by Honor Moore
On his return he had a brain scan, and days later my sister Rosemary and I sat with him in a consulting room at Columbia-Presbyterian, listening to a surgeon trying to be gentle. The doctor told us that when he looked at the MRI of my father’s head, he stopped counting at six. Six sites of melanoma, and they were continuing to spread—replicate—across my father’s brain. Something like spiderwebs, or mold, the cancer’s origin a cyst removed from behind his ear—“just a little something”—two years earlier.
“These conversations are theological, not medical,” the surgeon said, and my father laughed.
“We should get along very well.”
Between radiation sessions to arrest the tumors, my father hit the road again, his Decadron-induced euphoria fueling his appetite to respond to every invitation. A columnist in the Metro section of the New York Times had noted in a profile that he was fighting an aggressive cancer, and letters of support arrived at Bank Street by the score. He traveled to Chicago to give the keynote at the annual meeting of the Episcopal Urban Caucus, an occasion that was a reunion of those whom he had inspired for decades in their work in the church and city. There was a standing ovation. “I’ve never felt better in my life,” he kept saying as he bought another airplane ticket: a visit to my brothers and sisters in California, a sermon in Washington, a week in Antigua with great friends. My brother George predicted that if our father was to die at all, it would surely be in an airport line. “Such a great man,” people said as I moved through my life in New York. “I’m so sorry about your father.” And then there was a day when he no longer felt like traveling. I took him to the theater one night and he was suddenly feeble, for the first time looking his age. I was grateful for the gloss of formality; touching him with authentic affection was still difficult; as if all the years of distance had irreversibly calcified, or had acquired an independent dynamism. I could take his arm to help him up the marble steps to the dining room at the Century Club, or to the curb for a taxi, but I held myself in when he embraced me.
But as the days went on, I could feel something returning to life, something from long ago, like the familiarity of a house in a dream. I began to burst abruptly into tears, and there he would be, young again, rowing a golden guide boat through black water, telling me a story. I want to love my father again, I said to myself as into each day came the new reality of his dying. The doctor had said he had four months. I didn’t have much time to make it right and I didn’t know how I possibly could, but now I could hardly bear being apart from him. One night I called my sister Marian, who had come in from Minneapolis to take care of him. She is ten years younger than I am. “I can’t stand this,” I said to her. “I’m so sad for him.”
“I’m so interested,” she said, tentative, compassionate, “that you’re in this place . . . He’s very happy about where he is with you,” she continued. I told her about our last dinner out together, when he’d told me about his conversion—his big hands pushing off from his head, his arms opening. “I felt the presence of God. It changed my life,” he said. “And I could always return there, and during the war, what came to me in battle when I was among the dying, the Crucifixion—that was where I could go with my questions, with my . . .” Here was the man whose ring they kneel and kiss. A man who had actually lived something he called faith, something implacable, certain, unassailable.
On March 19, 2003, the United States invaded Iraq and there were demonstrations all over the world, and four days later my father preached at an evensong for peace at St. John the Divine. Mark Sisk had succeeded Bishop Grein, and this was one of the first sermons my father had been invited to give at the cathedral since he had been inhibited. Listening to the tape now, I hear that my father’s voice was weak, but I also hear the familiar preacher as he forcefully poses a question. “What kind of Christian,” he asks, “is a man who prays alone in the White House before proceeding with a war that millions across the earth of all faiths have protested? What are we going to do?
“I don’t know,” he said, answering his own question, and in that I don’t know was the knowledge that he would not live to find out. “But no sermon can end without hope,” he continued. “No sermon is complete without hope. Some hopes are just dreams. Some have reality. This is one of my most favorite, from the Book of Revelation.
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.
And then, on the tape, I can hear the sound of rustling papers, and my father giving a concluding blessing. “Let us in silence pray that these dark times will pass. Pray that we will have the courage and the freedom to stand against death and destruction, pray that our leaders will turn from their course. Pray that our loved ones will be protected. Pray that this great land will again be a land that lives out our principles and a land that people come to with peace and joy. Amen.”
There is a video of the aftermath of that service. My father is sitting in the nave of the cathedral, and people are coming up to him, and I stop counting when the number of those who kiss him and whom he kisses and embraces passes one hundred. “I love you, Bishop,” over and over, or he grabs at the hand of a nun, “Will you come see me, so we can talk about old times?”
In early April, at the yearly family meeting in New York about the Adirondacks, my father begs us to care for “that exquisite . . . exquisite . . . place . . .” and unable to find the next word, tears coursing down his face, exclaims, “It’s my . . . brain . . . my . . .” After the meeting, eight of his children and a few of his grandchildren celebrate him around a big table at the Waverly Inn, each toasting a quality he’s passed on. “Your love of life,” I say, raising a glass. And the following week, in the enormous gallery at the Century Club, there is a party, my father sitting in an old-fashioned bentwood wheelchair surrounded by more than a hundred friends and family. Imagine! A going-away party before one’s death—off-color, sentimental, and heartfelt toasts, my father’s face happily large and placid, bowing like a great balloon.
