I didn’t mention before and should for clarity that between my father’s cancer diagnosis and my mother’s death my poor brother got divorced. His wife left him one day in the middle of July. Shortly after my mom was put in the hospital, he started dating a woman and they quickly became engaged.
After my mom died, my dad and I became much closer. We were already close, always had been. I was close to both my parents. But after she died it was as if I kind of took her place as his best friend. We talked every day, and I went home most weekends. We even started going to the movies–something we hadn’t done together since I was in fourth grade (ET had been the last one.)
The holidays that year were odd. He and I drove to Dallas to spend Thanksgiving with my brother’s fiancee’s family. It was good that there was something different to do, I think. It was weird and awkward–as neither of us cared for the fiancee or her family–but we had each other and it wasn’t nearly as sad as it would have been if we tried to do the big turkey dinner at home.
At the moment, I’m not remembering Christmas or Hanukah that year. Hm. It’ll come to me later.
In October my dad was complaining about a backache. When I, or anyone else, suggested he go to the doctor he said it was pointless because they’d just tell him to exercise to build his abdominal muscles and he was too tired to exercise.
Then one day in late November, I think, he was at work–he was a machinist–and fell off one of the cement steps at the back of the building. He tore his rotator cuff. And as they did x-rays and such for worker’s comp, they found a mass behind his kidney.
His doctor didn’t like the look of it and sent it to his oncologist. It was mid December at this point. His oncologist didn’t like it, either. They scheduled for him to be in the hospital for several days, right after the new year, to run tests.
My dad asked me not to tell anyone, particularly not my brother who was getting married on New Year’s Day.
I didn’t.
We went to the wedding, and I remember my dad having to get out of the way and go sit a lot because his back was hurting so much. The drive there and back was hard on him, too.
And that Monday night we went to dinner with his GP and his wife. He had been my mom’s GP and they were all friends from the synagogue. We went and had Chinese food. We talked about my brother’s wedding a little, but mostly about what kind of tests he wanted run on my dad and what we should expect.
The next morning we checked him into the hospital. When my brother got back from his honeymoon that night my dad called him from the hospital and explained what was going on. Tests.
A PET scan taken on Tuesday found tumors between each vertebrae in his spine. A larger mass behind his kidneys. Masses in his lungs.
The cancer had metasticized. Quickly. They believe now that the cancer did not originate in his salivary glands, but somewhere else deeper in his body that was hidden by organs during previous scans.
They started radiation immediately. My brother drove down a day or so later.
Dad was doing well, though, all things considered and they sent him home on Saturday. My brother and I both started back to school on Monday and so had to (had to? Hell. I fight myself about that all the time) go back–him to Dallas and me to Lubbock.
He had appointments on Monday and Tuesday with various doctors. I was driving back on Wednesday night to go with him to get his prognosis from the oncologist.
When I walked in the door–just two days later–I saw what looked like a pharmacy on the kitchen counters. One of the most frightening things I’ve ever seen. There was oxycontin. Morphine. Steroids. And a host of other things I couldn’t pronounce. And each of them were labeled with sticky notes detailing when he was supposed to take them.
He was a little delerious that evening and not hungry at all.
I went into his office to check some things he asked me to look over. Bills, to be sure he had gotten the amounts and dates right. An e-mail he needed to answer. That kind of stuff. When I came back into the kitchen he asked me to look outside. He said something went outisde that wasn’t supposed to and he couldn’t get it to come back in. What? He couldn’t remember. There was nothing out there.
That night I could hear him talking in his sleep from the other side of the house. I’d only ever heard him snore before.
That morning as we drove to the doctor’s office he kept talking. To someone. But it wasn’t me. This had happened all morning, and I’d ask him to repeat himself or ask him who he was talking to and he’d snap out of it. But in the car, when he said something (and I wish I remembered what it was), I said, “Dad? What did you say?” And he said, “I’m having a conversation and there’s just no room for you in it.” And I laughed, then he laughed, and we laugh/cried the rest of the way there.
My dad was always the funniest person in a room. Cancer didn’t stop that.
In the waiting room he saw a woman he knew. It ended up being a woman they had met during my mom’s treatment. She had MS, too. She didn’t know my mom had died. And I could tell she knew something wasn’t quite right with my Dad, but she didn’t say anything. She was very kind.
His name was called and we went back in. The nurse took his vitals and asked a ton of questions about how he was and how the medicine was doing and reminded us of what the side-effects were.
The doctor came in. Two weeks. He said if we did nothing, my dad had two weeks.
I was 31, sitting here with my dad who was 58 ten months after my mom died at 56 hearing that he had two weeks. Two weeks. If we did nothing.
Chemotherapy would extend that. By how much, he didn’t know. But we would get him checked back into the hospital that day and they’d start chemo first thing in the morning. Because of his weakend state and because he lived alone they said he might need to be in the hospital for the entirety of his chemo treatment.
Not a problem.
He sent us home to pack up some things. They’d call us when a room was ready.
We went home, called my brother and updated him, and as I packed his things I asked him if this is what he wanted to do. He said it was his only option. I told him it wasn’t. That he could stay home and I’d stay with him and we’d deal with it. But he said no. That he had to try to fight. And so I packed him up, we got the phone call, and I took him and checked him in.
That was around 5pm, I think.
I sat with him in his room until 10:30pm.
They had him on a lot of pain medicine, and he kept asking for more. The oxycontin. The morphine. They weren’t touching the pain in his back. And he became more delirious.
“I love peas and carrots,” he said in almost a little boy’s voice as he physically went through the motions of eating.
