Going Down Slow
I Should Have Said Goodbye
We don’t get back to the hospital until late afternoon, what with stopping for food and Rob having to get some things from his house. When we arrive, Dad is awake. He doesn’t greet us. In just the few hours we’d been gone, he looks even more exhausted, maybe preoccupied with pain. We all take our places: Rob on the windowsill, Annie in the chair at the foot of the bed, Mom on the edge of the recliner seat at Dad’s right, and me sitting in a chair at her other side.
Mom says, “The hospice was a real nice place, honey. Clean.”
“Hmph.” Dad’s somber eyes fix on her.
She clutches her purse on her lap and sits straightbacked. “I can stay there with you at night and even get food sent in. And the pictures on the walls were done by the children—isn’t that nice? What do you think, honey? Are you ready to go there?”
“Yes.” A whisper.
I draw a deep breath, trying to be quiet about it and see Anna’s shoulders drop in relief.
But Mom has lowered her gaze from Dad’s face. Sorrow pulls at her mouth. She knows.
Rob says, “I’ll call the hospice and get the arrangements started.”
While he is on his cell phone, Anna rises from her chair. “I have to go now. I’d like to make Houston before dark. Is there anything you need, Dad, before I go?”
He shakes his head, studies the foot of the bed.
“Mom?”
“No, honey. I guess you have to go. You give my grandson Taylor a little squeeze. When will you be able to come back?”
“I’m not sure, but soon. Houston’s just a few hours away.” She walks past me to come close to Dad. She rests a hand on his shoulder and leans in to peck his temple. As she circles back, she says to Rob, “You’ll call me if anything changes.”
From the door, Anna calls, “Bye, Dad.” He doesn’t say anything, but lasers her with his dark, sunken eyes. Her own eyes, so like his, fill with tears, and she pivots to leave.
“I’ll walk you to the elevator,” I say, leaping up at the sight of her grief, and join her in the hospital corridor.
She wipes tears from her cheeks with her fingertips and straightens her shoulders. A small laugh. “I’m all right now.”
I try to cheer her. “I liked the hospice. I think Dad will be happy there. Don’t you?”
Anna, who knows about these things, flicks me a quick glance and says, “Well, he’ll be on morphine. . . I don’t know how aware he’ll be.”
“Oh.” I revise my image of Dad in hospice. Okay, so no wheelchair in the gardens. But I picture him lying comfortable in his bed, listening to that country music he likes and watching the trees through the window. Then a loose fact, like an errant rolling B-B, clicks into a groove. “Morphine is gonna make Dad. . . It’ll hurry up his. . .”
“Yeah.” We’re at the elevator and she presses the button.
“Maybe I’d better make arrangements at work to fly back in a week.”
“Whatever you think is best. Whatever you can work out. There’s just no telling.”
The elevator door opens. Anna and I hug, encircling each other’s shoulders tight, then she steps back. Steel doors snick shut across her smudged face.
I am bereft at Anna’s leaving. I know it’s a sadness weighted by Dad’s dying, but still. I drift, weightless, through the corridor, my body a balloon barely tethered to this place of sizzling fluorescent light sparking off chrome and pooling in glares of white enamel. I stop and look at the square floor tile in front of my feet until the hall shifts back to normal. Then I can continue.
When I enter his room, Dad glances at me, then back to Mom. She’s still sitting on the edge of the recliner, holding some papers over her open purse. Some sheets have cascaded out of her grip. She’s reading and it sounds like a letter from Dad’s sister, recounting news and sending hopeful wishes. Rob is busy with his computer, earbuds in place.
I take Anna’s seat at the foot of the bed. The TV hums and murmurs over my head. I watch Mom and Dad, the way they are together. I remember a picture of them from early in their marriage. They’re sitting on a bench, and from the angle of the shot–about two feet off the ground–I know Dad must have handed me the Brownie camera and told me where to stand. In the photo, Mom is wearing a white dress with big black polka dots and a wide black patent leather belt. Dad’s in front-pleated slacks and a v-neck sweater over a shirt. I remember it was their honeymoon. They both look so smug.
“Tess?” Rob’s low voice floats into the memory, brings me forward to now. “It’s about time.”
“Yeah. I guess we’d better go.” I’m due to catch a red-eye in four hours to go back to Wisconsin. Rob will take me to his house, where I’ll have a quick supper and visit with his wife, then off to the airport.
“You leaving so soon?” Mom asks.
“Yeah, I wish I didn’t have to.”
Dad has leaned his head back. He has followed my exchange with Mom and now says, “Thank you. For coming.”
“Oh, of course, Dad.”
It’s time to say goodbye. I should touch him.
I make my legs move, awkward, and circle round Mom to be by Dad. I sit on the side of the high bed. I have never, since I was a small child, held his hand, and when I slide my hand under his, he becomes, shockingly, a man, not just my Dad, but a person who has an entire life I know so little about. I lace our fingers and squeeze. He squeezes back faintly. I’m staring at our hands. To look at his face would be an intimacy, and a grief, I cannot support, cannot bear, not now.
Then I unlock our fingers, slide off the bed and make a show of smoothing where I’d been sitting. Finally, I look at his face. He focuses on my eyes, like he’s waiting for something.
“I have to go back to Wisconsin, now.” I bend and kiss his cheek, stiff. “I guess you’ll go to the hospice in the morning.”
He blinks. “Mmmm.”
I walk back around Mom. I retrieve my purse from the chair. “Bye, Mom.” I know he is following my every move.
At the door, I circle-wave, feeling numb, empty. “See you, Dad,” I mutter, and turn abruptly. In the hospital corridor, I berate my cowardice. I should have said goodbye.
He died three days later, slipping in and out of a morphine-induced comatose state soon after admission to hospice. Mom and Rob were with him when he died. Anna arrived from Houston just afterward. When Rob called to tell me Dad had died, he assured me there was no way I could have flown down in time. There was no way anyone could know exactly when he would go.
I asked Rob if Dad said anything. Rob told me that Dad asked Mom, “Is it okay?” and she said, “It’s okay.” Those were his last words. Several hours later, his breathing slowed, and slowed some more, and then stopped.
Something happened, though, on the day Dad died. I was outside about dusk, and saw an owl fly over me to land on the edge of my roof. She swiveled her head to fix me with golden eyes, but when I stepped forward, she opened her wings and took flight. I lost sight of her in the gray twilight.
