Time in a Bottle

My father is dying. I sit near his bed as he grapples with his pain. His anguish puts a helpless twist in my gut. With trembling hands, I pick up the morphine bottle and fill the calibrated dropper to the five milliliters prescribed for “pain as needed”. I release the soothing dosage under his tongue, and his moaning subsides within seconds.

Eighty seemed unimaginably ancient when I was a kid. Now it seems too young to die. It makes me wonder if I’ll still be above ground when I become an octogenarian twenty-five years from now.

Dad entered the hospice stage of his cancer struggle six weeks ago. I’ve made the three-hour trip up from Manhattan every weekend since to stay with him. But yesterday, his palliative care worker called me. “He might have a week - maybe days only,” she said. So, I arranged for some time away from my investment firm to be with him. Until his time runs out.

Deeply set in his ways, Dad still lives alone in the farmhouse he was born and raised in. He is a fourth-generation dairy farmer, but his milking operation ended over a decade ago. My mother passed away seven years past, but he refuses to consider any other living arrangements. I believe that for my father, moving out of this house would represent a concession to his own mortality.

On my ride north from the city this morning, I was struck by how drastically the years since my childhood have changed the face of my father’s world. Our dairy farm is located in the small upstate town of Verdance, in Chenango County, where sixty years ago dozens of thriving family farms dotted the countryside. In those days, along every back road, neatly painted mailboxes stood beside milk can pick-up platforms at the ends of driveways sloping gently uphill toward tidy farm homesteads. Most farmers were milking fifty to a hundred cows daily, and a family could generate a comfortable income on their milk sales to the nearest dairy.

By the time I entered high school in the late 80’s, large agribusiness interests had entered the picture, and the small farms were operating on borrowed time. One by one, they lost their ability to compete with the mega-farms. Dad was one of the last farmers in Verdance to stop milking. It was all he knew. It was who he was.

Now, the milk stands are gone. The mailboxes are falling apart, and the barns are empty. Members of the younger generation have either moved on to more vibrant, job-rich areas of the country, or joined the military, or are living paycheck-to-paycheck working for one of the few local businesses still managing to stay on its feet. And on those once thriving family farms only the elderly remain, with their arthritis and their memories; they are the last custodians of a lost way of life.

If my father had had his way, this only child would have followed in his footsteps when he was ready to retire. Dad had taken over for his father, as my grandfather had for my great-grandfather, as sons in our family had done for their families time out of mind. But even as a high school senior, the writing on the wall was clear to me. Staying in Verdance milking cows twice every day for the rest of my life didn’t fit with my own goals and dreams, even if the family dairy farm had survived.

When I graduated first in my class from high school and aced my SAT’s, Syracuse offered me a significant academic scholarship. My father and I had a hard discussion about it before I left for college. He didn’t stand in my way, but it was clear that he would have much rather seen me sitting on a tractor than behind a desk. In any event, guilty baggage and all, I was off to Syracuse’s Whitman School of Business Management, where six years later I had completed both my undergrad and MBA programs with honors. A career in Manhattan’s financial markets opened up to me, and I’ve been there ever since.

In the decades that followed my leaving the farm, the subject would come up now and then. At first Dad struggled with my decision, but I believe he eventually found a way to make peace with it. That said, I also believe that he secretly found something vaguely illegal (or at least unethical) about someone making a mid-six-figure income while failing to produce any physical evidence that anything at all had been done to earn it.

The morphine has helped Dad fall into a peaceful sleep, and I decide to use the quiet time to slip out and take a short walk around the property. It is early spring. The trees, which had looked hopelessly dead and gone as recently as a week ago, are now sporting fuzzy green halos - the points of their new leaves popping from the ends of red bud-tipped branches. Birdsongs around the barnyard convey a lusty energy, and the last stubborn patches of ice are nearly gone from the pond below the house.

Across the circular driveway is the barn where Dad and I spent years of countless mornings and evenings milking cows. I cross the center grassy area in the middle and approach the barn. Its red sides are badly faded and in need of a fresh coat, which they will almost certainly never get. I grab the handle of the huge sliding door, and with no small amount of effort I force the rusty rollers to squeal to life and pull it open.

