My Father’s Living Will

It is a haze of fog and low cloud at dawn and the kookaburras are wild with ecstasy. The soft low click of the neighbors’ gate breaks in among the birdsong: opening, closing, opening. They are leaving early for the long weekend of midsummer.

In the room next to mine, a man is retching, heaving, coughing; a woman is speaking softly to him. They are my father and my mother. I live with them and my children on the cliffs between the Pacific Ocean and Sydney Harbour. The climate is temperate, never cold and hardly ever hot. Rains come briefly; the breeze is steady. People here dream of the surf and of rising property values. They dress as if they were about to take to the waves. I have returned here after a long time away, to take care of my parents and to be taken care of by them.

My father’s bilious attack stretches over the weekend. My son calls for help and becomes entangled in a checklist of questions from a computer-generated nurse. No human help is available on a long weekend. Between bouts of vomiting, my father sleeps. I wake him to offer water and sweet mints. When he rises from bed, feeling a little better, there is a sudden acute pain in his back. His doctor returns from the weekend, prescribes pain medicine, and takes off on safari.

That night my father wakes in a rage, booming out commands to bring warm drink and bedclothes, and when they arrive, demanding air conditioning and ice. A fever spikes. His pain returns. My mother moves to another room. My son and I take turns with my father. At midday in midsummer, he is shivering. When we make appointments with doctors, he cancels them. He who had an infinite appetite is not eating, is morose, furious, and exhausted.

I do not recognize him. When he is possessed by rage, stubbornness, and refusals, I am reminded of why I left Sydney. In the peaceful times since my return, I began to doubt my memories of his dictatorship, but as life fails in him, his ferocious will rises again. Except he can’t even go to the toilet on his own. I do not kowtow as I did when he was my Father. As his caretaker, I can honor him and not be dishonored by him. We are all so starving for sleep.

My son and I keep vigil night after day after night as my father’s heart fails, his lungs fail, and his legs swell till the skin is stretched to bursting. Each morning I call a doctor, but there are no more appointments, so we do what we can to make my father comfortable. Most of the night he is kept awake with coughing, and in the day, he sleeps in sudden bouts, waking with fright. We are watching constantly in case he gets up, becomes disoriented, and falls.

I leave my father with my gentle, patient son to help my mother make Shabbos dinner. As we keep vigil by the bedside, she keeps the household running: washing, hanging, drying, folding, marketing, preparing food, mopping floors. She is too old to be doing it by herself.

Three healthy adults are taking care of one sick man, and we are all disintegrating.

Friday night, Shabbos eve, I fall asleep wrapped in the wires of captivity, my obligations stretching out infinitely long before me, into my own old age and decrepitude, as I spend my energy and life force on a dying man. I dream of escape. I should get some work done! Swim in the ocean! Not let my father’s moods rile me up! We are hitting rough spots. Nothing to panic about. I am not in danger. I can live here the rest of my life, in peace and safety. I can manage it. But not if I don’t sleep.

Shabbos morning, restless, I leave my father with my mother and son and take the long hot hike to a synagogue I haven’t been to for three years, ready to move into something new.

Until now, my father had no ailments and took few medicines. He is of indeterminate age. His passport places his birth date in one year (1928), but he will tell you another year (1932) if he is in the mood. During the Second World War, his father was interned in Budapest with Polish Jewish escapees from the death camps. They emphasized the importance of knowing your birth date, rehearsing it, and being able to answer fluently when asked for it, without hesitation. Eighty years later, my father knows his several birth dates and recites each one fluently, without hesitation.

However old he might be, his mother lived almost a hundred years, and he plans to follow her in her decline: moving out of the bedroom into the living room and having his children take care of him as he took care of his mother. Any hint of change to his plan, he resists as he resists death. Because he will get old, but he will not die. If he turns his face from death, death cannot catch him. This is his estate plan, his living will, his answer to those who sought to end him, his family, his people: I will not die, because I will live.

But my father’s mother did not, as my father does, have a wife who wants a living room suitable for entertaining guests. My parents are at completely different stages of life.

