Two weeks ago Friday, around six o'clock in the evening, my father died. I wasn't with him when it happened, but I had seen him earlier that afternoon. By that point, he already seemed far away, hovering in some liminal space, his skin taut and bright -- almost shining -- as he took heavy, labored breaths. His cheeks were smooth; one of the nurses had shaved him. He squeezed my hand, but I wasn't sure if it was recognition or instinct, the way a newborn will wrap a fist around your finger.
The nurses regularly appeared to take his vitals, administer morphine, moisten his lips, and shift his body to prevent skin sores. They assured us that he could hear everything we said to him, but (speaking to us in the hallway) they were divided on how long he might remain in this limbo. One said a week was possible, another said two or three days, and a third, who knew him best -- and who ended up being right -- predicted that he wasn't going to last long enough for one of my fellow out-of-town brothers to see him, that if he had any final words to say to our father, he should do it over the phone, from the train.
A few weeks earlier, my father had contracted Covid, which was followed by pneumonia. Initially, we didn't think it would be too serious -- he had weathered worse -- but by Monday, he had stopped eating and his oxygen levels and blood pressure were perilously low. The medical consensus was that he wasn't going to make it. We contracted with a hospice organization, whose doctor recommended stopping his meds and replacing them with morphine and Ativan. It was just a matter of time. It was sad news, but we were all ready to hear it, my father, I believe, most of all.
The past three years had been hard on him. After being diagnosed with dementia, his independence quickly deteriorated. He struggled to walk and stand without assistance, to add numbers (one of the early signs of dementia was his inability to keep up with his poker group), and to control his bladder and bowels. As time passed, he could often no longer distinguish between television and reality. He was sometimes agitated -- angry and afraid of nothing he could explain. He said unkind words to those he loved most. Eventually, he couldn't swallow. A few weeks before his death, the nurses told us that he was being moved to a pureed diet, which he would have hated even more than the non-pureed food ('swill') he was regularly served. He was never happy about being in memory care, but he -- and we, his family -- had reached a point where there were no better options.
Death and sickness are pervasive in the memory care unit, but -- as I learned -- there's still space for living, and I believe my father did his best to meet the challenge. He gamely participated in the daily activities the nurses arranged -- drawing, coloring, listening to performers -- and he never lost his rebellious spirit. Along with complaining about the food, he liked to tease and banter with the nurses, who bore it with good humor and infinite patience. He plotted with his old friend Henry, who also had dementia and Parkinson's, to steal a truck and break out of memory care, but Henry died before they could get away.
By the end, his mind and body had almost completely betrayed him. I say 'almost' because he could still recognize his wife and children and friends. He never descended into the vacant-eyed purgatory I associated with many of the other patients in memory care, the ones who sat for hours with their heads against a table, seemingly utterly defeated by life. We were all relieved -- even grateful -- that he avoided this fate. He was ninety-four years old. His death, with one of his children by his side and his wife holding his hand, seemed like a victory. After he was gone, we sat with his body, the skin now ashen and still. I kept expecting his chest to start rising -- my mind was tricking me, leading me to detect movement out of the corner of my eye -- but when I looked directly, he remained perfectly motionless. There was no question that he was no longer with us. We all agreed that he was in a better place.
The next morning, finding solace in habit, I woke up early and went for a run. As I lost myself in the barren trees and diffuse, winter light, I wondered where my father was. Perhaps nowhere, as the logical part of me believed, or perhaps zooming through space, as my mother had speculated the night before. Or maybe with the angels and God, as another brother stated.
Over the past few months, my father had also discussed the question of the afterlife with my brother who lives in Pittsburgh, the one who, along with my mother, had spent the most time caring for him. On purely administrative grounds, my father couldn't understand how there could be a heaven. Who was keeping track of everyone? And what about the animals, the billions of insects?
I've always wanted to believe that the afterlife is a place where someone who's no longer alive can inhabit the mind and body of someone else who is. Not in a malignant or ghostly way, but simply as a matter of omniscience, a benefit of membership in the collective soul of life. This version of the afterlife is like a cable television package with an infinite number of channels (purchased for a single, non-refundable price). Sometimes I think of it like a transitional phase between life on earth and true death, which happens when you're no longer interested in what's unfolding in humanity and you turn the television off.
