By Paul Dalmas
My father spent his last birthday, his fifty-first, in a hospital bed recovering from surgery that revealed liver cancer metastasized throughout his gut. It was also Thanksgiving Day. What I remember most clearly is the young nurse who breezed into the room, wished my father a happy birthday and joked that the IV she inserted into his arm was flavored with turkey and stuffing.
That year, 1959, I was 14, and because she loved me and wanted to protect me, my mother followed the doctor’s instructions to keep the truth a secret, especially from my father and me.
“We’ll treat him with drugs,” the doctor told me.
“He’ll be fine.”
I turned to my mother.
“He’s okay,” I told her. “It’s Thanksgiving and we have a lot to be thankful for.”
“Yes, we do,” she replied without a smile.
My father had 94 days to live.
My memories of the fiction of my father’s recuperation are vague. I remember him lying for long hours in bed or sitting on the couch in his bathrobe watching television. He was usually too tired to read. His suffering followed a predictable cycle. As days passed, the discomfort in his abdomen grew painful. He would move from fatigue to distress to an unquenchable anger I had never seen before. Eventually the doctor would arrive with a huge hypodermic needle which he would insert into my father’s stomach to suck away the foul stuff that had collected there. Then my father would feel better for a few days until the process repeated. He was six feet tall, but I watched his weight sink steadily until he weighed less than 100 pounds.
One day a small statue of St. Jude, the Patron of Lost Causes, appeared on my mother’s bureau. It was a cheap plaster figurine with an indistinct face and a garish green robe.
“Pray for a miracle,” my mother told me.
I nodded but told myself that she was making no sense. I knew what the doctor had said: “He’ll be fine.” So, I didn’t pray. I did my homework, I attended junior high dances, and I played ball with my buddies. The only real change in my routine was that now my dad wasn’t at work. Each day, instead of my waiting for him to return home, he waited for me. When I arrived from school I’d stop by his bedroom and ask him how he was feeling.
“Okay,” he’d say with whatever enthusiasm he could muster.
My father had spent the last day before his diagnostic surgery, the weekend before his last birthday and Thanksgiving, finishing a fence around our brand-new tract home in Anaheim. The fence was seven feet tall with tongue-andgroove slats held by sturdy redwood four-by-four posts sunk into concrete. I wonder now if my father felt the fence would defend us from the death he already sensed was growing inside him. I know he was trying to protect both of us when he looked at me weeks later with his thin face and said he was fine, even though it took an effort for him to stand. His words worked. I continued to see what he wanted me to see: the leader of my Cub Scout troop, the man who took me fishing for bass on our family’s leaky little boat, and the boss who ordered truck drivers and forklift operators around the Kraft Foods shipping dock in Buena Park.
I finally understood how serious things were when distant relatives, my father’s aunt and uncle, arrived suddenly one Sunday from San Diego. My father was back in the hospital–a minor setback, I’d been told, but in fact he would never return home. I was at the house alone when Aunt Hester and Uncle Ralph arrived.
“He’s doing okay. The doctor said he’d be fine,” I promised. “They’re treating it with drugs.” They didn’t react to the good news. They just looked at each other and refused to meet my eyes. They knew what I did not, and their silence told me what my father, my mother and the doctor had hidden. My father had less than a week left.
There was a final awkward conversation with my dad alone in the hospital room. His voice was weak and raspy, and he couldn’t raise his head from the pillow. He seemed to know he had to say something to me, but he didn’t know what.
“I might not be coming home,” he said. “Be good and take care of your mom.” That was all. My memories of the funeral are of sweet-smelling flowers and my mother’s tears. A week later, a well-meaning priest came to our house to see how we were doing. He sat in my dad’s easy chair wearing a cassock and a Roman collar and sipped coffee from our best china.
“You know that your father became a Catholic on his last day,” he said. “Now he is with Our Lord. There’s no question about that. He is a very lucky man. I would change places with him in a second. You should be happy for him.”
I tried to be happy for my dad, to think he was lucky, but I couldn’t take denial that far. What I knew was that he was suddenly gone, and my life would never be the same. Overnight I had become a kid who was different, who had only one parent, whose family wasn’t what it was supposed to be.
Before my father’s passing, like most kids, I seldom thought about death, but when I did, my ideas came mostly from movies where things always seemed sad but beautiful, where everyone was prepared for the inevitable. In East of Eden, Raymond Massey lay on his deathbed and reconciled himself with his wayward son James Dean. They were both redeemed. In Pride of the Yankees, Gary Cooper played a Lou Gehrig who bravely stared down death and called himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
These portrayals didn’t fit with what had happened to me. For my dad and me, there was no scripted scene when we both said just the right thing to ease our pain. There was no moment of transcendent understanding to replace the future we wouldn’t have. I would never see his pride in what I became, and I would never bring him his grandchildren. I was angry for a long time. But as decades passed, there were other deaths: my mother who succumbed at 53 to an aneurysm that finished her in two hours, my mother- and father-in-law who both died in ICUs after years of decline and weeks of suffering, my aunt who floated for years in a demented fog and died in her sleep, and my 21-year-old nephew whose undiagnosed depression ended him with a newly purchased pistol.
As an adolescent, I bore these losses with a sure faith in God, and later, as an adult, with a surer sense of what Camus called “the benign indifference of the universe.” With faith and without it, I was never any more prepared for death than when my father died. No one, I’ve decided, is ever ready for the end. Death is always a surprise, a shock, a roaring thunderclap you can anticipate but never be ready for.
Maybe the doctor was right. Cultivating denial may be best when facing the worst. But I try to avoid it. What I experience now is more like denial’s opposite, a sense that death always hangs nearby. It is a presence I ponder every day. When I say good-bye to my wife each morning, when I see my daughter off at the airport, when my son leaves on a transcontinental cycling adventure, in the back of my mind a stubborn spider clings to a dark web. Something may intervene before we meet again. Some catastrophe or contagion may wipe them from my life. But I would never banish this grim imagining. It is vital to my appreciation of life itself.