For two days family members have trickled in to visit with each other and to tell my father they love and admire and appreciate him, and to say good-bye. Those living farther away video called to do the same. But my father has been in a coma. Today he has begun to show the signs of death: a rising core temperature (at times 104 degrees F); cooling extremities; sweating and clamminess; inability to swallow (he has not eaten or drunk for six days); healthy color fading to cadaver gray; producing very little, very dark urine; not registering pain or reacting to any stimuli; gurgling on liquid in his lungs; no bowel movements. The day was calm and filled with tender expressions, and I imagined he would slip away quietly into death, his body and mind finally shutting down. The rattling and gurgling in his ragged breathing seemed to worsen. I learned later this breathing is called the “death rattle.” Finishing the hundredth phone call of the day, I could hear from across the house a concerning increase in the raggedness of his breathing, and hurried to his side, where I was horrified to find his mouth filled with a thick creamy liquid. How is he even breathing through all this goo? was my first thought, quickly followed by a frantic He’s going to drown!” I remembered seeing a rubber bulb used to suck a sick baby’s nose, and ran to retrieve it. He might be on the verge of death, but he would not meet his death by drowning, not while I was here to do something about it. Please, God, help me know what to do. Somehow, my father was managing to convulsively breath despite the liquid, and I set to sucking it out with the bulb, squeezing the contents out onto a sheet. Please, God, help me to keep him alive until Steven gets here. Ten panicked squeezes, twenty frantic squeezes, fifty fearful squeezes with the bulb. My hand began to ache, and the phlegm piled up on the sheet. His mouth now clear, I called the on-call hospice nurse, who explained the goop was a normal accumulation of mucous in an unconscious person with congestive heart failure who could no longer swallow. I felt chagrined, that this were so normal, why did a hospice nurse not tell me to watch for it, prepare me to deal with it? She ordered the delivery of a suction machine. The motor suction wand helped me remove more mucous, though much of the underwater gurgling lay deeper in his throat where I was afraid to jam the wand. While he could no longer swallow, he could also no longer gag, and I probed as aggressively as I dared to clear his throat of phlegm. I did not want to injury him or cause him pain. My sister Carolyn took over suction duty while I raced to the airport to get my brother Steven, about to arrive from North Carolina on a trip planned months previous. I apprised him of the condition in which he would see his father, hoping to soften the experience. He stood over Dad, offering his silent and whispered good-byes. Carolyn, Steven, and I began to plan the night, resolving on hourly suction shifts. I would take 11 p.m., midnight, and 1 a.m.; Carolyn would take 2, 3, and 4 a.m.; Steven 5, 6, and 7 a.m.; and I would resume at 8:00. At 11:01 p.m., as I wrote this entry, pushing one minute past my shift start-time (what harm could one measly minute do?), Carolyn came to my room and whispered that our father’s breathing had changed, had calmed and slowed. We descended the stairs and found our father not breathing at all. I cleaned his face of the last thrown-up mucous and felt for breath and stared for a moving chest, but all I saw were slack muscles and a ghostly greening face. I ran for Steven, and Carolyn ran for Mom, who descended the staircase slowly on the lift in her long white cotton nightgown. We stood around our father and husband, not quite believing he was gone, his body still hot, his body unmoving, his body covered with a white flannel sheet stenciled with blue sheep. Peace and tenderness and loss and relief and sadness permeated our own bodies, together with the one last unexpected trauma of preventing his drowning, and we said nothing until I somehow knew I need to say something, not just anything, but something sublime and holy and apropos, so I offered to pray, and I thanked God for this great man, this powerful intellect, this generous heart, thanked God for giving him to us, thanked God for having each other, thanked God for ending my father’s years of daily suffering, thanked God for a family filled with love and devotion for one another. And we let him go.
Rabbit Lane 