It's this version of the afterlife I like to believe in when I'm running, the one in which my father, wherever he was, can now hear my thoughts and see the world through my eyes.
We both started running around the same time in the 1970s, when it first became a big fad in the United States. We never ran together -- as in running the same route at the same pace, conversing -- probably because we were each too competitive back then to understand that not every run needed to be a race, but we shared an appreciation of the sport. Sometimes, if I'm running a certain way -- a little back on my heels, but shoulders loose -- I can almost feel him in my stride, the way you sometimes look in the mirror and see one of your parents. His stride was quirky and slightly bow-legged, but he had a good kick, which is pretty much the same for me.
He liked to run a few miles at the track or on the main avenue in Barnegat Light, where we went to the beach every summer. I joined the local Road Runners, which met every day after school in the public park in Mt. Lebanon, the town outside of Pittsburgh where I grew up. I made new friends with my fellow young runners, while my father did the same with his fellow dads and moms. It was a nice way to spend time with my father.
Running is (or can be) a competitive sport -- as I quickly learned once I started racing with the Road Runners -- but it felt less serious (in a good way) and competitive to me than hockey, which I had also grown up playing in the wake of my three brothers. With hockey, I always felt a weight of expectation, like I would be disappointing someone (namely, my father) if I didn't follow the family tradition. I'm not sorry I played hockey, but it didn't bring me the same joy as running did. With running, I entered -- or invented -- a new world without expectations, and my father was a part of it.
As the decades passed, I kept running. My father stopped at some point in his seventies, but running continued to be an important part of our relationship, something we talked about in lieu of politics, where we almost always landed on opposite sides of an issue.
When I last visited him in January, a few weeks before he died, he asked me if I was still running and how it was going. I told him that I was, and that -- a few nagging injuries aside -- it was going okay. It felt good to tell him the truth instead of hedging or shading or trying to explain the nuances of something (like my job) that was beyond his ability to understand at this point. Running served as a kind of shorthand for us, a way for me to tell him that things were going well enough without getting mired in specifics (or politics). It was something we understood about each other, a disposition and maybe even an outcome.
It wasn't our only safe topic of conversation. For a while after he retired, there was gardening -- we spent time together working in the yard of his old house -- but it was harder for him to talk about gardening after he moved. And in truth, he could be a pretty reckless gardener, unable to resist the impulse to 'whack' something back to a twig and with a propensity to arrange annuals in dispiriting rows. But sometimes with the plants he displayed a tender, caring side -- moving the struggling ones into better light, or giving them more water -- that he did not often reveal.
We also talked about pets and animals. He liked to ask me about the cats, just as he had always loved talking about (and being with) the family dogs. One of my earliest memories is of him offering me a sniff of one of our dog's paws after deeply inhaling himself and telling me how good it smelled. I laughed, but he wasn't kidding around (or not entirely). If Dog Paw were a cologne, I'm sure my father would have bought it. (That said, my father and I were aligned in our dislike of cologne!) The last time my mother saw my father cry was when he took Zeppo, his final dog -- the one I had begged my parents to let me adopt when I was in sixth grade -- to be put down at the vet after he was diagnosed with cancer. He understood my grief when our cats died.
After he moved to senior housing, he spent hours in the apartment he shared with my mother watching the birds and the deer and the stray cats (and the bats) that moved through the fields, with the low mountains of Western Pennsylvania in the background. His room in memory care didn't have the same view, but we hired an aide to take him on field trips a few times a week. He was always at peace watching the trees and the birds.
It's another reason I like to think of him seeing the world through my eyes when I'm running, so that he can enjoy the view of the river, and the park, and the trails through the forest that connect the two.
This year, I started running with the Front Runners of New York City, the gay running club. On a recent Saturday morning, as I circled Central Park with a pack of gay runners (and my father on my mind), it occurred to me that his death would offer us both a chance to know each other in new ways. My father -- like most men of his generation -- was not altogether comfortable with the idea of homosexuality, but in the afterlife, I thought, maybe he might develop an appreciation or at least an understanding for what had seemed incomprehensible while he was alive.
In death, he often seems farther away but at moments feels closer, as we take each other to places we've never been.
