My stepmother and two half brothers, who had been caring for my father without respite over the course of his decline, were exhausted and depleted. It was agreed that, when he went, he ought not to be alone. It was decided, not easily and not without reservation, to let go of him, and to let him go. A heart attack would be painful and frightening. His caregivers had gently and regretfully begun to suggest that it might be time to stop treating this particular element among the complex of things that were killing him. But the norepinephrine drip that could magically restore my father to a close approximation of the man we remembered was likely to put him into cardiac arrest. The latest enemy was acute hypotension, which when untreated would drop him into the scary nether regions of the mmHg scale. A studied, even militant avoider of exercise all his life, he had been seriously overweight for most of the past forty years, diabetic for a decade. Until then, he’d been responsive, aware, irritable, funny, querulous, weak, confused, furious, loopy, but recognizably himself. My father had slipped into unconsciousness twelve hours earlier, about an hour after we stopped the intravenous adrenaline that had been keeping his blood pressure up. Now, if you were writing dialogue for Doctor Spock . . . My father and I had already done all the talking we were ever going to do.Ĭan’t help you there, said my father, a pediatrician, though long retired from practice. I wanted to believe that he’d heard me, heard that I loved him, that I forgave him, that I was thankful to him for having taught me to love so many of the things I loved most, “ Star Trek” among them, but it felt like throwing a wish and a penny into a dry fountain. No twitch of an eye or a cheek, no ghost of a tender or rueful smile.
I’d tried talking aloud to my father a few times in the hours since he’d lost consciousness, telling him all the things that, I’d read, you were supposed to tell a dying parent. Hey, Dad, I need a line, I said, breaking, if only in my head, the silence that reigned between us.
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