I had to admit to myself today that Dad is dying.

Through six weeks of touch-and-go medical intervention, I held out hope that he would rebound--that we might still get a few good years out of him. He's not that old, after all. Only 79. And the cancer he has is not that aggressive.

But complication after complication compounded his situation. He went into the hospital with a serious infection that prevented him from moving around for over a week, while he laid in bed with an IV dripping industrial-strength antibiotic into his vein. After that, he had daily physical therapy to try to get his strength back, but it seemed it was always one step forward and two steps back. One day, he'd be able to walk down the hospital hallway with a walker. The next day, it would take two nurses to get him onto the bedside toilet.

My mom and I advocated for him to come home. We thought that if he was at home, we'd be able to give him the one-on-one care he needed to get better. We reasoned, also, that the clinical dreariness of the medical environment was draining his will to recover.

But we couldn't bring him home; not yet. He had a very serious infection in his blood, the doctors said. He needed the IV antibiotics, and we couldn't administer them ourselves.

He was moved into a "rehabilitation center"--basically a nursing home, understaffed and fairly unhygienic. Just a few more weeks, we promised him, and then you can come home.

The next complication was pneumonia, which he picked up either in the hospital or the rehab center. This necessitated a second industrial-strength antibiotic. Back to the hospital he went, and the strength he'd gained in physical therapy dwindled. Doctors and other hospital people started speaking to him, and to us, in the language of bereavement.

A doctor from Palliative Care came to speak with us, to get us to fill out a form that would instruct the doctors of how to respond in the event of pulmonary arrest. I was skeptical. I knew what "palliative" meant. The doctor was bright and cheerful and kind. She spoke in positive terms, but her underlying function was to prepare us for Dad to die.

"Are you anxious to get home, Ray?" another doctor asked.

"I'm anxious about my life," Dad answered.

"Yes, well. You have a lot of health challenges. But we're doing our best to make you comfortable."

Comfortable. That's what you do with dying people. You make them as comfortable as possible, under the circumstances. You don't help them retrain their muscles for walking. You don't take them out to eat. You don't push them to try harder. You fluff their pillows and give them morphine to quell the end-of-life anxiety.

Yesterday, Dad came home.

I had held onto hope for his recovery through all the pessimism, through all the signs that his body and mind were deteriorating. These are just side-effects of being in the hospital, I thought. Of needles and boredom and subpar food. Once he gets home, he'll start to improve.

He came home by ambulance, because he is unable to walk. A team of hospice nurses preceded him. The EMTs wheeled him up our newly built ramp on a stretcher, but the stretcher wouldn't fit around the hallway corner, so I brought the hospice-provided wheelchair outside. He was wrapped up in a blue hospital blanket. These two men lifted him, one on each end, like a burrito and placed him in the chair.

He's so skinny.

I'd brought home takeout from his favorite barbecue restaurant to welcome him home. While Mom talked business with the hospice nurses, I spoon-fed him pulled pork, baked beans, and coleslaw.

"Isn't this the best food you've had in six weeks?" I asked.

He had a faraway look in his eye, and it took him minutes to answer. "Delicious," he finally said.

"Dad," I said. "I want you to know, you're not coming home to die. You're coming home to live. You don't have to live forever, but you have to live while you're alive."

He broke into tears.

"Just do what you can, okay?" I said.

He nodded.

For the rest of the night, he was unable to communicate with us. He couldn't form words, and when we asked questions he couldn't even nod or shake his head. He seemed always to be looking off at some point in the mid-distance, like a scene was playing out on the opposite wall, and no one could see it but him.

This morning, the first thing I did was massage his legs before getting him out of bed.

He's so skinny.

The leg muscles are hardly palpable under his papery skin and sharp bones. I did some stretching and resistance exercises with him in bed. But he can't stand. Even with the walker, he can't.

He was lucid for about an hour this morning. He ate his breakfast and sat outside on the new deck for awhile, but then he wanted to go lay back down, and he slept for several hours. We got him back up in the wheelchair in the afternoon, and the lucidity was gone. Again, he seemed to be watching a movie on a blank wall. When we spoke to him, he seemed to be trying to form words, but none would come out. He drooled a lot, and he's so skinny.

My husband, Eric, thinks Dad's problem is more a problem of will than a problem of physical health. This makes a certain kind of sense. Prior to his hospitalization, Dad spent almost three years being completely sedentary. No matter what we did or how we begged, he wouldn't leave his armchair except to go to the dining table or use the bathroom. He had had some health issues for the first time in his life--a stroke, another stroke, a cancer diagnosis, and he seemed to have given up, even though his mind was still sharp, his body still in good enough shape that he could be mobile and enjoy doing everyday activities.

We were all a bit mad at Dad, I think, when he went to the hospital the first time. If he'd only listened to our advice, if he'd only gotten up and moved, he wouldn't be in this situation now. But you can't change the past, so what's the point in being mad at him?

I now think that he spent those three years trying to avoid thinking about his own mortality.

I will never do that, I tell myself. I will be active until the day I die. You can't change the past, so you have to be proactive in the present. And then I light up a cigarette.

I want to agree with Eric, that if Dad could just find the will to continue, he could recover. For awhile, I did agree with him. During his whole hospitalization, I believed he could bounce back. He could live for four, five, six more years. He could walk again. He could play chess with his granddaughter. He could sit out on the porch with me at dusk to watch the bats, like we used to when I was a kid. They flew in screeching clouds, up from the woods and into the sky.

But today, that hope was dashed. His first day home, and his mental and physical agility are both worse than when he was in the hospital.

At first, when your elderly loved one falls ill, you think it's only temporary. Maybe some accommodations will need to be made, but ultimately they'll get better. Then, gradually, you start to see the signs of permanence: the catheter, the bedside toilet, the oxygen tank--for emergencies only. You pretend that these things can be removed when your loved one gets back on their feet and regains mobility. When the course of antibiotics is finished. When they come home.

But, symptom by symptom, reason sets in. This isn't temporary. This is end-of-life. You have to accept it.

Dying grows on you.

It has grown on me. I'm making peace with the fact that my Dad, who used to bring ten books home from the library each week and make sculptures out of wire coat hangers, is deteriorating. Permanently. He's never going to walk down to the creek again, or make his famous quesadillas. He might not even regain the strength to move himself from the bed to the bedside toilet, with help. His body and mind are shutting down, and all I can do is watch.

And make him comfortable.

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Thank you for reading!

Hi! I'm Leslie Starr O'Hara, but my friends call me Starr. I live in the mountains of North Carolina and I write fiction, satire, essays, and musings here on Steemit.

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