The air inside the barn is cooler than outside. A row of stanchions lines each of the two long walls, with a wide trough-lined center walkway between. The interior is dimly lit by rows of small, cobweb draped windows. Curly chips of whitewash have dried, peeled away and fallen into long rows of soft grey-white detritus onto the concrete floors at the base of the walls. I remember the whitewashing Dad and I did every spring, to keep the milking parlor looking clean and presentable for our annual inspection by the local FDA agent and dairy managers.

I exit the barn through the pasture side door, where we would let the cows in for milking and then turn them out again afterward. The roughly twenty-acre pasture runs away from the barn at a fairly level grade, then slopes upward - gradually at first, then more steeply toward a hilltop a few hundred yards behind the barn.

At the summit, I turn and take in the view. I’m always struck by how odd it is to look down on the rooves of the house, the barn, and the other buildings below. The change in perspective that makes large things look like toys is pleasantly unsettling.

Processing all of these memories reminds me of how aging affects the way we see the world. When I was a child, the farm seemed impossibly huge. The cows were enormous mythical beasts. My father was a stern but generally benevolent giant. My mother was a tall, beautiful angel in whose arms I always felt safe and loved. Our dog was a fearsome but loyal wolf protecting us from the monsters who most certainly lived in the nearby woods. The barn was a huge, stinky, dangerous fortress full of unexpected sights, sounds, and experiences. The hay mow was a hideout for whatever hero or rascal I was playing in the adventures of my boyhood days.

The magical setting of my childhood imagination was limitless with possibilities. Everything was big and scary and wonderful. Remembering that feeling, I experience a pang of loss. Those childhood perceptions and sensations far outmatch the pragmatic, utilitarian lens through which I now view the world in middle-age.

My sense of time, and how I experienced it, was also completely different then. As a grade-schooler, an hour seemed like a year. The month between Thanksgiving and Christmas felt like an eternity. Now, it’s Spring. Then without any sense that the Earth has completed another trip around the sun, the seasons will pass, a year will roll by, and impossibly - it will be Spring again.

I head back down the hill. It’s nearly dark by the time I get to the house. Inside the kitchen door I flick on the light. Dad is sitting at the table. His border collie, Rosie, is gobbling away at her bowl.

“Hello Albert,” Dad says, matter-of-factly. “I wondered where you were.”

“Dad.” I’m dumbfounded, and feeling more than a little guilty. He hasn’t been out of his bed in a couple of weeks. I have had heard stories of the dying experiencing an eleventh-hour burst of extraordinary energy, but to see it first-hand is astonishing. “Are you okay?”

“Fine. The dog needed feeding. And I was thirsty.” There is, in fact, a glass of water on the table in front of him. “What time is it?”

“Huh? Oh - it’s almost seven. I’m so sorry, Dad. You were sound asleep, so I took a short walk.” He didn’t respond. “You sure you’re all right?”

“Fine,” he says, raising an eyebrow, “Not dead yet.”

“Okay.” I flash an uneasy smile and sit in the chair across from him. “So, are you hungry? Can I get you something?”

“A little. Maybe some toast and tea? I could try that.”

“You got it. I’ll have some too.”

In a stupor, I get back up, put the kettle on, pop some bread in the toaster and get out the butter and jam. I keep him talking, partly because I want to assure myself that he is okay, and partly because I can’t believe this is happening. I just want to enjoy it.

I put the tea and toast on the table, then sit back down. I tell him about my walk through the barn and looking down on everything from the top of the hill. I mention my musings about how differently we see the world and experience the passage of time as we age.

“Oh, it’s true,” he says. “You remember my old friend Ed Shipley? Well, I guess all my friends are old. Or dead. Anyway, Ed always used to say ‘Life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer you get to the end, the faster it goes.’”

I laugh and nod my head. I look at him as he takes a shaky sip of his tea. I feel grateful and incredulous and a little sad, all at once.

