The Part about Death

The Part about Death

I sat anxiously waiting for the Chrysler New Yorker to turn down my street. Though my father still had his license, the re-test at 84 years of age was only a written test which didn’t help much when he peeled out of driveways without looking behind him or fell asleep at the wheel. But here it was, hurling down my tiny dead-end street, my mother holding the dashboard for dear life. Though they now lived only 26 minutes away, it was still a great relief to see them arrive in one or two pieces.

They were coming to inspect my new rented cottage; my place of landing after my marriage went south. I had originally arrived at their house with my seven year old son and two complicated poodles but after 3 weeks of him asking where I was going and when would I be back I felt like I had reverted to being a 14 yr. old and started acting accordingly. My mother finally said, “Vickie, if you don’t find your own place you are going to lose your mind” Which translated meant, Vickie, if you don’t find your own place, we are going to lose our minds. Still, I would miss our long standing morning ritual of Dad poking me in the arm and asking me if I wanted a fat lip as I grumpily tried to pour a coffee.

After inspecting the windows and doors, he sat down and said “I think this is okay, I think you and my boy will be okay here” He then gave my son Jack his customary sucker and pack of gum. When Jack was two months old, I caught Dad just in time as he was feeding him a piece of melba toast lathered in whip cream. My father rarely left the house without his pockets filled with gum and candy just in case a child happened to cross his path. I used to love walking down our street with him as he tossed packs of gum to kids playing in their yards. Al Fagan, the King of Maranda Street.

It was a couple weeks later when they returned for Thanksgiving dinner that I noticed things weren’t right. After boasting about how he had dropped 30 pounds simply by eating whole wheat Italian bread instead of his favourite white Italian bread, I noticed he wasn’t really eating much of anything and was having difficulty breathing. In fact his lips were blue in colour and he had to leave the table to go sit in an armchair and fall asleep. I asked if he had seen his doctor lately and he responded that he had an MRI scheduled in a few months, not to worry.

24 hours later after “ratting him out to his doctor” we sat in the emergency department of the Greater Niagara General Hospital or as I refer to it the “Where’s the fire?” department waiting an interminable eight hours for him to be admitted for tests.

While feeling like shit, Dad still embarked on setting the tone by charming the nurses with compliments, pranks and his famous don’t mind me demeanour that had people running in circles to help him. While visiting my house a few years back he actually got up, got dressed and waited politely for me to wake up so I could take him to the hospital as he was having a heart attack. Now two years later, I left him that night with that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you know this will be the one that you aren’t going to get away with.

The next morning, I sat with my mother listening to their family physician explain that between the heart failure, aneurism and stage four lung cancer, he indeed wasn’t going to get away with it this time. She gave him 3 months with the aim to keep him as comfortable as possible. I had been dreading this moment pretty much since I was ten years old and hearing it was honestly even worse than I had ever imagined it would be. My mother, who would rather be hit by a bus than admit she was hard of hearing, politely nodded and waited until we were outside to say, “I know it was bad by the look on your face but I didn’t hear a thing she said” After she digested the information, she took a minute and said, “Well, I still want to go to Zellers for the yarn sale.” Mom was an Olympian at denial. If she didn’t acknowledge it, somehow it wasn’t really happening or maybe it was the old school etiquette that no emotion should ever be displayed in public or even to immediate family. That was secured for the wee hours of the night when you were on your own to grieve, rage and wallow. As that rule never really took hold with me, I wandered the aisles of Zellers with tears streaming down my face as nervous shoppers swerved out of my way. As I called each of my brothers, I realized we had no emotional training for this. This was one of the benchmark discussions we would experience in our lives and we had never even said I love you to each other. Too late to change all that now, we discussed the business at hand with a matter of fact distance to the details that were too horrible for words.

My mother’s denial was extended to hospital visits. She hated them and would do anything to avoid it. I think the reality of seeing my father in a weakened state was more than she could bear. Years before when I had called her to tell her dad was having a heart attack and to get a ride down to the hospital, she paused before asking, “ Do I really have to? “ It wasn’t that she was completely heartless; she just didn’t have the capability to look it in the eye.

