Death

Facing the Inevitable

Dad and I circa 1986 (age 3)

***If you’d like to read all of my locked content, start a paid subscription for only $35/year. That’s just under $3/month.***

This personal story—as most of you all now know—has been retold by myself ad nauseum. But for those who haven’t heard it, a brief recap.

In early June, 2021 I left Manhattan, where I was living in a little shotgun 3^rd-floor walkup in Lenox Hill, to visit California.

I was born and raised in Southern California, Ojai, 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles. Ojai is a little 8,000 population rural town 12 miles east of Ventura off Highway 101, filled with fields of orange groves, rugged mountain trails, the Topa Topa Mountains, a lush, wide valley, a teeny-tiny downtown, hippies, surfer-biker bros, rich people, and ex/current/former Hollywood celebrities. (It’s also a cherished spot for Buddhist meditation. Krishnamurti once lived there.)

In June, 2021 I hadn’t been back to California in 18 long, harsh months. It was the Pandemic Period. When the lockdowns had hit, in mid-March, 2020, I’d been unfortunately living in what turned out to be the Wild West of upper East Harlem. I wrote a whole book about that; click HERE to read it.

Since 1991, when we moved to Ojai from Ventura when I was eight, my folks have lived in my hometown. The Thomas Fire in 2017 changed their desire to remain. They decided to leave. Santa Barbara—where my mom volunteered and had her friend group—made the most sense. So, in the middle of the pandemic, right as I was simultaneously breaking my lease in Harlem (I’d been chased twice, witnessed a rape in Marcus Garvey Park in midday, and had been told that two men broke into our building and held up a tenant at gunpoint one night while I slept upstairs), my folks were moving the one hour northwest of Ojai to the shimmering diamond that is glorious, gorgeous Santa Barbara. Sixty-nine and 74, they were going to enjoy their golden years, traveling, walking along the beach, walking the dogs, enjoying their spectacular view of the city and Highway 101 and the Pacific from up in the Santa Barbara Riviera, up above it all.

But, as is so often the case in Real Life: It didn’t go down that way.

*

Dad, I knew, had had a cough for a while. Since I hadn’t seen any family in 18 months, it was impossible for me to get a full picture of him. My folks and I had Zoomed every 2-3 weeks while I was in New York, but that hadn’t been enough for me to really know the extent of their conditions. I commented a couple times on my dad’s consistent, lingering cough. He waved it away, as he waved away everything he didn’t want to deal with. Zoom only showed me his head and shoulders.

But the moment I saw him at their new house—which was lovely—I knew something was wrong. He’d lost perhaps a good 15, even 20 pounds. His cough was nasty and wracking. In hidden, brief, quiet conversations Mom told me he’d had the cough for a whole year. I couldn’t believe it. He’d done a physical before the lockdowns, but since then nothing. (It was Covid, of course.)

When my mom and I finally convinced him to go, it was somehow both surprising and not surprising at all when we got the news: Cancer. Stage four. Melanoma. Skin cancer.

The story of the journey of his cancer and my mom and I as caretakers is my next book. (Already 100 pages deep into writing it.) It’s too long to relate here. Suffice to say: It’s been an intense journey. Here are the basics. I never went back to New York; my landlord, who I’d just resigned a one-year lease with, kindly let me off the hook. My friends cleared my apartment out and shipped all I owned (very little except for crates and crates of books) across the country to my parents’ house. For the first time in nearly twenty years I was living—temporarily—with my folks again.

The cancer had spread to his brain. He did successful brain surgery. But the main tumor—even though we never did discover where the “primary” actually started—was in his lungs. A series of MRIs and CT scans began. The immunotherapy worked on the cancer in his body.

By October I had a little studio apartment I found above a garage in the front of a house in a suburban area off Highway 192 at the foot of the Los Padres Mountains. It was ten minutes’ north of my folks. Dad started immunotherapy and soon, due to the toxicity of one of the drugs, he developed an extremely rare neuromuscular disease called Myasthenia Gravis, which slowly weakens the muscles of the body and eventually, if not fixed, can lead to death. His symptoms included: Droopy eyes and terrible eyesight (double-vision); bad/high/slurred speech to the point of having to write things down because we couldn’t understand him; the total inability to swallow (we had to have a peg-tube surgically inserted into his stomach for liquid food via a machine pump).

