The Story of My Father

by Sue Miller

  But we had arrived. We had. And guilty as I felt, terrified as I was, shamed as I felt for feeling it, I was glad. I was glad that my father’s body had found the way out, the reprieve from what had been waiting for him.

  I told the doctor that I’d already thought about this and I wanted to sign the order. She said she would have it prepared. I asked her how long it would take him to die. She said she wasn’t sure, that it depended a little on how long he continued to eat and drink. Maybe a week, maybe several. She said she’d instruct the nurses that he was to have no pain; he’d get regular morphine. She said she was sorry and then she left. I never saw her again.

  I stayed with my father the whole day, feeding him a little, giving him liquids. I left the room when they came in to turn him and change his bedding, but from the hallway I could hear him cry out.

  Before I left that evening, I stopped at the nursing station and signed the DNR.

  That night, at home, I called everyone again. This time they believed me. I could hear the shock in their voices—some of it, I think, at me, at my choice. I could hear that most of them didn’t share the sense I had of a kind of frightened elation for Dad, on his behalf.

  So it began. Every day I rose and dressed and had my breakfast, and then, as if I were going to a job, I drove out to Sutton Hill, feeling frightened and weepy each time I drew near. Once I arrived it was better. I held him, sang hymns to him, or read to him, mostly scripture, a lot of psalms. I brought tapes of the music he’d liked to listen to in New Hampshire and played them. Sometimes I just sat silently by him. I fed him, as long as he could swallow food. I gave him water and juices, at first from a cup and then, when that became impossible for him, from a straw, releasing it drop by drop into his mouth.

  The nursing care was wonderful through all this, except for the morphine, which I sometimes had to fight for. But he was always clean, and the women who handled him were tender and loving, sweetly solicitous, especially when they had to cause him pain, which happened whenever they moved him.

  My husband came out with me twice. Ben came once. But most of the time I sat alone with him. It took him ten days to die. The organism wants life—clings to it desperately, in fact, whatever the terms—even when the intelligence has decided that the terms are so degrading that death is preferable.

  Every morning on the drive out—beautiful day after beautiful day, as I recall them—I was terrified that I’d arrive and find him already dead. It seemed to me part of a pact I’d made, with him and with myself, when I signed the DNR—that I would be with him throughout. That he wouldn’t die alone. The thought that he might made me wild. One morning, after I’d gotten off the highway and was nearing Sutton Hill, a bird flew into my windshield with a loud thunk! My heart lurched. As I drove away, I could see it on the road in my rearview mirror, a flopping motion, then stillness. It was a sign, I thought, and began to cry. But when I arrived, Dad was still alive, shrunken now, his nose enormous in his face, his hands held up like claws on the sheet, but breathing. Snoring loudly, in fact. I was so grateful I kissed him over and over.

  In all this, I tried to imagine what I would want, dying. To feel loved, I thought. To feel connected to those I had loved. So I held him. I stroked his face, his hands. I kissed him. I spoke the names of the people he’d loved: my mother, his parents, his children, his siblings. The last few days, as his body labored, I told him over and over it was all right to let go, that he didn’t have to work so hard. By then, I think, he wasn’t conscious. He probably didn’t hear me at all. But I kept doing it, in part, I suppose, as a kind of consolation for myself.

  He died early in the afternoon on the tenth day, breathing more deeply and slowly, then pausing for a long time between breaths. Then one last breath, and I knew he was gone. His color changed, nearly instantly. He was suddenly, palpably, absent.

  All the grief I’d held in for days—really, for years—poured out of me. I didn’t care how loud I was. At some point, one of the aides came in, then quickly left. The head nurse came a moment later and sat with me awhile, and then the kind woman in charge of social services replaced her. When I finally felt ready to leave, I called my husband, and he came to get me.

  At home, I went upstairs to lie down, to weep some more. I had called one of my brothers from Sutton Hill and asked him to call my other siblings. My husband offered to call a few other people—some of my friends; his parents. I could hear his muffled voice rising from downstairs as I lay in our room. At one point, talking to his mother, he laughed about something they’d moved on to, and I felt a shock, a jolt: life went on, then, for others. It would, of course, go on for me too, but at that moment it seemed an impossibility. I felt locked into this grief, as though I’d never get out. I couldn’t imagine, actually, wanting to. Dad’s dying had been like a long labor, the work mostly his, but the experience for me as profound, as isolating, as the labor of birth. For weeks after my son was delivered, I remember, I was stunned by it—by what I’d gone through, by how alone with it I’d felt, by how astonished I was by it, and by how isolating that astonishment was. Others held my son, admired him. They saw him simply as a big healthy baby. But when I looked at him, part of what I saw and felt was how he’d come to me, that long solitary labor, the amazing combination of agony and release that I felt I could explain to no one else. And in some nearly parallel way, this is what I felt about my father’s death. It was what I returned to frequently, it was privately where I lived, for a long time after it was over.

