The snow continued falling. I wanted to hold out my hand to my mother and help her across the icy bridge to her husband’s death. But I also selfishly wanted to run across it to be there with my father when he took his final breaths. “No,” I said, even more firmly now. “We’re not going to the FedEx drop box. We’re going straight to the hospital.”
“But it’s on the way!”
If I’ve learned one thing from being my mother’s daughter, it is this: Resistance is actually futile. So as my father lay dying in his hospital room in Baltimore, we drove to the nearest FedEx drop box in a strip mall. In a snowstorm. My boots crunched the first tracks into the pristine white coating of the streetlight-lit parking lot as I raced across it, my feet shouting with what felt like indecency, “Look! I am here! I walk this earth!” I slipped the carefully sealed envelope, addressed to Bart Dibble, into a drop box that was not exactly on the way to Johns Hopkins, but whatever. Each of us processes grief in our own way. Me? I wasn’t processing anything for the time being. I was too busy worrying about getting to the hospital before Dad’s last breaths and answering two constantly ringing cellphones, Mom’s and mine. “Where are you?” my traumatized sisters kept shouting. “What’s taking you so long?”
I started enumerating the various hold-ups: “Mom took a shower. Then we had to drop off an envelope at FedEx…” It was as if I were speaking a foreign tongue. What? They kept saying. WHAT? “Never mind. Don’t ask. We’re on our way.”
Outside the car, it was still dark. As we drove, we were privy to periodic updates. One sister, Julie, was too upset to speak. Jen could speak, if barely, but my brain couldn’t process what her eyes weren’t able to process either. My surgeon sister, Laura, who would never so much as pilfer a candy bar from a drugstore, had taken it upon herself to swipe another bolus of fluids from the hospital storage, to keep Dad alive until we got there. “I can’t keep propping him up with liquids,” she said. “How close are you?”
We were still on the beltway surrounding Washington, D.C., before the turnoff to 95 north. “Pretty close,” I lied. I didn’t want her to worry about the timing of our arrival on top of everything else she was managing.
When you’re the sole person with a license to practice medicine in your family, and you’re all of thirty-six years old on the morning your sixty-seven-year-old father is in the final throes of dying from pancreatic cancer—but really he’s dying from everything else that was shutting down his organs that morning, after his belly filled with ascites on Thanksgiving day—you are put in the unfortunate position of having to be both the newscaster explaining the carnage to your family as well as their go-between with the oncologist. Laura, in other words, was not given the chance, as her father lay dying, to be the grieving child. She had to be capable, on top of things. Keeping her father alive until her mother and sister could get back to the hospital after their ill-conceived detour.
Mom and I made it to the hospital, parked the car, zoomed up the elevator, and sprinted down the hallway to Dad’s room. He was still functionally alive, if barely. His death rattle was pronounced, a hideous, gear-stripping struggle to pull in oxygen and push out carbon dioxide. His tongue was hanging out of the right side of his mouth. His chest rose and fell out of sync with his periodic gasps for air. Make it stop! I wanted to scream, at the same time I was begging whatever deity might have been listening for one more crack of Dad’s crooked smile. I was used to movie death scenes: The soft music swells as the patient quietly says his meaningful goodbyes and slips away. This, however, was a horror film. My father’s lungs were filling with fluid. He was literally drowning in front of our eyes.
His vitals on the monitor were fading: low numbers, long valleys between heartbeat mountains, a barely perceptible pulse. My mother, walking in on this scene, was clearly and quite visibly unnerved. Her husband had gone from slightly cogent, when we’d left ten hours earlier, to barely of this world. Mom, either trying to crack a joke to lighten the darkness or maybe she was experiencing a trauma-induced psychotic break, poked Dad in the upper arm and said, “So, Dick, did you hear? Bart Dibble lost his job.”
Dad’s vital signs visibly spiked. His rattle grew more intense.
