The Last Wave

Final Days with Dad

My father’s last three words to me were, I hate you.

It took such effort. He strained mightily to spit the words out, just before his large hands shoved me back into the chair on which I had been perched for what seemed like forever but was only the beginning. His eyes flew open, widened and looked straight into mine as he said it.

Catch yourself.

You will want to reassure me that he didn’t mean it, to remind me of what the disease does to the brain and how my father loved me beyond all measure. The closeness we shared, extraordinary, a wonder, really, after all we had been through. I don’t blame you for the impulse. It’s a punch to the gut, to think of a good man spewing cruel words to his only daughter while she helped him die. You will naturally offer up cliches meant to comfort: It wasn’t really him talking at the end. He had no idea what he was saying. He was on so many pain meds.

Your father would never want to hurt you. I will only half believe you.

Maybe he said my name, too. I hate you, Hollie.

Yes, I believe he did.

He went to some lengths, now that I think of it, to say it to me. It was as if he really needed me to know where I stood with him, at just that moment. And I suppose his honesty in that regard stood me in good stead the whole of our lives together, letting me know where I stood with him, where I stood in general. It couldn’t have come easy by then, the simple act of utterance. Shouting and whispering at once, breathing shallow, jaw jutting out, teeth clenched, spit flying, veins popping from his neck, beads of sweat dripping down his translucent forehead. He tried hard to rip himself out of his death bed, to sit up or stand, to simply move around, to keep going.  Terminal agitation, they call it, when “anxious, restless or distressed behavior” occurs at the end of life. I laughed when I first read that, because it also described a goodly bit of my father’s life, some of his best years, in fact. I hadn’t seen that version of Dad since his drinking days, but I knew him instantly when he reappeared. Never could such an otherwise quiet man put on a show quite like him when his mind was set to it. He had not rattled the windows with his roar, and put the neighbors all on notice, in many years. It seemed a fitting way for him to take his leave.

When we received the news that there was nothing more to be done, Dad seemed resigned and serene. It had been about a month and a half since the diagnosis, but he likely knew it for much longer. In the car ride home from the Medical College of Virginia, I remember firing a lot of questions about what we would do and what “the plan” was now, and Dad just quietly said, “the question isn’t what I’m going to do anymore. It’s, what are you going to do?” And then later that night, as he sat in his chair downstairs for what would be the last time watching some old John Wayne movie, he assured me that he was ready, that he was prepared to go. He said he hoped my mom and I would get there soon, meaning that he hoped we would accept his departure in short order and not make things harder than they needed to be. I still had this nagging feeling that the other shoe was about to fall. And if you knew my Dad, and you believed the road ahead would be an easy one, then you weren’t paying attention.

My mother couldn’t fully face it, so riven with grief that she was unable to fully consider my own. And who could blame her? Fifty-four years is too much of a lifetime to be expected to behave as if the world was not literally ended. I am still daily amazed that she goes on, laughing even now and enjoying life. Humans are such a mystery, especially in the wake of loss, and the countless varied responses to life’s betrayals are overshadowed only by our shared will to press on. But in that in-between time of dying, it all washed over her. His rage, my exhaustion, the endgame. I brushed my teeth, made a stack of clean clothes in the corner, and suggested she leave me to it.

My father possessed a power so totalizing at the end that, even on the doorsteps of his own death, he could throw me up against a wall before you could blink. I tried as hard as he to exert my own not insignificant strength against his, to get him to return to bed, to lie down, to rest, to take his medicine, to close his eyes, to sleep. And in the coming days we would have epic, hours long battles, just the two of us—him wanting what? It was never quite clear. Me always making him do something he didn’t want to do. But what, really, was to be done? We both knew nothing. He pushed against me, I against him, physically and in every other way. The arc of my teenage years bending crazily back onto me—who has the stronger will, who would be the first to relent.

In the end he exerted that relentless will we had lived with for so long, against every odd, almost until his last breath. His immense physical strength and stamina had been a defining feature throughout his life but had all but disappeared in those late years. He had begun to vanish before our eyes by the time the New Year had come, no longer eating or drinking, “non-ambulatory,” as they say, which always struck me as a peculiarly anodyne way to signal when the fight had gone out of a person. He wasn’t exactly ambulatory, but nor was he happy to take it lying down. And yet my father’s strength seemed to grow tenfold in those final days. I’ve heard stories about it, how the dying regain their youthful verve at the end, but never believed it was possible. Everyone is given to indulgence at the time of a loved one’s passing.

