Going Down Slow
Help the Mother
I look up from my book at the sound of Dad’s what, chuckle? Was he laughing? But his eyes are closed. His lids twitch. Maybe he’s dreaming again, but not agitated like before, when he was moaning out scraps of words, not making any sense.
I’m not going to say I am waiting for Dad to die, even though there have been times, in this overheated hospital room, that I sit with my hands twisted in my lap wishing I knew when. If I knew when, then I could plan…what? The last flight down here? The last of seeing, hearing, touching him alive? But his body is on a covert mission, the secret workings of death, and the ‘when’ of it is hidden from all of us. Even once the corner is turned, and a person stops trying to live and starts trying to die, it still takes time. A man turns his face to the wall, but the last breath is hours away.
Well. Enough of that.
I push off from the chair and stride to the door. I want to change my thoughts, walk around, maybe find a water fountain. But just as I pass through the doorway, a white-coated man pulls up short in front of me. I back up a step to study the sepia face of the doctor who has already started to speak.
“So sorry!” His eyes, brown and harried, widen as he smiles. “Yes, yes! Doctor Chang, Cardiology.” He touches his name tag on his white coat, then extends a bent arm, like an action figure.
I shake his hand, fighting the urge to bow. “I’m John Friedrich’s daughter.”
“You are eldest daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Ah. Good. You know we recommend no more treatment? You know we recommend hospice?” His sentences are blunt and hurtful, hampered by his lack of idiomatic English, but his forehead puckers in concern.
“Yes, my brother explained that to me.”
“You understand about hospice?”
“Yes.” A place to die.
“Then maybe you help the mother.”
I am confused. What is he asking?
“Help her to understand. About hospice.”
“Oh . . .yes. Yes, I will.” I make a little bow in spite of myself.
“Good.” With a parting nod, he hurries away.
“Help the mother,” Dr. Chang had urged, with the clear implication that the father is beyond help. Well, I know that. Dad had the triple-bypass surgery four months ago, but was afterward diagnosed with congestive heart failure and put on a fearsome regimen of medication. His lungs had been drained three times since then, which afforded him enormous but temporary relief. The doctors concluded that the procedure was simply delaying the end, not offering an opportunity for improved heart function. And now, despite the medication, his heart could no longer keep the rest of his body going.
When Dad realized that the doctors were adamant about discontinuing treatment and referring him to hospice, he asked Rob, who lived in San Antonio, to call us all in. Anna drove over from Houston yesterday and I flew down from Wisconsin this morning.
“Help the mother,” the sympathetic Chinese doctor had said. He had, of course, met and talked with Mom. He could not have failed to understand, even during a brief interaction, that she was far from acknowledging Dad’s imminent death. Anna told me that Mom questioned the doctors and nurses repeatedly about how to “get him better and back home.”
I wasn’t sure why Mom resisted Dad’s death so strongly. Yes, she’d relied on him as a life partner for almost fifty years. Yes, she’d married a man eight years younger than herself and had probably expected, perhaps even hoped, that she would be the first to go. Maybe none of the doctors had bluntly confronted her with the truth of his dying?
When I’d arrived earlier this morning, I took Mom down to the vending machines in the lobby just by the elevators. I was pushing coins in the slots when she said “Why can’t they just get him better?”
I punched a button, dug out a package of crackers from the machine’s pouch, and straightened up. We are the exact same height. She has gray eyes and thick, wavy, white hair. She wears red lipstick and no other make-up. She is eighty years old. Her skin is soft and clear.
“Well, why can’t they?” she demanded.
“Oh, Mom.” My gut tightened up and I pulled in my lips. “Daddy’s dying, Mom.”
She glanced away with a puzzled frown, then replied primly, on her dignity, “Oh, I just can’t believe that.”
