Photo by author
It was Wednesday night, March 7, 2013, about 7 pm. We were heading home in the morning. I had completed my part in “Dad’s death process,” honorably. But at the moment, he was being a real bastard to the young hospice nurse, and we needed to calm him down. So we headed back to the hospice facility.
How long’s this gonna take?
He had early dementia and was dying of stomach cancer. His care had become too much for Mom to keep him at home anymore, and his end was getting close. So, my husband and I had traveled to their home in Pennsylvania to help my Mother move him into a local hospice there.
The Maria Hall Hospice facility was a peaceful place, located on the grounds of the Motherhouse for the Catholic order of nuns there — the Sisters of Saints Cyril and Methodius, in Danville, PA. My Mother’s sister had belonged to that order before she died years earlier in a tragic car accident. For the last several years, my parents had been living nearby in a retirement community run by that same order of nuns.
In his typical fashion, he was being difficult to the end. When we moved him in on Monday, he glared at me from his chair and said,
“Well, what do I do now?”
I suggested rest.
On Tuesday, as he lay there, he looked up at me and asked,
“So, how long’s this gonna take?”
As kindly as I could, I simply said, “Well, Dad, I don’t know. That’s between you and God.”
Calming him down
Now, on Wednesday evening, we got a call from the nun at the hospice facility that Dad was giving the young nurse a difficult time. I wasn’t surprised. For whatever reason, he respected the nuns and wouldn’t give them trouble. He always had some kind of reverent attitude about women who chose to give up so much in life to dedicate themselves to God. But a strong-minded young nurse trying to do her best for him? He would go for her throat.
I walked into the room and came face-to-face with “the look” – the one seared in my brain from a thousand confrontations. He might have been failing physically, but his eyes still reminded me of a snake that was tensed and ready to strike. Whatever mental faculties he was losing, he still retained more awareness than we sometimes gave him credit for. And that included him trying to use his favorite weapons –bullying and rage. However, he was losing his edge.
In the past, he bullied with a finely-honed mastery of fury, delivering just enough violence to freeze you but not enough to leave any telltale marks. Then, he had a razor-sharp ability to switch faces as needed, like a chameleon – smiling face around certain people, savage face around us.
But now he was attacking from a more primitive place – the one instilled by his abusive mother in his childhood — and that made him more unpredictable. He was more like a short-circuiting electrical panel, sparking, and smoking. More reactive than strategic. So with any strong woman other than a nun, he might do anything.
Ed and I sat him back down on the bed.
“She’s doing what she is supposed to do. What they TOLD her to do…for you.”
Yes, blame it on the nuns. He would accept it if he knew the directions came from the nuns.
“She’s giving you the best care she can. You cannot treat her like that.”
I used as much firmness in my voice as I dared, without triggering his anger further. Despite all the history between us, despite all the things I wanted to say to him at that moment, and despite all the truths I wanted to hurl at him…and that he deserved, he was a dying man, weak, and it would have been an unfair fight, uneven power between us to do that. I knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end of that power, being at his mercy for so many years. So, I was never going to risk my honor to fight an unarmed opponent and become him. Besides, provoking him wouldn’t have helped the nurse, so I did my best for compassionate calming.
The man on the work badge
He sat on the bed, stiff-backed, tight-lipped, sullen. The visage was the same man I saw staring back at me all those years from his Pratt & Whitney work badge. He always looked like he was daring someone to take a swing at him so he could punch them back.
Straightening up, I shook my head and sighed.
After tonight, I would probably never see him alive again. I felt like something needed to be said. But what? Truth? Accusations? Demands for an apology?
There must be something kind to say
I tried to reach for a gesture of kindness. And it was a real, deep, deep reach into my soul searching for something I could honestly say, anything kind I could give to him before he departed this life. Inside, conflicting emotions roiled, each one jockeying for control.
For sure, there was anger. And opposing that, there was that place where I believed God lives in all of us — the place of unconditional love. Then there was the Catholic programming place — the one the nuns always drummed in that we must love and forgive. I’ll talk about “forgive” later.
Also in the mix, fighting for its voice to be heard, was the wounded adult child hoping, despite all, that maybe, on his deathbed, he might somehow soften just a bit, give some admission, a drop of remorse…anything.
