Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(52)

My dad roused every once in a while and chuckled as Peterson detailed with reverence the Winnebago’s gleaming chrome accents and spacious over-cab loft bed. The open road, the great plains, Kelly by his side—this was the life. Until it came time to empty the Winnebago’s sewage tank. Oscar was pretty sure he could figure it out unassisted.

I looked up from the book, into my sister’s expectant face and over at my dad’s unconscious one. Was Oscar Peterson about to tell us a story about gallons and gallons of his and his wife’s liquefied feces spraying out of a Winnebago? Was I about to read it out loud, in a soothing voice, at my father’s deathbed? Yes. Yes, I was.

Dad’s hospital room was small—only two guests could hang out in there comfortably—so my mom, my sister, and I took turns sleeping in the chair next to his bed, holding his hand, while one of us lounged on the cushioned bench under the window and the odd woman out decamped to the cafeteria or the “family lounge” down the hall. The family lounge was a small, windowless room with an old TV, a couch upholstered in what looked like leftover airport carpet, and a pile of battered, cast-off VHS tapes, because nothing takes the edge off your father’s slow suffocation like Speed 2: Cruise Control.

Did you know that sometimes there just isn’t anything else that doctors can do to save your dad? I knew it intellectually, before this experience, but I didn’t understand it in practice. In practice, it means that, at a certain point, a fallible human being called a doctor has to make a subjective decision that it is no longer feasible to mitigate both the internal bleeding and concomitant dehydration of your father, so all you can do is give him enough morphine that it doesn’t hurt so much when he drowns inside of his own body. And you have to go, “Okay,” and then let them do that. And then wait.

My dad lost consciousness on Saturday night. My mom told me to go home and sleep, that she’d call me if it looked like he was going to go. I passed out on my parents’ couch, making peace with the fact that I would probably miss the end. It was okay. I had said good-bye, told him I loved him. But the next morning, when I woke up, he was still holding on (he was always strong, he didn’t want to go), so back I went. We picked up our routine again—chair, bench, family lounge—and we sat there. Waiting. All day Sunday, into Monday. Each breath got slower and rougher—I use a French press now because I can’t bear the percolator—and we sat and listened to every one.

Sometimes a team of doctors would come in and loom over us with well-rehearsed but clinical concern. “How are you doing?” they would ask. Oh, you mean besides sitting here on this plastic hospital chair listening to the world’s best dude struggle for breath for the past thirty-six hours? Um, fucking gangbusters, I guess. “Is there anything we can do?” Apparently not, considering this whole long-slow-death thing that’s happening in this room right now. Also, you’re the doctor. You tell me.

I have never wanted anything as much as I wanted that shitty purgatory to be over. Except for one thing—which was for that shitty purgatory to never be over. Because when it’s over, it’s over. And eventually it was. Monday afternoon, my dad stopped breathing, faded to black-and-white like an old movie, and—I don’t know how else to describe it—flattened slightly, as though whatever force was keeping him in three dimensions had abruptly packed up and moved on. He was, and then he wasn’t. One moment his body was the locus of his personhood, the next moment our memories had to pick up the slack.

A nurse brought us granola bars and juice boxes on a little rolling cart, like a “your dad died” door prize. A guy with a mop came in to start cleaning up the room for the next patient. There was someone with a clipboard, asking questions. “Could you give us a fucking minute?” my mom snapped. “My husband just died thirty seconds ago.”

We sat with the body that used to be him. I didn’t understand the point, honestly.


Back in November, before Thanksgiving, before the tree fell on the house, before the hospital, Aham and I met up at a bar on Capitol Hill. We hadn’t spoken in a week or so, and my pain and anger had cooled to something more permeable. I’d spent that time with friends and family, eating and drinking and carrying on, coming back to myself—getting reacquainted with the person I’d been before Aham, even before Mike. I had an identity other than my relationship—I remembered it now—and this grimy fish tank I built around us hadn’t been good for me either.

Grudgingly, I’d come to see Aham’s point a little bit. He fell in love with this person, and in my desperation to hang on to him, I morphed myself into something else entirely. He wanted a partner but I gave him a parasitic twin. Except worse than that. A parasitic twin that cried all the time. Worst X-Files episode ever.

At the bar, Aham and I ate tater tots and got drunk. We didn’t talk about our relationship and I didn’t cry. I felt detached; my capacity for sadness was maxed out. I had given up on trying to force him to come back to me, and he apologized for trying to force me to be his friend. Somehow, we had fun. Relief poured back and forth between us, quietly electric. Aham had a gleam I hadn’t seen in months. For a minute, we held hands, and something woke, tiny but palpable, in my chest. Outside, it snowed, big, fat, wet flakes. I dropped him at the bus stop and said I’d see him in L.A., feeling something that wasn’t quite despair for the first time in a month. He said we’d talk. Of course, that never happened—he flew back down the day after the tree fell, and I was already gone.