But still nothing came out. Then the bladder spasms began. He groaned when they came over him. “You’re going to have to catheterize me,” he said. The hospice nurse, expecting this moment would come, had brought the supplies and trained my mother. But I’d done it a hundred times for my own patients. So I pulled my father up from the seat, got him back to bed, and set about doing it for him, his eyes squeezed shut the entire time. It’s not something a person ever thinks they will come to. But I got the catheter in, and the urine flooded out. The relief was oceanic.
His greatest struggle remained the pain from his tumor—not because it was difficult to control but because it was difficult to agree on how much to control it. By the third day, he’d become unarousable again for long periods. The question became whether to keep giving him his regular dose of liquid morphine, which could be put under his tongue where it would absorb into his bloodstream through his mucous membranes. My sister and I thought we should, fearing that he might wake up in pain. My mother thought we shouldn’t, fearing the opposite.
“Maybe if he had a little pain, he’d wake up,” she said, her eyes welling. “He still has so much he can do.”
Even in his last couple of days, she was not wrong. When he was permitted to rise above the demands of his body, he took the opportunity for small pleasures greedily. He could still enjoy certain foods and ate surprisingly well, asking for chapatis, rice, curried string beans, potatoes, yellow split-pea dahl, black-eyed-pea chutney, and shira, a sweet dish from his youth. He talked to his grandchildren by phone. He sorted photos. He gave instructions about unfinished projects. He had but the tiniest fragments of life left that he could grab, and we were agonizing over them. Could we get him another one?
Nonetheless, I remembered my pledge to him and gave him his morphine every two hours, as planned. My mother anxiously accepted it. For long hours, he lay quiet and stock-still, except for the rattle of his breathing. He’d have a sharp intake of breath—it sounded like a snore that would shut off suddenly, as if a lid had come down—followed a second later by a long exhale. The air rushing past the mucoid fluid in his windpipe sounded like someone shaking pebbles in a hollow tube in his chest. Then there’d be silence for what seemed like forever before the cycle would start up again.
We got used to it. He lay with his hands across his belly, peaceful, serene. We sat by his bedside for long hours, my mother reading the Athens Messenger, drinking tea, and worrying whether my sister and I were getting enough to eat. It was comforting to be there.
Late on his penultimate afternoon, he broke out into a soaking sweat. My sister suggested that we change his shirt and wash him. We lifted him forward, into a sitting position. He was unconscious, a completely dead weight. We tried getting his shirt over his head. It was awkward work. I tried to remember how nurses do it. Suddenly I realized his eyes were open.
“Hi, Dad,” I said. He just looked for a while, observing, breathing hard.
“Hi,” he said.
He watched as we cleaned his body with a wet cloth, gave him a new shirt.
“Do you have any pain?”
“No.” He motioned that he wanted to get up. We got him into a wheelchair and took him to a window looking out onto the backyard, where there were flowers, trees, sun on a beautiful summer day. I could see that his mind was gradually clearing.
Later, we wheeled him to the dinner table. He had some mango, papaya, yogurt, and his medications. He was silent, breathing normally again, thinking.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“I’m thinking how to not prolong the process of dying. This—this food prolongs the process.”
My mom didn’t like hearing this.
“We’re happy taking care of you, Ram,” she said. “We love you.”
He shook his head.
“It’s hard, isn’t it?” my sister said.
“Yes. It’s hard.”
“If you could sleep through it, is that what you’d prefer?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“You don’t want to be awake, aware of us, with us like this?” my mother asked.
He didn’t say anything for a moment. We waited.
“I don’t want to experience this,” he said.
The suffering my father experienced in his final day was not exactly physical. The medicine did a good job of preventing pain. When he surfaced periodically, at the tide of consciousness, he would smile at our voices. But then he’d be fully ashore and realize that it was not over. He’d realize that all the anxieties of enduring that he’d hoped would be gone were still there: the problems with his body, yes, but more difficult for him the problems with his mind—the confusion, the worries about his unfinished work, about Mom, about how he’d be remembered. He was at peace in sleep, not in wakefulness. And what he wanted for the final lines of his story, now that nature was pressing its limits, was peacefulness.
During his final bout of wakefulness, he asked for the grandchildren. They were not there, so I showed him pictures on my iPad. His eyes went wide, and his smile was huge. He looked at every picture in detail.