Passing. A passive word. Wholly out of place in this story.

Well-intentioned friends reached out across oceans, many different time zones and in the midst of their own crises and chaos to encourage me when the time came for me to go and be with my mom and dad for an end that came out of nowhere. It was, after all, only ever the three of us. They knew and loved my father, as he had such style, strength and wisdom. He was so easy to love, people often say of him. So, they naturally imagined it would be a rather calm affair, filled with loving exchanges and the quiet my father treasured. Maybe even I believed he would be granted—that he would grant himself—a death cast with the sort of dignity that had so marked his life.

The truth is rather more like this: death, like birth, is an ugly business, an equalizer in the worst kind of way. It is a reminder that there is work in this life up to the very end. We are best served in our preparations for it by remembrance of our human fragility and failing, rather than high-minded talk of strength and holding loved ones in The Light.

We are told by gurus of all stripes on Instagram and Tik Tok, etc., that if we can only master things like meditation, self-awareness, and higher consciousness that we will be prepared for anything, even our own death. And that we can do the work of dying—on whichever side we may find ourselves—with “clear eyes and a full heart.” I have even said such stupid things myself whilst sitting in the front of a packed classroom filled with adoring students, nodding intently. The idea that we can control much of anything, or determine in advance an emotional response to trauma, is a kind of New Age cliché, likely to be recited by someone who has not thought very deeply about what it takes for the sick and the unwell to die. Or what the mystery of being human is all about.

All of which is to say that I did not find my father’s work of dying, or my own in helping him to do so, to be anything like crossing over a rainbow bridge or the beautiful homecoming I was told about by friends wanting to help, despite quite a lot of collective mindfulness and self-awareness betwixt the two of us. I rather found it to be brutal, disgusting and impossibly hard.

Friends suggest that I unpack it all in therapy and “really process” it so that I can begin to heal, to “make peace with his death,” another cliché that confounds me, I confess. Maybe if I were a more evolved person, or just someone with more time on her hands, I would do that instead of crying into my lover’s neck every so often, only to quickly push it far back again into the recesses of my mind. Forgetting the end, so that I can recover the man I loved, the one who loved me, too, beyond all measure, has been some of the hardest work of my life. And I suppose putting that down in words is a way of making peace with it, for a writer.

In the West, we tend to not talk about death that much, keeping it at a safe, antiseptic distance. And when we do talk about it, we are rather bad at it. We shade the truth, use obtuse language, and generally make ourselves and others feel badly about our mortality and corporeality. This betrays a cultural weakness of spirit that we would do well to overcome. There have been some efforts in the medical and psychological fields to challenge outdated and inadequate frameworks for thinking about and planning for death. It is now customary for people to develop what is a called a “good death plan” in the spirit of the ancients or a modern-day birth plan. We are encouraged to journal about what we want our final years to look like, and how we ideally want our end to unfold. One can find things like the “12 principles of a good death” in a quick google search, which includes things like: to be afforded dignity and respect, to know when death is coming and to understand what can be expected, and most incredibly, to have time to say goodbye and control over other aspects of timing. I am 100% confident my father did not need to die in order to find all of that ridiculous, if not well meant, but he surely would now after the fact. And certainly, there is no shortage of New Age psychobabble bullshit that talks a great deal about death, romanticizing and idealizing it in weird ways, including “forgetting the limitations of your body” at the time of death, “dissolving the misperception of the self and not self,” feeling no pain, discovering the reason for your birth in your death, finding freedom in dying and the realization of samadhi, or bliss. We are talking about death more and more in the West, and that is good, I suppose. But it all still misses the mark and is just a little too aspirational for me. Sometimes, a thing just is what it is, even something as fundamental to human existence as death—really fucking hard and something any reasonable person wishes they never had to do. Not being gone, most of us accept that, even if we cannot comprehend it. Dying, at least in my estimate, does us a good turn when it takes us quickly and by surprise.

