A Series of Bungee Cords: Part Four
by Lily Landers
He didn’t die on Tuesday. But he did have a bloody nose and blood in the back of his throat. We thought it might have been because he was dried out from the oxygen tank, so we asked him if he wanted to gargle with some coconut oil.
“No, that won’t help.”
“What would help?”
“Apple crumble?”
Fiona spooned him a bite of the apple crumble pie and that was the last thing he ate on earth. He didn’t want his bone broth that night and when he went to bed he said his heart hurt when he rolled over. I called the on-call hospice nurse and she said it was time to give him the Lorazepam that was in the fridge. The pain in his heart was probably the stress that the body was feeling because it was starting to shut down. He was already on a low dose of liquid morphine that I administered on an as-needed basis and logged in a binder. I recorded the time, dose, and his pain level so the nurses could chart his progress. The on-call nurse recommended that I increase the morphine and begin to administer the Lorazepam. I requested a visit from our regular nurse for early the following morning. Dad was also scheduled for a sponge bath and massage on Wednesday afternoon.
“I’m definitely sticking around for that,” he said.
The Lorazepam helped and he was able to sleep through the night. We put a baby monitor in his room that night without telling him, which was so weird because just a year before he was telling me stories about hearing the monitor from his parents’ room. My dad spent the last years of his life caring for his parents who are both in their nineties. Dad told me that my grandpa had hallucinations in the early morning hours about being stuck under a train repairing it or trying to get a pickup truck started. I was doing my volunteer hospice training at the time and told my dad that often people who are about to pass will talk about going on a trip, waiting for a bus, taking a ride in a car. I thought maybe it meant Grandpa was getting ready to go. But he and Grandma are still kicking, still living at home, and my dad’s been gone for six months.
Dad had hallucinations before he died but he was aware enough to know that they were hallucinations. Out on the back porch, he asked me if he had been up on the hillside picking lemons. When I told him that he hadn’t picked any lemons he said he could have sworn he had just been up there picking lemons, playing with the cat, doing the things he would have done here at the house when he was healthy. He asked me if I could see a tree with white leaves blowing in the wind up there next to the lemon tree. When I said I couldn’t see it, he said it was hard for him to tell the dream from the reality, and that the tree with the white leaves must be from the next world. He had another vision where he saw his friend William riding a mountain bike in the clouds. And another where the clouds were all dead kings and queens floating by in their burial shrouds as if to say, “Everyone dies, king and peasant alike.”
I took the other end of the baby monitor with me and slept in the back bedroom. Fiona slept on the couch. I listened to him breathe for a while but I couldn’t fall asleep so I finally just turned the monitor off. When the nurse came in the morning, he asked if Dad wanted to sleep it out. Dad was still coherent so he was able to answer for himself. He said yes, to put him on the good stuff, and the nurse said that was the dignified way to go. So he upped the dosage of morphine and Lorazepam and told me to administer the drugs every four hours. 8am 12pm 4pm 8pm 12am 4am. He asked if we needed an aide to help with the around the clock care but I said no. We would do this ourselves. I guess we’ve always been private people.
At 12pm when I leaned over to drop the liquid morphine into Dad’s mouth, he joked (I hope), “What, are you trying to get rid of me?” And at 4pm when the drugs really kicked in he said, “Alright, ya squarehead!” He asked me if I had slept on the couch and I said no, Fiona did. And he said, “Right here,” and touched his thumb to my third eye. I like thinking about my third eye as a couch. A good place to recline with Dad. Sometimes when I close my eyes I can still feel his thumbprint there. Toward the end, when I put chap stick on his lips and fluffed his pillow, he told me I was anticipating his every need. The last thing he said to me was, “You’re so beautiful.”
When he couldn’t really talk anymore I was glad he had said I was anticipating his every need. I felt like I could figure out what he needed and give it to him even if he couldn’t tell me. I was doing great until I fed him ice chips and lost one in his ear. I seriously couldn’t find that sucker once I dropped it. I started simultaneously laughing and crying and talking to him, digging in his ear for the stupid ice chip. By the time I found it, it was mostly melted. Maybe it felt refreshing. Maybe it felt drippy and horrible. The crazy thing is that I’ll never know.