Dad wasn’t much better, though the doctor assured us she had been in to give him the news, when we went in afterwards the whole messy business was not referred to at all. In fact over the weeks, I would hear him telling friends that they just had to get to the bottom of it and figure out what was wrong. “What really buffalos me” I’d hear him begin as if this was merely a math problem that had to be mastered.

I finally had to pull the doctor aside and ask if he had understood what she was telling him. Of course he had, but again, if he pretended that he thought there was some hope it might alleviate the discomfort of people getting sloppy about it.

So we tiptoed around the big fat elephant in the hospital room and focussed on breezy conversations that wouldn’t bring anybody down. My father was busy on the phone making sure Louis the Greek could pick up his cheese order for the Kiwanis that was left in his trunk before it went bad and I busied myself organizing oxygen and at home nursing visits so we could get him the hell out of there for as long as possible.

Louis or “The Greek” as dad called him was a restaurateur that Dad had befriended 40 odd years ago when he immigrated to Canada. Dad loved helping immigrants. As a Customs Officer, he knew his way around landing in Canada and when Louis was establishing his restaurant “The Golden Steer” not to be confused with “The Flaming Steer” (owned by his cousin) Dad spent many hours volunteering as maître d. Their friendship flourished to include regular fishing trips and boisterous arguments conducted in half English, half Greek. Growing up, I remember feasts at the Steer after fruitful hunting trips where Louis would try to get me to eat duck tongue. And after my 4 times weekly ballet classes, my dad and I would go to the Steer for a heaping plate of French fries covered in ketchup, vinegar and gravy. Louis would grab my chin and say, “ Beekie, you wanna be da ballabina?” This french fry ritual along with other shared delicacies like creamed onions and white bread with gravy were later de-programmed out of me when I became a student at the National Ballet school. Dad just never cottoned on to the dancer/starvation thing.

When we got Dad settled at home, he busied himself with sorting out his stamp and coin collection of 50 years, holding meetings for the Kiwanis, Boys and Girls Club, the Conservative Party and various other charities that he helped out. He was one of those guys that were constantly running around doing stuff, after his retirement from Canada Customs and shopkeeper of 2 stamp and coin stores, he threw all his energy into volunteer work with a fervour that exhausted me and to this day leaves me feeling guilty that I haven’t carried the torch. So why would he now let a little stage four cancer and his ever present oxygen machine get in the way? My mother was much subtler in her philanthropic endeavours. She would sit at home and knit baby clothes for pre-mature babies or sweaters that my sister in law would take to Guatemala. She also had a passion for crocheted villages which she donated to church bazars. We kept one which became our yearly Christmas montage. A small village with a mirror ice rink in the middle surrounded by white cotton baton. Unfortunately the citizens of the village only came in summer attire so we had a winter wonderland scene with a family gamely waving to their neighbours dressed in shorts and t-shirts. I personally think she hit her peak when she crocheted a Winnebago complete with a microwave.

Being unemployed, I had the luxury of coming by daily to check on him, do grocery shopping and take my mother to her appointments as she had never learned to drive. I would sometimes bring my poodles to visit so he could play shake a paw with my dog Ray. Dad and my dogs had a love affair that frankly was cemented when he started making them their own custom hamburgers. Over the years when I would be getting into the car after a visit, I had to factor an extra 20 minutes for my Dad to repeatedly say “Nice to see you Ray” as Ray would present his paw for a hearty nice to see you too shake. It never got old. My mother would finally break it up with an exasperated, “Oh Al, knock it off, the dog doesn’t know what you’re talking about” If Ray tried to win her over with the same trick, she would deadpan, “I don’t do that” At five foot one, with a sweet bird like voice, my mother caught you off guard. You really had to listen to get the full impact of her barbs. She walked a fine line between new-born kitten and barracuda. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the phrase, you can’t judge a book by its cover was created to describe Mary Fagan.

As the painkillers increased, Dad began to sleep more though his sleep took on a life of its own. I would watch as he frantically sorted stamps with the blanket or had a long discussion with his long dead father about going to the store. It didn’t look like such a bad place to be. Awake, life became more frustrating as his food intake was down to cans of Ensure with vanilla ice cream added in. He became anxious with a need to wrap up the details of his world and make sure we would all be able to carry on as if nothing had happened when he was gone. As I sat with him one afternoon, he said, “Your mom, how’s it going to work?” “You know, groceries and appointments and all that, how’s it going to work?” He calmed when I assured him I wasn’t going to leave her stranded.