All of this was profoundly difficult on multiple levels, and for all three of us. (My father most of all, of course.) Between early July, 2021, and early February, 2022, things were chaotic. Caretaking became a fulltime job for my mom and I. Picking up meds. Groceries. Walking the dogs. Carrying anything heavy upstairs. Crushing meds and administering for dad. Helping him move, dress, communicate. Cleaning his bed. (There was diarrhea on and off, etc.) Driving Dad to doctors’ and oncology appointments. Taking him to the ER. Taking him to the hospital. To rehab. Visiting him in all these places, often multiple times per day.

It was beyond stressful. I lost weight, pounds and pounds. During my time in New York I’d discovered running and I was doing eight, nine, ten-mile runs multiple times per week now, to relieve the stress. I was lonely and sad and tired, having left my Dream City for a town I didn’t know and didn’t particularly want to live in, despite it’s natural beauty and prestige as one of California’s coastal crown jewels. I wanted comfort. Sex. Love. Freedom. I wanted my father to be healthy. I wanted things to be how they had been before the lockdowns in 2020. Everything had been dumped upside down and shaken violently. Nothing made sense. Things were backwards, unintelligible. My father—a man I’d always loved but never understood—was a pillar of my life, of my assumed privilege. He’d always just been there. Solid. Stoic. Stubborn. Like some ancient Grecian statue. Permanent.

And yet now that statue was showing cracks.

*

It’s a long story. Things were up and down for my father for a while. He got passed the Myasthenia Gravis. His swallowing never came back full bore, but it did come back partially. He could eat some foods, carefully, in small bits, slowly. His eyesight improved. His speech fully went back to normal. I felt so good about his condition that, in May, 2022, I took my first trip in what felt like forever up to the Bay Area, where I’d lived for a decade from 2008-2019, when I moved to New York.

He made it through the summer okay but at some point in later 2022 his condition began to waver once more. Since then it’s sort of been up and down; the vicissitudes of cancer and M.G. Days would go by where he was taking naps on and off all day, getting up only for little snatches of time to say hi to my mother, and then other days came where he was up and alert with relatively high energy and he was talking and they were listening to their audio book together and he’d even walk down the twisting stone stairs to the garage and use the rowing machine for five, six minutes. It just depended.

During all this time his granddaughter—my sister’s daughter—graduated from high school and started college. I fell in love and got engaged. I wrote a book. Read I don’t know how many books. Became their regular dog-walker. Starting writing on Substack. I turned 40. *(As a wild, raging blackout alcoholic in my teens and twenties most people—myself very much included—didn’t think I’d make it to 30.) In other words: Life changed. Evolved. Time moved, as it always does, incessantly, not caring what that means. Time is immortal, eternal, uninterested in our sappy emotional ideas. The clock ticks. We live. We die. It keeps ticking.

*

And this brings us to now. Early April, 2023. My fiancé and I live together in Lompoc, an hour north of Santa Barbara. Lately, the past couple of months, Dad has been…meh. Not great. Not terrible. Generally his energy has been low. He’s been sleeping much of the days. Yet other times he suddenly gets a wild, unexplained burst of energy and he’s up and working on his laptop. (Shockingly, he’s still been working at his job, as a computer engineer, remotely, on and off since his diagnosis. Work is what makes the man tick.) Days happen where, like before, he’ll row a little and he and my mom will chat and spend their day together, doing their own things and then things as a unit. Back and forth. Up and down.

Until a few days ago.

The past week or so he’d been looking less and less good. Sleeping a lot, holed up in his little room, with his large pot for vomiting which he’d had since the effects of the oral chemo had started hitting him. He’d started oral chemo a few months back. (He’d done 15 treatments of radiation for the lung tumor as well.) The last MRI had shown the brain tumor was holding the line; no new growth. We hadn’t done a new scan of the lung in a while.

