Dad Dead 9 Months
Reflections on Mortality
It’s been almost nine months since my father died. March 2nd will commemorate that reality. It’s still shocking. I still see his stiff blue flesh—cold to the touch—and his vacant marble eyes after he “left the building,” after he “fled his meat-suit.” I still see the scars from his bruises, purple-blue, looking like badly-done stick-n-poke tattoos all over his torso and thin, flabby arms.
He suffered the final days, not so much physically—though, yes, that to a degree—but emotionally. He had to say so many exhausting goodbyes. Not to me and my mother: He’d said all the I love you’s and thank you’s and then some. But to my older half-sister and my brother-in-law who he’d seen less frequently. I saw Dad cry more in those last two weeks than ever before in his life. Emotions were always hard for my father. They did not come naturally. It was his DNA and his generation: Stoicism; avoidance; glancing away; distraction; superficial conversation. (His favorite shields.)
But he could not avoid the slippery, ineffable axiom of his impending death. Camus reminded us that it comes for us all and we never know when or how—we’re all condemned to die, sentenced by existence—but my father knew it was coming, and soon.
There was so much uncertainty back then. It was late May, gorgeous out in Santa Barbara. Dad was lucky enough to be sick for 23 months at home—minus the multiple hospital visits, including one for three weeks—and to ultimately die at home, in his own bed, with his loving wife of 47 years, and his only son. I was 40 years old. Engaged to be married. Dad got to know my wife, thank God. They got along well. A while before Dad died my wife gifted him a Frameo, a digital frame which you add photos to from your phone; the images change over and over. His final weeks Dad watched that thing obsessively, sometimes well into the night, tears in his blue eyes.
I was staying down with Mom and Dad at their new house in Santa Barbara up in the hills overlooking the town and the Pacific for a while, on and off, starting in July, 2021, after I left Manhattan not knowing I’d never be returning. That small, narrow shoebox apartment. My folks had moved from Ojai—my hometown—an hour north to Santa Barbara mid-Covid, in the nefarious summer of 2020. Around the time I’d fled East Harlem for the Upper East Side, thanking the Lord I’d survived the anarchy, chaos and violence in Harlem during the Pandemic.
I’d never understood my father. He’d never understood me. His father—my grandpa—had been a wealthy CEO and stock-investor throughout the 1960s and 70s, well into the 80s. He’d expected my father and his brother to be high achievers, get PhDs, make boatloads of money.
Instead, my father had trekked his own road, becoming a community college chemistry and math teacher and then switching careers to computer engineering. He’d always been, in my younger eyes, a man of safety, a man who took the conventional, boring path, who gave in to society’s demands to be just another one of “them.” My angry, explosive rebellion in high school was something Dad did not comprehend, or, it seemed, even grapple with. Instead he chose denial. Avoidance. Rejection. Abdication.
I turned to my mother and she failed me in a different way: Having been a survivor of family abuse and trauma herself, she seemed to offer me a strange mixed gift of profound love, holy creativity, denial, narcissism, spoiling love, coddling, strictness, and controlling rage.
I fell, then, into the rabbit-hole of punk rock, drugs, booze, sex, fast cars, internal suffering and external lies. I built a fortress around myself, pretending to be tough, when I knew deep down inside I was soft, sensitive, weak, warm, and incredibly desperate and needy for love and attention.
I realize now that my father was not so safe. He rejected his father’s money, and his desire for my father to get a PhD and to do things his own way. Grandpa did not approve of my mother, who’d spent two years in the psych ward in her late teens before they married in their twenties, and who was not highly educated and who’d had a child in 1969, at the tender, precarious age of 19. Yet this was my father’s choice. He forged ahead, because that’s who he was. He chose the career he wanted, married the woman he wanted to marry, and lived his life as he saw fit.
In this regard our lives were more similar than I’d once assumed.
But his life was never my life.
