by Sandra Lowen

Created on: September 17, 2009

A DYING FATHER

Dad died.

He didn't die drunk. He didn't die hard, clawing the air for breath, or in pain, as he might have a year or so later, had the tiny tendrils of metastasizing bone cancer reached the consciousness of his pain receptors. No, he died reaching for a tissue. His caretaker, a white- gown-clad ex-con who'd gone straight, caught him in his arms and saved him the indignity of slamming into the damp marble of the bathroom floor. My sister, who had put him in this summer camp for seniors above his objections in the first place, was notified immediately.

Joanie has never been known for making the most clear-headed decisions. When he arrived at the hospital with a thready pulse that was still detectable, she insisted that the staff put him on life support. Machines held him suspended between two worlds while doctors labored over a lost cause. Meanwhile, Joanie dashed off to town to pay his rent for the upcoming month.

That was at ten in the morning. I got a call from a nurse who wondered who the other woman was in the photo in his wallet and enquired of the right family members. She found me at two in the afternoon.

Joanie and I could hardly be called 'close'. She'd made several attempts on my life when I was an infant and she was in second grade. One, burying me in a snowbank and running away, nearly succeeded, landing me in hospital for more than three months. She fed me Ex-Lax and poured milk in my eyes. She tried to shove me in front of large moving things. She abandoned me on buses. As an adult she competed unsuccessfully against me for the better marriage and the handsomer children and the higher education. Therefore I was not surprised that the death-watch call did not come from her. She could hardly be trusted to tell me my father was moribund.

I was baking cookies when I heard he was in hospital with a blood pressure that was too low for him to survive. "Don't rush," the nurse said. "He'll be gone before you get here." I called my husband anyway, and we picked up our son, loaded the car with funeral wear, and started the 400-mile drive. Midway we had to stop to call a neighbor to turn off the oven, in which the cookies were charring.

Little John didn't know his grandfather. Boston was a long way from Baltimore, and the one time I left him with Dad for four days, that venerable gentleman spent the whole time being drunk. "I drinked too," my then-four-year-old son said. It was a long time before Little John visited again. We'd seen Dad

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