His energy was fading. He started to look older. Myasthenia Gravis symptoms began showing up again, despite the fact that, worried about this very thing, the oncologist had stopped the chemo. (Which can also trigger it.) His eyes were droopy again. His voice was shifting to a newer, deeper tone. His weight was fine. He was getting plenty of liquid food intake.

But one day, while my mom was out giving a lecture for the museum she volunteers for, Dad fell down in the bathroom. He scraped his arm and hit his head, cutting it. He was lucky: It was minor. Then my mom got sick.

All the past 18 months we’d been careful: Covid shots, flu shots, washing our hands, keeping a distance if we felt sick. When I’d been around people I tried to not hug him. His immune system was very weak. We knew that.

I know my mom got sick because she got me sick. Nothing much, just some dumb, annoying cough with sneezing, light chills, and fatigue. We’d always been careful. But nothing had ever happened. My dad had been tested for Covid a dozen times or more over the past 18 months and he’d never had it. He never got sick. We never did, either.

But this time was different.

Whether the infection he got came from the scrapes from his fall or from whatever my mom had, the point is he got a viral infection. When his breathing became labored, and his oxygen dipped to 89-90, my mom worried. We’d gotten an oxygenator and she used it that night. It fell some more, sitting between 83-87. She kept an eye on him. We texted, both worried. In the morning, it was 78. She took him to the ER.

They triaged him right away and got him in a room. The past few days have been a blurry rush of chaos but the upshot is this: My father, 77, weak and frail, with terminal cancer and a body which has undergone radiation, chemo, 12 blood transfusions, brain surgery, immunotherapy, etc, has the parainfluenza virus, staff infection, aspiration pneumonia, sepsis, and a significantly grown malignant tumor in his lung which is profoundly fast-growing and aggressive.

The past five days have been, as I’m sure you can imagine, emotional and draining. I immediately drove down to Santa Barbara on Tuesday, April 4^th, grabbing only an extra pair of jeans, a fresh T-shirt, a pair of socks, and a book. Since then I’ve spent most of the past five days in and out of the hospital, staying with Dad, being with him. He looks beyond exhausted; very sick. They’re waiting to see if the plethora of heavy-duty antibiotics help. He’s still on oxygen assistance (6%, down from 15% a few days ago) and hasn’t yet been able to breathe safely on his own. We saw a scan of his lungs and it looks both beautiful and starkly disturbing; one might say ghastly. The white blobs and snatches of pneumonia amidst the blackness of his lungs look like bright filmy stars in a dark desert sky. It’s everywhere. And then there’s the large blob on the right lobe, the cancer.

The main goal at this moment is to see if he can get his breathing back to above 90 on his own. Simultaneously, the doctor and pulmonologist had worried slightly that it’s possible he may have endocarditis, affecting his heart. They’re doing blood cultures, which take 18 hours of waiting time, to see if that may be true. (As of 4/9/23 this looks very unlikely.) They also tested yesterday (4/8/23) for MRSA, and we’re waiting to hear back on that but this, too, seems unlikely. Best case scenario, though: He’s still got pneumonia and sepsis to deal with. And then, assuming he survives the infection (questionable): We’re left with the growing tumor.

My dad is tired, I can see that. Not just physically but spiritually. The fight isn’t exactly gone yet…but it’s not strong. The little blue flame is still there but barely. I of course don’t blame him. He’s been through countless insanities visited upon his body and his mind and his spirit and his soul the past 1.9 year(s). At a certain point I think a man holds his hands up and says, Enough. I’m done. I don’t think he’s quite there yet…but he’s close. I probably would be, too, if I were in his shoes.

Today (4/7/23) my mom and I left for the hospital around 8am. He looked a little better, lighter, more energetic. We chatted with the pulmonologist and the doctor (“hospitalist”). Both seemed generally upbeat but also typically vague. We sat at the foot of Dad’s bed. I sort of felt like I’d run out of things to say. There’s only so much idle chatter I can endure, being who I am, and now, I supposed, wasn’t the time for “going deep.” You may read that and think, No, now is exactly the time to go deep! Speak now before it’s too late. But the deeper truth is: I think I’ve said everything I need to say to my father. Not all of it has been said literally; much of it has been said with my actions: Leaving New York; becoming his caretaker; holding his hand through all of this the past 18 months. I’ve been here. That is what I had to say. That I love him. That I am here with him. That he’s not alone. He has a son.