Suddenly, I feel a sense of urgency. It occurs to me that this may be one of the last lucid moments we share, and there are a couple of things I want to tell him. Before I can’t anymore.

“Dad?” His eyes are glassy. “Dad.”

“Yes, Albert?” he says, sitting up straighter, and wiping a bony hand across his brow.

“I wanted to tell you that – well, I’m sorry I didn’t stay.” He looks at me without responding. “You know, when I decided to go to college – “

“Son,” he says, waving me off and shaking his head. “No. We’ve settled all this. Sure, it was hard for me at first. But after a while, I saw the sense in it. Why you did what you had to do. It’s okay. I – I’m proud of you, Albert. Really. Let it go. I have.”

There was a long moment after he spoke when we sat silently, simply looking at each other. I nodded and he nodded, his lips curling a little in the shadow of a tired smile.

“And Dad. I want you to know - I love you.” At this he sits back in his chair, raising his eyebrows. He folds his hands together on the table and looks at them. “We’ve never said it much, but I just feel like I need to say it now. You’ve aways been a great Dad, and I love you.”

He waits a few heartbeats, then his eyes move up from his hands and look into mine. “You’re right. We haven’t always been the huggy-kissy types, have we?” He takes a deep breath. “But I love you, too.”

The room goes silent, save the ticking of the cuckoo clock on the wall sounding oddly louder than usual. I notice he has finished his tea and most of one slice of toast. The other sits on his plate untouched.

“You had enough, Dad?”

“Huh? Oh, yes. You know, I don’t feel so good. Think I’ll head back to bed.” He impulsively gets up too quickly and nearly loses his balance. His chair tips and I move to catch him. Rosie trots over to sniff him. I get my arm around him, and together we shuffle back to his bedroom. When he is settled, I sit nearby and pick up a book.

He tries to fall asleep, but he’s restless. He turns and twists, pulling at his covers. He frowns and groans in pain. I can’t bear to see him suffer. So, I pick up the morphine bottle, measure out another dose, and squeeze it under his tongue. “Time in a bottle?”, I think . But on second thought, it’s almost the opposite. Time is subjective. It flies when you’re having fun, but crawls when you’re in misery. So, the morphine turns slow, painful time into fleeting, untroubled time. “More like freedom from time in a bottle.”

Either way, in minutes Dad is sleeping. I try to read but soon grow drowsy myself, so I put the book down and watch him. “How many nights did they watch me sleep?” It is strange. Parents have children, then children become parents, then time catches up with them. The roles reverse, the parents become children again, and the children parent their parents.

I make my way to bed in the room next to Dad’s, leaving both doors open. I fall asleep almost immediately and a deep, dreamless slumber carries me through the night. All of that fresh air and deep thinking, I guess.

The next morning, I wake up to a mockingbird singing maniacally from a tree in the yard. The first light of morning slants across the bedroom floorboards. The house seems eerily quiet.

I lay the covers back, get up, and walk over to Dad’s room, pausing at the door. He is motionless. I approach his bed slowly - listening, hoping. I stop at his side, reach out my hand, and place it on his forehead. It is cool. I put two fingers along the side of his neck below his ear. Nothing. I bend over and place my ear close enough to brush his lips. Not a whisper of breath.

The weight of the moment consumes me. I sit heavily on the chair next to his bed and lay my hand over his. There has never been one second in my fifty-five years when I didn’t know that my father was in the world. Now I will never know that he is again. Thoughtless and wordless, I am, at least in this moment, untethered and bereft of context.

I sit with him for what feels like a very a long time. As a responsible, rational adult I know there are a hundred things to be done. Contacts to be called, decisions to be made, details to be arranged. But I don’t want to. Like a petulant child going limp on the floor of a grocery store, I refuse to move. Some irrational part of me is convinced that by taking no action, by refusing to acknowledge time’s claim on my future, I can hold off the new reality that death has delivered.

But of course, ultimately time gets its way. It always does. The idea of “killing time” is just wishful thinking. So, I get up, start making calls, arranging details, and deciding what to do with the farm. My future is no longer an option.