“With no one to see”

Read My Father’s Body, at Rest and in Motion by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

When my Dad was dying in the hospital, I remember one very brief moment when I thought that he recognized me, but then he lapsed back into a feverish, irritable unconsciousness, marked by attempts to remove the catheter that was obviously bothering him, without saying a word. Did he really know who I was? Maybe, but probably not.

His body was struggling, and failing, to maintain its homeostasis: hepatitis had destroyed a critical bodily function, and the rest of his organs could not cope with the poisons that were released into his bloodstream – his own personal “failure cascade.” Doctors, nurses – all of us – recognized this, and the next day Dad was removed from life support (mainly the catheter, but also, I think, oxygen), given pain medication, and transferred to a hospice (well, to the building where the hospice was, because there were no beds available in the hospice).

“At death you break up,” Philip Larkin (the poet) wrote,

“the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see.”

Mom, Joan, and I were there for hours that final day, keeping watch and fulfilling the ancient tradition of respect and helplessness. We watched him breathe, watched the taut, yellow skin (the color was a byproduct of hepatitis) on his chest rise and fall, but he never regained consciousness. How long?  One day?  Two days?  A week?  Then Mom and Joan stepped out of the room for a moment.

While they were gone – perhaps only a minute after they left the room – I watched and heard Dad take his final gasp of air and then grow silent, his chest no longer rising. I felt for a carotid pulse – there was none. When Joan came back into the room, I asked her to get Mom and the nurse.

This “sudden” death is not unusual: those who are dying frequently wait until loved ones leave before letting go. Dad waited until the person who mattered to him most – his wife, our Mom – was absent from the room before he ended his battle to maintain homeostasis. He was a man who, whatever his shortcomings, had loved one woman since high school, and he couldn’t bear to die in her presence.

But, contra Larkin, I was there “to see.”