Just A Few More Things

My father has been talking to me a lot lately. Of course, he is a quintessential conversationalist—no mundane chats for him. He isn’t one to participate in the banal back-and-forth about the weather, or the economy, unless there’s something exciting to discuss. A tornado coming, perhaps. A stock market drop.

Not that all his talking points are intense either, although lately they have been. Lately, his words come in written form, as if he can’t bear to wait until we are together to say what’s on his mind. His thoughts pour into emails and texts, replacing the handwritten letters he might have favored in the past. Lately, he has been talking about more serious things, like his will and his health—although today, he looks pretty good to me.

He is at my house. His hands are clasped, resting on the wooden kitchen table, and I notice when I glance over from the dishes I’m washing, how good he looks. His upper body is strong, for a man of seventy. His face is lined but only just barely, and although I know this is because my mother enforces the daily use of sunscreen, it adds to overall look of vibrance that seems to emanate around him. I stop what I’m doing for a second, my soapy hands suspended over the sink.

He begins to talk. “So, the beach,” he says, meeting my eye, his clasped hands punctuating the table lightly as he speaks. “The house is open the July 4^th week. So, you guys can go.”

I look at him in surprise. The beach house, a family treasure, is never open on July 4^th. It’s always rented, capitalizing on holiday rental rates to earn its keep—this humble little shore home that we all love. This year, when the current tenants for the most popular beach week of the year backed out, we talked about keeping it for ourselves. My mother, and my brother Cory, and I, and our families. We tried to convince my dad, to sway him with the promise of a once-in-a-lifetime holiday family trip. We all happened to be free…jobs, kids’ sports, and finances had all lined up, almost magically.

Still, Dad said no. It just wasn’t possible, he said. We agreed sadly, knowing it wasn’t only about the money. Knowing that it had been a feather of hope, all along. Still, when he said no, we were crushed. Finality can do that to you—take disappointment and inflate it to astronomical proportions.

Now, a smile spreads across my face. The holiday is only a few weeks away, and will require some back pedaling and scrambling, but we can do it. I cannot wait to call Cory, to tell him not to make any other plans…we’re going to the beach!

My dad’s smile doesn’t match mine. His carries a hint of wistfulness, as if he’s waxing nostalgic about times gone by. He meets my eye, as if he’s just given me a gift he didn’t want to part with. It’s starting to make sense to me.

“You’re going too, right?” I say, daring him to deny me the answer I want. But he does.

“No, not me,” he says. He is sorrowful, but certain. “You guys.”

***

A few weeks later, we have another conversation. I feel like I should be talking to him in person more often, but it’s been hard. Everyone is busy, including him. We joke with him how packed his social calendar is, that he must pencil in me—his only daughter—in advance. He laughs over Facetime, on the brink of tears, as if he is bowled over with gratitude that he has so many friends, that he’s so popular. We’ve always known this—my dad is everyone’s favorite. His arsenal of friends is not accidental. Sometimes, I wish I had spent more time with him before, when his social life wasn’t so jam-packed. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, he says now, along with focusing on the present is important, and so when I realize this, as we stand on the shore of the pond at the edge of my childhood home, I try to block everything else out besides his voice.

Again, he looks good today. Strong. We are calf deep in pond water, watching the kids navigate the water in blow up boats with plastic yellow oars. They are too small to do this effectively, each of them wearing a dusty blue life jacket as Cory treads water alongside of them, steering them. Cory is the only one, besides my father, who will brave the murky waters of the pond, its innards thick with seaweed and water snakes and who knows what else.

The shore on the other side is only navigable by boat. The thicket around the pond sides prevent walking there, but if you can get there by boat, there’s a nice little area. Years ago, Dad cleared it out, put a couple wooden Adirondack chairs and made a small fire pit. In the summers, we row the boats over and take S’mores and bug spray and extra camp chairs. It seems like a lot of effort for something we could do on this side of the pond, but when we go over there, we have the view of the pond backed by the house backed by a sunset.

“Worth it,” my dad said then and still says now.

It’s not quite sunset, and we didn’t bring anything for S’mores, but the kids and Cory are nearly across. My mother and Cory’s wife are already over there, starting the fire. For a moment, my father and I simply watch them all in silence, Cory reaching land and lifting out one kid at a time, pulling up the boats and picking the strings of slime off his legs. The kids shriek and run amok on the far side, as if they’ve never been there before. Golden light hits my mom, and the scene—one that I’ve seen and participated in my whole adult life—undams my tears.

