A Good Death

A Good Death



If anyone dared adore my father, as they often did, my mother would shrug and say, “He’s really just a small town boy from Sidney, New York.”  And even though she hated Sidney, a tired, dusty hamlet upstate, she sure loved my father.  She says he rescued her from chaos, the complications of a prickly life in Queens.  Ironically, he said the same about her.  Somehow, in that meshing of rescue and love, they formed a near-perfect union, two incomplete halves growing, the way a full moon forms from a thin, unfinished crescent.  For fifty years they laughed and sometimes quarreled, the years passing with the assumption of another day.  Then, almost unnoticed, Alzheimer’s crept through the back door, and slipped a choke hold on my father.



He is dying now, in the late-stage of his disease. They live separately, 20 miles apart in southern Vermont, my mother in their long-time clapboard colonial with over-flowing window boxes, steadfast along the Battenkill River; my father at Fillmore Pond, a proud-looking Nantucket-gray facility for patients with failing memory.  According to my mother, an ex-hospice nurse who has seen her share, Fillmore is impressive:  friendly, warm, and caring.  All words from a brochure, antiseptic though accurate.  Thinking of them, she in the house, he at Fillmore, tightens my jaw.



By many accounts, they were a couple versed in dying.  My mother’s work with hospice stayed with her after she retired, and she spoke often about her patients, weaving curious physical details (the breath is often rapid at the end) with her enduring warmth.  Listening to my mother describe final hours convinced me that the thing about dying is not to do it alone.  My father, both a surgeon and a psychiatrist, distanced himself from death’s darkness with characteristic humor and jazzy confidence.  His bravado comforted me.  “Sprinkle my ashes down the Battenkill,” he’d announce, almost cheerfully, watching the water move gracefully and eternally alongside his property.  He’d laugh again, certain we’d be sprinkling in celebration of a life fully lived.  “Don’t ever let me get to that point where I’m drooling in the corner!  End it when I do!” he’d say, ignoring the complexity of life’s end, as though any of us could breezily end a life so sweet, so kind, so full of pure and abundant love.  He casually ascribed all of our anxieties and tensions and worries as manifestations of Freud’s death anxiety, neatly placing our troubles under the umbrella of a tidy psychiatric phrase.  Somehow, listening to them both, I believed in the possibility of a good death.  If life is good, and death inevitable, isn’t a good death the logical extension?



Yet, now, as my father’s end begins its forceful march, my belief in a good death shrivels, like a once-bright balloon. His proclamations about dying feel silly and specious, uttered without admitting that by dying, he will leave not only earth, but my sisters and me, and, especially, my mother.  Scientifically trained, he had always talked about the beauty of ashes to ashes, dust to dust, as though dying is elegant, intrinsic to life’s enduring cycle.  A good death.  However, when he started to slip away, he clung to my mother.  He would not leave her side; and they morphed from vibrant co-stars to weepy patient and exhausted caretaker, lost in the deep, hollow dark of long Vermont winters.  He seemed to sense death’s arrival; he cried easily.  Death now hurries his way, and he and my mother are without the balance of the other, alone.  She grieves the loss of him; he is unaware of who she even is.  Did he know enough to say goodbye?



  Nurses calm my father’s anxiety with Seroquel, and he sits, blankly in his maroon recliner.  He sleeps.  His watery blue eyes gaze vacantly around, no longer up for cheering.  Diapers have stolen his dignity.  We wish for his passing.  When I dare to visit, I think about his slow and solitary exit, an ending detached from the life he knew.  Is it different for anyone?  My only hope is one day, after my mother, sisters and I have sprinkled his ashes, that his voice will ring, yes, ring, along the banks of the Battenkill, and his beautiful good life will grab hold of and shake the bad death that followed.