My mom was at the hospital all day. I left around 12:45pm to walk their dogs. I drove the backway, as I call it, taking Los Olivos from the hospital past State Street and along the Mission and onto Alameda Padre Serra, the narrow, snaking road above the city with little spots showcasing breathtaking views. For the past 18 months I’d been driving this road, back and forth between my folks’ and my apartment in town before moving in with Britney. APS felt familiar and familial, warm and safe, tranquil, like Highway 101 which I’d been driving all my life like some asphalt umbilical cord tying me back to myself. I often listened to music or podcasts on this drive but this time I just rolled the windows down and was silent.

I walked the dogs—a German Shepard/Husky mix and a yellow Lab—until they were both panting and then tried to rest for a while. My fiancé called and we talked for a little. Then I slept. Mom texted and wanted to come home so I showered, dressed and got back into the car. I walked back into my dad’s room at the hospital and asked him how he felt. He said ok. Mom was exhausted. We gathered her things. I gently clutched my father’s mottled, bruised arm and told him I loved him, looking him in the eye. He said he loved me, too.

We left. The drive was quiet. I took us back the same way, a la APS. At home, we chatted for a while in the little room by the kitchen, sunlight glaring through the windows at us. Then I said I was going to write. I took my laptop up the stone steps to the upper backyard and placed it on the turquoise-framed glass table. I started writing this essay. I wrote for hours. When I was done it was dark. I could barely see the keyboard. A fat full moon was out. It was absolutely silent. Not even a car driving along Highway 101 a mile away.

Finished writing, I felt satiated. Full, like I’d eaten a great meal. I sat there for a while and then gathered my laptop and things and walked down the steps and into the house. Inside it was dark. My mother was crying. Lightly. Not trying to hide it but not announcing it, either.

I stepped across the kitchen and sat down in the chair across from her in almost total darkness. I saw only her outline. Moonlight beamed in partially. The door to the deck was wide open letting cool air in. It felt nice. The glittering multicolored lights of Santa Barbara shone down below.

For perhaps an hour we cried together in the darkness. We talked about how, though my dad had not been a good father, he had been and still was a very good man. Flawed as he was, emotionless as he could sometimes be, incredibly walled-off, protected and stoic as the man presented, he nonetheless had always been there for me. Maybe not in the ways I’d hoped, certainly…but there. That meant everything. We discussed the mammoth pillar my dad had been in the family, the rock, always dependable, always steady, always sure. A man of character. Laconic. Intensely practical. Intellectual. Mildly philosophical, but much more a man of science and math. (He’d always been our human calculator.)

We talked about the gaping hole he’d leave us with emotionally, especially for my mom. It’d be 50 years this October they’d been together. Since 1973. Dad had been 28, Mom 23. Wild. Both had emerged from their own survival stories of the 1960s. We talked about how hard this would be, the grief, the loss, his death, the sheer permanence of it. Eternity in death. My mom worried about herself after him: The loneliness, the loss of her best friend and lover, her partner, her man. Half a century. Mom intermittently started weeping, and I sat across from her in the dark, looking away, gazing down at the glittering city below, imagining my life with my father deleted. As if time itself had decreed that a character it had created was to suddenly be redacted. Snatched back by the jaws of the abyss. Nabokov said, in his memoir, Speak, Memory, “Life is but a brief crack of light between two abysses.” He was right, of course.

I cried, too. Less vociferously, more reserved, trying not to let the dam burst its sketchy walls. I knew if I started I wouldn’t be able to stop. I needed to get through tomorrow. Mom mentioned how some couples had big families and lots of support and were social; they were external, but that there were also couples who were loners, dyads; self-sufficient couples who were internal. My mom and dad were the latter. Of course. Our family is small and fractured, fragmented and splintered. Like myself, my folks had always been their own little isolated unit. And now one part of that unit was signing off.

