In fact, it wasn’t clear at the outset that I would stay with my dad full time. But as the days went by, it just seemed to make sense given how things were working out. I had become acquainted with the home care people who were coming in twice a day as well as the daily hospice staff. I also grew familiar with the routines surrounding my dad’s care, what he wanted/needed, pain meds, etc. Given the state of decline in my dad’s health, the focus was simply about making him as comfortable as possible.
Admittedly, it wasn’t easy. In addition to working in the dark of early morning and the need to be on call all the time for my dad, there was the heavy emotional toil of knowing that my father was miserable and slowly dying. I felt tired all the time.
* * *
I was also alone most of this time. In some ways it made it easier and in other ways it made it more difficult. On the plus side, having no one else around, I had few other demands on my time except that which was imposed on me by work (ex. online meetings with my colleagues mostly in East Africa) and, of course, the needs of my father which came off and on throughout the day and night. Because of his condition, he had no regular sleep or food schedule. In fact, he was mostly sleeping and doing very little eating or drinking.
The downside to being alone was both emotional and practical. Even though he slept a lot, I didn’t want to take the chance of him waking to find no one there, especially if he needed help of some kind. When one of the home care staff came by, I would take advantage of their presence to pop out and go for a run, go to the gym or run errands.
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| Going for a run along the beautiful Snake River canyon and Shoshone Falls |
Emotionally it was tough in that my dad wasn’t the most gracious or kind person with his caregivers. I accepted that his condition made him rather unpleasant much of the time, including with me. I tried to imagine myself in his place and how, having so much of his wits about him, he was sort of trapped in a failing and decaying body. It doesn’t excuse everything that he said and did (I won’t go into it here), but it is a recognition that it was a terrible state to be in.
* * *
Eventually there were signs that we were getting closer to the end. He almost completely stopped eating and drinking. Periodically it appeared he was hallucinating, raising his arms with his eyes open as if he was reaching for something. It was clearly a new phase in his decline. I was advised to step up the meds to make sure that he was not in pain. I would occasionally use a straw to drop some water into his mouth given how dry he was.
As we neared mid-November, he was barely conscious. We decided to stop the home care given that there was not much to do. We knew his passing was getting closer. On the morning of the 16th, I was on a call with my wife as had been my early morning routine – her afternoon teatime and my coffee time. At one point during the call, as I was regularly watching to see if my dad’s chest was moving up and down, he seemed to stop breathing. He had been experiencing apnea, periodically not breathing, so I continued to watch to see if the chest would eventually expand again. It didn’t. I quickly ended the call and continued to watch the blue Boise State blanket draped over my dad’s torso. I wetted the back of my hand and felt to see if he was breathing. I honestly couldn’t tell given that there seemed to be heat coming from his mouth. After about five minutes or so, I was finally convinced that he had passed. I proceeded to call hospice, as I had been previously directed to do, and then went upstairs to wake my two sisters who were sleeping. By now it was a little after 7am and it was clear that we had now shifted into a new phase.
Even though the previous two weeks had prepared me for this moment to some extent, once it happened it was more difficult than I expected. For the first time in my life, I had no father. While I was happy that he was no longer suffering, it was taking some time to get used to the finality of it all. But in the midst of it all, there was a need to shift gears and deal with all that needed to be done.
Hospice arrived after about 45 minutes and make the official confirmation of death. About an hour after that, the funeral home arrived to retrieve my father’s body. It was all very professional. As business-like as it was, there was still this surreal feeling in the background as I was getting used to this new reality.
* * *
I spent some time helping with things around the house and finished up my task of organizing photos, scrapbooks, etc. into plastic tubs. I then began to prepare to travel back to Boise to spend some time with my mom. Because of the focus on supporting my dad, I hadn’t spent much time with her since I had been in Idaho. By early afternoon, I packed up my things and headed out. According to plan, my sister CJ would now take the lead with the posthumous tasks. It was time for me to clock out.
As I approached the car, I stopped and looked back at the house that had been my home throughout most of my childhood. I wasn’t sure if I would ever see it again now that the family was no longer residing there. It would likely be sold in the coming months. It would be the end of not only our time in that house, but also in Kimberly and in southern Idaho. It was the end of an era. I took a quick photo and off I went.
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