“I know he has a black suit,” my mother kept repeating.

I knew my father. He didn’t have a black suit. He might have had a black suit at one time, but he didn’t have one now. I might have been away from my parents’ home for awhile now, but I could tell you what was in his closet. The camel hair sports coat he got from Saks Fifth Avenue that he bragged what a good deal it was. The seersucker sports coat that he found any reason to wear. The beige suit that he got “just in case,” but never had a reason to wear it. He had a lot of suits and sports coats, but no black suit.

My mother was getting frantic. “We need to get them his clothes now. I want him in that suit. We have to find that black suit.” She was getting physically upset. Her voice was getting angry and breaking.

I made the decision to go to my room, opened my suitcase, and pulled out the black suit I brought with me. I handed it to my mother and said, “Found it. Here you go.” She put it in a plastic shopping bag, along with his Penn State belt, Penn State tie, some odds and ends that she wanted in my father’s casket, said she was going to head over to the funeral home.

My father had developed pulmonary fibrosis. Pulmonary fibrosis is when the air sacs in your lungs, the part that pull the oxygen from your breath and put it into your blood stream, slowly scar and thicken until they are useless. People who get pulmonary fibrosis either have some sort of great trauma to their bodies or work somewhere where they breath in fine particles. My father never worked in a factory or had any major autoimmune diseases. So, my father was labeled as having idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. A polite way of saying “we don’t know why he has this.” My father was essentially drowning on land in slow motion, and no one had any clue why.

It should be noted that my father was not the picture of health. My father had the following medical issues at the time of his pulmonary fibrosis diagnosis: heart disease, congestive heart failure, angina, a leaking heart valve, cardiac stents, type II diabetes, and bi-polar. He had plenty of medical issues to worry about, but only pulmonary fibrosis came with a firm end date. With everything else, it could be slowed down or managed. This was something that told you and everyone around you, “this man is going to die soon.”

I got a call at work which I knew was serious. I really dislike receiving personal calls at work and have (and will) broadcast that to anyone who will listen to me. So, getting a call from my mother on a Friday as I was about to leave the office told me how serious this was.

“He’s in the hospital,” she said. “I think this is it. You need to come home.”

Within twelve hours, I was back in my hometown walking into my father’s hospital room. “Good looking, what are you doing here?” my father said to me. For a man my mother said was on his death bed, he was doing an incredible act. But, that’s what my father was known for in the last years of his life. He rarely went into public, but when he did he saved up all the energy and put on a show. If it weren’t for the oxygen tube that left permanent divots on his cheeks, you would not have known how sick he was. But, as soon as he was back home, he was in bed for four, five days to recover.

Within a few minutes of being in the hospital room, I knew something was wrong. He couldn’t hold a conversation. He wasn’t complaining about the wires and tubes and the uncomfortable bed. Many years earlier, I saw him pulling out tubes and needles as we tried to get him in an emergency room as he was having a cardiac episode. While no one would call it a heart attack, something was wrong then and he didn’t care. He just pulled out anything they tried to attach to him demanding to go home. Now, my father was just laying there.

Why he was in the hospital this particular time I can’t quite remember. But, what I do remember was the very direct and serious talk that was going on between my mother and the doctor. All of the talk affirmed that whatever was wrong, he didn’t have much time to live. It was time to call hospice. It was time to start making plans.

My father and I hadn’t spoken to each other for several months. Truthfully, the trigger was something quite petty. He said something abrasive to me over the phone, but it was the final thing that pushed out an avalanche of emotion from me. I sent a rant-filled and disjointed email to my mother and sister declaring I was done with him, and my father was now their problem. I drew a line that I wouldn’t talk or see him until he was dead. My sister reacted negatively to what I had to say. My mother was upset but didn’t present any sort of approval or disapproval to my decision. My mother promised to call me so I didn’t have to call their house in the off chance my father would pick up the phone.

My father had a habit of calling me endlessly and multiple times in a day. This started when I left home to go to college. After I graduated, the further away I lived the more he would call. The only reason it stopped was I moved back in with my parents for awhile. When I left their house for the final time, my father’s calls started happening up to six times a day. He would leave messages on my answering machine, on my cell phone, and call me at work. Most of the time it was out of boredom. Due to the pulmonary fibrosis, he couldn’t and didn’t leave the house. My mother worked during the day so he was left home alone. He wouldn’t read more than a few paragraphs of a newspaper due to being in a fog of medication and his dyslexia. He would listen to the same Air Supply and Barry Manilow songs extremely loudly, watch Judge Judy, and call me repeatedly on the phone. Those were his hobbies.

At the beginning, most of the phone calls were innocuous. Rarely were there direct reasons why he was calling. But, as the calls increased, my father would leave messages with questions on why I was trying to hurt him. He would ask why I wasn’t married yet. Didn’t I realize that he needed to see me get married? To get my wife pregnant so he could have more grandchildren? He would ask why I didn’t live near him any more. If I loved him, truly loved him, I would move back home and take care of him. He would ask why I was wasting my education. He would ask why I was wasting my life with little money living over five hundred miles away. He would say how disappointed he was in me.

As the calls grew in frequency, he would asked why I didn’t love him. If I really loved him, I would move back home. If I really loved him, I would become a lawyer, get married, give him grandchildren, and take care of him. One out of twenty calls were filled with these questions. Which became one out of ten. One out of ten became every other call. All with the same message: you left me, you’re a disappointment, and you don’t love me. By implementing a total cut-off of personal contact, especially by phone, I just threw down the nuclear option. You thought I didn’t love you? What do you think now?