This is the kind of thing my dad likes to talk about lately—moments, memories. How the simple things evolve into the most profound—a summer night in nature. I turn to him, with so much to say and finally ready to embrace the level of openness that he’s been trying to instill in me, but he’s pulling the last boat to me, nodding to it.

“Can you handle this thing?” he says, like he always says, because of a long-standing family joke based on one time when I capsized a raft.

“Yes,” I say with a roll of my eyes. “Here, you get in first.” I put hands down on the green rowboat, the only real boat we have, and steady it for him.

But he shakes his head. “No, you go on.” He puts his hands in his pockets, staring over the water, not looking at me. I know the issue is this: the kids will be scared, in the dark, to row their little boats back, and it will become an issue, as always, of ferrying everyone back over in the real boat. Then the issue, tomorrow, of retrieving the other boats. My father has grumbled about this for years, has said for years we need to invest in a second rowboat, heck, even a third one. He makes the grandkids help him bring the blow-up boats back when daylight returns, and they all complain while they laugh and help, staring up at their grandfather with adoring eyes as he pretends to be bitten by snapping turtles the whole way across. Every single time, he insists we need more rowboats, and every single time, he doesn’t follow through.

But he’s never not come across the water. I look at him, questioningly. Heartbreakingly. I think I know why he doesn’t want to come, but I don’t want to leave him here. What’s he going to do over here, all by himself? More importantly, what are we going to do over there, all by ourselves? Without him to lead the conversation, without him to tell the ghost stories to the kids and make sure everyone has actually applied the copious amounts of bug spray we’ve hauled with us? Without him to make sure the fire is totally out while we organize the rides back to this side?

“Are you sure?” I ask, knowing he is. He still won’t meet my eyes, not tonight, and instead, he claps his hand on my back, leaving it there for a second. I think I will feel that imprint for the rest of my life, the first time my dad didn’t come with us.

“I’m sure,” he says. “You and Cory can handle everything just fine.”

***

It’s almost July 4^th, and we’ve been madly planning the beach trip. The house, as my dad told me, remained open, and the trip has become something else. It’s not just my mom, Cory and I that are going. Cousins are coming. Family friends. We will be squashed like sardines, kids sleeping on air mattresses, and so much preparation is going into the plans for the night of the fireworks. We’ve never been there for this, but the display over the ocean, reportedly epic, will be visible from the beach in front of our house. Mom rented a tent, and we’ve bought hot dogs and sparklers in bulk amounts. It’s going to be a monumental event.

But it’s impossible to think of it, even as we sit with my dad and plan it all out, without tidal waves of underlying sorrow. We are stunned now, stunned that he isn’t coming, even though we knew he wasn't. There was a part of us that hoped that with the sudden change of plans, when he told me “the house is open”, that he would follow up with “screw it, I’m coming too.” We know it’s impossible. We knew it a few weeks ago, and I knew it that day on the shore of the pond. He looked well and strong, yes, but inside he was already rotting away.

Now, he lies sleeping, resembling a little boy. We sit in his room and plan our beach trip, quietly whispering from the chairs we’ve moved in here. It seems inconceivable that we are doing this when he is dying, right before our eyes. And yet…he told us this is what he wanted.

For months, he insisted that he would get his affairs in order, and he did. He handled every financial and legal aspect that one must handle. He gathered his friends and explained his decision to eschew treatment and live in the moment. It was hard to believe, just a few months ago, that something was festering so malignantly inside of him…he looked so alive from the outside. His friends would walk away, in disbelief. Characteristically, he would put his arm around them, tell them that it would be okay. He spent more time comforting everyone who was prematurely grieving his loss than he did feeling sorry for himself.

Now, we sit in his room and plan the beach trip, because that's what he wants. And we want to be close while we do this, even though he isn’t participating in the conversation anymore, not really. My mom wonders out loud if we really need to include every single person we know at the beach house. We’ve decided, as per my father’s wishes, to invite anyone close enough to come on the evening of July 4^th, just to watch the fireworks. When my mom suggests cutting the list, my dad groans, and we all smile. He hasn’t had much to say the last couple days, and we take this effort as a yes, yes, we will include everyone.

