Visions
There's a vision that, while I wouldn't say it haunts me, keeps playing over and over in my head. When it comes, it takes all the blinking I can muster to hold back the tears. Sometimes, though, I let them come, and I cry silently as I watch TV or fall asleep and not so silently as I write these memories.But I think about my dad, yellow and swollen, looking completely different than the man I know and love. Ridden with cancer, surviving by machines coming from every part of his body. He fought so hard. But in the end, he couldn't walk or talk or even speak to his family and friends who were there to see him. The last thing he said to me, though, was that he loved me. They were breathy and difficult words to get out because of the pain he was in, but he opened his eyes, held my hand, and told me he loved me. And nothing, not even death, can take those words away. So I cry because I think of his pain and his love. And I cry because he was taken away from us without living out all his dreams with my mom. And I cry for her because I think about what she's feeling and her loneliness without the man she loved so much.
But the last day is what I re-live almost daily. He was so sedated because of the pain, and he had a ventilator to help him breath. But we, as a family, made the horribly hard decision to take him off the ventilator and let him die peacefully since that fate was coming anyways.
He labored there, breathing for 2 hours, as we cried around him, held his hand, and stroked his white hair. I saw a commercial in the airport of a nurse stroking an older man's white hair, and the silent tears came yet again. At my dad's bedside, I wondered multiple times as we waited if that specific breath would be his last, and part of me hoped it would, for his suffering's sake. But as his daughter, I hoped for a miracle - that he would do well off the breathing machines. But he declined, and I watched the machines ticking away, his oxygen decreasing, his blood pressure increasing, and heart rate slowing down. They had sedated him less so that maybe he could speak to us, and we tried so hard to have him hear us. We must have said "I love you" and "talk to us Mike" 1000 times in that short time period. We didn't know what else to do or say.
But at 5:12, January 19th, my mom and I holding his hands, the final breath did come. That time I hoped it wasn't real - that it wasn't his last, despite his suffering. I ended up holding my breath, in hopes that we could breath together again. But he didn't. He was gone. Just like that. We broke down, and my mom threw herself on him, crying out for him not to leave her. She said she couldn't live without him, and she begged him not to go. But he was already gone.
posted by Biff @ 12:07 AM
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