The Best of Me(107)

How dare he! I thought.

In the end, a quick prostate check and the CT scan were the worst I had to suffer that day in Paris. After taking everything into consideration, the French doctor, who was young and handsome, like someone who’d play a doctor on TV, decided it wasn’t the right time to take little bites out of my bladder. “Better to give it another month,” he said, adding that I shouldn’t worry too much. “Were you younger, your urinary-tract infection might not have been an issue, but at your age it’s always best to be on the safe side.”



That evening, Hugh and I took the train back to London and bought next-day plane tickets for the U.S. My father was by then in the intensive-care unit, where doctors were draining great quantities of ale-colored fluid from his lungs. His heart was failing, and he wasn’t expected to live much longer. “This could be it,” my sister Lisa wrote me in an email.

The following morning, as we waited to board our flight, I learned that he’d been taken from intensive care and put in a regular hospital room.

By the time we arrived in Raleigh, my father was back at Springmoor, the assisted-living center he’d been in for the past year. I walked into his room at five in the afternoon and was rattled by how thin and frail he was. Asleep, he looked long dead, like something unearthed from a pharaoh’s tomb. The head of his bed had been raised, so he was almost in a sitting position, his open mouth a dark, seemingly bottomless hole, and his hands stretched out before him. The television was on, as always, but the sound was turned off.

“Are you looking for your sister?” an aide asked. She directed us down the hall, where a dozen people in wheelchairs sat watching The Andy Griffith Show. Just beyond them, in a grim, fluorescent-lit room, Lisa and my sister-in-law, Kathy, were talking to a hospice nurse they had recently engaged. “What’s Mr. Sedaris’s age?” the young woman asked as Hugh and I took seats.

“He’ll be ninety-six in a few weeks,” Kathy said.

“Height?”

Lisa looked through her papers. “Five feet six.”

Really? I thought. My father was never super-tall, but I’d assumed he was at least five nine. Had he honestly shrunk that much?

“Weight?”

More shuffling of papers.

“One twenty,” Lisa answered.

“Well, now he’s just showing off,” I said.

The hospice nurse needed to record my father’s blood pressure, so we went back to his room, where Kathy gently shook him awake. “Dad, were you napping?”

When he came to, my father focused on Hugh. The tubes that had been put down his throat in the hospital had left him hoarse. Speaking was a challenge, thus his “Hey!” was hard to make out.

“We just arrived from England,” Hugh said.

My father responded enthusiastically, and I wondered why I couldn’t go over and kiss him, or at least say hello. Unless you count his hitting me, we were never terribly physical with each other, and I wasn’t sure I could begin at this late date.

“I figured you’d rally as soon as I spent a fortune on last-minute tickets,” I said, knowing that if the situation were reversed, he’d have stayed put, at least until a discount could be worked out. All he’s ever cared about is money, so it had hurt me to learn, a few years earlier, that he’d cut me out of his will. Had he talked it over with me, had he said, for example, that I seemed comfortable enough, it might have been different. But I heard about it secondhand. He’d wanted me to find out after he died. It would be like a scene in a movie, the wealthy man’s children crowded into the lawyer’s office: “And, to my son David, I leave nothing.”

When I confronted him about the will, he said he’d consider leaving me a modest sum, but only if I promised that Hugh would touch none of the money.

Of course I said no.

“Actually, don’t worry,” I said, of the plane tickets. “I’ll just pay for them with part of my inheritance…oops.”

“Awww, come on, now,” he moaned. His voice was weak and soft, no louder than rustling leaves.

“I’m going to turn him over and examine his backside for bedsores,” the hospice nurse said. “So if any of y’all need to turn away…”

I was in the far corner of the room, beneath a painting my father had made in the late sixties of a monk with a mustache. Beside me was the guitar I was given in the fifth grade. “What’s this doing here?” I asked.

“Dad had it restrung a few months ago and said he was going to learn how to play,” Lisa told me. She pointed to a keyboard wedged behind a plaster statue of a joyful girl with her arms spread wide. “The piano, too.”

“Now?” I asked. “He’s had all this time but decided to wait until he was connected to tubes?”

After the hospice nurse had finished, my father’s dinner was brought in, all of it pureed, like baby food. Even his water was mixed with a thickener that gave it the consistency of nectar.

“He has a bone that protrudes from the back of his neck and causes food to go down the wrong way,” Lisa explained. “So he can’t have anything solid or liquid.”

As Kathy spooned the mush into my father’s mouth, Hugh picked the can of thickener up off the dinner tray, read the ingredients, and announced that it was just cornstarch.