  For a variety of reasons, my siblings wanted to wait to have a memorial service until the middle of the summer. I argued for something immediate, but my energy was depleted, and I didn’t bring much passion to the argument, though I felt passionate enough about it. When I told my older brother that for myself, I wanted, I needed, some ceremony earlier than that—now— he suggested I could scatter Dad’s ashes. Would that help? Yes, I said, though I wasn’t sure it was the case. Yes, I think it would.

  And so my husband and I drove up to New Hampshire with the wooden box I’d requested my father’s ashes be put in. (Why had I chosen this? A useless expense in some ways. But I think I remembered the flimsy cardboard box Mother’s ashes had come in and felt I wanted something different, something more solid, even though in the end it would have held my father’s ashes for only a matter of days.) We stayed overnight in a pleasant hotel and got up early. The ashes were to be scattered according to my father’s instructions at a spot high up on the Androscoggin River where my parents had often gone together; my father would fish, my mother would read, the old dog would wade or hunt or sleep on the grass. My mother’s ashes had been scattered there, and though I hadn’t been present for that ceremony, I knew exactly where it had taken place. I’d gone often enough to the same spot with my parents for picnics.

  But when we arrived—on a beautiful clear day, the air still cool and damp—the whole site was crowded, crowded with people with fishing gear. They stood on the rocks, casting off; they waded in at the edge of the rushing water and dropped their lines in the stream below them. It must have been the opening, or near the opening, of the fishing season. Initially it struck me as funny and sad and perhaps entirely appropriate that this should be so.

  I moved around carefully among the congregation of fishermen, excusing myself, trying not to get in the way, reaching again and again into the plastic bag that held what was left of my father and scattering it—into the gunmetal rushing water, onto the rocks where he’d stood to fish, then back in the flat clearing where my parents had sat together and had their picnics. The fishermen clearly knew what I was up to. They stepped away from me and called their dogs in as I worked my way around the site.

  I tried to be quick, to be minimally intrusive. I was glad to be doing it, glad to be the one to do it, but its peculiar and public nature robbed it, for me, of some of what might have been healing in it. Or maybe I had exaggerated in my own mind what might have been healing. In any case, when it was done and we drove
away, I felt none of the sense of relief, of having ended something fittingly, that I’d hoped for.

  In fact, for several years after this I continued to suffer from what I think of almost as seizures of grief, unexpected and uncontrollable bouts of sorrow and rage, triggered by the memory of my father’s helplessness in his illness and my own in response. I began to have those dreams of him, the dreams in which he was in some situation he couldn’t manage, in which he needed my assistance; the dreams in which, in one way or another, I always failed him. I thought of them as Alzheimer’s dreams.

  None of this was startling to me—that I was haunted by him, that I couldn’t let him go. But the way I thought of him and of myself in relation to him began to run on such a well-worn and circular track that I recognized it finally as obsessive. I tried therapy. The talking cure. And it did help with my anger—at my siblings for not coming to see my father while he lay dying and for postponing his memorial service after he’d died; at the doctor who never returned to his bedside once I’d signed the Do Not Resuscitate order; at the sweet and stupid nurse who withheld his morphine because it wasn’t “good” for him; at the Sutton Hill preacher who, in spite of my protests, woke my father to semiconsciousness and pain in order to pray “with” him; and at myself—for everything I’d done and hadn’t done. It relieved a lot of the anger, but it didn’t stanch the sorrow, which could still overwhelm me from time to time.

  At some point, then, I decided it might help me to make an account of my father’s life and, to a larger extent, of his dying. I wanted to scatter his ashes both more publicly and more privately. I wanted to write about him. The purpose of it all, as I imagined it then, would be to help someone else in my position. Someone who found herself taking care of a beloved parent as he disappeared before her eyes, leaving behind a needier and needier husk, a kind of animated shell requiring her attention and care—care she would offer in memory of the person who once lived inside it. I wanted to remember him and also to make some use of his long and terrible dying. I wanted, of course, to heal myself too. And so I started.

  Afterword

  OF COURSE, it was not so simple. I started three times during the next decade, and three times I stopped, halted by the sense that I was somehow off on the wrong tack; and then too by an idea for fiction that pressed in on me.

  The first of these interruptions was, naturally enough, a novel about the death of a parent. The parent in this case, though, was an elderly mother. A difficult woman, a prima donna of sorts, who comes to stay with her middle-aged son for some months on her way to a retirement community. A woman who bore certain similarities to my own mother—though she didn’t have an eighth of my mother’s charm. Still, it amused me to think it was perhaps to appease the spirit of my mother, competitive and narcissistic as she was, that I had conjured this book. It made perfect sense in terms of the family dynamics, didn’t it? I had to cope with her first. She came first. First, her book; then—only then—Dad’s.

  So I wrote The Distinguished Guest. And when I was done several years later, when it was off to the publisher, I turned back again to my father, to the memoir. As I had the first time, I hauled out the box of family papers; once again I hired an assistant to find out what the latest in Alzheimer’s research was. And for the second time, after a period of working on it, I hit a kind of dead end—the magic of appeasement be damned.

