Chapter 1: Letting Go
"Recognition"
It was becoming clear that things were getting worse. I could see it in his eyes, a distinct straining that was not familiar. It had etched into the lines of his face like the daily grime he was now too tired to wash away. I was sure that my father was experiencing unrelenting pain, but he had not told me this in words. His body told me, with shoulders and elbows jutting out through his thick winter jacket, pants that hung from uneven hips, and clothing that sat on his body disorganized and uninterested. I leaned over to fix the coat that was falling from his shoulders, to adjust it over his back and protect him from the cold, and that he let me do this struck a shiver through my body.
My father had only just turned eighty, but he could have been one hundred, or one hundred and ten. I had never seen anyone out and about that looked as ancient or as decrepit as my father. His skin was so paper-thin that a mere brush or a handshake could cause unstoppable bleeding. Bright hues of purples and violets stretched up and down his body; just a light touch would cause rainbows of new colors to appear. That he insisted on pretending everything was ok, that he insisted on going with me everywhere I needed to go for him was all becoming too much.
To make matters worse, my father lived in a basement suite at my sister's house, and how he managed to climb the stairs every day, up and down, hour after hour, heading outside for another cigarette, was beyond me. How either those stairs or the cigarettes hadn’t already killed him, I had no idea. But he loved it there, and getting him to move was an impossibility.
Even more disarming was how he looked at me now; the confusion in his eyes, contrasted with the bits and pieces of gratitude that seeped from his body. He was no longer pulling away from me, from this new assistance I hesitantly offered. The child-like quality to his demeanor was so disarming that the finality of our time together was starting to hit me. It was like I was witnessing in real-time the freefall of eighty years of life right before my eyes; each day found me adjusting to a more juvenile version of my father.
There was a level of compliance in him that was so unsettling, so unusual, that I felt, at times, quite frantic, wanting and willing for the other man to come back, the one that I had hated for my own fifty years here on earth. I realized, however, that it would, in the end, be impossible to hate this child in front of me, and this put me weightless, airborne, and it snatched from me any of the old solidarity I had once found beneath my feet.
This new man offered up no more fights for independence or freedom, no more energy for an archaic macho manhood. The pretty girls on the streets could go about with their proper playfulness; the young girls could run around with their innocence unmarred. And I could at least try to relax; for the first time in all my years, I could let my guard down and let my father’s world circle around me without my frenzied interventions.
What was left of him now was a slow shuffling of feet, on spindly, wobbly legs; no more destination left for him save where someone directed him to go, here and there, this doctor or that clinic. Where had all the meat and muscle gone to while I was not watching?
There was nothing of substance left of him, with knees and ankles and hips spiking out through a gossamer skin, crooked parts of him jutting out in the most awkward of places, like no piece of him had a home anymore. When I looked at him, without all the bluster and brawn to hold him up, it was as if there was nothing left; there was no higher part of himself that could fill all the empty spaces left vacant by lost pride, vanished self-satisfaction, and ill-conceived grandiosities.
What I could see now, or thought I could see, in the fogged and sallow eyes that pleaded into mine, trying to tell me critical things that had no spoken words, was that he wished there was something more to him than just this skin and bone. Something more for him to draw upon, like some good men can, at the end, when the dignity of a life well-lived means the journey was worth the final, crumbling moments.
I helped him out of the van then and watched him start his shuffle, his arms outstretched in front of him, leaning and grasping forwards towards nothing and everything. I ran to him quickly, before he could trip on a curb, a stair, a stone. I eyed him intently, all parts of me ready for action, to reach out and catch him at a moment’s notice. I wanted to hold his arm, steady him, comfort him, but even in these dying moments, I could see that he would shuffle alone.
There had been a time, not that long ago at all, when I would have driven him to the pub this day, so he could drink, and eat, and smoke too much. Sometimes I would stay and listen to the old cronies’ gossip, and other times I would walk over to the Wal-Wart and kill the hours wandering through the aisles of plastic. Either way, a few hours later, I would walk back to the pub, where he was either playing the VLTs or flirting with a waitress, and I would drive him home. There, he would take his medications, curl up in a ball, and sleep the rest of the day away, where my antipathy at such a tiny and wasted life would recoil in all its old-established patterns.
