I know this is totally off topic, but it’s Father’s Day and
I’m just thinking about my dad.
And I guess to connect all of it, my dad is the reason I am
who I am when it comes to relationships, dating, men.I might be struck with a bolt of lightning for saying this, but he was kind of a jerk of a father.
He was controlling, unkind, selfish, self-centred, immature; an alcoholic.
In the end, that’s what took him down.
After so many years of wishing he would just go away, he died, quietly, just ten months ago.
His liver finally gave in. He was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver just four years ago. His doctor said he probably had three or four years to live. He was put on the liver transplant list but his doctor said he may not survive long enough to benefit from a transplant. He died about three years and a few days after that diagnosis.
Last year on Father’s Day, my mom just reminded me from looking in her journal, I went over to their place and had an earnest discussion with my very sick and sometimes delusional (liver disease causes toxic build-up in the brain to the point of dementia) father. I had discussed being his liver donor with him before and he didn’t seem too keen on the idea so I’d left it alone. On this occasion, I guess I wanted to clear my own conscience and give him the final chance to refuse the offer of part of my liver. I didn’t even know if I would be a match, but something kept nagging at me to try because I worried that I would regret it afterwards if I didn’t. I told him I’d been thinking about it and that I didn’t want him to think I had abandoned him. If he wanted to have the transplant and wanted part of my liver, I would do it. My mom and sister were absolutely against this idea, worrying for my own health and future. But I felt that I was the only one in the family who might be an option as a live donor, being single, young and having no dependants. I felt it was my duty to consider it.
When I broached the subject, he looked at me with surprise and said that he absolutely did not want or expect me to do that. I know that originally he wanted to protect my sister and I from that sort of challenge and was adamant that he would not allow us the option. But as he grew increasingly sick, it felt like I was watching him drown. I couldn’t get the image out of my mind that he was drowning in his toxic waste and hoped someone would soon toss him a life raft: I wondered if he felt abandoned.
In the end, I realized that not only did he not want me to donate my liver; he did not want a transplant at all. He did not like the idea of the surgery and months of recovery, rehabilitation and medication he would have to go through. But I had to ask one final time, more to clear my own conscience than anything else.
It was only two months later that he died, and what a strange experience it was.
One morning, when he was still living with my mom in their condo, he came to the realization that he was dying.
“Am I going to die?” he asked my mom through tears, scrunching up his face.
“I don’t know, I think so,” she said, crying herself and not knowing how to respond. They held hands and cried together for a time.
“Can you call the girls?” he finally said.
As I recall it was a hot July morning, and I got the call from my sister saying that we needed to go see mom and dad. I think it was a Sunday, or at least a day when I didn’t have much else on, so I took the Go train out to their place and my sister and I spent the day there with my dad. He was in and out of sleep and consciousness by this point but for a few minutes he was lucid and we all sat around his hospital bed in what had become his nursing room.
The four of us – my sister, mom and I – sat with him and held his hands, stroked his hair and face. He said to us, in a jumbled string of words, “I will always love you” with his face scrunched up into tears, and, “Take care of your mother.”
We cried, held hands, and cried some more.
A week or so later, he was accepted into Dorothy Ley Hospice and at the hospice they tried to make his days comfortable but discontinued the medication he’d been on to combat the symptoms of his illness.
There were times I was in that room with him when he would talk about his sisters, father and mother as if he were a kid again. “Where’s Sheila?” he would say. “Did she come home from school yet?”
Or, “Where’s dad? I think he’s looking for me, I think he’s angry at me.”
He was like a little boy, confused about what was happening to him.
I held his hand and stroked his arm to try and comfort him, but I’m not sure he even knew who I was at that point.
The day before he died, in the hospice, my sister called and said, “Dad’s wide awake, totally alert and sitting up in bed, you need to come see him.”
She had arrived early in the morning and was shocked to find him fully conscious and awake after many days of being almost completely uncsonscious.
When I got there, he was indeed wide awake and conscious. It was a strange sight after so many weeks and months of sleeping.
He was sitting up and talking but his eyes were far away; they were glassy and glazed over as if he were already in a different world. He was a bit agitated and seemed anxious and frightened. He easily answered the questions we asked but seemed unsure of his answers and unsure of what was happening to his body.
The best way to describe him is that he was like a child, a frightened child.
We spent the whole next day by his side and he slept and slept and slept. He did not rouse a bit even if we spoke to him and asked him questions, touched his hands or face. He was very far away by that point.
Early the following morning, I got a call from my sister that my dad had died. She was in tears at the hospice and had been the first one to come across his motionless body at 7 a.m.
She was always so good about visiting, every day, and spending any available time she had by his side. Even though they fought like nobody’s business, they always had more of a father-daughter connection than he and I did. She loved him fiercely, despite his flaws and saw past what I refused to. She always saw the good side of him and he was lucky to have her as his daughter.
So I went, and what a strange and foreign feeling that was to go into the room and see him lying cold and motionless. His face had fallen into a bit of a smile, simply due to gravity and the fact that he was lying on his back. His left eye was not completely closed and it seemed as if it could still flutter open at any moment.
When I went into the room, my emotions overcame me. He hadn’t always been the best dad, in fact he wasn’t very nice to me a lot of the time, but in the end, he was still my dad and I loved him all the same.
It was the sheer ending of it all and finality that hit me so hard. I sat for a long time, looking at him and crying and crying and crying and crying. I felt like I could cry forever and fill up a river with tears and sadness. I cried for what he was and what he wasn’t and never could be for me; I cried for what he was and what he wasn’t and never could be for himself. I cried for the fear he must have felt, for the loneliness and for the anger and frustration that may have lingered within him, ever so slightly, for what he had done to himself. I honestly think he had no choice but to be exactly what he was. I know he wasn’t happy with it and for years he wrote notes and journals, encouraging himself and pleading with himself to change the way he was.
But in the end, he was who he was, and there was nothing he or any of us could have done about it.
So today, I think about him, and wish that he could have been the person that he had wanted to be. The person he might have been. Underneath many layers of frustration, agitation, impatience and anger, there was a man who really loved his wife but didn’t know how to be a good husband, who really loved his kids but didn’t know how to be a dad, and who just wanted to be so much more than he ended up being. He didn’t know how to get there and didn’t know how to ask for help.
Happy Father’s Day dad, I love you, just the same.
