WHEN YOUR FATHER HAS HOURS OR DAYS OR WEEKS TO LIVE
Notes from the waiting.
Your father is dying. You know this because the doctor said so, because the numbers said so, because your mother keeps asking about the black mark on his face like if she figures that out everything else will make sense.
You’re not sure what you’re doing here exactly. You’re here.
You’re not sure why your mother is here exactly, either. Okay, that’s bullshit, you know why she’s here, but jeezus, they were the definition of codependence. Just… endless toxicity together, there they always were, defined by it.
Your father is dying. But you don’t have time to be sad. You don’t really have the capacity to be sad right now anyway, so it’s fine. “Fine.”
All your mother can focus on is the black mark on his face. It could be a bruise, she says. It could be a symptom of the late stage Alzheimers, you say to her back. Or the nursing staff could be beating your father. “GENTLE,” she scowls at a nurse, face-pointing in Dad’s direction.
It’s been 24 hours in so the emaciated face you see that once belonged to your father no longer shocks you, no longer takes the breath away the same way that death does the same.
He’s at the end stages now.
Can you believe it? You actually remember when Dad was on the phone when he was notified his father passed away, your fraternal grandfather. (He smelled like mothballs and never hugged you. That’s all you got.) And you remember the look on his face… it was sorry but it was also… relief? Did he actually smile when he was saying “oh, how tragic?”
You heard your aunt was here earlier. You also know this because you got an irate voicemail from someone on the hospital staff and you can only imagine what they were like when they were here: Hi Ernie James here Washington Health Telemetry Unit at your earliest convenience. I, Uh, we just have a, uh, situation with the family that arrived. Um, that, uh, yeah, we need to discuss maybe having somebody that’s family to come to be with them while they’re here visiting. Uh, heah, please call me back at your earliest convenience.
And all you can think of is, Oh God. The terror of Mom but with the power of English skills. You wonder what crazy things she was demanding.
You tell your mom this. She makes a comment that your father has said, verbatim, that he cared more for his brother and his wife rather than for Mom and you. You remind her that she was the one that called them when the situation seemed more dire. You remind yourself that you were the one that fixed her phone so she could call her sister-in-law.
There’s a palliative surgeon here. He’s South Asian because duh, doctors, and double duh, Fremont. But the fact that he’s younger than you throws you off for a second until you realize: you’re almost 50, you moron. Most of the hospital staff is now going to be younger than you. Except for, you know, the old. And dying.
What tech you have is definitely trying to punch up to its weight. There’s Wispr Flow which is trying its best to transcribe voice to text, but ain’t no test environment going to be like the chaos that is mom talking in Mandarin over everyone talking in English, asking WHAT DID HE SAY? WHAT ARE YOU SAYING? and then interjecting with choice thoughts such as I DON’T WANT TO LISTEN TO THIS TRANSLATOR ANYMORE, SHE SOUNDS LIKE A ROBOT AND CHATGPT IS EASIER TO UNDERSTAND. Yes, she said this out loud. To everyone.
There are a couple of things Mom can’t seem to shake off. You learned Dad has cancerous tumors in his lungs, most likely spread from somewhere else. But what kind of cancer? We don’t know. Why don’t we know? Because that would require a biopsy.
“The air in Fremont Village gave him cancer. We should have never put him there.” You told her that that was, literally, the stupidest thing you had ever heard and that it was distracting her from the bigger decisions she’s been hedging on, like whether or not he should go into hospice now or wait 24 hours for him to magically fucking heal himself.
You remind yourself Dad’s last cognizant sentence to you: Be Chinese. As in, be something else, someone else. Not… (waves hands your direction) this.
(breathes) Sorry. Not appropriate. Sorry.
So speaking of technology, you had Claude build an artifact, something that she could read on her iPad. It’s in two languages. It explains her situation. She opens it up. She reads it. You think she gets it? She stares at her iPad and you stare at her and you tell her you have to go, that tomorrow you have to meet with representatives from the hospice company.
Okay, she says. You second guess whether you should leave for your house or not, but you do.
You don’t know what to say when people ask how you’re doing. You say fine. You say he’s hanging in there. You’ve been saying “hanging in there” for months now and at some point those words stopped meaning anything and turned into a sound you make at people. He’s hanging in there. You’re fine. Fine.