In his prime, my father had weighed 165 pounds; I know this with certainty because it had been important to him. He was not a tall man, nor a muscular man, but it was imperative that he not be a small, skinny, weak, or sickly man. He could eat a 20-ounce steak, a rock-lobster tail, and a twice-baked potato, with two large pints of beer to wash it all down, and in his part of the world, the Canadian Prairies, he would most certainly drive himself home too.
It was for this reason alone, the driving, that I had always made myself available for his afternoon pub jaunts. If I were to say I had been of any relevant service to the world regarding my father, I would have to say it has mostly been a public service. Eventually, all of this turned into a form of muscle memory, unstoppable, and I spent much of my life believing that this was the way men were created, even supposed, to be. Hating my father turned into a 50-year journey of misplaced misandry, full of “The Vagina Monologues” in the middle years, Alanis Morrissett early on, and later, pretty much anything by Chimamanda Adichie to stoke my fire.
But this day, here and now, my father and I were painstakingly walking down the sidewalk together. We were mere steps from the van we had exited, even though many minutes had already passed us by, and I asked him then, suddenly, before I could change my mind: “Dad, how much did you weigh this morning?” The words were strange, the moment uncomfortable, like we were entering a new territory of our relationship, somewhere we had never gone before. But this had been on my mind for some time, the idea that there was something more to be done, that maybe I was not doing enough.
It took him a bit to answer, but he did. “105,” he whispered.
I felt my chest compress at his words, and prickly bumps rise on my arms. My eyes closed, and I stood on the hospital sidewalk, this all-too-familiar sidewalk, with no birds or trees or flowers, just my father and I, slowly, together, coming to realize our finite time. It was cold, and the wind whipped brown leaves around our feet, and I wondered where the leaves had come from and why they had chosen such a place as this when they could go anywhere.
When I opened my eyes, Dad was nearing the entrance to the hospital, and I ran the last few steps to catch up, right behind him, my arms hovering behind his back, ready to steady him as he went to open the door.
It was in the waiting room, while I was carefully putting the medical mask onto my father’s face, his eyes scrunched closed, his lips and cheeks grey and flaccid, letting me care for him as I would a child, that I realized the irony of the moment. How I had called out to him, repeatedly, as a baby, and then a child; as a youth, teenager, young woman, middle-aged woman; and now on the cusp of becoming an old woman myself, how he had never come to me.
And now, suddenly, here we were, and it was all flip-flopped around on us. And maybe some, or many, would feel the beauty of these moments as the end comes near. But what I felt was an awkwardness, a discomfort, and a genuine distaste for what we now had to pretend to be: me, the adoring daughter, and he, the benevolent father.
I felt, then, that if someone would ask me, maybe one day in the future, if I mourned my father, or if I would, after some time, eventually mourn my father, I would say no. But that I was mourning something was true; something intangible, something about his smallness, the way when his body shrank and shriveled; how there was nothing left of him, not even memories.
I mourned the understanding of what his pleading eyes were begging of me: that I could find some reason for his life to have been more than what it had been; to have been something more than he had chosen of it to live; something more worthy; even one great moment to talk about while we shared our final time. And I mourned because I could not give him that.
We were finally in the waiting room of the hospital for my father’s appointment, and as the exertion took its toll on my father’s labored breathing, I worked at getting his mask straightened onto his face, under his glasses, and over his ears. This ritual of the mask, multiple times a day, was becoming increasingly unsettling. The first time I had helped him with it had been strange enough. He had had it on backward, inside out, upside down, covering his eyes, and with shaking hands, he was desperately trying to arrange it on his face. I had tentatively reached out to him, and that he had allowed my help, I remember thinking, surely, this cannot be happening to us, not yet; I am not ready for this.
But now he no longer bothered to pick up the mask, ask for it, or even reach for it; instead, he would stop all movement and point his face to mine, slack, open, and serene, like a baby, and I, like a mother, would intuitively know his need. And he would look up at me, then, close his eyes, and wait for me to fix and rearrange him.
“Rudi Unrau?” the doctor came into the room then, interrupting my rambling thoughts.
And my father looked at me, uncertain, as if to say, “Is that me? Is that who I am?”
And I nodded to the doctor, “Yes, this is him; this is my father,” and I carefully helped him to his feet.