That evening, I go into my father’s room. I’m not sure what compels me to do so, I’d nearly been asleep myself, sitting vigil in the adjacent living room. No alarm has gone off and the house is quiet. I do not know where my mom is, and even the dog, who has been faithfully at my side since I’ve been staying here for the past few days, seems to be missing. In the dark, I feel my way into his room, not wanting to flick on any ambient light that might disturb his sleep, his deep slumber that I fear each day he’s never waking up from.

To my surprise, he’s sitting up in the dark. He hasn’t been out of bed at all today, at least not since the nurse came in the afternoon to help him shower, and I am falsely encouraged. I know he isn’t going to get better, that he isn’t going to recover from Stage 4 cancer that has been swiftly shutting his earthly body down. I know this, and yet I cannot deny what I see. He sits on the side of the bed, and I see that the dog has traitorously left my side and come to him. She must have known he was awake.

He is petting her, vigorously rubbing her sides and she spins in delight at his feet. When he looks up, his face is grim. He doesn’t appear pleased to see me in the way he has my whole life, as if each time I walk into a room I’ve provided physical representation of his greatest achievement. Cory jokes that I am the favorite but we both know that it’s true. I have always been the apple of his eye and suddenly, stunningly, it occurs to me: it must be hard for him to say goodbye to me, too. Maybe it’s harder for him than it is for me.

Maybe that’s why we haven’t.

This whole time dying, he’s been soothing the way. He’s written me letters. He made it so we could go to the beach house one last time. It never occurred to me that perhaps he’s as afraid to leave us as we are to be without him.

I blink back my tears though. I realize, inexplicably, that there’s a suitcase beside him. This seems strange…where does he think he’s going? Cancer is ravaging his body, but his mind is okay, so this is perplexing. He sees me looking at the suitcase and stands up, with an ease I haven’t seen in at least two weeks.

“I just have to do a few more things,” he tells me.

“Well, okay. Let me help you,” I say, putting my hand on his arm. Does he think he’s going to the hospital? He was adamant about living at home, dying at home. Did he change his mind?

He pulls away from my grip. He seems nearly annoyed with me, which can’t be possible, he’s never once been annoyed with me my entire life. He will not look at me, only gazing out the window, where the starlight is starting to materialize.

“You can’t help me,” he says quietly. “I’ve got to do this on my own. I just have a few more things to do, and then I’ll be ready.” I watch, flabbergasted, as he closes the small suitcase and walks away.

I snap awake.

There are voices, softly, in the background. I realize, with a crushing sense of devastation, that it was a dream. Once again, a fucking dream. This brings me to my knees, just like the one where he told me the beach house was open. Just like the one where he told me Cory and I could handle the boats. But this one. I can feel the warmth of his skin as he pulled from my grip. I can hear the cadence of his voice, even though it’s been days since he’s spoken.

With a sudden sense of panic, I tear back to the bedroom. There, my mother and Cory stand, chatting softly with the hospice nurse. She is talking about transitions, about physical changes when the body bends towards death. She is talking about spiritual changes, as well.

“I don’t think he’s in that body anymore,” my mother says softly, tearlessly. She embraced and accepted that he is gone, even if his lungs are still drawing air. Cory too, he seems resigned to the fact that this basically over—he has said his goodbyes.

“Some people think of it like this: like the spirit needs some time to prepare. Some time to go inward, finalize things, before they’re ready to embark on the next phase of life,” the hospice nurse says, her voice oozing with kindness.

My mother and Cory haven’t noticed me, so I back out of the room. I go to the chair I was sitting in, pick up the yellow legal pad with the latest update on the guest list for July 4^th. I note the date on my phone…a week to go. I think of my father’s words, as they rang out in my dream less than a month ago—The house is open the July 4th week. So, you guys can go. How we then called the rental company, how stunned we were to find out that no one had snatched an open week in the prime of summer. How the plans for my father’s Celebration of Life…which would include the spreading of his ashes in the ocean beneath a sky full of fireworks, evolved so perfectly.

Cory comes into the room then, and he doesn’t have to say anything. I know that he is telling me its time. By my father's bed we sit, and outside the starlit sky evolves exactly as it did in my dream. His body is still, his breathing infrequent. I wonder if I'm in his dreams, too?

I lean down to kiss his forehead, and I tell him goodbye, for the first time. I know that he’s on his way…he just has a few more things to do.