As 2022 was slipping away I eventually found my way into a tearful slumber with mixed emotions about leaving the year behind. It was the year I shared my last memories with my dad. The last year we shared in a Rio Grande Valley Bird chase. The last year we visited the National Butterfly Center together. But most gravely, the year I spent three days in a hospital room watching life slip from Dad’s feeble body following the removal of life support on the heels of a massive stroke…
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| Snowy Plover excursion with Dad, La Sal del Rey, Hidalgo Co, TX 5Feb2022 |
This whole passage-of-time-business associated with the New Year seems rather arbitrary and symbolic…a symbol system to measure time by seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, centuries and so on. We mark the ending and beginning. And then what?
I woke in 2023 feeling just as sad as 2022, just as unsettled and just as haunted as the day before.
Rewind to early July…
After a couple months of my dad insisting he was driving north this year to Michigan with or without my help, I agreed to fly to Texas to drive my mom and him from the Lower Rio Grande Valley to Wisconsin and then onward to “the Cabin” in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I had hoped my parents would not insist on returning to their prior Michigan home that was now owned by my cruel sister. But dad had his sights on returning.
I had closed the door on that place and its memories during the Fall of 2021 after a series of family breakdowns and the maltreatment of my parents surrounding their agreement with my sister about them living there during the summer months. Yet here we were poised in July to return. (REGRET).
July 13th we arrived at “the Cabin” with little light remaining to open up. A disagreement about the plan of action leading up to our arriving resulted in Dad exclaiming, “Why are you being such a bitch?!” because I went against his suggestion for the order of our stops in town. My decision was logical, avoided back-tracking and the wasting of precious daylight. Dad had insisted on a different order. Calling me a bitch was highly uncharacteristic for him. My 20/20 hindsight tells me now this episode was one of the many foreshadowing events leading to his death. Clues. Warning signs I missed. (REFLECTION. REGRET).
Dad and I spent the following day, July 14, getting the water and generator running. This day, as many others during the month of July, was shadowed by Dad perseverating on his grievances surrounding how my sister and her spouse had treated him the preceding fall. Coming back to the cabin bore those wounds re-opened. As much as I wanted for this migration of sorts to be a happy time for my parents, the family drama of 2021 painted everything black…
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| Dad’s hand turning on the water |
July 15th, Peter, my nephews and their mother arrived for a long weekend spent enjoying the treasures of the Pike Lake cabin and the nearby southeast shore of Lake Superior. In other words, we indulged in what had been for most of my life, MY HEART. The boreal forests and bogs had been my playground since I was preteen. They were my first love if ever there was one…
During our long weekend, Dad had a fallen by the boathouse. Though not too severe, Dad’s face was bleeding from an abrasion. It was enough to warrant a break from working and attention to his injuries. However, he resisted my help to gain his footing and insisted on trying to continue tinkering in the boathouse. I begged through tears for him stop, “Stop! Please stop. You’re bleeding.” He finally stopped and retreated to the cabin. He looked defeated. He appeared dejected. I could sense he felt like I was treating him like a child. This wasn’t the first struggle we had had in recent days. This was Dad’s fight to maintain his independence. It was also likely his struggle with cognitive decline brought on by what I now know were clots being thrown to his brain, clots that eventually occluded one of his cerebral arteries. HINDSIGHT. REGRET I did not do more, did not insist we go to the hospital to have him examined, did not nag him enough to take his blood thinner… He had been skipping doses, especially while we traveled from Texas to Michigan. I learned of this when I reminded him upon arrival in Wisconsin to take his medication. He informed then he had not taken anything since we left Texas! What?! I had backed off on nagging during our travels because he had spent the night before leaving Texas carefully setting up his medications. He also expressed being focused on taking his Warfarin because he needed to get his INR in range. Then why skip? When your blood was already dangerously thick, why skip? IF ONLY YOU DID NOT SKIP YOUR MEDS DAD.
We finished our long weekend together with a trip to Vermilion Point. Dad immersed himself in his usual nature photography as did I. We lingered on the pristine beach along Lake Superior. The nephews played and swam with Uncle Peter. Mom and dad sat and picked around by the makeshift driftwood shelter. I searched the shore for agates. Life was good.
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| Dad hiking back from Vermillion Beach July 2022 |
Back at Pike Lake, Dad enjoyed what would be his last time fishing off the dock with his grandsons. He also got in his last hugs with the kids, something I often encouraged. I keenly recall standing in the kitchen at the cabin encouraging the boys to hug Grandpa stating “We never know when our last time with Grandpa will be.” I was often mindful of this in recent years. I cherished every moment with my parents, especially my dad. In their advancing age and with Dad’s declining health, I often reminded myself just how FLEETING and FINAL any passing moment could be. I wish now I would have taken more photos of those final hugs. The memory for now is quite saliently etched in my brain: tender, loving and disarming to a Grandpa that had often become grumpy. I fear the day those memories fade…
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| Dad fishing with Kelby, July 2022 |
July 18, we departed back to Wisconsin…
Three days later I was amid a chase for my Wisconsin lifer Limpkin, closing in at approximately thirty minutes away when I got the call from my sister telling me Mom found Dad down by the boathouse frothing from the mouth. An ambulance was on the way.