The decision was made to take my father home and get hospice. Carefully, through snow and ice, we got him home and in his bed. My mother, a former hospice nurse herself, made the decision to see how my father was at home in his own bed before we called hospice. Since getting hospice involved meant hospital beds, nurses, and new medications, my mother wanted to see what we could do right now before we pulled the trigger. As long as he was in his bed we thought he would be happier and more comfortable.

In an effort to slow down the pulmonary fibrosis, he was on a heavy regimen of steroids. The side effect of the steroids was it rapidly sped up osteoporosis in my father. Every time my father would fall down, he would shatter vertebrae in his back. After three known fractures, standing and sitting became painful. After trying to find a mattress that he could lay on for extended periods of time, he ended up spending so much money on this elaborate, thick mattress that the store gave him a new LCD TV for buying it.

Once my mother, sister, and I got my father in bed for the night we instantly knew there was going to be trouble. He insisted on getting up at all hours of the night. At first, we put pillows around him to keep him from getting up. This worked briefly. He wanted to go to the bathroom, maybe seven or eight steps from the bed to the toilet, but we knew he couldn’t walk it. Plus, once he got there, he wouldn’t be able to get off the toilet. We had a commode next to the bed where one of us would sit him down on it, but he would never actually have to use it.

To make sure we all were able to get some amount of sleep, my mother went to bed and my sister and I took turns looking after him. During my shift, he asked to get up because he wanted to go for a walk. I politely but firmly told him no; he needed to lay down. He asked if he could sit up since he was tired of laying down. I helped him sit up, and it became apparent he didn’t have the strength to sit up on his own. I had him lean on me and held him up while my father rested his head on my shoulder.

“How ya doin’, good looking,” I said to my father.
“Not good,” he replied.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you.”
After a long pause, my father said, “This is it.”
“No one knows.” I rubbed his back.

“Are you talking to me yet?”

Receiving this call at work threw me for a loop. I worked in a cubicle doing phone sales. If it was witnessed that I hung up on someone who called me on my work phone, the first question out of my manager’s mouth would be, “Why did you hang up on that customer?” It wasn’t a customer; it was my father. After not speaking to him for several months, I had to talk to him because he called me at work.

“Well, you called me. So I guess I have to talk to you.”

We talked briefly. While he never actually said he was sorry, my father said he didn’t mean to hurt me. And I believed him. I never believed my father was intentionally malicious. He asked me if I would call him back. I told him I would, but I very sternly told him that my work number is for work calls and my personal number is for personal calls. I told him if either Mom or him called me at work, it better be for a serious reason.

“I miss calling you. Your mother says I shouldn’t call.”
“How about I call you.”
“I just worry, good looking.”
“I know. I’ll talk to you soon.”

When hospice came, they brought a hospital bed and put it in the family room. The hospice nurse brought medications from a compounding pharmacy. His prescriptions were in a liquid dose making them easier to swallow. I looked at the bed. It had a thin foam rubber “mattress.” I looked at his new medications. After years, decades, of finding the right medications for his heart, his diabetes, his mania, and his depression, he was given essentially pain medication and a sedative. Adding to this, he usually had a violent reaction to opiates like morphine. He was prescribed morphine. I asked my mother, the former hospice nurse, if this seemed right: the thin mattress on my father’s fragile back, the whiplash from one type of medication to another. She said to trust hospice. They knew what they were doing.

Once we got my father into the hospital bed and gave him his liquid medicine, he started crying. At first, we thought he was crying due to the pain. My mother tried consoling him, but once the sedative kicked in my father made little sense. After talking to him for several minutes, it came out why he was crying: my father knew he was there to die.

When you see a film or a TV show, they show death bed scenes as a graceful, brave goodbye or a slow, quiet passing. What I witnessed was my father crying and increasingly louder. A strained voice foggy from the lack of sleep and various drugs coursing through him, my father let out heaving sobs and giant tears. The only thing he could get out was, “no.” He kept repeating it over and over. My mother tried to calm him down any way she could. If she left his side, my father would start wailing. When she tried to show him pictures of his granddaughters, who he probably loved more than any person alive, the sobs came louder and harder. There was no valiant goodbye. There was no making peace with his eternity. He knew he was dying, and he was alternating between wallowing sorrow and a losing battle to stay rooted in the living.

Eventually, the crying trailed off and the breathing started. My father started breathing in short spurts. While I had never witnessed this before, my mother from years of working in hospitals and in hospice referred to this as the “death rattle”. When this breathing started, you knew this was the end. My mother, trying to remain stoic, ran for a watch to time his breathing like she would do with any other hospice patient. The breathing would pause, and start back up again. I ran up to the chair next to my father, sat down, and whispered in his ear. I let him know that I loved him, that we all loved him, and that everything would be OK. My mother ran back in the room with a watch with a second hand. She was trying to time the breathing, but was so flustered that she couldn’t keep track. He stopped breathing. The same day he was placed in the hospital bed in the family room my father was dead.

My mother and I stood there for a few minutes looking at my father. He was there. Less than 24 hours ago, I was talking to him. If you touched him, he was still warm. But, he was doing nothing. No breathing, no pulse. I half-expected him to take in a huge gasp of air like he used to do waking up from an apneic fit. He didn’t.

My mother called hospice and the funeral home. When the funeral home arrived, they surveyed my parents’ home and determined they couldn’t get a regular gurney in the home and had to use a flexible stretcher. They carefully put it under my father, and attempted to carry him. At this point, my father was over three hundred pounds and these two men couldn’t pick him up. One of them sheepishly asked if I could help them. My mother gasped upon hearing the question, but I said it was fine. The three of us picked up my father, carried him through the house, and loaded him into the back of a modified black minivan. Once the back hatch was shut, I looked up and could see my neighbor looking through his window. I waved at my neighbor. He waved back.