“His breathing squeaks and roughs. They have disconnected him from the monitor because his heartbeat and blood pressure are too low to be picked up. And because it doesn’t matter anymore. Sometimes he bangs or pulls his legs.
The nurse comes to have a look every half hour, this morning she said a few times that it didn’t take long. She has since stopped. My father is dying on dying more than a day, but he is still alive.
Father with nine lives
We called him ‘the father with nine lives’, a nickname that he does honor to the bitter end. Over the years it was more than once lace. He was only 44 when he was operated on his heart for the first time, but that did not stop him from living through at the same pace. Working days from seven in the morning until eight in the evening, night shifts, weekend shifts – as a doctor he was always there for his patients. They walked away with him.
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I have been asked several times if it was not great to have such a man as a father. I always laughed a little sheepishly. I knew how important his work was, that he helped people and sometimes even saved lives. But I also knew that there was little time and energy left for his family. I feel that I never really got to know my father. And I think that’s a shame. I would have liked to see that differently.
What I thought of
Now it’s really too late for that. He has not been to knowledge for hours and will no longer come to knowledge. Or well, you never know with him, of course. Here in the hospital they are increasingly surprised that he has not yet blown up his last breath.
Next to me my mother speaks to him reassuringly. That he can go. That it’s good. He answers her with an extra scraping air. My nieces could no longer look at the agony and are with my sister down to drink coffee.
I have to stay with myself, no matter how hard I find it to see him like that. No matter how much it hurts to realize that this is the end of his life. Or will be in any case soon. No too big stews. No rock hard through the living room, operas -blazing operas. No spinning cats that nestle on his stomach.
In fact, I used to experience my father alone during the holidays, the few weeks a year that he was not working. I remember a drive in Milan, on the way to our summer address at Lake Garda. A lot of honking behind us, while my mother was struggling with the map.
The only one in our family with a sense of direction was my father, but he drove. And did not let itself be rushed; He put his hand out of the window, the same gesture that he had seen the Italian before us before. The honking then got a lot worse, but my father was grinning behind the wheel. My mother asks why I am laughing and I tell her what I was thinking about. She grins through her tears. My eyes are also red.
The previous times he was in the hospital, I never cried. Never really worried myself. Did I feel so little connected to him? I have been afraid for years that his approaching death would not do anything to me. Fortunately that is not true. The last few weeks and certainly the last days I have cried a lot. For my father who is so young, just 71. To how hard he worked and how little he enjoyed. Because of what has never been between us and will never come again.
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Lunch together
When my father was in the early fifty, he got his second heart attack. The ambulance was already at the door, but he first stumbled his consultation room to find some books. Because he didn’t want to get bored in the hospital. He didn’t read a letter of it.
After an operation of more than nine o’clock, he no longer came out of the anesthesia. Due to a cerebral infarction during the operation, it turned out later. He had to stop as a doctor and suddenly had seas of time. An opportunity for me to finally build a relationship with him. Small problem: I worked as a travel journalist, so now I was rarely at home. I had also never agreed with my father alone and when I suggested that I had lunch together, he thought that was strange.
Half a year later we sat opposite each other with both a bouncer in front of us, within walking distance of my parental home in Leiden. And there I received again what I actually already knew: he was not that sharp since his last operation.
He turned out to be afraid that I was angry with him, that I had taken him apart to tell him the truth. Because he had always found church and religion so important and knew that I hadn’t had it nice during my Reformed school career. He found it hard to believe that I wasn’t angry.
I told me that I just wanted to get to know him and was curious about how he was doing. He was not really at ease during the big two hours that we were there. That is why I have left a new one-on-one appointment-and I now regret that. My mother asks why I cry. I tell her about that one lunch and she turns out to be unable to remember.
My father’s convulsions get worse, it also stands out for the nurse who is just before her umpteenth visit to his bed. She proposes to increase the morphine a bit so that it is ‘more comfortable’. I think she does it especially for our comfort. This fight with death does not look pleasant.
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Morbid humor and morphine
Heart failure was the diagnosis that my father eventually received. His health sometimes went backwards with a blow, but he kept scrambling up again and again. Until a few months ago. That time it was different. He was in the hospital and was not involved. We didn’t know him like that. The man who once walked his COSCIES in the cardiology department and always wanted to know everything about the medication and treatment of his doctors, now kept his mouth shut.
A few days later he started to app again. The danger seemed to pass, but we remained worried. He had clearly taken a big step back, more than usual. And those nine lives are of course once.
Last week it suddenly got worse, except with his morbid humor. That fourth supreme. Because no further treatment was possible, a hospice was mentioned. My father got a huge cough and then squeaked completely dry: “Hospice no longer needed.” His cardiologist only dared to laugh when we did.
The nurse comes in with the morphine and squirts it into his drip. It will indeed make it calmer. His breathing now sounds more like snoring. It reminds me of the time that my eldest son had stayed with grandparents and told at home that grandpa snored so hard. I myself never came to my parents’ bedroom, but my child had woken up at night and crawled between them. As if it was the most normal thing in the world. And it was.
Suddenly it is quiet. I look at my father and see the last bit of color pulling away from his face. The nurse also sees it and looks at the clock. Time of death: 5.42 pm. Hello Dad, if the heaven you believe in really exists, then we’ll talk about it. “
More wife
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