“Mom!” we said in unison, followed by a distinct choking on our own chuckles. Scientists who study the hows and whys of humor refer to this as “relief theory,” a release of psychic energy during moments of extreme tension. I prefer to think of it as the Bart Dibble theory, which is closer to Schopenhauer’s theory of incongruity: Humor, according to Schopenhauer, is what happens when we violate expectations, like when sixty clowns crawl out of a tiny car or, as linguists will add, when nonsense words in Dr. Seuss make us laugh. Was Mom’s joke inherently funny? No. Was its timing, during a hideous death scene, an unexpected comic gold gift of untold value? Yes. Now, whenever I remember the unspeakable pain of my father’s last hour, it is counterbalanced by the Seussian sound of that double B followed by an L (may Bart Dibble, too, rest in peace) and Mom’s spurious report of his job loss.
“Dad, we’re all here now,” said Laura, bringing us back to the macabre task at hand: watching the man we loved die.
* * *
—
My father, who was born in 1941, had been raised as a latch-key kid in Kansas City by a married pair of lawyers with their own two-person firm—Copaken and Copaken—and rock-solid humanist principles. Their specialty was representing the indigent, who otherwise would not have been able to afford legal services. My grandparents accepted everything from sacks of potatoes to homemade pies as recompense for their services, meaning money was as absent in Dad’s life as love was present. His father, a Jewish refugee from Kiev, had one arm that didn’t function. It hung limp by his side, ragdoll-style, shorter than the other. Its bones had been shattered by Cossacks who, while ransacking his family’s home, had lifted him out of his crib and smashed his infant body against a wall. Dad’s mother, whose Jewish parents had also fled persecution in Eastern Europe—Vilnius, in her case—was one of the rare female lawyers in America of her generation. She sewed her own clothes, wore sensible flats, and eschewed makeup and artifice of all kinds. She was gentle, calm, brilliant, achingly sweet, and both a prolific letter-writer and great listener, but she also had no time or patience for the roles culturally expected of her, particularly housework. This had been a source of secret shame for Dad, who—though he loved his parents deeply—felt he couldn’t invite friends over to his unkempt home after school.
My mom, born in 1942, was raised in the Bronx by a comically gifted if culinarily challenged housewife, who believed ketchup was a perfectly acceptable condiment on pasta, as well as by an emotionally distant, sometimes volatile army doctor, who would apply his leather belt to his children’s skin whenever he felt it was warranted. When Mom told her father she wanted to be a doctor like him, he told her there wasn’t enough money for a girl to go to medical school. My grandfather’s mother, from whom he was estranged, had stolen every dollar he’d saved and hidden under his mattress, which he’d planned to use to go to medical school. He then became a postal worker for several years to afford his tuition.
So while money in my mother’s home was also tight—an army doctor’s salary barely covered their two-bedroom, basement apartment, in which he and his wife slept on a pull-out sofa in the living room, to give their three kids, two girls and a boy, the two bedrooms—my grandfather’s pronouncement that whatever was left would be wasted on a girl wanting to become a doctor was uttered just as Mom’s older brother, my uncle, was finishing up his studies to become the oncologist who would, years later, discover Dad’s cancer.
Subconsciously or not, like many married couples, my parents had each chosen the other, I’ve come to believe, as a salve to heal past wounds. He would have a sparkling clean suburban home and a wife who would forgo her own career to look after the children. (The song they chose to dance to at my wedding was “Wind Beneath My Win
gs.”) She, after a lifetime of living below ground level, would have a skylit roof over her head, a baby grand Steinway—she’d been a gifted musician, a Music and Art graduate who played piano, flute, and cello, and had once conducted at Carnegie Hall as a teenager—and enough tuition for her kids’ college education, no matter their gender.