But the strongest place — the most forceful voice in that cacophony— was that small, gentle child still alive at my core – still sensitive and caring after all these years, in spite of all that was done to her. I hadn’t seen her in years, but there she was, and she won out over all the voices.
So, I dug deep to find that one kindness I could offer, honestly, and not choke on. Surely, over all that hell, he had to have done even one thing right, even once, for the right reason, versus his usual doing it for his benefit or ego. They tell writers to give even their worst villains some tiny redeeming quality because no one is all bad. So there had to be something.
“Thank you for the good things you did for me.”
I offered it gently. It was a true statement. One I could stand by. Regardless of his intent, he had kept a roof over our heads. He taught me how to be strong and how to survive. He inspired a love of learning, whatever his reasons. The most confusing thing about him had always been the constantly alternating waves of kindness and abuse. We never knew what to make of him — good things, fun things one minute, and the next, absolute, life-threatening rage. But, for this moment, I focused on the good things.
Exhaling, I felt my jaw loosen and my stomach knot ease. The small child was satisfied. I scanned his face for his response…even a flicker of an emotion.
Just leave him to God
But it was that miserable, macho, tough-guy face from his work badge who spoke. With no recognition of the irony of his words and with what appeared to be a total certainty of his virtue, he declared:
“I always wanted to stand for something.”
I closed my eyes while images exploded in my brain: his fist at my throat; him in the basement telling me this isn’t wrong, and it’s love, and it’s special; my mother on the floor at his feet where he knocked her down. For how hard I was clenching my jaw, my teeth should have turned to powder. It was all I could do not to yell:
“Well, when the hell are you gonna start?!”
That’s when that kid stepped back in, that gentle, honorable, incredibly strong child inside who took in all those truths spoken in church about God and love, and who always took care of her family. In that moment, SHE exerted her will and said:
“Just leave him to God.”
That kid clamped my mouth shut and filled me with this awareness of the spiritual immensity of what he was facing — impending death and possible judgment before God.
And so, for that kid, I stayed silent no matter how angry I was. That kid has always been my best part – that piece of my soul connected directly to God. She reminded me in that moment of who I was…am. And that, in my heart of hearts, I really had no wish to inflict revenge. It isn’t sweet, and it belittles you. So, I deferred to her and left him to God.
I stood up, kissed his head, was glad I wasn’t in his shoes, and took one last look at the man who had so formed, plagued, abused, and haunted me for my entire life. And then I left.
I was at work Friday when the phone call came, and I heard the words: “He’s gone.”
It’s over…but, not really…
Numbness came first as I tried to wrap my head around the reality that, for the first time in almost 6 decades, the heavy load I had always carried was gone. I guess I expected maybe a touch of sadness. But instead, a different emotion crept, then flooded in, and what came was not grief but overwhelming relief. Amazement. Even awe.
The almost incomprehensible realization crystallized in my brain that FINALLY, after a lifetime of standing guard, I was now OFF-DUTY. The battle was done. I’d seen it through to the end…honorably. And it was, at long last, OVER. I was free.
Or so I thought then. But as is the case in such moments, the real work was still to come. Even when some things are over, they aren’t over, and more work is waiting for you.
For one thing, a reckoning about the past was long overdue — the rubble of a lifetime with him still to be cleared away in my psyche. But before that “housecleaning” could be done, there was still the living parent to deal with — Mom.
With him finally out of the picture, this would be a new path. For the first time in both our lives, for the first time in 58 years, it would be Mom and me, no “Dad” to dictate the relationship…or control the interaction.
Questions flooded my brain, things like, “Would she do okay without him since he had always run things?” and “How would her health…and her end play out?”
But the real question in my mind, the real issue to be determined was the unfinished, no…the unspoken business between us. “Would we now have a better relationship and finally talk honestly, or would she unleash a lifetime of bottled rage at me?”
What I should have seen coming was the third path.
Tags: dementia, domestic abuse, hospice, incest, Maria Hall Hospice, nuns, Pratt & Whitney badge, sexual abuse, Sisters of Saints Cyril and Methodius
Soul Mosaic 
Leave a comment