My phone rang this morning at what I knew was too early for proper, and staring at the phone I realized it was Destiny, calling to help get Dad out of bed. I tossed on my shorts and a t-shirt and was still buckling my belt when I came into the living room. She already had him standing inside his walker. 

    “Doe he have to go to the bathroom?”

    “Yes.” She helped him turn and here he came, bumping the walker in staccato jumps in front of him, always with slight irritation at the whole idea of this process, a rickety rack that he needs just to help him get from the bed to the bathroom, from the car to the restaurant door, from the couch to the kitchen. Head down, belligerence his calling card, You got me this contraption and you’re making me use it, now get the hell out of the way.

I made a slide show of the last pictures I could find from the thousands I can find among the thousands I’ve lost. A few of them were from Minnesota, from a trip Mom and Dad and I had taken to some northern lake town they’d visited in heartier years. Gary and Janet were with us, Dad was strolling through one of the storefronts and I had my eye on him as I was listening to Gary talk about the sorry state of farming and I saw Dad go down. He stumbled on one of the front porches of some knick-knack store, and he went down to his knees on the wide wooden deck. By the time I got to him he had righted himself and was dusting off his pants, which now sported a prominent scrape. He was OK. The stain washed out of his pants I’m sure, with Mom’s borax and water and hand-scrubbing before any machine could even try. It was a small incident in a larger trip where we visited his old high school, Mom’s birthplace, the farm he grew up on in Iowa, the graveyard where Mom’s parents are laid to rest.
I have fond memories of that trip, the three of us, taken during 2012? 2013? The metadata in the photos would tell.

    The remnants of the man who scraped his way toward me on the carpet was, is, both humbling and inspirational. This morning, to me, groggy and unfiltered from sleep, he seems an exhausted and exhausting marvel. According to the ER doctor a few days ago, he suffered a massive heart attack, the second in four months, and they were prepared to move him a floor up for “comfort care” in case he didn’t last until check-out the next afternoon. Comfort Care is a medical euphemism for "dying". We kids, coming in from three states, had all acquiesced to the inevitability of hospice care and agreed that taking him home was optimal, even if hospital policy had not been pushing him out the door. That was on Wednesday. He rallied on Friday after arriving home and finding a gaggle of his own children waiting for him, and reveled in the attention. He was shouting orders, making up spontaneous rhymes, thanking and kissing all who came within earshot or lip reach. It’s who he has been since Mom died, it’s who he has always been in spirit. I was late for this perhaps final party, driving in from Alabama. I had made the decision to get my truck’s a/c fixed on Thursday, and left late Friday, so I only heard about his miraculous spark and spunk and fire. By the time I got here he was in the newly installed living room bed and he looked more like a cadaver than I had ever seen him look, and he needed prompting to remember names, no matter whose. “I’m Tamara. Your daughter. That’s Rex. He’s your son."

    So as he pushed his way forward toward the bathroom this morning, I backed up in front of him wondering that he could stand at all, much less be headed my way like a Roomba, avoiding objects and moving determinedly with clear purpose. “Turn on the light!” He barked as we headed across the living room into the dining room and the hallway beyond. He’s a creature of habit, and the dining room light is on his habit list. If it’s on already, he acknowledges it: “The light, yes, there. Thank you.” And if it’s not on when he’s headed that way, he lets everyone know something needs to be made right.

    Since he returned from the hospital Friday, he has lived in the living room. His caregivers: Sam, Jan, Britney, and Destiny, have slept on the couch beside him. The room is large and quiet with the large wooden mechanical movement clock on the mantel ticking out the seconds prominently, as much a part of the ambience of the room as the fireplace or the couch or the television or the Greco print on the wall for the last sixty years. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. It has a warm and resonant voice, seldom faltering. It must be older than Dad, and that is old in either Dad or clock years.

    Jan said last night before she left that Dad had changed in significant ways. Jan has a way of telegraphing these tidbits of import. She will stop moving, lean against something, and squint her eyes closed as if she has to steel herself to deliver the next few sentences, and I have learned to brace myself. She has been witness to certainly dozens, “hundreds” to hear her say it, of deaths, and when she puts Dad into that box and begins mixing him up with the impersonal souls who are now no longer extant, I listen. 

    “I don’t want to say your Dad has lost his dignity. That’s not the word I’m looking for. He still has his dignity.”

    “Independence.” I offer, thinking I know what’s coming.

    “Yes, well…let me put it this way. Even a week ago he would never let me help him go to the bathroom. He wouldn’t even let me keep the bathroom door open...”

    “Oh I’ll bet! He would start to holler…”

    “Exactly! He would yell at me to Get the heck out of here,” she laughed. “And now he accepts it. He accepts the indignity of having someone help him sit on the toilet, or of having to use the toilet chair right here in the middle of the living room. He’s accepted what’s happened. And that’s new. He knows. I think he’s ready. I don’t think it will be long, I don’t want to guarantee anything, but I feel like I can almost guarantee that he will be going pretty soon. And I think he will go peacefully.”