At Bank Street, the telephone rarely stopped ringing, my father making dates still, in his inevitable tiny black book, visitors arriving to take him out to lunch, to have tea, cocktails, supper. They call ahead or just arrive at the door begging to see him, and he sits there, praying with those who come to pray, smiling and nodding with old friends from Indianapolis or Washington. “You can’t see him,” I say once to a caller. And the prominent man in his eighties bursts into tears. “Never again?” And so I write him into the book for the next morning. And so the days pass and I teach, ride the subway, sit in a café reading student papers or writing, everyone walking past outside as if the world were a normal place, as if the blue sky were actually blue, as if my father were leading an Easter procession again, in his white brocade, following the gold cross, the dry, heated air pungent with incense.
One Tuesday morning, Rosemary and I hired a town car and took him to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. He had been having radiation for eight weeks; if the tumors had decreased in size, then it would be possible to attempt further treatment—in other words, there would be a chance of survival. We wheeled him into the doctor’s small consulting room, Rosie and I each taking a chair. “How are you?” the doctor said.
“Weaker,” my father said. The doctor was looking at the sheets on his clipboard, lifting one, and then another. “What I really want to know is what’s going on up here,” my father continued, pointing to his head.
/> “It’s worse,” the doctor said. “It’s going to progress at a relatively rapid pace.”
“A week? Three weeks?” Pop asked.
“Weeks,” the doctor said. “How many I don’t know.” I saw my father look a little dazed, and so I filled the silence.
“Would it have been worse without radiation?”
“Much worse,” the doctor said.
“Well,” my father began, “my brother came to see me two days ago. I knew what I wanted to say, and then, well then I just forgot it!” I looked at Rosie.
“There will be more incidents like that,” the doctor said, as if he were talking about a problem with a furnace or a car. “Also more sleepiness and seizures.”
“What do we do now?” my father asked, and the doctor said that the only treatment possible now was palliative care and the continued use of Decadron. “There’s nothing else?” my father asked, and the doctor continued his emotionless monologue.
“My own outlook is to be very aggressive in treating this disease, but to be realistic, treating it aggressively when such treatment will have no effect just makes the patient miserable.”
“So I’ll just gradually get worse until . . .”
“It’s not going to be gradual.” My father looked at the doctor, his eyes filling. The doctor looked away, and then my father’s head dropped as if he were a heartbroken child.
Back in the waiting room, when Rosie left for a moment, he looked at me and said, “I sort of knew, didn’t you?”
“Sort of,” I said. Then, to change the subject, I asked him his latest thoughts about an afterlife.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think I’ll just go to sleep,” and then, “Well, no one has really come back from the afterlife.”
“No one except Jesus,” I said.
“And he was a little”—there was a pause—“maybe a little nuts.” His mystified expression was like a big cartoon.
“I don’t think it was as bad for Jesus as it is for you,” I said. He looked at me as if I were crazy and held out both his hands, palms up.
“But he had pain.”
“But don’t you think,” I said, “that the pain was so great he might have stopped feeling it?” Pop looked at me and I at him, and then we began to laugh.
Two days later when I arrived at Bank Street, my father was in the living room, facing the window in his big chair. He had been scheduled to preach the previous Sunday, Palm Sunday, at St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery, had climbed the pulpit only to find he had brought the wrong notes; the congregation had broken his fumbling silence with applause and chanting, “We love you, Bishop Moore.” He had become what the hospice worker called “confused”—he talked like a poem or like a character out of Samuel Beckett: “Three gentlemen came, we had the luncheon, that was all.” In fact only one man had come for lunch, and Pop had sent him away. The day was beautiful, and so I wheeled him out the front door onto the stoop, and we sat there for a while, watching the new buds on the trees.
I stayed for supper. We ordered food from a place called Mama’s, and at the table that had once been in the Kent dining room, we ate turkey and mashed potatoes. Halfway through supper, he began an inventory of his children. He was looking at me, his white hair, his wide-open blue eyes, and it was dark in the room. When he got to me, he paused and took a breath.
“That therapy we had didn’t work,” he said.
You must once have loved your father very much. The light in the therapist’s small office came back.
“It worked for me,” I said. “Why do you say it didn’t?”
“We didn’t finish,” he said.
“Brenda got sick, I didn’t think you would have wanted—”
“It didn’t bring us back together.” Together. The word wrenched my heart.
“But I’m here,” I said, filled with sorrow that I had failed him again. Then, abruptly, he seemed somewhere else.
“And why was it that we went to therapy?” he asked. I forgot that he had tumors in his brain, that he was losing thought and memory, that he was dying. I was angry that he didn’t remember as I did. Cold and angry.