  I began to think my problem had to do with voice. With the fact that I was accustomed to using the first person only fictionally, hiding behind an imagined speaker who might be close to who I was but was not “I.” I never had to own any of the thoughts and ideas and feelings I described in a novel; they belonged to my “employees,” as Grace Paley once called her characters. Here, in the nonfiction work, I was self-employed, and I was having trouble figuring out how far forward I wanted to step, how much of the real “I” to expose. At least that’s what I told myself.

  I thought it might be helpful to me to write a personal essay or two, to practice using a nonfictive first-person voice in some shorter works that would be less difficult for me emotionally than the book about my father’s death. I began to take on a few journalism assignments, something I’d always turned away from before.

  It did help. In the short essays I wrote, I could feel the breaking down of the scrim that had hung between me as first-person narrator and my imaginary reader. And even though the essays were not, in fact, themselves very intimate, I found myself writing comfortably and intimately in them.

  But in the meantime, while I was working on this problem of voice, along came another idea for a novel, a novel that rescued me again from the memoir, a novel called, appropriately enough, While I Was Gone. When I’d finished it, though, the memoir was still waiting, still prodding me.

  I started again, with the more assured voice I’d taught myself in my essays. But as the writing began to come with greater ease, what I discovered was a more basic confusion on my part—the underlying question about why I was doing this, about what its truest, deepest aim was.

  It made me think of the way I’d taught fiction when that was how I was making my living—of what I would have said to a student writer as confused as I still was about what I was writing. How I would start her thinking about what to do. What drew you here? I’d ask. What’s making you want to record this? What’s the point, for you? And how can you make that apparent? How can you embody that in what you put on the page?

  I had often quoted Flannery O’Connor on writing to my students, in particular a passage from one of her beautiful essays in Mystery and Manners. In it she says:

  St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: “The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” No matter what form the dragon may take [she goes on], it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell.

  When I cited this passage with my students, I went on to secularize its meaning, something that would have horrified O’Connor, of course, but which was useful to me and, I think, to them. I spoke of the necessity for fiction to construct a problem, spiritual or no, for its characters, to ask them to solve it, and to watch them in their attempts: whether they triumph (slay the dragon); whether they’re defeated (are slain, devoured); whether they win, but lose so much in the process that it’s barely worth the prize; whether, as in some more modern work, we leave them at the moment they realize there is a dragon they’re going to have to fight—or flee. In all these cases, I’d say to my students, the question for you as you start writing is, What is it that your character needs to struggle with? What’s the right dragon for exactly the person you’ve created? What is the nature of the conflict, implicit or explicit, that you’re asking the reader to witness and consider? It’s understanding this about your own story, I’d argue to them, that makes it compelling to others.

  And now I asked myself these same questions about the characters in the memoir.

  For my father, the dragon was clear. It was his illness and what he would make of it, how he would deal with it. That part of the narrative was the easy part, in a certain sense.

  But I was present in the memoir too. And I hadn’t asked myself what my dragon was, what my character was struggling with in this story and its aftermath, what thing she’d vanquish or be vanquished by. I hadn’t even accepted myself as a character in this sense up to then. Now I had to.

  For my father’s memorial service in July, my sister had asked me to read Psalm 103, the one that begins, “Bless the Lord, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless his holy name.” It speaks—with bitter irony, it had seemed to me as I prepared to read it at the service—of God’s mercy:

  Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases; who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s.

/>   It speaks of our inconsequence by comparison with God’s goodness:

  For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust. As for man, his days are as grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.

  I stood in the little white wooden church in the clearing in New Hampshire and spoke these lines to my father’s friends, his family: I, who had seen my father stop eating; who had, as long as I could, fed him water from a straw, drop by drop onto his parched tongue, while he was dying. Who watched him turn into a wizened tiny form in diapers in his bed, all beaky nose and clutching hands.

  The memory of this was still fiercely alive in me when I began this memoir. And what I initially hoped it would do, the writing of it, was to assuage this horror and grief by insisting, I saw now, that my father was not as a flower of the field, dammit; there was sense, meaning, to be made of his life in terms of a narrative structure, an explanation of his self—the story of my father—as narrated by me.

  The dragon for me was the disorder and oblivion that marked his dying and death. That’s what I had been struggling with. That’s what I’d seen myself as conquering as I wrote. I, the writer, would redeem my father, I would snatch him back from the meaninglessness of Alzheimer’s disease, from being as the flower in the field when the wind passes over it. This was my struggle, I thought. This was why I had undertaken the memoir in the first place. And at this point, for a while, this worked for me as a focus for the book.

  And then it didn’t. Another novel interrupted me, and by the time I returned yet again to the memoir and began what I was sure would be my last revision, I literally saw things differently too.

  I have some confidence by now in the unconscious processes of writing, those processes that bring me certain scenes, certain details, to work with. I believe it takes a fully conscious mind to do the work of writing, to bring things around, as it were; but I think there’s often something deeply revelatory about the detail or the plot element that just “occurs” to you out of the blue: the anecdote you overheard years earlier and remember now; the memory that wakes you in the night; the odd part of a story someone tells you that stays with you and seems to fit into what you’re working on. These seem to me to be the very things worth examining and reexamining when you ask yourself those important questions about the deepest meaning of what you’re writing.