Closure
By Persephone
The family stood looking down at the hospital bed, in which the blue and gray tubes and clear plastic bags seemed to form a cocoon or a web, overwhelming the patient. We were in the gleaming Intensive Care Unit of Hartford (CT) Hospital. The patient was our father.
He looked terrible. His hair was long, wispy and completely white; his face was gaunt and white; his arms and hands covered with what looked like puncture wounds rather than bruises left by the many needles pumping stuff in and out, or monitoring his vital signs. His hipbones and feet—skeletal-- jutted out from the covering sheet. In short, he looked deathly… or maybe ghostly.
Dad was in fact in very bad shape. On entry to the hospital he had presented grisly symptoms (bleeding from either end). He had a grossly enlarged spleen, so that a splenectomy was under discussion. He could not talk but mumbled incessantly. He appeared to recognize only two of us. His eyes did not track. His hands plucked fitfully at the needles in his chest and arms; he kept trying to pull them out. When we asked the docs about his chances if they undertook the splenectomy there was a long pause and then “We would generally perform this procedure on a much younger man.”
So. The family debated the likely outcomes of this procedure; and agreed that we wanted only minimally invasive procedures and did not want the resuscitation or intubation. As my mother said, “Why prolong this? He’s in so much pain. It isn’t much of a life.”
So it was settled. In a subsequent conversation with my brother, Dad appeared to agree with these decisions. Dad would go back an assisted living facility in Connecticut, where they would “make him comfortable.” And Dad had agreed also that he would be cremated, and his ashes stored in the garden at the family house on a Maine island.
One could say that this sequence of decisions provided closure. Careful input from all. A decision, agreed upon with the patient. The door gently closed. The kind of ending that many of us might wish.
So why do I characterize this as striking? As a family, we had not assembled in one room together in over 25 years; yet there was accord. The family acted like a unit, working together to come to a decision. We all had a chance to help Dad at the very end of his life.
In a later phone call my brother asked me if I felt I had had “closure.” And I said, “Yes. But I don’t believe we recognized each other. Which meant I could hold his hand and say silly meaningless kindly things in an attempt to comfort him, just as if I had found a stranger who‘d been hit by a car and I was waiting with him for the ambulance to arrive. for me, it was a great relief.”
Why would I be happy not to recognize my father? Well, Dad was the singular monster in all our lives. Destructive anger was the emotion which most characterized him. He was abusive in every possible way. I hated him. And I had cause.
But I no longer recognized him. Among Japanese bunraku puppets there is a young god character who is smooth, handsome, charming, and smiling—and whose face with a twist of the unseen controlling wires becomes that of a raging demon, red faced, eyes glaring, hair in a wild aura around the head, teeth sharpened to points. Dad as I last remember him. The ghost in the hospital bed no longer resembled him at all.
Who was this seemingly diabolical character? Dad was a paranoid schizophrenic. He ran the gamut from high manic delusions to no-affect catatonia. At the high end, Dad believed that God spoke to him and that he was destined to be president of the United States. At the other end, he became catatonic. His thoughts were slow; his responses to questions were short and empty. He would not leave the house. His face had become flat and without affect; he stared emptily into space. He ran down like an old LP on a turntable, slowing to a stop.
Do not be deceived, however. Dad was a far more disturbing character than this account makes him sound. Although he appeared good looking, well educated, and active in the church, behind the doors of the family home things were very different. Dad’s behavior oscillated between the catatonic—he once spent three weeks sitting with his face to the wall drinking vats of cheap sherry, completely silent—and frequent violent destructive rage, culminating in beatings of his children.. He was forced to give up the beatings only when his sons had become stronger than he and fought him back.
Dad’s central issue was the need for complete domination. He would use any means available, generally public humiliation and private violence, to keep the family miserable and subdued. One family friend astutely commented that being crazy did not excuse Dad, saying “A crazy sonofabitch is still a sonofabitch.”
I yearned for escape. And after college graduation, I thought I might finally have found it. My three years in Nagasaki Japan teaching English were downright idyllic. But even Japan was not far enough. Letters from home made it clear that the tenuous fabric of Dad’s sanity had begun rapidly to unravel. One letter told me that a flock of giant birds, perched on Dad’s head, were ripping his flesh with their claws. Simultaneously, frantic letters from my mother describing Dad’s hostile behavior, insisted I come home to help her. And like an obedient child, I did. And it was worse than I could have imagined. That was many bitter battles, and 25 years ago.
This brings us to date, to that ghostly white gaunt elderly man in a cocoon of tubes in a hospital bed. There was to be no healing conversation --- no closure for me. But he could no longer hurt me. I no longer hated him. As another patient’s daughter had put it, “You know your father is no longer in there.” He was not. And so I said good-bye to my father, and departed Hartford Hospital.
- - -
Persephone is single, female, and lives in northern Manhattan with two cats, both charming and rife with attitude. Inspired by Edgar Baxt’s tales of Dorothy Parker, she is currently hard at work perfecting her mix of the martini and composing her memoirs a telling portion of which, she is proud to say, appear at Deflowered Memoirs.