But I couldn’t stay angry. Two mornings later, a call from Bank Street: He’d had a terrible night. He was incontinent and frightened. “His brain function has further deteriorated,” I wrote my brothers and sisters when I got home that evening. “His memory is utterly blasted and his verbal capacity near zero, the same with his comprehension. This was not expected to get better, though if he rested, it could uptick a little.” Oxygen was brought into the house, and a supply of liquid morphine. Rosemary and I met with the hospice nurse, who delineated certain milestones that mark the way to death. My father was not yet picking at his bedclothes, there weren’t yet “changes” in his skin. His heart was still strong. But I put a message on his voice mail saying that he was no longer accepting calls.
The next morning, however, I arrived to find my father had slept very well—twenty hours straight. With the nurse’s help, he had showered and put on his red silk aviator jacket, one of his favorite presents from Brenda. Rosie and I sat down with him and the hospice nurse, and Pop very clearly said he wanted to stay at home “for the duration,” as if he were asking our permission.
“Yes,” we both said. “Yes, of course.”
The next day, Good Friday, I arrived after lunch. We did his mail, and as the sun fell and the room darkened, we were having what conversation his sputtering synapses allowed. On an impulse, I went over and sat on the chair next to him, snuggled up to him, and said in a little-girl voice, “Oh, Poppy, will you tell me a story?” I hadn’t called him that in years, and I expected he’d cuddle in return, but instead, violently, he drew back.
“I love you,” he said, an expression of terror and distaste on his face, “but not . . . so . . . close.” He tried to recover himself. “I mean I love you, but . . .” I had been helping finish his sentences, and so I helped him complete this one.
“. . . not that much.”
“Yes,” he said, holding himself apart, “not that much.”
It was my turn to draw back. I stood up and moved in the darkness to the sofa across from him, holding tears in. This time I wouldn’t flee, I told myself. I would sit right through whatever came. I watched him turn toward me and settle back into his chair, and I settled into mine and considered how to reconfigure the conversation.
Suddenly I heard him say, “Once upon a time . . .” And then he stopped, embarrassed.
And I said, like a child again, “Oh, tell it . . .”
“I think I’m too—” He couldn’t find the word, so he tapped his head.
“Please,” I said into the darkness.
“Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a little girl who lived by herself in a house in the forest. Every night she dreamed of a wonderful man who would come and save her.” He said “wonderful” as his mother would have, bouncing from syllable to syllable, the sound of the word becoming a world of tenderness and wonder. “Night after night she dreamed of this man, oh, how she wanted this man.” My father was inside himself, not looking at me. “And then one night she heard the sound of footsteps outside.” And here he tapped his chair with a finger. Tap tap tap. “Footsteps through the forest. The little girl was frightened. What was it? Who was it? And then she heard a knocking at her door.” And Pop knocked on a table, hard: the bishop knocking on the doors of the cathedral, the storyteller sound effect that thrilled me as a child. “Should she go to the door? She couldn’t tell if it was a mean man or the dream man.” A mean man or the dream man! I leaned forward, and he continued, no problem with the sentences. “She was so scared. But she heard the knock again.” And my father knocked again on his table. “And this time she went to the door and opened it and there before her stood the most extraordinary man she had ever seen, dressed in
white armor and carrying a sword and a spear.”
This was a new story, nothing I’d ever heard him tell. How could he know I was falling in love, right then. Falling deeply in love with a man who was also falling in love with me? How could he know that in the darkness of these extraordinary months, my question had been exactly the one he was now asking for me: A mean man or the dream man? It was as if this father of mine had walked the terrain of my dreams, had found there the thread of my story, a story he was now, at the brink of death, weaving from what had gone unsaid all our years together. Soon the girl and the man were dancing, he was saying, and I could see us, whirling around the room. “And then, then,” my father said, with an exhalation of relief, “then they went to bed together!”
“Pop,” I said, “what about breakfast?” My father hesitated, and then he smiled, a glint of delighted mischief in his eyes.
“I can’t tell you that now.”
One morning the following week, I climbed the stairs to my father’s room, opened the bedroom window, and pulled up a shade. The room had low ceilings and took the entire width of the house, four windows, sunlight coming in through all of them. His bed was queen-size and quite low, and there he was, lying on the coverlet, a pale mint green embroidered elegant thing. I rearranged his pillows so that he could hold a glass of iced tea and drink without spilling. He’d allowed me to help him, to be tender with him. I’d brought him some French blue cheese and crackers, because blue cheese was always his favorite. Sometimes, late at night in Indianapolis, he’d pour himself a glass of milk and cut a piece of Roquefort, and I’d sit with him in the kitchen. He’d be wearing khakis and a flannel shirt, just as he was today in the sunlight on the bed in which he would die. It was this late night cheese that he gave up whenever he wanted to get back down to his usual 185 pounds, and now he still looked beautiful, the black eye he’d got falling a month before still there, but diminished, his skin healthy. He was clean and shiny, the same physical body I knew as a child.