Just before 7 a.m. on this day one year ago, I awoke in a guest room in my parents’ house. I padded up the long hallway to a little set of stairs and took a few steps. My mother and father slept a few feet to my right, but I turned left to another room, to greet the Angel of Death.
“Good morning,” she said.
Her French Caribbean accent made the words sound like burnt sugar, and her smile was kind.
But she lied. It was a very bad morning.
My father was dying. Cancer had spread to both lungs and his liver. He had pneumonia. His kidney – cancer had invaded the other, and a physician who was more technician than healer had removed it 13 months earlier – was failing.
Now, a hospice nurse with a soothing accent, a gentle manner, and a bottle of morphine tended to him.
We had tucked a hospital bed into the corner of his bedroom, and he had slept through the night. My father was too weak even to turn, and the nurse asked me for help turning him on his side.
Nearby, my mother slumbered alone in the bed she and my father had shared for decades. I worried that moving my dad would wake her. Reality was ugly, and I wanted her to have the comfort of sleep.
The nurse agreed. She went to check my father’s blood pressure.
She came back and said this: “Your father has no blood pressure.”
“Does that mean he’s gone?” I asked.
A simple nod would have sufficed, or a yes. Instead, she said it again.
“He has no blood pressure.”
I knew he was dying, but it took a moment for me to understand what she meant. And then the tumult. Telling my mom. Telling my older brother, who also had spent the night in the house. Calling my sister and my younger brother.
I stepped away from the chaos, to the quiet of the family room. It’s usually a boisterous place, but for a few moments that sad morning, it was just me. I sat down and hyperventilated.
I remember being surprised at my reaction – hyperventilation. I figured maybe I’d cry or something, but that didn’t come until later.
For now, I’d gulp air.
Today is a year. My family and I have gone through the things people go through in a year: Birthdays, anniversaries, holidays. They have been less joyous, and sometimes unspeakably sad.
The all-encompassing grief that washed over me in the days after my dad died is unsustainable, and has subsided a little. I’m even happy sometimes. Then I feel guilty for feeling happy, and then I feel silly for feeling guilty for feeling happy. And sometimes I’ll see something, or hear something or smell something or think something, and a wave of sadness will hit me. I go all weak in the knees – my legs literally lose their strength – and my eyes flood. And then I smile.
I’m used to it. Not over it.
Alvin N. Weinstein was 87. He had a good life. He managed to be both urbane and silly. He spoke four languages, he was a brilliant lawyer, he was a virtuoso musician.
People tell me he lived a long life.
I agree.
But it wasn’t long enough.
