So Little One Can Do

There is so little one can do, sitting at the bedside of one's father. One can clean his glasses, knowing that with every rub one is destroying evidence, fingerprints from all the times his fingers, scarred and knotted, have unfolded the metal legs and placed them on his weary face.  One can hold his hand, squeeze it tightly and feel the tears flood as he squeezes yours in return.  One can whisper, “I love you,” over and over again as the light through the closed blinds fades from midday to dusk.

Otherwise, one sighs, smiles bravely at the nurses who slip in and out of the room, imagines how in the world one can survive as the tide ebbs farther and farther from the shore.

I'm not sure that any of us thought Daddy was ever going to die.  And certainly not from something so pedantic as cancer. If you'd asked me, I would have told you that when the time had come for him to, like David, sleep with his fathers, he would, like shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams -- on some balmy summer night with the moon dangling over the grain bins –, walk across the backyard into a cornfield thick and green and bending in the breeze, pausing only long enough to look back over his shoulder and whisper, "God's good, ain't he?" as he disappeared into the stalks.

If he had heard me say that he would have shook his head and said, "All right now, Doll.  You know better'n that."   And I do, but it really is kinda what I have always thought.

Nevertheless, despite his toughness, his determination, his resilience, despite the fact that four months ago on his 88th birthday he was doing things like cutting grass and planting pine trees, despite the sobs that rise in my throat every time I consider a world without him in it, the truth – which in my father’s ethos matters most – is that he is dying.  

A few Saturdays ago, as we followed the ambulance taking him to hospice, we all wept.  His last trip down Settlement Road, which was going to be named Bradley Road until he refused because it sounded too proud.  His last glance at the fields he had harrowed and plowed and planted and watered and harvested for 50 years. His last glance at the pine forests and the red clay and  John Deere 6400.  Even then it hardly seemed possible.

But it is possible.  It is also inevitable.  And in these last days, as his grimaces grow deeper and his breaths more erratic, one can not help imagining what the world will be without his presence – his stories, his admonitions, his prayers.  One can not help wondering what happens when the fulcrum of a family falls.  

In the days to come there will be the rituals that strive to give shape to grief.  There will be the mechanics of stopping this and closing that.  There will be all the emotions, not just the pleasant and sympathetic ones.  And in each of those rituals, those mechanics, those emotions there will be a painful reminder that – in the tritest of terms – life goes on.

It is dusk.  It is time for the next person who loves him, who is loved by him to take over the honor of keeping company, bearing witness.  It is time for me to go.

There is so little one can do, leaving the bedside of one’s father.  

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