Until I watched a death up close, I always felt avoidant around grief and grieving people. It was one of the things I hated most about myself—my complete loss of social fluidity among the heartbroken—though I know it’s common. I am a shy person at heart, and a grieving acquaintance is a shy person’s nightmare: The pressure to know the “right” thing to say. Seeing a person without their shell. The sudden plunge, several layers deeper than you’ve ever been, into someone’s self, feigning ease in there so you don’t make them uneasy. Navigating, by instinct, how much space you should be taking up—or, even worse, bringing yourself to ask.
I spent a lot of time alone as a kid. I’ve never been an easy hugger. The social conventions that keep human beings separate and discrete—boundaries, etiquette, privacy, personal space—have always been a great well of safety to me. I am a rule follower. I like choosing whom I let in close. The emotional state of emergency following a death necessarily breaks those conventions down, and, unfortunately, I am bad at being human without them.
I never caved to the impulse, of course—it’s repulsively selfish and I’ve chewed my cheek bloody just admitting it here. Other people’s grief is not about you; letting self-consciousness supersede empathy is barbaric. I’m the first to drop off a casserole, send flowers and a card. “Anything I can do.” “Thinking of you so much right now.” But before death had ever touched me directly, those interactions felt like trying to dance, sober, in a brightly lit room.
Someone picked me up at the airport and drove me to my parents’ house, where my dad either was or wasn’t, I can’t remember. He was in and out of the hospital so often at that time it was hard to keep track, elation swapping places with despair at flickering speeds like a zoetrope animating the last days of my childhood. Flick, flick, flick.
Even though my mother was a nurse and I grew up immersed in hospital culture—talking eyeball surgery over dinner, specimen cups full of mandarin oranges in my school lunch—I didn’t understand shit about hospitals. I didn’t know that even the best ones were miserable and lonely places where you couldn’t sleep more than a couple of hours at a stretch; where, with each second you weren’t discharged, you could see the outline of your death shiver into focus. Hospitals were full of medicines and machines and doctors and hyper-competent people like my mother. I thought they were a place you went to get better, not a place you went to die.
Cancer doesn’t hand you an itinerary. It’s not like, up to a certain point, you have an okay amount of cancer, and then one day the doctor’s like, “Uh-oh! Too much cancer!” and then all your loved ones rush to your bedside for some stoic, wise good-byes. Cancer, at least in my dad’s case, is a complex breaking down of multiple systems, both slow and sudden. You have six months and then you have six hours. Treatments are messy, painful, and often humiliating. The cost/benefit is anything but clear.
My dad didn’t want to die. He turned seventy-six that year, but until his prostate fucked everything up, he radiated the same tireless exuberance as he always had. My mom said he didn’t like hearing his own prognoses, so she met with the doctors herself, carried the future inside her all alone. She, the realist, and he, the fantasist, as ever.
In those final weeks, though, even Dad couldn’t deny that his body was failing. That horrible Thanksgiving, when he vomited into the empty margarine tub at the dinner table, was when I first noticed it. He had begun grieving—for himself, for the life he wasn’t ready to leave behind. I, true to form, was terrified of his grief.
Those days eat at me. Why didn’t I spend more time sitting with him? Why did I sleep so much? Why didn’t I read out loud to him, our favorite books, the ones he read to me when I was little? Why was I so fucking chirpy in all of our interactions, desperate to gloss over the truth, instead of letting myself be vulnerable with him? Why the fuck did I move to L.A. three months before he died? What was wrong with me? Who does that?
He wanted me to go, though. That was before he admitted he was dying—if I had stayed, it would have been confirmation that something was really wrong—and there was nothing he loved more than watching his children stride out into the world and flourish. “Knock ’em dead, kid,” he said. And I did. It’s so fucking unfair that he didn’t get to see it.
Eventually, I ran out of chances to sit with him, to be vulnerable, to tell the truth. We went to the hospital for the last time.
As Dad drifted in and out of consciousness, my sister and I read to him from the book he was halfway through at the time: A Jazz Odyssey: The Life of Oscar Peterson. Aham once told me that Oscar Peterson, my dad’s hero, was the lovable dork of the jazz pantheon. “He’s incredibly well respected,” Aham hedged. “He’s amazing—just the least edgy player ever. He’s kind of like Superman.” Peterson never had a drug problem; he loved his wives; he was huge in Canada. Unsurprisingly, then, where my sister and I picked up in A Jazz Odyssey, Peterson was describing a hobby that I can confidently declare the exact opposite of being a philandering New York needle junkie: pottering around America’s parks and monuments with his wife Kelly in their brand-new Winnebago.
My dad roused every once in a while and chuckled as Peterson detailed with reverence the Winnebago’s gleaming chrome accents and spacious over-cab loft bed. The open road, the great plains, Kelly by his side—this was the life. Until it came time to empty the Winnebago’s sewage tank. Oscar was pretty sure he could figure it out unassisted.
I looked up from the book, into my sister’s expectant face and over at my dad’s unconscious one. Was Oscar Peterson about to tell us a story about gallons and gallons of his and his wife’s liquefied feces spraying out of a Winnebago? Was I about to read it out loud, in a soothing voice, at my father’s deathbed? Yes. Yes, I was.
Dad’s hospital room was small—only two guests could hang out in there comfortably—so my mom, my sister, and I took turns sleeping in the chair next to his bed, holding his hand, while one of us lounged on the cushioned bench under the window and the odd woman out decamped to the cafeteria or the “family lounge” down the hall. The family lounge was a small, windowless room with an old TV, a couch upholstered in what looked like leftover airport carpet, and a pile of battered, cast-off VHS tapes, because nothing takes the edge off your father’s slow suffocation like Speed 2: Cruise Control.
Did you know that sometimes there just isn’t anything else that doctors can do to save your dad? I knew it intellectually, before this experience, but I didn’t understand it in practice. In practice, it means that, at a certain point, a fallible human being called a doctor has to make a subjective decision that it is no longer feasible to mitigate both the internal bleeding and concomitant dehydration of your father, so all you can do is give him enough morphine that it doesn’t hurt so much when he drowns inside of his own body. And you have to go, “Okay,” and then let them do that. And then wait.