One evening when I came over to watch him while my mother went out for a well needed break to play bridge; he became agitated, saying I shouldn’t have to be over there looking after him. It wasn’t right! I got teary and said, “Dad, I can’t make you better. This is the only thing I can do for you and you have to let me do it, I need to do it” He seemed to understand that angle and I can’t tell you how awkward yet oddly exhilarating it was to basically say- it’s not all about you. The irony is that this is the kind of situation where you really need your parents the most. This is when you want to lie in a rolled up ball on the floor and ask them to make it go away.

As his 85th birthday approached, I agonized over what to do. What do you get a man who has 10 weeks or so to live? When I decided on a sensible pair of slippers, my mother, always the pragmatic one advised, “Get the cheap ones, he’s not going to be wearing them for long.”

Shortly after his birthday which he basically slept through, he was admitted back to the hospital after he started falling. I think we all knew he wouldn’t be coming home again but pretended otherwise. He had a pretty steady stream of visitors which ran the gamut from local politicians to his mechanic, the 12 year old boy down the street, Greek waiters, and old cronies from various walks of life. You get a really clear picture of the breadth of a person’s life when you see who comes through the hospital door at visiting hour. One afternoon as he slept, one of his former colleagues, a man in his eighties talked to me about the integrity of Al Fagan. He told me about a time years before when my father couldn’t actively campaign for anyone due to his job on Customs, he would sit quietly at the back and staple campaign signs together. A former mayor coined him the King maker, always working relentlessly behind the scenes. I remembered when I worked for a television station in Toronto; he would enlist me to make copies of movies so he could take them down to the children’s ward at the local hospital, the same one he lay in now. As this former colleague talked of my father’s reliability, he started to get misty and in a moment of frustration and embarrassment exclaimed, “Oh damn, I’m on Paxil, I’m not supposed to get emotional.”

One day I walked into his room to find him in a traumatized state, gasping for air. I ran for help and an hour later it was confirmed that he had had a heart attack. My mother was at home with my son and my brothers all lived out of town. I stayed late into the night until my father started to get upset that I wasn’t at home with my son. Then I hid in an adjacent room that the nurses provided so I could pretend that I had gone home. The nurse on duty asked me for instructions for his wishes on resuscitation as it was quite possible he wouldn’t make it through the night. The next day he awoke to find his entire family surrounding his bed. He took it in for a moment and said, “What the hell is everyone doing here?” These kinds of false alarms became hard to cover up. Our murmurings about how we all just happened to be in the neighbourhood, brothers, sisters in laws and grandchildren included were fairly transparent but again, how do you delicately say we were pretty sure you were going to pop your clogs.

As the weeks progressed, I started to become anxious about packing it all in. Where was that movie moment when you tell your loved one all that they have meant to you, those words that will sum it up? How the hell were you supposed to say goodbye? A couple of times I would start to tell him what a great father he was and what a good man he was but he would immediately brush it off with a “ Let’s not talk about that!” Let’s not talk about that? What are we waiting for?? My mother who had surrendered and was now making daily visits summed it up nicely one day. She looked at my father and said, “Well Al, I might as well ask you now as later, do you want to be buried or cremated?” “Jesus, Mary, I don’t know!” he responded. I felt it was time to borrow a line from Bob Hope and asked “Do you want us to surprise you?” Yes, he said, surprise me. Dad made fast friends with a rotation of roommates. Within hours, he would be on first name basis exchanging political views and family anecdotes. I’d come in with a newspaper or some mail for him and he would say things like, “She’s a good girl” or “if you ever see my daughter bending over, kick her in the ass. She’s a Liberal”

The Christmas season was upon us, a particularly poignant time of year at the best of times. My dad rivalled any six year old in his enthusiasm for Christmas. By Christmas Eve, he would be worked into such a frenzy of excitement we often ended up opening our presents that night. I flashed back to many years of holiday tradition where we would start the evening with bacon and eggs and then get ready for our next door neighbours “The Sopers” to arrive for festivities which included cocktails and platters of cheese cubes, salami, crackers, pickles and homemade Christmas pastries. Actually, they were homemade pastry that my mother commissioned Mrs. Soper to make but they were still made in someone’s home. We would sit with the Soper family for a couple hours until it was time to put our coats and boots on and move the party over to the Soper’s house next door where Mrs. Soper would serve up the exact same snack tray and pastries that we had just consumed. I loved this tradition, it made absolutely no sense and I loved it.

