These Days We Throw Cherry Pits into the Field, Yelling
In the end, he forgot how to swallow.
If pneumonia or infection do not come first, this is what happens. Alzheimer’s patients starve to death, die of dehydration. This is easy to read but impossible to understand.
At 7:30, the light is weak in this morning. My father’s rented hospital bed. We, Mom and I, whisper. I now understand much better just how he could hear us, wondering aloud if he was gone. “The last thing they can do is hear,” the night nurse told us. So we spoke quietly.
The day before. We told him it was OK. You can go. We will protect each other. We said that but it wasn’t worth anything to say it. The words were light out of our mouths compared to their weight.
Here it is. Tuesday, Christmas morning. Under my hand, his skin rapidly yellows. Birthmarks on his face I’d never seen before appear, hidden by his ruddy blush.
It started a week earlier. Vomiting water. Breathing in his dinner.
He had edema. A large protruding collection of fluid in his abdomen. Mom called it affectionately, “Mt. Fuji”. Mt. Fuji had been with us for ten days or so.
The really bad things are hidden under routine. Edema, another problem to work on.
He had not spoken in two years. He was a paleontologist. A chair in his biology department, forty years of lectures. A skull he helped discover in Africa. A tree he climbed, where a photo was taken, impossibly green.
He often smiled with his eyes. He recognized us.
Looking for vulnerable places on his skin. Where it could split or get infected. Carefully. It never did. Turning him. Bathing him. Chatting to ourselves.
We knew he would live. Because that is all we could know. That is what a person can stand. There was a system of rules. Rituals. Much we had come to know.
*
A black snake crept into the house.
“Mom,” I said. “A snake.”
Earlier, when Dad was still whispering about things on occasion, he once told Mom that his parents were there. That they had arrived to stay near to him.
A black racer snake.
It disappeared too quickly in the room for us to find it. Mom whispered, certain of it, “That is his daddy, coming to take him. It’s going to crawl down his throat.” The one who died when Dad was three years old, and who couldn’t wait any longer. Who couldn’t watch him suffer and wanted to walk away from it together early.
Mom sat up in the night wearing yellow kitchen gloves, waiting for that snake to come back out. I scraped my shin across the doorframe, rushing in. Mom was on her hands and knees, reaching under the couch. She darted her hand caught it around the neck. She threw it out into the woods.
Never questioned that the snake was Dad’s father. We understood that it was.
Mom caught it by the neck and threw it every time it returned. She stopped wearing the yellow gloves. She caught the snake and shook it with her bare hands, and threw it away as hard as she could.
*
“He doesn’t know I’m here,” the hospice nurse said, a different one. One we liked. She was kind to us. She didn’t say that he didn’t know his family was there, either.
“You did everything you could,” she said, when he was gone. When she came to help us wash his body.
What is that you see when you see us? What do you think we’re hearing when you comfort us?
It comes to the ear like the one Volunteer Rescue member muttering that we should stop calling when he falls. The hospice people, insisting to my mother that he shouldn’t be kept at home, as if it wasn’t a fully informed decision she made. The cashiers at our small grocery store ask me, once my mom is out of earshot, “After he dies, will she go home?” as if she hasn’t lived the same country as them for thirty-five years, the same trees. The people at the hospital who are always mistaking Mom for Dad’s at-home nurse, small Asian woman pushing a wheelchair – of course. Mistaking me, forty years younger than Dad, for his bride, even though our faces resemble each other. The same chin. The same hands.
How small the graces are. The same chin. The same hands.
“No, it’s not enough,” my mom said, putting on favorite his shoes. He had not worn shoes for over six months. He had always wanted loafers like these, as a poor kid living in a rusted trailer in Norfolk. His church shoes. They fit perfectly without the edema.
“Oh honey,” the nurse said, “it’s enough.”
No. You don’t understand.
He couldn’t drink. His kidneys were failing. His urine was a deep brown. He was choking more than breathing, no matter how much my mother tried to suction out the fluid. He couldn’t drink. His eyes were fixed by the second day without water.
We thought we knew enough to help him. As long as we follow the correct procedures, the rules. We had to hold back his water. We couldn’t give him his lunch. He still watched us, smiling. I wanted to give him everything. We couldn’t eat either. Every meal for a week. I used to make him toast. One egg for breakfast every day. Grilled cheeses. He ate a peanut butter sandwich every day from elementary school until a week ago. Not even a sip of water.
Even after we came to all this, he waited until we were out of the room to take his last breath.
*
We kept his body until we couldn’t. Hovering over him, keeping him warm as usual. In the dim light, he slept quietly. We made sure he had his teddy bear.
We filled his cups with juice. Coffee. Made his meals.
Now he is gone.
A black snake swims away.