It broke my heart, seeing my mom suffering. She’s always been there for him, helping him through. The past 18 months has been no different. It’s been one Hell of a fight. My dad has given everything he’s got. And we’ve been with him every step of the way. Now that fight is exhausted, very near the end. Dad is like a marlin who, finally, after two days of resistance, at last exhausts himself and lets go. And that’s what my mother and I are in the emotional business of doing right this moment: Letting my father go. Because we have to let him go. He has to let us go. We all have to let go of each other. This is life. This is what is required of us. Every single one of us.

*

My father and I have never been close, in many ways. Not in the conventional sense. As a boy, yes. But my alcoholic, angry teens tore through that love. For a long time we were strangers, speaking once or twice a year, superficially and briefly, seeing one another once only at  Christmas, the one holiday I came home for from whatever city I happened to be living in at the time.

Getting sober, in 2010, at age 27, changed that.

We didn’t get close right away. And really, in traditional-normative terms, we still aren’t “close.” It was a slow, slow, careful process. A text here. A ten minute phone call there. A longer-than-normal hug. A “I’m proud of you, Michael” there. Supporting each other from a distance. We were still characteristically awkward around each other, by turns silent and careful competing with angry and loud and clashing when suddenly arguing about politics or some deep intellectual discussion. (My father was once a college professor.)

In 2021, when he was diagnosed, we grew much closer. Again, not as much in words, though to some degree there was that, but in spirit, in non-verbal understanding and gratitude. He knew what I was giving up in leaving New York, caring for him, being here. And I knew he loved me, and I loved him, and being here was the right thing to do. I wanted to be here for him, hard as it was for me in other ways.

When I was a kid my dad and I used to play The Sock Game, which consisted of me (I might have been eight, nine years old) sitting on his stomach and him throwing a pair of balled up socks into the air above us. The goal was for me to attempt to catch the balled socks before he did. I never could. He always caught the socks before I managed to somehow. He was tall and strong and lean back then and had long, thick arms. As frustrated as I got as a kid, I always knew my father could catch the things above me before they crashed into me, catching me unawares. I trusted my father implicitly. He knew what he was doing, even if we were worlds apart.

And the truth is that we are both worlds apart and yet totally similar, as is often the case with fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. I have his keen, sharp intelligence, his professorial, lecture-y nature, but also his arrogance. I have his stubbornness, something for me to now be aware and wary of. I have his appreciation of solitude, his non-need for a ton of friends or a lot of people around me. People have always drained me, though I do have a small, close circle of intimate friends I can call at 3am anytime. We share our free-thinking skepticism and contrarianism, though his life has been cloaked in upper middle-class convention and mine in the living-on-the-edge unconventional artists’ life. In many ways we love and loathe the same things. We’re polar opposites to the point where we mirror each other almost exactly. We’re both a bag full of complex contradictions.

I’ve learned a Hell of a lot from my father over the decades. He’s never been an emotional or expressive man. Stoicism has always been his protocol. It’s his generation; it’s the way he grew up; it’s what his father modeled. For a long time I think I took my father’s existence and unconditional love for granted. He was simply always there, like water or mountains or the sea. Permanent. Solid as rock. He’s always been a thing I can agree or disagree with, bounce against or push back from. A tether from which the wild anarchy that is my nature can swing.

But here we are, aren’t we. We’re once again playing The Sock Game. But I don’t think my father has the strength anymore to catch the socks before I do. I think I’m catching the socks now. And that’s okay. This is the nature of existence; the reality of being human. This is how things work. Birth, life, death. My father is very much still with us as I write this all down (4-9-23, 11:01am), but that could change tonight, or tomorrow, or in 48 hours. Maybe he’ll survive this period and come home, but I doubt it. And if he does? What then? He’s got a tumor the size of Kansas in his lung, growing despite the treatments, despite the radiation.

It's okay, I tell myself. A Buddhist teacher in San Francisco I used to meditate with used to say, Right now it’s like this. Yes. Right now it is like this. Nothing can be done about that. We have to sit and wait and get tests and results and talk to the experts and see how it all unfolds.

Whatever happens, one thing is crystal clear to me: I love this man.

And I’m ready.