I thought of the year I brought home my 3 week old son on Christmas Eve. Dad stared at him sleeping and said “I wonder what you will grow up to be like?” When I was having difficulty breast feeding and started crying in frustration, Dad advised, “ Honey, you just have to toughen up those nipples!” There was a moment of shock as we both processed that this was hands down the most awkward conversation we had ever had. But he was right. I thought of a story my mother had told me years before. My parents had lost their first child when she was 4 months old. The doctor prescribed medication for my mother to dry up her breast milk and for my father, a sedative to help him make it through the initial days of grief. Of course, they got their medication mixed up so my father had extremely dry nipples and my mother sat leaking milk completely stoned. We used to call them the “Mary and Al Show” and I would vow that after they passed on, I would open the family home as a museum and give guided tours highlighting the stack of Harlequin Romance novels stacked by my mother’s lazy boy recliner or the collection of cases of Tomato soup my father kept in the basement in case we found ourselves under siege and unable to leave the house for months, finishing off with the 52 margarine containers that sat in the fridge, a savings tip so not to waste money on Tupperware. “You’re full of malarky!” Dad would say.

Now three weeks before Christmas, he was refusing even a poinsettia though his hospital window sill was filled with seasonal cards. A nurse came in taking pre-orders for Christmas dinner and Dad perked up and asked if it was real turkey. “Yes it is, with all the trimmings” replied the nurse. “Well in that case, sign me up!” Dad said. I didn’t dare point out that he hadn’t had any solid food for about 2 months at this point and the idea of him digging into a full holiday meal was pretty optimistic.

The doctor called me soon after that to tell me he was declining at a rapid pace and there wasn’t any chance we would be taking him home. She had spoken to him about it that morning. When we went in to see him that day, he told my mother and me that he wanted us to use his tickets to a holiday fundraiser lunch at the Casino. “I don’t think I’m up to it this year” is how he put it.

I took a deep breath waiting for my mother to state the obvious but thankfully, she let this one go with a knowing smirk.

He then told us that he had decided to stay in the hospital as he didn’t want to burden Mom at home. I could feel her relief from across the room as she was terrified of him dying when she was home alone with him. Frankly, so was I so we went along with the pretence that this was his idea. Then in a moment that was as close to acceptance as I’d heard yet he said, “It’s time for the good Lord to take me home”

It was then that I realized it was time to let him go and as my sister in-law wisely advised me; let him know that it was okay to go. I left him and my mother alone to share the moment. From the hall, I could see them holding hands and talking closely. Later that evening, I came back and found him sleeping. I sat on the floor beside his bed and put my head down and wept. A few minutes later, I felt a tapping on the top of my head and when I looked up, Dad said, “I love you too.”

This was it. This was our big moment and honestly there really wasn’t any more to say.

I brought my son in to the hospital, something we had avoided because Dad didn’t want Jack to remember him that way. But I felt he needed to say goodbye too. Dad woke up to see Jack standing beside his bed and gently put his hand on Jack’s cheek and simply said, “ My boy, my boy”

A week later, I was awoken at 3am by a call from the hospital telling me to come down with my mother as my father’s condition had changed. When we arrived, they told us he had gone peacefully somewhere between midnight and 3am, just how he would have wanted it, without fanfare.

They led us to a room where his body was and I was struck that he looked like he had frozen in mid thought. His eyes were half open, mouth was open and his hand looked like it was about to point at something. This was what he was looking at the exact moment his body stopped. I remember not recognizing the sounds of grief that were coming out of me. When I calmed, my mother and I sat holding hands and in the silence she leaned over and said, “Would you like a mint?”

