Life and Death

I’m sitting at my parents’ dining room table, listening to my father’s Cheyne-Stokes breathing from a bedroom down the hall. My mother is asleep next to him. The cat is doing laps, watching him and then watching her and then wandering over to watch me before she goes back to the bed to start over. And here she is again.

On January 23 he had surgery to remove cancer from his abdomen, a task the surgeons accomplished by removing everything that had cancer in it. One of them came out to talk to us, and when he said, “We had to remove his stomach,” my brain wouldn’t take it on; I spent several seconds wondering how they put it back in. Then I got it. An MRI showed new cancer on his liver not long after. We’ve had many doubts and questions, but here we are anyway. He’s had a series of strokes, and lost speech entirely over the weekend. Eight days ago he said good-bye to me, and I told him to slow down with that stuff and just get home so I could bring his granddaughter to him. But he was, in fact, saying good-bye, whether or not I was ready to notice.

Going back: The morning of the surgery, I drove in from Los Angeles and met my parents at a hotel near the hospital in Phoenix. He had to be there at 5:00, so I got to the hotel by 4:40 and settled into the lobby to wait for them. He showed up a minute later, getting coffee to take up to my mom, and then we all walked over to the hospital. January 23: He walked to the hospital.

The day before, he had walked the trail at Lynx Lake.

Now, having lost the ability to speak and with his eyes always closed, withdrawing, he still somehow declines to give in. He pushes at the blanket, gathers strength to rock his shoulders, shoves his feet over the side of the bed. The man is trying to stand up. We keep finding the toes of his right foot on the floor, in contact. I knew on Sunday that he wouldn’t make it through the night, and now it’s Tuesday morning. We expect wind and heavy snow, so we’ll see how long the hospice nurse can get here. He may die during the storm; he may outlast the thing, on raw stubbornness.

I have more things to say than I have the time or the patience to work through, at the moment, but I see in my father the opposite of what I see in the state of the world. The shamefully pusillanimous Paul Roleau says that he reluctantly concludes a frightened government was justified in treating peaceful protest from citizens as a wartime-equivalent threat, freezing bank accounts and dragging people to jail. Remember that Justin Trudeau responded to the Freedom Convoy by vanishing, withdrawing from Ottawa and speaking in Parliament on Zoom. A global leadership class is somehow distinguished by its tendency to prefer teleconferencing to the pain and danger of meeting human beings in person. And to gesture at a whole argument without taking the time to make it, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. Lord help us.

The amount of weakness, cowardice, and moral debility in the world has become dangerous and unsustainable. Strength and directness leak out of it like it’s punctured. I watch my father try to stand up as his body dies and he refuses to participate. I know him: He’ll die trying.

So. Back up the hall to the bedroom. It’s another morning. May we have strength.

If you’re so inclined, please say a prayer for Hal Bray, who is still trying to stand up.