My parents married young, at twenty and twenty-one, during an era when an unmarried twenty-four-year-old female was already considered an “old maid,” and college-educated women with master’s degrees like my mother were expected to become homemakers. How could these two have possibly understood, on their wedding day in 1963, what it might be like, decades hence, for one of them to have sacrificed their dreams for the other’s? Or maybe both of their dreams were subsumed into ours. Dad was a weekend painter. He built an art studio onto our house. He would retreat there to throw paint on a giant canvas, à la Morris Louis, which he sold and exhibited here and there. Though he rarely complained and claimed to enjoy his job as an international lawyer in a white-shoe law firm, my hunch growing up—and particularly toward the end of his life—was that, had he not had to support four daughters and a wife; had healthcare been a national right instead of a privilege; had choosing art as a career been as acceptable in his circles as choosing law, he might have happily spent every waking hour in that art studio, making a professional go of it.
Or maybe I’m just projecting, knowing how euphoric I’d felt during my twenties as a photojournalist based in Paris, creating images that also paid my bills while relying on France’s excellent free healthcare; or between my midthirties and early forties, spending every day, from dusk till dawn, in the mentally challenging but giddy flow of composing income-generating sentences. I tried talking to him about all of this before he died, but he quickly shut me down. “No, I’ve loved every second of my life,” he said, ever the optimist with that constant, crooked smile, “and I wouldn’t change a thing.” But it’s telling that he spent nearly every hour of the last two months of that life, whenever he was not in pain from the chemo, with a paintbrush in his hand. He even managed, with my sisters’ help, to put together a final show of his new work within a month of his death.
I was on a twelve-city book tour during Dad’s show. “You cannot renege on your responsibilities to your work,” he’d said. “I’ll be upset with you if you come home for my show.” To say I still regret missing that show is an understatement. I look at the photos that were taken that day and feel a deep ache. What was so important about selling a few extra books that I missed out on my dad’s final moment of glory?
As we girls grew up, and as my parents’ traditional gender roles began to chafe, Mom lashed out with words and silences, Dad with secretly gobbled sweets—he contracted type 2 diabetes in late middle age and was less than stellar with compliance—and impulse purchases: sports cars, cameras, top-of-the-line stereo and video equipment. Could he afford these frequent indulgences, on top of his art supplies, food, clothing, four college tuitions, two weeks of summer vacation every year in the little cottage in West Harwich, Massachusetts, and the extra mortgage to build the art studio onto the house? Yes. Sort of. But all of this meant that our modest kitchen, which Mom had always hoped to renovate and expand to fit our growing family after my twin sisters were born, would remain too small, in her eyes, for the six of us to sit there comfortably during dinner, until years after her daughters were already out of the house: a symbolic rebuke, she felt, to the role she’d taken on as homemaker.
One time, at that kitchen table, Mom stood up in the middle of dinner and announced, “Girls, if I’m not here when you wake up tomorrow morning, you’ll know I’ve finally left your father.” At the time, I was mortified. And seething, just under the surface of my adolescent skin, with a hidden rage that I lacked self-awareness to process or understand. During our one attempt at family therapy soon thereafter, with Mom’s therapist, I hijacked the last fifteen minutes of that session with a string of wrath-filled expletives I could hardly believe were erupting from my mouth, but there they were. Out there. Naked. I begged for more sessions, but no one else in the family wanted to uncover that can of worms again. So we never went back.
Decades later, after having experienced similar frustrations in my own marriage, only with the added burden of having been the primary wage earner on top of the outmoded expectations that I would take on all the responsibilities of house and home, I not only understood my mother’s threat that night to leave her husband, I was the one who ultimately followed through on it.
Why didn’t my mother do the same? Part of it, I’m sure, was a lack of wage-earning options for women of her generation who’d left or never entered the workforce, as well as the social stigma of divorce. But also there was the undeniable fact of my parents’ palpable bond of love.
