, but we can't understand most of it. Mom and I wonder if this is what they talk about in the books for Hospice, when the dead people he loves will come to visit him? So hard to tell. What we know is that he cannot walk at all today, cannot in fact even stand without us holding him up. He tries and tries to get out of the bed, and it's hard to know if we have become jailers or are helping him. Sometimes we bring him out to his chair, and then back to the bed. There is no peace.
Last night as I lay listening, I wondered what my role is here this weekend. The caregivers and nurses and doctors all seem to think he is living through sheer willpower and fear. He is scared to die, and so he clings to life. So, is it time to tell him it's OK to let go? Last night I wondered, and wondered too if I could do it. Today, I have spent hours with him telling it's OK, telling him he has done his job, telling him mom and I can take care of everything that's left, telling him that when he lets go it will all be well. (A small miracle, one time I told him mom and I could take care of anything left to be done, and he laughed and told me that was a stretch!) I told him the people he loves are waiting for him and that when he lets go there will be no more of this. He will be able to use his legs again, and his hands, and his eyes, and he will be able to look after us all again. At one point as I sat on the bed, sometimes just being there, sometimes holding him so he wouldn't roll out of it, he rolled to me and hugged me close. I told him he did a good job taking care of me, and I loved him, and I dripped tears on him, and hugging him I prayed and prayed and prayed for God to be with this man, and for God to hold him and take away his fear, and for God to wrap his arms around him and let him know He is loved.
At one point he asked me to just drag him out and leave him in a ditch. Never, dad, never.
This morning, too, he can't hold his cup. Morning coffee, one of the few pleasures that was left, ended with him spilling all over. He does not know how to tell his hands to hold the cup, or how to bring it to his lips. If you put a straw to his mouth, he doesn't always know how to close his lips around it. Trying to give him all the various medicines this morning, mom tells him to swallow, swallow, swallow. I swallow alot. Reflex.
And we gave him the drugs. There is no other way to keep him quiet, in the end, and it feels too cruel to keep holding him down, and eventually there will be a moment where we miss and he falls. It's been seven hours of up and down and near misses and scares and trembling and we are all tired with him. He keeps trying to talk, but he sounds like an old man with no teeth, as if he cannot move his mouth right anymore. Finally, finally, we thought the drugs seemed to be working. For awhile he sits in his chair quietly. But he is still not sleeping, just watching me and mom. And fighting. You can see it in him, the fight, the fight. We tell him over and over again if he takes a nap we will be here when he wakes up. Still no sleep. We have given him enough sedative to knock out an ox, but still he is trying to talk. When we can understand him, he asks about helping the neighbors, about work, about getting the shop set up for Monday. He does not know he is retired. He asks about money, and he worries that things are not arranged properly. There is no rest, and the time for sitting quietly turns out to be short, and now every few minutes again he tries to get up. But he can't. For five minutes he sits back and closes his eyes, then he tries to get up. Another five minutes, another attempt. He just can't let go. Over and over and over we tell him, let go, sleep, we will be here. No sleep.
