And then I cried.

 My father is dying, and it is terrible. 

It is terrible because it is death, which is the end, but also because death brings about all kinds of new and surprising horrible physical things, like being bedridden in diapers, and agitation but no way to describe why, and-- if you happen to have lung cancer-- what essentially amounts to slow suffocation. 

In the face of all of this, we are doing everything right-- or at least as right as we can make it. We have a hospice nurse coming in daily, reading his body like a map and telling us how close we are to his final destination. We have held his hand, and kissed his shrunken cheeks, and told him how much we love him. I have only been able to say a few sentences at a time without crying. It always distressed him to hear me cry. I don't need to add desperate hysterics to the complications of organ failure. 

Here are some things I have said to him. 

1) When hospice was called in, and he could still listen and speak for short intervals of time, I told him, "I'm so sorry, because I know I haven't been the best kind of daughter. I hope you will forgive me." (And I cried.) And he said, "Things are alright between us, Martha-Lynn." And then I grabbed this ridiculous pile of poetry books I had taken with me from Richmond, and asked him if he wanted to hear any poetry, and he said "No....no thank you." And I babbled, "OK, well, I'm going to sit them over here on the dresser so they will be near you. I have John Keats, and Shelley, and Famous Poems of the English Language, and The Oxford Book of Christian Verse." (And I cried.) And he said, "I love you, Martha-Lynn." And I told him I loved him, too. (And...I cried.)

2) A few days after that, I brought Eva and Silas with me, and he shocked us all by mustering enough strength to sit almost upright in the hospital bed. He listened to me chatter a little bit about what they were going to do with their summers, and he asked Eva about summer school...and I said we were all looking forward to spending time at the pool... and I mentioned that Silas had been having water gun fights with some of the boys on the street. And he said, "You have? I used to have water gun fights, too! With all my friends. They were marvelous. And sometimes we had pine cone battles!" And Silas perked up, and said he'd never even heard of that before, and that he wanted to try it. And then he asked Eva if she would be going to Camp Chanco again this year, and she said that she would, and he said "Oh, good. I know you love doing that." And then at one point he looked at Silas and said "Silas, I can tell you are going to grow into a fine young fellow." And he said something equally sweet to Eva, too. 

And then we let him sleep, because we had exhausted him, but I was so happy and so grateful that we had those few minutes together. And then I cried. 

3) My younger brother had been having a kind of deep and lengthy conversation with him in which he reminded Leigh how much of his life he'd spent studying the Psalms, and Hamlet. And that despite the fact that his uncle was a revered Shakespeare scholar, he had his own thoughts and ideas about Hamlet, too. And he told Leigh what he wanted his funeral to be like, and that he wanted each of his children and the older grandchildren to read, and what.

Later, Leigh was telling me all this, and I wondered what he might want for his epitaph. And Leigh said that he thought it would be OK for me to ask him, that he was very much in that headspace and OK with being in that headspace. So I did. I opened my mouth and somehow asked him what he might want on his tombstone-- would it be something from literature, or a bit of scripture, or....? And he said, "I don't want anything. Just my name, birth date, and death date." And then I probably said something else...and eventually he told me "I wish there was a way to communicate between heaven and earth. I've been thinking about that a lot." And I told him, "Sometimes, people still living see a certain kind of bird, or hear a line from a poem or a song, and it feels to them like their loved one speaking with them. If you can do something like that, you should." And he agreed that he would, if he could. 

And I told him I loved him again, and I left the room. And I cried.