I come home from synagogue. My father is out on the porch in the summer’s day, a little revived. Standing, holding onto a chair, lifting his legs in an old habit of exercise, trying to drag the chair inside. He sits, and begins to speak the names of the melamdim, the religious teachers of his childhood. All gone, he says, all gone, only one came back from the Nazi deportation. And by some chance his wife and six or seven children came back, too, by a completely different route. What made him think of them now?

They are waiting for him. His brothers are waiting for him, too, the ones who were murdered when my father was saved. I feel that, the logic of it, the justice of it, that when we go, we meet those who have gone before us. When my eleven-year-old cousin lay dying, he told his mother he was afraid because he didn’t know anyone where he was going. A few days before, his grandmother had died suddenly, and when the dying boy’s mother told him that his grandmother was waiting for him, he was at peace. When we leave this world, we join the loved ones who have gone before us, just as when we are born, we join the loved ones who have come before us.

I listen to my father’s testimony about those who came back from the deportation and those who didn’t, and go out to the kitchen to cry. I want to take him back to synagogue once more to say goodbye to his minyan men whom he prayed with, but that is in the past, those excursions. We did many of them, and they were good.

I am so miserable, my father says, his legs so swollen that skin that used to hang loose on him is stretched, cracked, and bleeding. Miserable. I have never heard him use that word before. My son prepares an ark for him on the couch, lined with feather down and soft wool, and my father falls asleep. He is feverish, his breathing rattling through his throat, waking him frequently. Each breath is shallower, his body slumping, leaving us. My son and I look up at one another.

I message our family living in distant places that they should come.

The next morning, a Sunday, a doctor calls suddenly from somewhere (when do Sydney doctors call on a Sunday?) to say my father’s blood results are very bad. In the week following, we beg for appointments with specialists, beginning a late apprenticeship in the medical rigmarole most people expend their later years on. The cardiologist declares his heart is strong, but he might have lung cancer; the hematologist says he doesn’t have bone cancer but absolutely must have heart failure, and everyone agrees something is wrong with his lungs, hard to say what. My father is polite to them, charming, and turns to me and whispers that they are talking nonsense. He is alive enough to know what’s what. And he isn’t taking the death sentence they’re handing him. That’s what.

He stays alive through the turmoil of nights in which I wake with my chest collapsed, afraid, afraid with dread in my lungs and every fiber. And in the morning, there he is having breakfast with increasingly swollen limbs and his spirits half of what they were the day before, but still alive. And I’m thinking of all the chances I didn’t take with him, the parks I didn’t go to with him, and the stories I will never hear, that will go down with him. The house is filled with family, moving around each other in confusion, each of us in our separate grief and rage and bargaining. He is still with us. I wish we could just be together, not be suffering and not be the cause of suffering. I wish we didn’t have to spend this time running to doctors who look at him through a reverse magnifying glass as if he were some pinprick on a paper a thousand miles away.

They don’t know what’s wrong, but they prescribe antibiotics. He takes them.

The air that had hung heavy as a cloud all the time of my father’s illness breaks, and the rain beats a tattoo on the hollow railing of the balcony, a relief from sun and sultry winds, washing away the weeks. Kookaburras sing on the electrical wires. The neighbors’ gate clicks open, shut, open. They have returned, their children walking out languidly in new school uniforms.

My father turns, comes back. The medicine produces its results.

My father’s near death, how I touched the end and shook with it and went delirious as he did and considered what we had done together and what I would never know and wished I did: That was a transport for me, too, and when it ended I became new, even though he is still with us and old. In almost losing him, part of me died, put me through the birth pangs, and afterward I began again. My body disintegrated with my father’s body until we came to a parting and chose the way up.

Sydney is humid again. My mother goes to the gym every other day and to the gardens on off-days, and she has a whirl of ballet and theater, but not with friends—they’re so old. And she debates with my father, who is mostly in the kitchen, making bites of food, sniffing out plans for a scintilla of change in his routine. Everything must remain as exactly it was, although my children are allowed to disrupt him, only they. And my children are growing toward where he was and where he is, earning a living and bringing forth life, taking turns being independents and dependents again.

I live with my future on a reel of time that unwinds in a prophecy before me. The reel wraps in a tight spool, silent and potent, one generation after the other, linked by the loops and fabric of love, hugging close to itself, expending the years in spirals: being cared for and caring for others.

Viva Hammer is at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute of Brandeis University.

Image by Alex Proimos, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.