DAVE DIED

In early 2016 my father officially retired and at the same time his cancer started acting up. His blood was funky and his liver was kicking out. There was no time line, no years-to-live diagnosis or anything like that, only a regular monitoring of his blood and liver function to track when he would need to start on dialysis. Dialysis would mean real life changes, but as long as he was up for it he would probably go ticking along as long as anyone. Eventually he started by going into hospital for weekly dialysis then within a few months it transitioned to at home dialysis, which was framed as being less disruptive. He was pretty upset about this because it meant he couldn't travel much anymore – which had been his life for the last ten years. I visited him in September and helped him set himself up and we had lots of good chats. Seemed to me that, despite the nightly tethering to a machine, things were pretty much as they had been. To guess, I would have said he had another twenty-five years in him.

Two days after I returned to Calgary I got a call. “Chris, I'm in the hospital. Tom brought me. I collapsed getting into his car...” They checked him all out and he had a sore that wasn't healing and had a small infection. They wanted to monitor him at the hospital for a few days. Then from there everything went sideways. Somehow the hospital gave him pneumonia. While dealing with the pneumonia he collapsed a lung and died, but they brought him back. Bringing him back left him with a messed up heart rate that refused to settle into something strong and consistent. Too erratic, they needed to put him out and then shock his heart again, which would hopefully reboot things. It did.

Then with his heart sorted he started bleeding, partly because for a decade he'd been on blood thinners so he wouldn't ever have another stroke. But somehow he got this bleed and it just wouldn't stop. He bled for days.

He was on his cell phone to me through most of this. By the time I flew in my sister and her family was there, and everyone else too. After all this trauma and these crazy interventions, and with all his family there, he signed a do not resuscitate order. He also asked to be moved to the hospice in East Van, where my stepmother had gone. There wasn't room at the hospice at first.

With everyone else having jobs and kids to attend to, I spent a lot of time with him as he languished in palliative care. Aside from myself and family being there every minute they could, he also had tons of other visitors all day long. When he wasn’t entertaining guests he would make these crazy phone calls, in what felt like fits of lucid urgency. It seemed he would remember someone, maybe some he hadn’t spoken to in years, and dial to tell them he was as good as dead. As you’d imagine, this was mostly greeted with surprise or confusion. Some folks he couldn’t get through to and so instead he left wild messages to the effect of “Hi, it’s Dave. So, I’m dying. This is it. Goodbye.”

Understandably, he never wanted to be left alone. He also never wanted to talk or even really interact when it was just the two of us; instead, he mostly slept and I spent the better part of a week reading Rumi and sketching pictures of him in his bed, looking terrible.

To my mind, he always talked about death. This topic took over after my mother’s death but ramped up considerably following the death of my stepmother and grandparents, naturally. He would bring death up with the server at his favourite restaurant or his neighbour in the elevator. (Some of this was him facing his own and our collective frailty and some of it was likely just his stroke which, as I liked to say, broke his tact muscle... More on that at another time.)

Eventually, after what felt like an inordinately long period, time to transition to hospice arrived. A gurney and two medics appeared to take him away. Wanting someone to travel with him in the ambulance, I volunteered. Upon leaving the palliative ward, one of the nurses in the ward congratulated him on going home. That blew my mind. He, almost gladly to my interpretation, declared to them that, no, after coming to hospital he wouldn’t be going home ever again. Myself and one of the medics piled him in the rear of the ambulance and took a seat on either side of his temporary bed. Traffic was stopped downtown and it took quite a while just to go a few blocks. He talked about this being a shitty way to see the city for his last time. It was then that his “never going home again” appeared to condense from abstract concept into reality for him. From there we shared the experience of that mental condensate arriving in his nervous system.

Despite being on what the nurse said were maximal doses of sleeping aids and opium derivatives, he reported being uncomfortable, anxious, and largely unable to sleep at night his entire time in hospice. To my memory, he was mostly in a heightened state of agitation while there. He couldn't stand being alone, which he never really was, and spoke of nights being hellishly long. He insisted on having someone stay with him at night, so my sister and I took turns sleeping over. He was in pretty good shape the first few days but then rapidly deteriorated until we could no longer communicate with him.

The last moment I had with a lucid Dave was when I walked into his room to find him chatting with his friend Graham and my brother-in-law. He was talking about his grandchildren and being so glad to have spent as much time with them as he did. He spoke about how proud he was of my siblings and then he looked over at me and said, “And then there’s Chris: the with nothing.” I’m not exactly sure what he meant. Unlike my siblings, I owned no car or house, I was not married and gifted him no grandchildren. I presume something in this realm was what he was on about. I said nothing in response and it went no further as Graham, who instantly spotted and jumped on the psycho-spiritual grenade the moment it was lobbed, offered “Oh, but he has so much.” Aside from feeling like the most honest thing Dave had ever said, given the conversations we’d had over the last few years it came across as a curious residual, and now indelible, summation. Soon after that he stopped speaking and spent more and more time, seemingly, unconscious.

On maybe the fifth day, my brother wanted to take a night shift and I offered to stay as well. At around 4:00am, the nurse came in to give him a regular shot of something. I awoke when she came in the door and couldn't go back to sleep after that, so I just sat up writing. I was thinking about Utah Philips, the folksinger, for some reason and I wrote dad his death song. I didn't know what it was or where it came from, just pieces of conversations we'd recently had and bits of things said between friends, but it just spilled out there. I decided to post it to social media. About an hour later a crackle emerged from his side of the room. Maybe he was trying to speak? I looked up and noticed his eyes were open, which was also unusual the last few days, so I went to him and held his hand and said, "I'm here, I've got ya Dave." (I don't know why I said that.) Then he took one very deep breath and held it for a long time, and closed his eyes. Then he took one very shallow, almost imperceptible breath and that was it.

My brother was still asleep. I hadn’t woken him up. Somehow it hadn’t even occurred to me that this could be the moment until it was over.

It was over at 5:22am, October 29th, 2016.