Purple was the color my dad was wearing when he died. A purple polyester polo shirt. What he called a Banlon, from some 1950s clothing brand none of us kids knew of.

It was my mom’s favorite color and her favorite shirt of his. She laid it out for him to wear at least once a week when she was healthy enough to do so. She understood his brain couldn’t decide what clothes to pick out anymore. One more reason for him to stay in bed.

The purple reminded them of their younger days, their college colors. They married in the summer of ’67. After my dad’s senior year and before my mom’s junior one. My grandmother wanted them to wait, for fear that my mom wouldn’t finish college. But they didn’t, and she did. As newlyweds, they lived on Holly Street in Greenville.

After my mom got sick, I kept laying out the purple shirt for my dad to wear. I knew it would perk them both up. He wore it on his last hospital visit to see her, on the day we were pretty certain she would die. After she passed, he never took off the plastic blue visitor’s bracelet they fastened around his wrist that day. A tether to the last time he was with her. And he continued to wear his purple shirt, evoking memories shared. Even when she was too weak to do much talking, she’d smirk a half smile and say, “Hey, look at you,” whenever he entered a room wearing that shirt.

He called it his hummingbird shirt. He’d wear it and sit on his front porch and their beating wings flocked to him. He was so still and quiet they would come within arms’ length and flutter about, as though he were full of nectar.

On the day he died, he wore purple covered in a thin, white hospital sheet. He’d spent two months bound to a bed that wasn’t his own. That cruel curve of life where the ending mirrors the beginning. “You got me locked up in this bed and you won’t let me out,” he would say to me, holding the bars at the side. At first, I’d tried to explain or defend. But I learned it was better to just give him a hug and say, “I know. I’m sorry.”

His purple shirt was cut with scissors in the back—a straight line up the middle from hem to collar. A trick taught to me by Pam, the certified nursing assistant assigned to him by the local hospice agency. She told me to keep him in some semblance of regular clothes instead of the hospital gown he was wearing during her first visit. “To preserve some dignity,” she explained. We took four of his Banlons and cut them in this way. Each made a cape at his back that peeled off around his shoulders, making it easier when it was time to change him.

Pam came first thing in the morning five days a week to give him a sponge bath and shave. My job was to have the small wash basin full of hot water when she arrived. It was especially cold that winter, and the hot water heater was slow to warm up.

The pain of every movement was evident in his face, even when he held his breath and his voice. We did whatever we could to lessen the inevitable lifts, tugs, pushes, and pulls. He was covered in bruises from a nighttime fall on the way to the bathroom back in November. I was asleep in the bedroom next to his. The sound of his body crashing to the floor woke me immediately, awfully.

Inky, large bruises covered the right side of his body: hand, forearm, knee, lower leg. His leg broke in the fall, but they didn’t put a cast on it. “It’s just his fibula, and you technically don’t even need that bone to bear weight,” the ER doctor explained. My dad had majored in anatomy and physiology, so he understood this fact too. Regardless of fact, however, it didn’t prove true. The injuries from the fall were a ball and chain with no fix. He wouldn’t walk again.

My dad’s bruises indicated significant internal bleeding leaving him low on hemoglobin, appetite, and the energy needed to push through the pain to heal. He would look down at his body multiple times a day in disbelief, asking quietly to himself, “My land, how did I get into this mess?”

It’s a common story, par for the course with a dementia diagnosis. But knowing it and living it are two different things. I came to understand why falls are referred to as the “F” word in eldercare circles. Once he got out of the hospital, he tried rehab at a nursing home. But when it was clear he wouldn’t get better, insurance stopped paying. And he hated being there anyways.

The bruises started out a deep purple, almost black, with blood rushing to the top of his skin. Over time they faded to include tie-dyed hues of blue and yellow, with hints of green around the edges. But the center held purple. He acquired new bruises—deep, berry-colored ones—on the two-hour ambulance transport from the nursing home to his actual home. The place he’d lived since 1970, where he raised his family, and where he now came to die.

The first time I lifted his shirt after that ride, I choked on my breath, shocked by the dark marks crossing his torso. I tried not to let it show in my face. The EMTs had strapped him in so tightly for the 144-mile trip down Highway 70 East that he looked like he’d been whipped, when really he’d been held.

That was December 31, 2021—the end of one year and the eve of another. He made it into the new year, and then three more weeks after that. He celebrated one more birthday, his 77th. We set his hospital bed up in the living room, the sunniest room in the house with plenty of room for visitors to come and pull up a seat. The television rotated between sports, news, Westerns, and The Andy Griffith Show. We set up a record player so he could listen to albums from his collection—Johnny Cash, Roger Miller, Elvis, Little Jimmy Dickens, and the like.

There were several days we thought were his last. At times, he looked like he was fading away in front of our eyes in real time. Like you see in the movies. Other times he was fresh-faced, dewy skinned, tender almost—his eyes more alert. I googled “what does a death rattle sound like?” and “how long can a person survive without food and water?” more times than I wish to admit. There is no real road map.

Pam—a daily constant in our lives—seemed the most sure that his day had come. She hugged us goodbye on a Tuesday, said it had been nice working with us, and predicted he wouldn’t make it to the next morning’s visit. As she got her things to go, she pointed to my brother in a family photo near my dad’s hospital bed. She asked me: “Does he ever come and visit?”

“No, not anymore,” I replied. “I’m not sure where he is. He hasn’t been in the picture for a while.”

“Every family has one,” she said.

“I keep hoping he’ll come back around at some point,” I replied.

