Entry from The Cancer Diaries #1

Telling Dad Goodbye and Thank You

*My father was sick with cancer for 23 months. My mom and I were his caretakers. Along the way I wrote what turned out to be 190,000 words-worth of journals. For context that’s about 750 pages. I am currently going through the collection of journals, all in one document now, unearthing what will be my memoir of Dad’s cancer told in the form of diary entries. (Possibly two volumes.) Below is one small section. I plan to post more of these over time. This particular entry section is from May 17, 2023. He died on June 2nd.

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The nurse told us patients with advanced cancer in the lungs usually go pretty quick. We were prepared for that. She took Dads vitals and listened with the stethoscope to his heart and lungs. “Very wet,” she said. Yeah. We knew that, too. The upshot is he gets Ativan and morphine. Not for pain, because he magically still doesn’t have any, but for his anxiety and general discomfort. (He feels a “pressure” in his chest, and struggles with ongoing wracking coughing.) Nurses will be coming a couple times a week. We signed a DNR and she made it clear that we now call Hospice, not 911. Right. No hospital. We know.

During all this, I took Romey, my folks’ almost-10-year-old German Shepard/Husky Mix, to the pet Urgent Care. About six weeks ago—when my father was still in Cottage Hospital with Pneumonia, Sepsis, Staph, Parainfluenza—I noticed some blood spurting out of Romey’s back left paw. I told my mom and she looked and didn’t see anything. But several times over the past month she’s left little thin drops of blood trails wherever she walks. Mom is beyond worried in general right now, due to my father, so she asked me to take Romey in.

Long story but the upshot is: It’s a growth on her paw. The vet thinks it might be cancerous but isn’t sure yet. They took a sample and sent it in for examination. We should know by early next week. She even mentioned the possibility of…get this…melanoma…the cancer my father has. How ironic would that be. It’s interesting, too, because Romey has been obsessed with my father ever since he was diagnosed in July, 2021. Constantly in his room, by his side, observing. Currently she lays literally in the center of the room or across the doorway of his room, as it keeping guard. It’s always as if she’s mimicking his state.

So hospice. Then Romey. Then home. I napped for a couple hours. I can’t seem to ever get enough sleep. No matter how many hours I pass out, I wake up tired. Every day I’m tired. The hours and days go by in a weird, effulgent blur. It feels like spring, 2020 again with that bizarre, syrupy time-slow feeling. Amber sludging slowly down a tree’s bark. Time, captured in thick mud.

I woke from the nap, groggy and confused. I came upstairs after throwing cold water on my face. Mom was nowhere to be seen. Dad was asleep. Odd. I made myself a cup of microwaved hot water. I chugged cold tap. I searched around the house. No mom. I sat outside on the deck with the glass-topped table and sipped hot water and looked at the sea and Highway 101 and the city down below, the high school and the green football field and the surrounding track, and I woke up slowly and thought, What a fucking thing this being alive phenomenon is.

My mom appeared. She was with the dogs. She came from the backyard. Not sure how I’d missed her. She was playing with them. We chatted briefly. Then we went into Dad’s room and visited for a while. We talked a little and looked at dad, as we do, and then mom got up to do something in the kitchen.

Dad said, “Michael,” in his groggy, coughy voice, and twisted his gold wedding ring off his finger. “This ring was given to me by your mother. I’ve worn it for 48 years. It was your mother’s grandmother’s ring. Do you want it? It would be for you to wear, as your wedding band, not for Britney. It’s pure gold.”

I felt shocked and sad and totally honored. I rose and walked to his side of the bed and took the ring. I tried it on. Too small for my ring finger. That was ok. It could be sized. Mom came in then and said she didn’t want me to take it unless I was going to wear it myself. She wanted to keep it in the family. Otherwise she’d take it. I said I wanted to think about it. I still feel conflicted. Should the son who’s getting married take it? Or the widow? Either way: He was giving up something major of himself. He’d been slowly doing that over the past 22 months, really. A little here, a little there.

I decided to call Britney and walk the dogs. I took them out around the neighborhood, as always. The “loop,” I call it, a little 25-minute down and back up the steep hill. Britney and I talked for 45 minutes or so, about her son’s winning baseball game hit, about my dad, Romey, about her staying with me down here this weekend, etc.

But all the while we were on the phone I felt anxious. Because I wanted to talk to my dad. I wanted to say something to him. I’d been wanting to say something to him for days. I just hadn’t been able to find the right moment. I wasn’t sure of the right words. And I didn’t know if I could say it without breaking down.

Back in the room Mom and I sat in our usual chairs four feet apart, facing Dad on his bed. His death bed, I keep wanting to say. So there, I said it. Anyway, Mom was chattering about something unimportant and I felt the emotion welling up and the anxiety rising and I knew it was coming, that I couldn’t stop it, and then Mom asked me where I walked the dogs and I said, barely holding on, Not far. She knew my tone was off and so she got silent. A space opened up and I was in this thing now so I let it happen.

“Dad,” I said. He looked at me. I felt my mom’s gaze on me from my left side. Dad was looking at me. The room was semi-dark. It was just before dark, a deep shade of gray out. “I just wanted to say…”

But I trailed off. I couldn’t finish. I stopped. My lips trembled. I tried to stop the river from overflowing but it came. I started crying. I tried to control it. But I couldn’t. Sniffling, the tears came. I held it together for a moment or two, and then…crash. I sighed, taking long, slow breaths. I faced the floor. I wanted, I needed to say this. But it was tough.

“I just wanted to say…”

But I trailed off again. More tears followed. Sighing once more. Letting the river roll and rumble through me. It made me think of the river rafting trip we took in 1994, when I was 12, down the Rogue River in Southern Oregon. Me, my parents and my best friend Ryan. I remembered going down one particularly hardcore rapid, with Ryan and his father and mine, and getting thrown off the raft during the middle of it, and Ryan’s dad did, too, and he tried to clutch my arm and missed me by inches and we both went down the rapids on our own. My dad remained safe in the raft. Ryan’s dad died of skin cancer in 2013, a decade ago. And now my own father was. We were all going down the rapids alone.

“I just wanted to say,” I tried one more time, and I sighed, long and low and heavy, “Thank you for letting me…”

But I cut off again. I took a break. Wiped my tears. Took some air. And finally did the deed.

“I just wanted to say, thank you for letting me take care of you.”

My mom broke down now. Dad was crying, I saw that. He wiped his eyes and then said, “I know I wasn’t the best father when you were young. I tried to be better than my own dad.”

That broke me. But I held steady. I added that the past two years we’d gotten closer than I’d ever imagined we could. “Amen,” he said.

Mom and I stayed up in the darkness talking for an hour after Dad passed out. We’d given him the morphine and Ativan. We talked about death, my mom’s pug who passed away shortly after they moved to this house in 2020, my maternal grandfather who died in 2015, the shocking truth that Dad would die before my mom, my uncle, and our two close family friends who were older and had always been much less healthy. But such is the game of life. No one knows how things turn out.

I walked through the kitchen onto the deck into the cool, wet fog. It reminded me of the Bay Area, or of Humboldt or Santa Cruz. The city was blanketed below, with red and yellow and green and blue lights dazzling the night. I had planned to exercise, but I needed to write. I felt that deep in my bones. I’m losing my sweet, sweet father. Nothing can be done. There’s nothing to fix or change. This is reality on reality’s terms. This is what I got sober for. To feel this.

He’s letting us go. Now it’s our turn.