    There’s an unexpected familiarity when I help Destiny hoist up his pull-ups up after he’s finished at the toilet. Skinny legs inside of wide white elastic bands, don’t twist it, there. All set. I’ve done this a hundred times with my children not that long ago in Dad years, and it’s not weird. It’s just a job. Together we each take a side, then his elastic pants over the pull-ups, and it’s done. I hold my arm in front of him sideways like a grab bar and he does grab more than clutch, way more than hold. We make it out of the bathroom to his walker, to the bed, turn, and he is down again sunk into the narrow bed like a fine pen in a custom case, indian print blanket over him with scarcely a wrinkle he takes up so little space in the bed. He has become too weak to form words at times, and simply articulates the syllables in a guesswork of sound: ah ah ahah. “You want water?” Aaah. I get him water with ice, aware that Destiny may feel that I’m encroaching on her job, but we do the dance. She steps on my feet during the slow parts, mouthing soft “awww”s when I tell my dying father I love him, when I say “You have done everything you need to do here Dad,” trying to insert cognition into the available space as best I understand it. He’s in a mystery world now where sound and understanding don’t sync, where his hands will move in a direction not intended, where his eyes will shoot intention for a moment then close leaving an impression in the air between us like an arrow passing through water. He smokes out a signal from beneath his heavy, emotive lids then he closes them again to return to his secret space of in between, leaving me or whoever is in front of him to deal with the impact of a compressed and concentrated, fiercely intense gaze of whatever we make it out to be. He has done his work here and is in the process of coming to understand its lonely and final implications. Or so I imagine. For that journey is not mine, not yet. I’m only here to help as best I understand the task in front of me: the dying of my father. 

He descends on the bed like a stacked pallet of drywall being craned into a construction site: inert, final. He sits in a heap and we must turn and drop his upper body while at the same time swinging his legs onto the bed. He helps, but expects to be lifted and directed. Once he is prone and angled correctly, we each grab an arm and a buttock and scoot him toward the head of the bed so it can be raised into a half-sitting position, which he seems to prefer. “Ah ah ahah”, he says 

    “Move your head down?” Ah. Someone finds the remote and he is lowered until “ah ahah”. “That’s enough?” Ah. Ahah. “You’re welcome.’ Ah ah ahah. “I’m glad I’m here too. You’re a sweetheart. I enjoy being here.”

    “You can rest Dad.” I think his eyes aim toward me but they are unloaded at present and I am unsure. I stroke the top of his head, dog-like, which I hope comforts him as much as it does me. There is precious little way to tell as the clock ticks in the quiet of pre-dawn. Destiny is quiet. I let tears run down my face and try to not cry openly, realizing I am silently singing the Rick Astley song, “Cry for Help”. “Why must we hi…i..de emotions? Why can we ne..e..ver break down and cry?” Destiny sits across from me and I am aware that we are as far apart as a plastic penguin and a ripe orange. She is on the job and I am sitting with my father trying to ease the burden of being alive. On an impulse I reach for his hand under the blanket and find it, a creature disjointed from my father, but him. I feel the thin skin over tendon and bone, finding his knuckles with my thumb, and run my fingers under his fingers. I squeeze his hand. He squeezes back. I squeeze again. He squeezes again. And again. His fingers search, and I slip my hand fully into his beneath the cover, holding his hand as I would my child’s, rubbing my thumb across his knuckles. I squeeze three times. “I love you,” I tell him quietly. Three squeezes. “I love you.” Three squeezes. He squeezes back. “Ah a ahahah. Ahaha. “I think he wants you to squeeze his hand,” I say to Destiny. I’m squeezing this hand and I think he wants you to squeeze his other hand.” She reaches under the cover and finds his hand, then laughs quietly. 

    “He’s squeezing it!” 

    “He is?”

    “Yes!” He doesn’t squeeze mine anymore, so I squeeze his gently, three times in slow succession. I. Love. You. It’s a gesture taught to me by my first girlfriend, a flaxen beauty I loved so fiercely I was afraid of losing her before she ever thought about saying goodbye. The love itself was so terrible in its depth I was afraid, giddy in empty space, lost in a new world of ache and yearning and desire so powerful the world fell away around me when I was with her. We traveled two continents and three universities and explored the infinite universe of a VW Bus for months before she left me and it was pure prayer and fear that saved me from an early death. 

    “I don’t want to live with you next semester,” she said. 

    “What do you mean?”

    “I just think we should…be apart. You helped me separate myself from my mother. You helped me learn to stand on my own. So now I want to do that.” I walked out onto the small landing of our upstairs apartment and felt my known world begin to fall away from me, then began to pray: God. You know there is no way I can do this. I can’t do this. You have to take over or else I will die. Get me through this please. 

    And God swept me into loving arms and away from the terrible pain of that heartbreak only to drop me head first again and again throughout my life into broken heart after broken heart after broken heart. But not that day. I felt my chest fill with air and I walked back into our one-room nest among the oak trees and said, “OK. I understand.” She told me one long train ride somewhere, in the electric hand-holding phase when any physical contact was new bold territory, that her father used to squeeze her hand three times. “This means ‘I love you’ We don’t even have to say it, see?” And she taught me that move and we practiced it and I perfected it through the years until I could perform it even on my own children. Squeeze. Squeeze. Squeeze.

    I stopped tracing Dad's knobby knuckles with my thumb and pulled my hand out from under the cover. Destiny did the same. His mouth had dropped open, his shallow breathing had assumed its familiar rhythm and his eyes were closed. The clock tick-tocked its resonant pulse, steady in the slowly brightening room and I could begin to clearly see his sunken features. This is a dying. There’s not a right or wrong way to go through it. I would wish I could write it into some metaphysical rite of passage but it is simply moments lived onto moments lived, one. each. at. a. time. Tick. Tock. Wooden heart. Squeeze. Squeeze. Squeeze.