“By then it will be too late,” she said, and then nothing more. She was out the door.

Pam was surprised when I called the next morning and asked her to come over again. His clothes and his bedding were completely soaked with sweat from the night. We needed her. She helped get him cleaned up, changed the sheets, and got him into his purple shirt.

“It won’t be much longer,” she said. That was the last time we saw her.

He died early Thursday morning, sometime between midnight and 1:30am. Living to see another day but not another sunrise. I was taking a nap next to him on the couch. I was with him, but I didn’t see him go. The hospice nurses tell caretakers to take breaks. “Sometimes they wait to go when they know you aren’t watching.”

He died in purple. Brightly colored on the surface, underneath a mixture of blue and red. Sadness and anger. Melancholy and fire. Passion for all his big hopes and dreams. Regret for all the ways life hadn’t turned out as he’d planned.

In the immediate after, there are phone calls and paperwork. You wait and you wait, which helps to normalize this new reality that your parent is dead, lying there next to you. Puffy bags surrounding his closed eyes, cheeks hollow, mouth slightly agape. I’d gone through it with my mom the year previous, but we were in a hospital then. Help comes a bit faster there.

I called the hospice hotline number posted by his bed, waking the on-call nurse. Wait for her to come, take his vitals, and pronounce him dead. She flushed his meds because she forgot to bring the cat litter. She explained it was against protocol, but the leftover morphine and Ativan went down the toilet. I soon regretted not pocketing the Ativan for myself.

There are more papers to fill out and then a call to the funeral home. Two more people are woken up in the middle of the night. They show up in suits to collect his body. I thanked them and they said, “Of course, of course, all part of the job.” Both of them had been pulled out of retirement to do this work. “So many people dying these days,” they told me. And the other funeral home in town closed last year. They stayed busy.

It’s nearly sunrise before they wrap him in a blanket and load his body into the back of their van. There’s nothing elegant about getting a lifeless person out of a house in the dark of night. I held a cell phone flashlight to guide their path. The flood lights on the house weren’t working, the front steps weren’t to code, and there was no handrail. Things I’d never noticed before.

The funeral home men left a single, artificial red rose on the pillow where his head had just been. After they left, I made up the sheets and smoothed the yellow sateen blanket out on the hospital bed. It was the same blanket that lay on top of my mom when she died. Some families pass down baby blankets, we bestow death ones.

At the funeral home the next morning, I made the arrangements. The flowers: white lilies. The casket: silver. The music: old country. How to cut and style his hair: with his sideburns intact, please. He’d worn them long down the sides of his face since high school. The way he liked them, they were even with the bottom of his ears, covering a deep scar he had gotten as a teenager when he first tried using a double-edged razor on his own. The funeral home’s barber didn’t honor this request. Not intentional, I’m sure. Just not the style anymore. They cut his sideburns slam off. I apologized to my dad when I first saw it, but also laughed a little at how mad he would have been.

He would be buried in a black suit with a purple tie. They reminded me to bring underwear, socks, and shoes for them to prepare his body.
“Do you want the clothes he died in returned to you?” the funeral director asked me, catching me off guard. It hadn’t occurred to me to request this before he posed the question, but “Yes, yes,” I said without hesitation. “I’d like the purple shirt.”

I waited for its return, left a voicemail, and sent a follow-up email. But the purple shirt never came back to me. When I want to see it, I turn to my smartphone’s labyrinth-like grid of photos. Screens
and screens of images, three by five at a time. Scrolling quickly with my thumb until I see my destination noted in the top left corner. January 20, 2022. James City.

My dad, who had been an avid photographer, had wanted me to take pictures of my mom after she died. He asked me to do it in a very matter of fact way, like you might ask someone to turn up the volume on the car radio. No sentiment of let’s not remember her like this, no inclination to look away. I recall how days later, he stood by the open casket at her wake, staring at her for what seemed like an hour, unblinking.

So, with the pictures, I did the same for him after he died. While I was waiting on all the formalities to happen, we had nothing but time. That’s how I came to have pictures of my dead dad, time stamped and location tagged, on my phone.

I find myself looking at them now and then. Not glancing in passing, but really holding my gaze. Bringing me back to that time instead of pushing it away. Most of us avoid looking at straight on, but there are so many things worse than death. We document the beginning of life so prolifically, lingering on the beauty of the miracle before us. It’s just the other side of that coin.

His death pictures are wedged between anachronistic pictures taken of old family photos, documenting happier times. I took hundreds of these “pictures of pictures” with my phone’s camera, then uploaded them to the funeral home’s website to prepare a slide show for his service. Pictures from across seventy-three of his seventy-seven years of life.

The earliest photo of him is from age four, when he snuck into school with his older brother to get his first picture made. He’s wearing overalls with a collared shirt underneath, patterned with images of cowboys on horses. The photo is in black-and-white, no purple in sight.

In photos from more recent years, purple shirt plays a starring role. Purple shirt goes to the mountains. Purple shirt goes to the beach. Purple shirt goes to the cookout. Purple shirt sips on a milkshake. Purple shirt waters flowers in the front yard. Purple shirt visits with brothers and sisters, eating banana pudding from their mom’s old recipe.

Purple still pays its visits, especially in the irises, wisteria, and azaleas that grow along the back fence of his yard. Reminding me that seasons change, and spring will return its perennial blossoms. It comes back to me through its primary parts. The bluest skies of winter and the reddest tomatoes of late summer. Teaching me that things break apart and come back together and break apart again.

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