My dad started off by being confused. He would ask me what something was, and use an extremely vague, inappropriate term for a common household object. He would take fifteen, twenty seconds to remember what word he was about to use.
The day after my mother’s birthday, they took him in for tests and admitted him to hospital on the spot. We didn’t know what it was for days. They glued little tan-coloured donuts all over his head to be able to pinpoint the scans better. Later, they did a biopsy and we found out what it was: glioblastoma multiforme, the deadliest kind of brain cancer and the least tractable. As this went on, he got weaker and weaker. I was at their house every night trying to help my mom get him dressed, get him to bed, get him to eat, get him into the car so we could drive him to the hospital for his radiation therapy that made him weaker and weaker. We rented a wheelchair. One night I was there it was so bad that he couldn’t even climb the stairs, so we bedded him down in the front room instead.
One day I got a call. He had had a seizure in the morning; the next-door neighbour (also a doctor) had run over and given him first aid, and was convinced he was about to die. He was in the emerge at Mom’s hospital. My uncle, who was in town (my aunt and her family spent a lot of time there during his illness) immediately picked me up at home. We sat in the family room at the hospital for most of the day, with my mom at his bedside in the emerge, alternating between silence and soft crying, for the longest day in my life. He was unconscious. Every so often he would start with a râle (difficult breathing) and thrash about weakly. I would try to keep him calm so he wouldn’t pull out his tubes. Later they moved him into the emergency ward, and made him as comfortable as they could while they did tests. His old friends came and stood around the bed, singing songs, and crying.
He didn’t die then. He was driven to the Neuro, set up in a room there. For the next several weeks we waited. One test would be done, some kind of surgery, then he would improve a little, and start sliding down again. That time is really a blur. He got weaker and weaker. He sometimes was conscious, and could mutter a little. He needed help for everything. The nurses would move him around, change his linens and his gown, fix the position of his feet, help him with his excretions. For a week or more he didn’t eat or drink anything.
Soon, when he was a little more together, he was able to eat - puree of turkey, puree of squash, puree of potatoes, thick soup, thick milkshakes, water with powder to make it thick. I fed him. I remember the feeling of desperate triumph when, for the first He was not allowed to drink, though I could use a sort of foam toothbrush to sponge water onto his lips, and let him suck it dry, or to brush his teeth and relieve his evil-smelling breath.
As for me, I gained about 20 pounds because I was eating cafeteria food and, when at home, nothing but pasta.
Someone stayed with him every night in a little cot - my mom, my aunt, my uncle, one of his friends. People brought pictures, flowers - there were always flowers from people from CBC. And they came in great numbers. People he hadn’t seen for years - old girlfriends, old friends, old work people. Sometimes he would open his eyes. Sometimes they would just talk to him for a while even while he was unconscious, to reassure themselves that it was real.
We stayed with him, taking it in shifts to sit up with him, to alert the nurses if something was wrong, if he seemed uncomfortable, which he did with great frequency. And he dwindled, deteriorated, got weaker and weaker until he was scarcely there.
Finally, the doctors admitted that there was essentially nothing left to do. They had tried everything they knew to manage the cancer, and the bleeding from the biopsy, and the sodium imbalance, and every other damn thing that kept popping up. My family’s minister came to talk to us in the little chapel where we had often gone to stretch out between ‘shifts’ of watching Dad.
I said my peace to him on the last afternoon of his life. My mother stayed with him.
The last day, Mom and I had gone home to have a little dinner and rest, while my aunt stayed with him. We got a phone call telling us to come to the hospital right away. We raced down and found out that he had already died. He had just suddenly started deteriorating sharply, and there was not even time to call us before he breathed his last.
My brother was summoned from the yacht club, and we all wept together for hours. Then we moved the things out of his hospital room, thanked the nurses, and left my father’s body there in the bed, for the medical people to take care of.
It was his and my mother’s twenty-fourth wedding anniversary, two blocks from where they were married.
We had a closed-casket visitation; before the visitation, when the funeral people allowed us to see him, he looked so distorted, so unlike himself that it would have been to leave it open.
And through it all, the worst was to see my mother, because I can endure many things but not to watch her cry.
And that is what death from brain cancer is like. Kind of less funny than dropping an anvil on a cartoon character, I think.