Dawn was approaching as I gathered his belongings from the now empty room. I heard the sound of Christmas Carols playing on a radio from a room across the hall. The rest of the family made their way down to Niagara and we got down to business. We didn’t talk about what actually happened much, just busied ourselves with the task at hand. My brother the chef decided we all needed a good breakfast and concentrated on that. Mom told him we didn’t have any bacon but suggested he call Tony Zappatelli the owner of the Sheraton Fallsview. Tony was a long-time friend of my father’s and had told us as many people had to call him if there was anything at all we needed. I tried to imagine what that conversation would sound like- “Good morning Tony, Dad died this morning. Can you get some bacon over here?”

We buried Dad in a blizzard three days before Christmas. It was a beautiful Naval ceremony, Dad in uniform and an attendance of people from all walks of life. I was moved by the brigade of former Navy officers now in their eighties saluting him and putting poppies on his coffin. I sat under a tarp by the graveside as the Greeks placed coins on my father’s coffin and I watched as his surviving brothers said their goodbyes. I remember hating leaving him there on such a cold day. At the luncheon held at the local Legion, I felt the full impact of all the people he had touched in life. I heard Louis’s broken English regaling a group with tales of fishing trips gone wrong while a local MP spoke of his relentless energy and commitment to years of campaigns and later a former Customs colleague complaining about the horrible smell of Al frying green peppers and onions on midnight shifts. When a friend of mine approached my mother to express her condolences, Mom replied, “Well, what are you going to do?”

As the dust settled, one of my brothers started to sign off our phone conversations by saying, I love you. I would say it back. We were trying it on, it was sitting pretty well.

Within weeks, my mother erased all images of Dad from the house. She removed every stick of cheese which she despised and he loved from the fridge, got rid of his clothes and gave me the framed pictures of him that were in the house. She started planning for a move to a comfy retirement home, in fact had started reviewing the menus while she was killing time during our hospital visits.

I hated seeing her in our family home by herself, she had always been a bit of a loner but this was too much. The idea of seeing her in new surroundings didn’t sit much better with me but she was keen to get a new thing going and at least she wouldn’t have to worry about cooking for herself. Her weekly grocery lists were dwindling to things like, 3 bananas, a pack of jube jubes and a couple M&M frozen dinners. After Dad had been gone a month or so, I asked her if she was missing him and without missing a beat she replied, “No not really, he got very bossy at the end.” She told me she had found an old love letter from him that he wrote her while they were in the Navy and then added she planned to shred it with the other papers from the week.

I was thunderstruck as Mrs. Soper used to say. Is this what sixty years of marriage comes down to? Was she just putting in time for the last 20 or so? I wondered if it was like when you know someone is going to break up with you so you start looking for things to hate about them so you can break up with them first. After a complete life together, surely the waters ran deeper than that.

Six months after Dad’s death, Mom moved into her new digs. She was listless and quiet on moving day and when I left her there I wondered if this move was more than she had bargained for. Seven days later, my brother, sister-in law and I sat in a room at the Niagara General Hospital waiting for the doctor to give us the diagnosis from Mom’s admittance to the hospital, the same floor Dad had been on. It was a warm June morning and as we waited with a mounting sense of dread, I realized that someone across the hall was playing Christmas Carols.

After the doctor broke the news to Mom about her non-treatable cancer and 3 month deadline, she sat quietly for some time holding my hand. She looked up at me and said, “You’re having a really bad year.”

When we brought her mail to her later that day, she opened a package from the War Veterans. It was a medal honouring Dad for his time as an officer. As my sister in law Janet read her the letter we all fought back tears, astounded by the timing of its arrival. She proudly showed it to her roommate and put it on her bedside table where she could see it. Maybe it was just me but between the Christmas Carols and the timing of this medal I was starting to suspect he was here with us to help soften the blow.

Nine days later, I sat by her bedside on what would be the last night of her life. She was in and out of consciousness, restless and agitated urgently murmuring, “I have to go, I have to go”. As someone once advised me, cancer doesn’t play by the rules; we don’t all go quietly into the night. I looked in her purse to find an emery board. She was meticulous about her nails and they were now chipped and broken which she would have hated. Suddenly it seemed really important that I fix them before she died. In her purse, I found the letter from my father and as I started to read it to her, she calmed down. It began,

Mary,

I am feeling so blue without you…

Her breathing steadied and she very quietly said, “Al”