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| Limpkin, Racine Co, WI 21July22 |
I felt that all too familiar visceral response: my body was overcome with shaking chills in the heat of July. I had felt this when Dad had his massive heart attack and then again when my parents were hit by a drunk driver and rushed to the hospital, Dad with an open head injury. Adrenaline. Sinking. Shock. This time, this news, I knew DAD WAS GONE. The day I had feared the most was upon me.
I was seven hours away from Dad, on the tail end of a two hour rare bird chase. Dad’s outcome was out of my control, so I went for the Limpkin. The memory of the Limpkin and the birders I encountered feels surreal. REFLECTION… I was detached from the bird, from the birder’s, from the fate ahead of me. I went. I saw the Limpkin. I made small talk. I made superficially yet personally revealing talk about my dad. I left the Limpkin. I drove two hours back home, packed my bags and headed back north to Pike Lake having just left there a few days prior.
I drove seven hours in the darkness arriving in the wee hours of Friday morning at the small rural hospital, Helen Newberry Joy. I saw Dad, intubated, lifeless. He had thrown massive clots to his brain. Our options were to transfer him to Marquette for further care or remove life support. We decided the latter knowing Dad never wanted to live out his days incapacitated and confined to a nursing home. We were assured the stroke was severe despite despite no MRI. One of the CAT scans had shown extensive clotting occluding one of arteries feeding the brain.
I spent that night alone at Pike Lake, in that cabin filled with SO MANY MEMORIES. MY HEART. Once MY HOME. Mom was staying with a neighbor. I remained awake into the early morning. Intoxicated. Trying to numb the indelible pain.
Mom and I returned to the hospital the next morning to remove life support. We said what we thought would be our final goodbyes to my lifeless, sedated dad. The respiratory therapist removed life support. I don’t know why I expected dad to immediately go, but I did. I work in healthcare and should have known better. The breathing tube was removed and dad persevered. In fact, with simple nasal cannula oxygen support, he rallied and fizzled for a heart wrenching two and half days. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, mom and I sat with Dad, feeling and watching his every coarse and progressively more congested breath. I swabbed his mouth. He suckled the toothette, even responded with reflexive swallows. Saturday, he showed additional reflexive responses in his feet and toes. His feet were always sensitive, so he recoiled and wiggled them when I stroked the bottoms. Was he rallying? Did we make the wrong call? Doubt set in, a doubt I have gone over again and again in my head since his death…But he never roused to talk to us. And when they moved him, he showed complete lack of head and trunk control. His head flopped atop his body when moving him.
Saturday evening, July 23rd, my sister and nephew, dad’s eldest of three grandsons arrived. We grieved and hugged at Dad’s bedside. I continued to sit at Dad’s side holding his hand, checking his pulse, watching him breathe. Oddly, my sister captured a photo of this on her phone. WHY? WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO REMEMBER SUCH A MORBIDLY HAUNTING EXPERIENCE?! She shared this photo with Mom. So to this day, when I am helping Mom with her phone, I stumble upon a memory of Dad I would much prefer to forget…
When we left Dad Saturday night. I hugged dad and told him in his ear that we would be back tomorrow. Colleen and Tyler insisted Dad nodded in acknowledgment. I was buried in Dad’s neck but doubt he had the strength or control to produce such a response…or perhaps it was his last hurrah…It would feel comforting to know Dad heard and felt my final “I love yous.” I DO NOT FEEL COMFORTED.
Sunday, July 24th, we gathered around at Dad’s bedside late morning. My brother and his family were feverishly racing to get to Dad’s bedside before he passed. Dad’s breathing had deteriorated. It was more shallow, more coarse than the prior day. He was hot to the touch coming in at a temperature of 105.1 F. I resumed my perch next to him, holding his hand, swabbing his mouth. I had even brought frozen Coke to swab his oral cavity. Coke was his favorite. He drank this in lieu of water… I abandoned the plan to give him Coke upon realizing he did not appear to be swallowing. I played Buddy Holly radio on Pandora for Dad. We visited with each other around Dad’s failing body. We giggled while reminiscing about various family events…Expected yet unexpectedly, among the din of music and laughter, Dad’s breathing went silent…and so did we. Smiles left our faces. Then tears, lots of tears in a week long marathon of tears. DEATH was upon us.
My brother and his wife arrived an hour or so later with their 5 and 9 year old boys in tow. This was our family’s visitation. There would be no embalming, no other gatherings around a corpse that barely resembled our lost loved one. This was it. No embellishments. My curious nephew inquired if Grandpa was sleeping. Would he wake up? “No, honey, he’s not going to wake up. He’s dead.”