But we do all have to do it—the rich, the poor, the beautiful, the ugly, the strong, the weak, the brave, the cowards. And death doesn’t care that you might have been someone once. Someone filled with piss and vinegar, someone filled with love and light, someone who was self-possessed and stoic, someone with a slow heartbeat and steady hands. For too many, death is an ugly battle, comprised of bloody rags, adult diapers, defecation, night sweats, bottles of pills, syringes, piles of wet towels in the corner, soiled sheets, hallucinations and begging for things to end. Maybe some people see a white light and smile and read the Bible or the Koran or Mary Oliver with loved ones at their side. That sounds nice. I have imagined my own in a similar fashion countless times, it’s true.

In a 2022 interview, writer Elizabeth Gilbert described death as “coming for a fist fight” when it was time for her lover Rayya to die. This made sense to Gilbert, because Rayya was the sort of person, like my father, though self-possessed was wont to put up a fight, to stay in control, to have the upper hand, to be the victor. Both went out swinging and that was a death that was, if not “good” in the sense that it was not particularly kind to their loved ones or the stuff that makes for pleasant lasting memories, was certainly properly calibrated to the life that they lived. Both Rayya and my father were addicts too, but perhaps this is not relevant. I suspect that it is, though. Gilbert then changes course and goes on to recall the face of her beloved at the precise moment of her passing as beautiful: “Whatever she saw, she loved, because the look that she had on her face was, like, holy shit…her face lit up…her eyes lit up…something was incredible….that expression stayed on her face for hours afterward, of joy…I don’t know what it was, but something was amazing.” Imagining it, I am still brought to tears. My father, on the other hand, waited to take his last breath only after I had passed out from exhaustion with drool running down my chin, unable to come to for hours after he stopped breathing, my mom asleep by my side. And I know that he well knew that wasn’t the death for him that I wanted. I wanted to be holding his hand, for us to be awake and there for him, telling him how loved he was and that it was okay to let go (or some other cliché we had been encouraged to recite to him, and had already said a hundred times). But it didn’t go down like that. I was so furious and hurt that he couldn’t even give me that after the hell he had just put us through. We don’t talk about anger and exhaustion and boredom and trauma and the resentment that builds when someone we love is dying, has died.

I found that dying brings out the worst in those doing it and those called to bear witness. If you think it will be different for you on either side of it, Godspeed.

Everything doesn’t need to be a journey or, worse, a “practice.” Such talk is the new common opinion of a certain sect on the left, in which every moment must be chock-full of meaning, intention and connection. Everything carries some spiritual weight nowadays. Emerson’s critique of the mindlessness of the dominant culture comes to mind just now, “This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, they're four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.”

I always loved that line, every word they say chagrins us. At sea in a post-modern, late-capitalist world, I feel the weight of them often. My father loved Emerson.

And he did love me, beyond all measure, that is true. The cancer had, in all probability, made its way to his brain by the time he said those last words to me, as he never made even the slightest effort to stem the tide and spare my mother and I the agony of losing him too soon. But beneath the surface of that love and beyond the recesses of all that mushy grey brain matter, was unassailable will against which we never bet. He would not bend to me or to anyone for the whole of his life. And everything he ever did, he did on his own terms. He made no apologies for the choices he made or the life he lived. And he wasn’t someone who believed that love was easy, or that you could skip over the hard parts and call it something else. If you loved, you loved it all—the charm, the well of kindness, the unconditional love, the addict, the diagnosis, the screaming, the suffering. Surrender was unthinkable. He expected all of this and more from me. He took the making of me into a worthy opponent as his life’s work.

When the time came, I never showed weakness—not to him, anyway. He was going to leave this earth knowing that I could manage the hardest things there are in this life. That he had raised a daughter who could see the job of helping the man we thought could never be killed die.

It secretly thrilled my father every time I won an argument with him in my youth, or found some new way to outsmart him. I lean hard on that some days, because it’s all I’ve got when I recollect that time of dying, which often felt just like winning an argument. I’ve come to see this small remembrance as a mercy.

Of course, he did not hate me. He loved me to the ends of the earth. What he hated was the way I had to break up the fist fight that death had come for, the way I had to say, in my best mom voice, Enough, Daddy. It’s time.