*
I remember telling my father—about a week before he died—Thank you for letting me take care of you. I cried as the words edged out of my tight, clamped lips. I trembled. Dad cried, too, as did my mom. It took me ten minutes to slowly, between sobs, get the words out. The words meant: I love you. I always have. I’m sorry for all the trouble I caused. I’m sorry we lost our way together, but we found our paths back to this moment. Dad intrinsically understood this, I think. It was a moment I’ll never forget, long as I live.
Those 23 months were sacred and hard and belligerent, and full of misery and great, profound joy. There was blood and vomit and fear and anger and accusations and alcohol (not me) and yelling. There were many prescription pickups, many ER visits, many long days of hoping against hope that something, somehow, would change. And things did change; up and down, up and down. Pay the ticket, take the ride. The ticket is being born, being alive in this world. Dad lived a wonderous, imperfect life for 77 years. He was my father, for better and worse, 37 years my senior. When I was born he was 37. I am 41 now, four years older than that.
*
I remember when his breathing slowed that final day. His flesh grew colder and bluer. And I remember Mom calling down to me—I was downstairs, sitting outside at my little desk above the front yard, writing—saying my name gently as the sun shone bright and the wind tinkled the wind-chimes. It was very quiet in the neighborhood, up in the Riviera, with that gorgeous, resplendent view of the Pacific. It was 4:00pm on the nose.
I swallowed and my heart thudded against my chest. My gut tightened. My throat constricted. I felt my palms go sweaty and warm. I got up and walked through the downstairs bedroom and slowly up the stairs. I took my time, placing one foot at a time on each step. Each step creaked under my nervous, uncertain weight. Mom looked shaken, shocked, ghostly. Pale. She said, I think he’s gone. I followed her—without a word—down the hallway, the same hallway I’d walked down a thousand times. Ten thousand times, all over the past 23 months.
Dad was there, on the bed, as before. His skin looked wrinkled and stiff and blue and cold. I touched his arm; freezing. Looking at him I knew: His face was turned slightly away, eyes vacant, mouth awkwardly ajar, as if frozen in cruel time. Just to be certain I felt his wrist and neck.
“He’s dead,” I said.
I stepped around the bed to my mom and she collapsed into me. Her hazel eyes, before she hugged me, were so full of terror and spiritual exhaustion and shock that I could barely handle it. We held each other tightly and cried. Our sobbing sounded loud against the late afternoon quiet. Finally, both stepping back, gazing at Dad’s corpse, Mom left the room. I walked over to Dad. I lifted his eyelids; there was a mysterious nothing in his marble eyes, like a spatial Black Hole. Negative space. Blackness. Zilch. Complete negation of light and life.
Mom came back five minutes later with a glass of beer. She sat on her usual green chair and sipped. I stood, across the room, in the frame of the open bedroom side door. The sun shone down. The wind again tinkled the silver hollow chimes; the soft, lugubrious noise spilled out across the silence like slow, warm sound waves. An LSD-like, surreal surge of warmth pulsed through my body: Dad was actually gone; dead.
Finally, I called Hospice. Told them what happened. My throat was tight; a lump sat there, refusing to budge. My father was dead.
An hour later the Hospice lady came, a nice older woman with white short hair. She made the requisite calls and by 8pm the morgue people showed up. Mom went into the other room. I stayed. They wrapped Dad’s body in a white sheet and put him in a bag and slowly, carefully carried him down the long, steep stone stairs along the side of the house. It was dark and silent out. The stars stood bright against the dark dome of night sky. It reminded me of those cold, clear winter nights growing up in Ojai. I remembered sitting outside as a kid, in the late 90s, Dad and I together, at the house on La Luna, my father and I gazing upwards into the darkness, Dad explaining to me what stars and planets actually were, how many lightyears away they were, and the likelihood of other life in our or other galaxies.
Before they’d come and with the Hospice lady in the kitchen, alone, Mom and I’d stared at Dad, knowing it would be the last time we ever saw him. “Him” being his physical being, his objective human essence. I placed my palm on his bald head and said, I love you, Dad. Thank you for everything. Goodbye. My mom said, Oh, Larry, oh sweetheart, and collapsed onto him briefly, her cheek touching his cheek.
He was gone.