Death Takes a Long Time

No one tells you how slow death can be, and how easy it is to miss it if you’re not paying attention.

3AM. I had finally endured the delayed flights and landed in Tallahassee, where my father lived. Driving in silence through the northern suburbs, I wondered how he was doing.

Not well, of course, I knew that. He had been in hospice care for months, though he didn’t seem to understand that he was terminally ill. Just the previous visit–where I had arrived at a similarly late hour and sat, reading, in the rental car, too afraid to find out if he was still alive–he had told me all about how he’d like to work back up to playing golf and moving around the house.

I knew he would never be active again, but I didn’t know that the man I knew as my father was already gone.

He had good genes. Even at eighty-six years old, dealing with late stage heart failure, COPD, and a litany of other issues, I was sure that his time was not up. Diminished, perhaps, but not up. Unfortunately, diminished was what matters.

And diminished is what I saw when I came through the door early that morning. Legs stretched down to the floor from his hospice bed, breathing ragged, dysfunction emanating from his bedroom.

I put his legs back in bed, checked on his oxygen, and tried to communicate. He didn’t seem to see me, just reacting to the sound of my voice, my touch, like he was haunted.

The hospice nurse arrived later that morning. She told me that he was actively dying, and we needed some prescriptions filled by a 24-hour pharmacy. But, she warned me, if I went to get them he could be dead by the time I made the short drive back.

Oh. Well, he needs the pain medication. I should go now, as soon as possible.

He did not pass in my absence, and I spent the morning and early afternoon sitting with him and the caretaker, counting down the time to his next dose. CVS called, asking if I wanted to have future medications delivered. I had been trying to set this up for weeks–let’s do it.

Then, shortly before his third dose of the painkiller, his breathing slowed to an impossible degree. I stood watching, my own breath trapped like his. How long had passed, I do not know. Fifteen seconds, thirty seconds. Then, he breathed again. I breathed with him, but he did not continue. That was his last.

The caretaker grew emotional and left the room. I stared for a minute, not sure what to believe. He had breathed again before, so I waited and watched for the rise of his chest that never came. I knew then, of course, that he was dead, but no one had ever taught me how to manage death.

In the Army, I had been taught what to do for a sucking chest wound, or a blocked airway, or profuse bleeding. But what now? I figured I needed to check his pulse. I put my fingers to his neck, an act which felt deeply strange to me, and confirmed that he was dead.

Then came a blur of hospice workers, family members, and legal responsibility to what came after. Countless conversations–yes, I am fine. No, he was suffering but now he’s in a better place. I’m sorry, I don’t know if you can have any of the furniture yet.

I lost myself in the practical aftermath. In fact, I would say that the functional moments far outweighed the emotional ones. I wondered why. Was I “processing” correctly? Did I care too much or too little? How many tears is the right number to shed?

But really, what I came to know very quickly was that my father had passed a long time ago. All those trips back home over many months–resigning from a job that I deeply wanted in order to take care of him, noticing capacity and coherence slip away more with each passing visit. Understanding that what made my father who he was had left long before I stared motionless at his chest, praying for another breath.

Death takes a long time. So long, sometimes, that you might not notice it.

I was most overcome, that day, with relief. Not for the end of his suffering, but relief that I had made it in time. I had grabbed that final connection out of Atlanta. That I had even been lucky enough to visit at all. Hopefully he knew his son was with him, in the end. I had done that job.

Now, though, I know the truth. Being there at the very end was only part of it. Death is slow, and I was there for all of it–I just didn’t recognize it at the time. Carrying him to the shower and helping him bathe. Paying his property taxes. Watching phone calls get shorter and less coherent. Noticing, visit after visit, that the man who chose to adopt and raise me as his own was no longer accessible behind those eyes.

The caretaker said she saw him smile before the end. Who can say.