I didn't say, "And may he stay down," but I thought it. Because he suffered. This was twenty-five years ago-1982-and suffering was still an accepted part of end-stage cancer. I remember reading ten or twelve years later that most cancer patients go out silently only because they're too weak to scream. That brought back memories of my father's sickroom so strong that I went into the bathroom and knelt in front of the toilet bowl, sure I was going to vomit.
But my father actually died four years later, in 1986. He was in assisted living then, and it wasn't pancreatic cancer that got him, after all. He choked to death on a piece of steak.
Don "Doc" Gentry and his wife, Bernadette-my mother and father-retired to a suburban home in Ford City, not too far from Pittsburgh. After his wife died, Doc considered moving to Florida, decided he couldn't afford it, and stayed in Pennsylvania. When his cancer was diagnosed, he spent a brief time in the hospital, where he explained again and again that his nickname came from his years as a veterinarian. After he'd explained this to anyone who cared, they sent him home to die, and such family as he had left-Ralph, Trudy, Ruth, and me-came to Ford City to see him out.
I remember his back bedroom very well. On the wall was a picture of Christ suffering the little children to come unto him. On the floor was a rag rug my mother had made: shades of nauseous green, not one of her better ones. Beside the bed was an IV pole with a Pittsburgh Pirates decal on it. Each day I approached that room with increasing dread, and each day the hours I spent there stretched longer. I remem bered Doc sitting on the porch glider when we were growing up in Derby, Connecticut-a can of beer in one hand, a cig in the other, the sleeves of a blinding white T-shirt always turned up twice to reveal the smooth curve of his biceps and the rose tattoo just above his left elbow. He was of a generation that did not feel strange going about in dark blue unfaded jeans-and who called jeans "dungarees." He combed his hair like Elvis and had a slightly dangerous look, like a sailor two drinks into a shore leave that will end badly. He was a tall man who walked like a cat. And I remember a summer street dance in Derby where he and my mother stopped the show, jitterbugging to "Rocket 88" by Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm. Ralph was sixteen then, I think, and I was eleven. We watched our parents with our mouths open, and for the first time I understood that they did it at night, did it with all their clothes off and never thought of us.
At eighty, turned loose from the hospital, my somehow dangerously graceful father had become just another skeleton in pajamas (his had the Pirates logo on them). His eyes lurked beneath wild and bushy brows. He sweated steadily in spite of two fans, and the smell that rose from his damp skin reminded me of old wallpaper in a deserted house. His breath was black with the perfume of decomposition.
Ralph and I were a long way from rich, but when we put a little of our money together with the remains of Doc's own savings, we had enough to hire a part-time private nurse and a housekeeper who came in five days a week. They did well at keeping the old man clean and changed, but by the day my sister-in-law said that Doc was ripe with it (I still prefer to think that was what she said), the Battle of the Smells was almost over. That scarred old pro shit was rounds ahead of the newcomer Johnson's baby powder; soon, I thought, the ref would stop the fight. Doc was no longer able to get to the toilet (which he invariably called "the can"), so he wore diapers and continence pants. He was still aware enough to know, and to be ashamed. Sometimes tears rolled from the corners of his eyes, and half-formed cries of desperate, disgusted amusement came from the throat that had once sent "Hey, Good Lookin'" out into the world.
The pain settled in, first in the midsection and then radiating out ward until he would complain that even his eyelids and fingertips hurt. The painkillers stopped working. The nurse could have given him more, but that might have killed him and she refused. I wanted to give him more even if it did kill him. And I might have, with support from Ruth, but my wife wasn't the sort to provide that kind of prop.
"She'll know," Ruth said, meaning the nurse, "and then you'll be in trouble."
"He's my dad!"
"That won't stop her." Ruth had always been a glass-half-empty person. It wasn't the way she was raised; it was the way she was born. "She'll report it. You might go to jail."