“What a gift to have this time with your father.”

I manage not to spit out a mouthful of coffee. The few seconds it takes to swallow are enough to regain my composure. My father sits in his beige leather chair with a blanket draped over his legs. Gail, his longtime partner, leans close. His body is frail as his lungs succumb to disease, but his eyes glimmer. He still solves the New York Times Sunday puzzle every week, expounds upon myriad subjects, and cracks jokes that make me laugh because we share a childish sense of humor.

This is our kickoff meeting with the hospice team that will guide us through the dying process. The question burning in my mind is how long? though I would never ask it, shame bitter on my tongue.

“I’d like to know how I’m going to die.” My father looks at me. I blink away tears and nod. I understand.

“Are you sure?” The hospice counselor asks.

“Yes.”

* * *

“If one more person tells me how much I’ll cherish this time with Dad, I’m going to shove a suppository down their throat.” My words are muffled behind ragged sobs. For a month I’ve been living five miles from my father’s house, in my twenty-five-foot Airstream trailer named Alice. “I hope karma is based on actions, because if it’s based on thoughts, I’m screwed.”

I’m parked outside Clyde Coffee. It’s a bleak day in early November, the icy slush on the pavement the same gray as the sky. Winter in Missoula. I lean back in the warm leather seat as my sister assures me karma is definitely based on actions.

As I navigate my indeterminate situation, I try to make sense of the confusing thoughts bombarding my brain. I expected the sadness, maybe even the self-pity, but my anger blindsided me—I thought I’d buried it long ago.

I cannot explain why I feel obligated to be here. My father would not do the same for me. As a kid, my world revolved around him. For years I was his right-hand girl at the pig operation; we spent hours together, working, laughing, forming a bond I thought was forever. I was his Care Bear. When I was fifteen, my stepmother discovered that empty vodka bottle, and my father sat me down in their ugly emerald-green chairs, on matching green carpet, surrounded by his vinyl record collection, and told me it was best if I lived full time at my mom’s. How casually he severed our bond. From that day, I understood I could not count on him.

I’ve made a conscious effort to not become him.

We eventually rebuilt a relationship, but he was never again a constant in my life, until the past two years, when I became his security blanket, and he became my responsibility.

Perhaps my anger comes from the lopsided expectations he has of me, and that I have of myself. Or perhaps it comes from the uneasy knowledge, sitting at the periphery of my consciousness, that I am here more out of a sense of duty than out of love.

The truth is my life will not change when my father is no longer in it.

* * *

I’ve spent the last year wondering when he would tell me he needed me. Because I’d promised.

It was October 4—suitcase from France half unpacked in the closet, animals just home from boarding, laundry hanging in the living room—when I received the text from Gail: “Your dad wants you to come.”

I packed Alice, shoving clothing, shoes, sports equipment, electronics, and animal necessities in any open space. On October 5, I loaded two smelly dogs and a flailing cat into the truck, hitched up, and headed north from my home in Colorado.

* * *

It’s a Sunday in early December. I’m adjusting the seat of spin bike #7 when my watch buzzes and flashes. Although I can barely read the tiny screen without my glasses, I see it’s Gail calling. I rush to my locker, bike shoes clacking, and grab my phone.

“What’s wrong?”

She struggles to speak.

I sink onto a bench, my vision blurring, and motion to the instructor to go on without me.

“Your dad just told me…” Gail’s voice shakes. “He thinks it’s time for him to go.”

The breath I’ve been holding whooshes out of me like I’ve been punched.

“I’m coming over. Hang in there.”

My father has a solid care team: Gail, me, hospice. My role is to be the calm, practical one, to make things happen. As I drive the ten minutes to his house, hands white on the steering wheel, all I can think is, What the hell do I do now?

I tiptoe down the hall to his bedroom. My father’s eyes are closed. Gail is lying beside him, propped on her elbow, stroking his hair. He’s tiny beneath the fluffy comforter. He reminds me of a wounded animal. As I watch his frail chest barely rising, I realize how scared he must be.

I kneel by the bed and cradle his cold hand in mine. “Hey, Pops.”

His eyes flutter open, and he smiles weakly. “Hi, Dear.”

“Gail tells me you feel like you’re ready to be done with this.”

“I’m so tired,” he says.

The three of us sit there quietly. What is there, really, to say? I had wondered if—when—continuing the fight to live would seem pointless to him. The constant struggle to simply exist. The indignities of a body failing.

Medical aid in dying as they call it, is legal in Montana, but hospice explained there are no doctors willing to provide it. It makes me indignant, but I do not blame the doctors, given the political climate, the potential backlash. We know from the hospice counselor that, without intervention, my father will slowly drown as his lungs fill with fluid.

There is another way. Leaning against the wall in his bedroom, my arms folded tightly against my chest, I outline the plan. His body can no longer function without supplemental oxygen. If he chooses to remove his oxygen, I could legally give him enough morphine and sedative to keep him from suffering as his brain conducts its final performance: the orderly shutdown of his organs.

I watch my father’s face as he listens. He cannot understand how monstrous I feel, detailing how he can end his life. But if this is what he wants, I will make it happen.

When I’m alone with him, I kiss his cheek and tell him two things:

“You cannot make this decision today.”

“But if you make this decision, I will be with you every step of the way.”

Can any of us say what we will do when we are staring at death? I don’t think so. Our will to live is powerful. Death is final, and we face it alone.

I pass no judgment on my father, that he could not say those words, make that choice.

* * *

The dominos began to fall that day.

I wonder if I would have said something different to him if I’d known that was his last opportunity to make a choice. That his brain would become too muddled with morphine.

