~ Published Work ~

It started slowly, quiet like a pin drop, barely noticeable.

Losing track of the day of the week. Getting confused by a cell phone. Forgetting the name for a pen. But when he yelled at my big sister calling her “ungrateful” and a “horrible daughter” as she was explaining to him why he couldn’t take his own medications while at the hospital for a procedure to fix his dialysis port, we were perplexed. Our dad, we called him Daddy, was the quietest man. “Easy Going” was his middle name. His parents never gave him one.

The manager at Daughters of Sarah Adult Residential Community told us we had to start paying them to dole out his meds. He was becoming too forgetful. On one particular visit, I entered his bathroom and immediately u-turned, quietly asking my family to go to the restrooms in the lobby so I could talk to him privately. The walls were covered in feces. This is not the conversation I was anticipating after flying across the country all night. He said he had been sick. But it became vividly clear to me that something was wrong, that he could no longer live without significant supervision.

He forgot my niece along the way, “what a nice young girl,” he would say. Once when a tray of food was delivered, he picked up a napkin, examining it as if he were a diamond cutter evaluating an exquisite stone, then placed it on the table and slid it towards me as if he was dealing me a poker card face down. “You can use this for the tip”. 

He would ask me how my mom was; she had been gone for 10 years. He no longer could feed himself, go to the restroom, or brush his teeth. He couldn’t walk. He had buzzers attached with wires to him so the nurses would know when he tried to leave his bed or wheelchair. He forgot he couldn’t walk.   

It started slowly, quiet like a pin drop. It ended in chaos, blood from the dialysis tube spewing all over the room as he ripped it from the dialysis port as he screamed that he was being kidnapped. One year earlier, he had told us that “he didn’t want to be that guy.“ So later that day, my siblings and I made the hardest and yet most loving decision in the world. We honored his words and let him go: we stopped the dialysis.

Six days later, I climbed in his bed and as I massaged his shoulders telling him he did a good job and could now leave his sickly body, he did just that. He let out a fluid long breath reminding me of when the two lovers took in a deep breath as the Titanic took its final dive into the ocean. In the peace surrounding us at that moment, I could hear a pin drop.

Published July 2018, Lummox 7, Lummox Press 

https://www.lummoxpress.com/lc/lummox-7/