Later it was, “Let’s get this thing on the road and see how fast it’ll go!”
Later still he managed to turn sideways on the bed and sit up with his legs over the edge. He asked me if I’d come over and see if I could figure out what was wrong with Word Perfect. It wouldn’t let him indent the synogauge newsletter the way he wanted to.
And after several hours of that and the pain and still being in shock about hearing “two weeks” I started crying. And in a moment of lucidity he looked up at me. I told him I was sorry for crying, and he said, “I’m just so sorry you’re having to go through this again.”
And that’s the last thing he ever said directly to me.
One of the nurses came in and saw me crying. She told me I should go home and get some sleep. They’d call me if anything changed.
I got my stuff together and was out the door into the hallway, but went back. “I love you.” He didn’t hear me. But that was okay. I said it. For the first time in probably ten years.
I went home at 10:30pm but couldn’t sleep. The phone rang at 11:30pm. It was a nurse. She immediately said everything was fine. She told me they had to put him on oxgen. It was helping him breathe and relax a bit.
That was the phone call, I figured. You always get called from the hospital once during the night. So I went on to bed.
And then the phone rang again at 12:30am. He had stopped breathing. They were doing CPR, but I should come up immediately.
I was there in about fifteen minutes. I went up the elevator and down the hallway toward his room. And a male nurse I hadn’t seen before looked at me, and I could tell he saw my resemblance to my dad. He stopped me. “Miss Rosenfeld?”
And I knew. And I started crying. And he hugged me.
They asked if I wanted to see him.
And I remembered how my dad said he regretted being there with my mom as she died. That he hated that was his last memory of her. So, I said no.
They took me to a seat and gave me a glass of water. They asked if there was anyone I needed to call right away.
And I hope there is never ever a harder call to make than that was. It was an hour and a half past my brother’s birthday when he anwered the phone. I don’t know what I said. Could I have just said, “Dad died”? I think that’s what I said.
A two week prognosis became less than twelve hours.
My brother asked if I wanted him to come home right then. No. I told him to wait until morning. Get more rest, get himself together before driving.
I went back to the house. And got into bed for about ten minutes.
Then I got up and found my mom’s obituary on the computer and rewrote it for my dad. While I did that I got onto The Usuals and posted. And SJ was online and was so sweet and so kind and chatted with me for a little bit.
Then went through his closet and pulled out his suit. I picked a shirt and tie and some socks. A tie pin. A yamulke. His talit.
I couldn’t handle the silence and so called his best friend in Denver. She didn’t answer.
I went through his drawers and began bagging stuff up to donate to the disabled veterans. I found his porn stash. And like a good friend, took it to the dumpster.
I bagged up all his medicine so that my brother didn’t have to see the pharmacy I walked in on. I found his life insurance policy, his pre-need contract with the mortuary, and his second mortgage insurance.
His best friend called back. I talked to her for at least an hour. Was hard to tell her, but not nearly as hard. She was very comforting.
I think I fell asleep for a couple of hours after that. I remember my sister-in-law calling to tell me my brother had left and would be there around 10:30am. So it must have been 8am.
The phone rang again shortly after that and it was a friend of my dad’s from the synogauge. She was crying and saying how terrible it was. I asked how she knew and she said the hospital had called her.
That seemed strange to me as she wasn’t on any of the paperwork.
Then she said, “Both of them. I can’t believe it.”
Through a lot of crying I figured out that she wasn’t talking about my father. But instead his GP. The one we had just had dinner with a week and a half before. He and his wife had been at a conference in Dallas, but when he heard about my dad’s prognosis and readmission he and his wife started driving back. He fell asleep at the wheel, and they crashed into a semi. Both died.
And then I had to tell her my dad died.
And then hang up and sit in a house all by myself, and think about that night we all had dinner and how two weeks later I was the only one still alive.
Losing my dad was harder for all kinds of reasons.
I was completely alone.
I didn’t have him there to support me.
It wasn’t expected. There had been no time to prepare. Even as I had driven home that night I was worried about the chemo treatments, not about whether he’d make it through the night.
I had to tell my brother.
His dying wasn’t just “my father died,” but “my parents died.” Within 10 months of each other.
The funeral was two days later. By the end of February we had cleaned out the house, settled his will, and had all the various paperworks taken care of. That summer I went up to Denver and became my 95 year old grandmother’s power of attorney, cleaned out her house (40 years of stuff to go through), and sold it (my dad had put her in a nursing home a few months before he died.)
And then life went on. Because it does whether you want it to or not.
My mother died on 03/03/03. My father on 01/16/04.
Almost six and almost five years ago.
I spent the first year or so afterward in a kind of paranoid fear that my brother was going to die. Both my parents were only children, so he is really my only blood relative that I have contact with. And to lose him might destroy me. So with all that bad luck on my side, I just knew it had to happen. Until the day I went to the doctor and he detected an irregularity on my EKG and sent me right to the ER because he was afraid I was having a heart attack. All was fine, it was a reoccurring heart murmur. But then my greatest fear was what it would do to my brother if I died.
And I, of course, hated God for awhile. And then decided that he hated me. But I’m mostly over that now.
I know my situation and how I lost my parents isn’t the worst thing that ever happened to anyone.
My parents GP and his wife that died? They had a 16 year old son.
I know that I was very blessed to have such good, caring, loving parents and to have them as long as I did. I know that I am lucky to have my brother and that we made it through that situation together and stronger for it–and that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes it tears families apart.
But I know it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. The hardest thing. The thing I worry I’ll never get over.