In the months leading up to that moment in my father’s bedroom, he and I discussed all his affairs. I knew exactly what he wanted me to do after he died. I decoded his scribbled page of illegible passwords, put my face ID on his phone. Why did I never ask him how he wanted to die? We could have had a secret code. I could have asked, he could have answered, and I would have known.

* * *

I run my fingers over the remaining vials, miniature glass soldiers lined up on the kitchen island. Eight. I press my palms to my forehead, trying to breathe, willing this to be over. Death rattle. It’s a term I won’t learn until after my father is reduced to four pounds of ashes. Tears and snot gather at the tip of my chin, then drip onto my pajamas. I thought I was prepared, but it turns out I trained for the one hundred-meter sprint when, in fact, I’m running the marathon. Indifferent white numbers on my iPhone tick off the seconds. Every fifteen minutes, hands shaking, I insert a syringe of the sedative into his nostril and press the plunger.

So many moments during these past three weeks I wished he would have ended it on his terms. I wonder if, with his silence, he was hoping I would make the decision for him. I didn’t think I had the right. Maybe I had the responsibility.

These musings are useless now.

He trusted me to have the strength to do this, but neither of us had any idea what he was asking of me. No matter that my brother—his son, a doctor—assures me I’m doing the kindest thing, that this is the only way, to end his suffering. No matter that my brain understands he is not alive in any other sense then that his heart is still beating. This is agony.

Every fifteen minutes I touch his cheek, look into his eyes, half open, unfocused—wondering if he sees me—and whisper, “I’m doing the best I can, Dad. I need you to know that. I love you.” Wondering if he hears me.

The silence is jarring, as if the universe pressed pause. My father’s expression is peaceful. His eyes closed. I collapse into my chair, grasp his hand, and look at Gail. The exhaustion on her tear-streaked face mirrors my own.

The hospice nurse opens the front door.

“Thank you,” I whisper. My father is past hearing, but this space and time feel sacred.

The nurse touches my shoulder and steps to the side of my father’s hospital bed, the hospital bed that sat quietly in this living room for weeks—austere next to the worn and duct-taped white leather couch—waiting to be needed. He checks my father’s vitals, and nods.

I inhale. “Ready?”

“Ready.” Gail says.

We let go of my father’s hands and intertwine ours, my right, her left. With our free hands we reach up and gently remove his oxygen tube.
We sit there—for how long I cannot say—hollowed out, waiting for the final deep sigh.

* * *

My father’s heart is strong, it fights to keep his systems going even without oxygen. It’s absurdly morbid, all of us staring at his chest, wondering if it will rise again. Each time we think he’s taken his last breath, we lean in and wait: five seconds, ten seconds, and then he surprises us with a deep inhale. I picture this as his final Dad joke.

At last, his chest stills.

* * *

I struggled to put these words to paper, in part because I was dealing with the aftermath of my father’s death. But perhaps in larger part because I knew they would reveal my inner thoughts, and the unflattering self-portrait I hid so well all those months.

It’s complicated.

I’m not one to get caught up in analyzing feelings, in questioning motives, in exploring deeper meaning, in digging up the past. Regret is a useless emotion. I’m a realist with a strong optimistic streak.

People remember me for my smile.
For the three months before my father took his last breath, I wore that smile like armor: I held his hand; paid the delinquent cable bill he insisted we take off autopay; kissed his cheek; paid his credit card bill online after patiently suffering through lengthy and detailed instructions from him (“don’t forget to hit , and then…”); sat with him in silence; bought anything and everything I
thought would bring him comfort; reassured him I would make sure Gail was okay; paid his taxes; wheeled him back and forth to the toilet; gave him morphine; found a roofer; lifted him onto the toilet when his legs no longer functioned; ran more errands; calmed him when the confusion began; held him as he peed on me; stroked his hair; stroked his hand; found help when Gail and I could no longer manage; changed his diaper (not well); kissed his cheek; lifted him off the floor when he forgot his legs didn’t work; gave him more morphine; held his hand; whispered countless times: “Dad, you have to trust me.”

Every day for those three months, I cried. Every night I sat in Alice, the cat on my lap, one hand resting on soft dog fur, and drank. But every morning I dragged myself out of bed, to CrossFit, spin class, a run with the dogs—anything to hold on to a shred of sanity—then packed away my messy emotions, took a deep breath and walked through his front door, bringing with me only kindness, patience, and a beaming smile.

It’s complicated.

* * *

Those final three weeks, I was forced to make impossible decisions. Too many times I had to hold my father’s hand and explain to him this was the only way. His morphine haze must have been disorienting, but I hold on desperately to the hope he knew he was never alone. If my presence gave him anything, please let it be that.

* * *

When there was no longer anything urgent for me to do, I was stuck staring at an unrecognizable reflection in the mirror. I sat on the cold hospital bed, stripped bare. My father’s wheelchair was folded in the corner. The familiar hum of his oxygen machine was gone.

There are days when I grieve for my father, when I miss the reality of him, when I think, I should call Dad, before I remember I can’t. I grieve because my most vivid memories of him are memories of pain and confusion. I grieve because he was not given an easy death. I grieve for all of us who watched him suffer, who suffered in our own way.

If I’m honest, I grieve for what I lost: whatever innocence I had left, or perhaps a comfortable ignorance. Whatever it was, my inner chandelier is missing a lightbulb. I watched my strong, intelligent father become bedridden and disoriented. It was my job to make the decisions he could no longer make, decisions I hadn’t considered and wasn’t prepared for.

But I gained something too. Perhaps cherish is the wrong word, but I am grateful for those three months. Grateful I was there to pick him up, to reassure and calm him, to hold his hand.

As I sat in silence on that hospital bed, I understood I never stopped being his Care Bear. I hope somewhere in his heart he knew that.

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