By Persephone
The family stood looking down at the hospital bed, in which the blue and gray tubes and clear plastic bags seemed to form a cocoon or a web, overwhelming the patient. We were in the gleaming Intensive Care Unit of Hartford (CT) Hospital. The patient was our father.
He looked terrible. His hair was long, wispy and completely white; his face was gaunt and white; his arms and hands covered with what looked like puncture wounds rather than bruises left by the many needles pumping stuff in and out, or monitoring his vital signs. His hipbones and feet—skeletal-- jutted out from the covering sheet. In short, he looked deathly… or maybe ghostly.
Dad was in fact in very bad shape. On entry to the hospital he had presented grisly symptoms (bleeding from either end). He had a grossly enlarged spleen, so that a splenectomy was under discussion. He could not talk but mumbled incessantly. He appeared to recognize only two of us. His eyes did not track. His hands plucked fitfully at the needles in his chest and arms; he kept trying to pull them out. When we asked the docs about his chances if they undertook the splenectomy there was a long pause and then “We would generally perform this procedure on a much younger man.”
So. The family debated the likely outcomes of this procedure; and agreed that we wanted only minimally invasive procedures and did not want the resuscitation or intubation. As my mother said, “Why prolong this? He’s in so much pain. It isn’t much of a life.”
So it was settled. In a subsequent conversation with my brother, Dad appeared to agree with these decisions. Dad would go back an assisted living facility in Connecticut, where they would “make him comfortable.” And Dad had agreed also that he would be cremated, and his ashes stored in the garden at the family house on a Maine island.
One could say that this sequence of decisions provided closure. Careful input from all. A decision, agreed upon with the patient. The door gently closed. The kind of ending that many of us might wish.
So why do I characterize this as striking? As a family, we had not assembled in one room together in over 25 years; yet there was accord. The family acted like a unit, working together to come to a decision. We all had a chance to help Dad at the very end of his life.
In a later phone call my brother asked me if I felt I had had “closure.” And I said, “Yes. But I don’t believe we recognized each other. Which meant I could hold his hand and say silly meaningless kindly things in an attempt to comfort him, just as if I had found a stranger who‘d been hit by a car and I was waiting with him for the ambulance to arrive. for me, it was a great relief.”
Why would I be happy not to recognize my father? Well, Dad was the singular monster in all our lives. Destructive anger was the emotion which most characterized him. He was abusive in every possible way. I hated him. And I had cause.
But I no longer recognized him. Among Japanese bunraku puppets there is a young god character who is smooth, handsome, charming, and smiling—and whose face with a twist of the unseen controlling wires becomes that of a raging demon, red faced, eyes glaring, hair in a wild aura around the head, teeth sharpened to points. Dad as I last remember him. The ghost in the hospital bed no longer resembled him at all.
Who was this seemingly diabolical character? Dad was a paranoid schizophrenic. He ran the gamut from high manic delusions to no-affect catatonia. At the high end, Dad believed that God spoke to him and that he was destined to be president of the United States. At the other end, he became catatonic. His thoughts were slow; his responses to questions were short and empty. He would not leave the house. His face had become flat and without affect; he stared emptily into space. He ran down like an old LP on a turntable, slowing to a stop.
Do not be deceived, however. Dad was a far more disturbing character than this account makes him sound. Although he appeared good looking, well educated, and active in the church, behind the doors of the family home things were very different. Dad’s behavior oscillated between the catatonic—he once spent three weeks sitting with his face to the wall drinking vats of cheap sherry, completely silent—and frequent violent destructive rage, culminating in beatings of his children.. He was forced to give up the beatings only when his sons had become stronger than he and fought him back.
Dad’s central issue was the need for complete domination. He would use any means available, generally public humiliation and private violence, to keep the family miserable and subdued. One family friend astutely commented that being crazy did not excuse Dad, saying “A crazy sonofabitch is still a sonofabitch.”
I yearned for escape. And after college graduation, I thought I might finally have found it. My three years in Nagasaki Japan teaching English were downright idyllic. But even Japan was not far enough. Letters from home made it clear that the tenuous fabric of Dad’s sanity had begun rapidly to unravel. One letter told me that a flock of giant birds, perched on Dad’s head, were ripping his flesh with their claws. Simultaneously, frantic letters from my mother describing Dad’s hostile behavior, insisted I come home to help her. And like an obedient child, I did. And it was worse than I could have imagined. That was many bitter battles, and 25 years ago.
This brings us to date, to that ghostly white gaunt elderly man in a cocoon of tubes in a hospital bed. There was to be no healing conversation --- no closure for me. But he could no longer hurt me. I no longer hated him. As another patient’s daughter had put it, “You know your father is no longer in there.” He was not. And so I said good-bye to my father, and departed Hartford Hospital.
- - -
Persephone is single, female, and lives in northern Manhattan with two cats, both charming and rife with attitude. Inspired by Edgar Baxt’s tales of Dorothy Parker, she is currently hard at work perfecting her mix of the martini and composing her memoirs a telling portion of which, she is proud to say, appear at Deflowered Memoirs.
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