My mother sounds tired on the phone. A pipe has burst in a wall in their house and the plumber can’t find the origin of the leak. The floor squishes underfoot. My father sloshes when he walks, though the water is in another part of the house. The oncologist has described my dad’s situation as a dam holding everything back in his backed-up body and when it breaks, it will go fast.
Until the source of the leak is found, the water needs to be turned off. I tell my mother, “At least you have that option.”
My sister calls me. They’re giving him morphine to help with the breathing. When I get down there, I find my parents in their master bathroom. My mother is trying to coax my father out of the bathroom back into bed. The smell of fear and urine are in the air and it’s hard to breathe. My mother says, “Look, Michelle is here,” and I can see my father trying to get his mind around what that means. The front of his pajamas are wet.
I’m not trying to be a crybaby, but I’m not sure if you’re all aware that I’m dying of terminal cancer. We’re dumb with shock. He has never acknowledged that he has renal cell carcinoma, calling his doctor an asshole.
My sister and I try to coax my father to use the plastic urinal. He keeps asking where the tube is. I say, “You’re the tube, Dad—put your tube in the hole.” He looks blankly at me, so I tell him, “Your johnson, Dad!” Say what? he asks in his best 1970s white man’s jive. We crack up.
We put my dad in the living room to cheer him up. Hospice nurses, home health aides, the people to set up the hospital bed and the oxygen, friends of my parents bearing food—the house is alive with activity.
“It’s OK, Dad, to let go,” we repeat as if from a playbook. Shut up! Stop being so phony. That’s just a mantra that people say. His grip is painful.
“Do you know which daughter I am,” I ask him? He politely fibs. My favorite one. I lean down low, whisper into his ear. “It’s Sha-sha, Mitchelino from Cupertino. The bad daughter.” He laughs. You devil, you. “Little Bobby,” I croon. Pure delight washes across his face for an instant, like a ghost.
To my mother: You turned these girls’ minds. He flinches at her touch. Your hands are cold, he accuses.
The Irish priest he met once and liked comes to the house to give my father the Anointing of the Sick. We all stand back from the bed at a respectful distance. Father Dylan speaks with a brogue and is priestly handsome. We gape, thrilled and shocked.
My father reverts to Spanish with his brother Al, and they converse. Al tells him, “Vamos. Let’s go home.” I watch, jealous. He is talking to his real family. Did my mother witness this?
Day nine. His vitals are strong, but the dam doesn’t hold. I hear that gargling sound, and then I don’t. It’s 4am and I’m the only one up. His lips are locked around that last gasp. The house starts coming alive.
The satellite dish for the flat-screen HD television is failing. The images are breaking up into hundreds of little pixels. My mother had scheduled an appointment early on in the week for someone to come on Sunday and of course we had all forgotten about it. Sometime that afternoon the worker shows up. I am outside in the backyard, sitting in the sun looking up at the sky, waiting for signs from my father (I had asked him before he died to send me a signal. Everyone tells me they received signs from their loved ones after they died, so I am anxiously waiting for mine. I am envious of the sign receivers.)
Outside, I hear the young man’s voice and I wonder if he knows what happened here just hours earlier. The signs are all there: the stripped hospital bed in the middle of the dining room, the living room furniture all jumbled together where it’s not supposed to be, the cluttered dining room table. I learn later that my mother did tell the service man that her husband had died. “Today?” he asked. He is young, though, and doesn’t realize that life is for the living and that one day we will want to watch “Dancing with the Stars” again. We learn that the dish had been improperly installed originally and was shifting incrementally, causing the signal to become weaker and weaker. He fixes it and now it comes in strong and clear.