Yes, it could often be plagued by what psychologists call the four horsemen of the relationship apocalypse: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. And those horsemen would one day gallop straight into my marriage and turn me into an oft-raging monster: a trauma my own children, in turn—particularly the older two, who were teenagers for the worst of it—must now process in their adulthoods. (I am ashamed of this, but it must be noted.) At the same time, there was also the way my father told their origin story with still-sparkling stars in his eyes; the way he always told my mother, whenever she was feeling down about herself, that she was the most beautiful woman in the world; the I love you’s he sprinkled like fairy dust, often and freely. Mom’s language of love resided firmly in selfless acts of service, which she performed dutifully and daily, making sure Dad’s shirts were ironed, his doctor appointments were booked, his meals were cooked, his social life was organized. Whenever he traveled for work, she’d make countless round trips to the airport. And she would blush like a girl and say, “Oh, Dickie,” whenever Dad presented her with one of his homemade cards, each festooned with one of his signature smiling birds atop his cartoon characters’ heads and filled, inside, with words of love and admiration.
“Oh, Dickie…” said Mom, starting to tear up again. Looking even more lost and scared: How do you summarize a lifetime of love, with all of its ups and downs, in the few minutes you have left? With her four daughters looking on, Mom grabbed Dad’s hand. “Well, Dick,” she said, massaging his knuckles with her thumbs. “We’ve been together for forty-five years.” She froze, stuck at this setup of fact. Now what? Ask anyone who’s watched a loved one die, and they’ll tell you that trying to say something meaningful and cogent in the last hours of someone’s life can feel not only performative and uncomfortable, it can also devolve into farce. As when Mom finally found her Borscht Belt–delivered punch line: “I can’t say they’ve been the happiest years of my life, but they’ve been years.”
“Mom!” I said, snorting at her valiant if failed attempt, as unintentionally hilarious as it was true.
Mom sputtered, unable to form sentences. “I just…how do you…I can’t…” She finally settled on the only words that made sense: “I love you,” she whispered, multiple times into Dad’s ear, before we moved her down to Dad’s feet to massage them as each of his four daughters grabbed an arm or a leg to do the same. How lucky, I remember thinking, to have four daughters and four limbs. Being on right arm duty, near his right ear, wanting to assure him that all was well, I leaned over and whispered, “Dad, Bart Dibble did not lose his job. Mom loves you. We all love you. We’re all here now. All five of us. You can go.” Each of my sisters reassured him of the same: We were all in attendance. He could stop struggling. Soon thereafter the room, with the exception of one long steady beep of the EKG flatlining and five women’s simultaneous sobs, grew silent. No more soul-shattering death rattle. No more breaths in or out. No more pulse beeps or blood pressure or brain waves.
At that exact moment, the first rays of sun shot through the hospital window, illuminating my father’s still-warm body and turning the tableau of our newly prun
ed, mourning family into a chiaroscuro. The photographer in me wanted to put a camera between the pain and my overflowing eye and shoot this. The newly fatherless daughter in me had lost her ability to take action. She stood inert, broken. For the next several years.
Dad had told each of us that whenever we needed to speak to him, he’d appear as either a sunrise or a rainbow. And while we knew our father was just trying to make his transition to nonexistence easier on us—since every day there’s a sunrise, and rainbows are cool—you have to admit it was an inspired idea to claim two natural phenomena as his own.
On his cancer blog that morning, I posted a final photo of him staring out at the sun rising over the ocean a couple of days after he found out he was dying. “Dad died at 7:02 a.m….” I wrote, “…four months to the day from his diagnosis.” He’d spent every morning of that final vacation on the Delaware shore waking up in time to watch the sunrise, sharing it with whichever grandchild he could convince to join him, which they knew meant not only watching the magical fireball rise in the sky with their grandfather but also hearing him expound on photosynthesis, on the speed of light, on Einstein’s theory of relativity, on why the moon causes waves, on the parabolic arc of earth’s rotation, on why we have seasons, on seeing Simon and Garfunkel play in a tiny venue, before they were famous, on art, on evolution’s punctuated equilibrium, and on the vast mysteries of the universe as yet unknown and forever unknowable. To this day, whenever I see a sunrise or a rainbow, my father feels both physically present with me and comforting in ways I find difficult to describe. “Oh, hi, Dad,” I’ll say, just as I did that morning he left his body and reappeared as the sun.
ELEVEN
Yes, and…
Ladyparts Page 14