by Ciel Downing
It was cleverly disguised as a hospital bed—once my father occupied it, the high-railed, adjustable apparatus transformed into a command post. The post in question sat smack dab in the middle of my daylight basement one-bedroom apartment, with just enough area to walk around three sides of it. The whole place constituted less than six hundred feet, but that hospital bed was the defining feature. The long side of the bed bore what used to be my grad school bookshelves a few short weeks ago; now commandeered for the more pragmatic use—hospital supplies: gauze, saline, orange prescription bottles, ostomy bags and a host of other things I was learning in alarming detail. My sister and I’d faced the bed toward the sliding doors so that he could watch the river drift by.
He wasn’t a good sitter, my pop; he was more of a doer. When you can’t do, the next best thing clearly indicated barking out directives so that other people got it right. My sister stood outside the glass doors, trimming the hedge when she caught motion out of the corner of her eye. Our bedridden father waved frantically, calling out words she could not make out. She dropped the trimmer in a panic and raced to the door to determine the source of his distress.
“Wrong?” he bellowed, “I’ll tell you what’s wrong! You need to come in at a three-quarter degree angle. The way you’re doing it, broken sticks will poke up right through the leaves.” My sister stood there struck dumb for a moment. Still breathing hard from racing in and a surge of adrenalin, she stared at him with a visibly dissolving tolerance.
“Are you kidding? That’s what you were screaming about?” Suppressing laughter, I moved her out of the room before words could be weaponized or blood could be shed. Sisters have to stick together, and I didn’t have enough money for bail.
When he’d been diagnosed terminal with only a short time left, my sister and I flipped our lives around, made arrangements, frantic phone calls, quick learning-curve crash courses on treating him at home, then brought him here to my apartment in a quiet little tree-lined enclave of Milwaukie, Oregon. She took a sabbatical from teaching and came over most days to help out. I postponed my grad school internship, knowing I could graduate the following semester. I was in my late thirties and figured I’d put it off this long anyway. My sister and I had always been allies, especially when it counted like this. She was the one who did life right and I was the one who was still trying to figure it out. We both agreed though, that at life’s end there was no question about where we would be: with our cantankerous, cigar chomping, back-slapping, dog-loving, take-no-prisoners, Seabee father, who had a loose interpretation of what constituted law.
Dad often switched our names or used other people’s names. Mostly he just referred to me as “The dark one” and to my sister as “The blonde.” In turn, we dismissed the slight and called him “Squid.”
When my sister neared the exploding point, I’d jump in to defuse or distract—whatever the situation called for. When it was me who came unglued, my sister stepped in to derail or redirect. We promised if we got through this with no one getting injured or arrested, we could share the leftover fentanyl patches.
Our pop mandated, guided, railed, and roared with laughter. The good looks of his youth had yielded to age and disease, hewing from a Clooney kind of guy to more of a Walter Matthau. If he had an audience, he owned them: enchanting, enthralling, and entertaining them with what he liked to call mildly embellished tales of his youth. What I liked to call overt lies, but who’s to quibble. He’d return to his “command,” educating us:
“Pork chops will dry out if you don’t put a lid over them.”
“Sandwiches should be cut diagonal, not horizontal or they lose flavor.”
“One cordial cannot possibly interfere with morphine.”
Ultimately, we loved caring for him, but there was more than one occasion when I had my doubts whether he would die from the cancer; or if one of us might kill him first.
My sister and he bet on the Super Bowl. Since he was terminally ill, they decided to go big and bet a million dollars. I can only report, not elaborate on the logic of this. At least my father’s thinking I can write off to drugs—my sister’s reasoning, I cannot fathom. She goaded him relentlessly for choosing the St. Louis Rams who hadn’t won since 1951. She’d gone with the Tennessee Titans. With less than three minutes to go in the game, she called him to gloat and suggested he may have to liquify his assets to pay her off. My father hung up and shooed the phone away like it was a mosquito, muttering that he should’ve used birth control more wisely. I moved the phone to safety. I don’t follow sports, but in those last minutes, the Rams must have scored, because my father began cheering and throwing gauze rolls and anything else in his reach into the air.
“Get me the phone! Get me the phone!” he said with excited urgency. He chomped on his unlit cigar, yelling into the phone receiver, “AHA! Who’s taking the million home NOW?” There was a pause while he listened, then he smiled smugly, stating, “You don’t think I can get to the bank, huh? For a million bucks, I’ll pay an ambulance to take me through the drive-through!” He laughed heartily before yelling, “Ante up!” slamming the receiver down in triumph.
Over the months, morphine and Ativan took their toll. Confusion would snake into his mind and he’d try to get out of bed to “report back to his quarters.” This terrified me as I knew I couldn’t possibly lift him if he got out and fell. I looked like the female version of my dad—more Lily Tomlin than Walter Matthau; but I was built small and wiry. Even with weight loss, I guessed him to be around a buck sixty. He hadn’t walked in five months. I ran the gamut of persuasions:
“No, please, please, Dad! You’ll hurt one of us, darlin’!” (Sweet talk, pleading approach).
“Dad, no! Stay in bed and I’ll get you an extra cordial tonight!” (Bargaining, bribery approach).
“Dammit man! You have to stay in the bed. The doctor said so!” (Threats, authority, and anger approach).
Then, one day, I heard the bed creak and the bed rail drop with him mumbling that he “had to get up on deck.”
In my best command voice, I snapped out a hard directive, “You’re in sick bay, Sailor! You keep your ass in that bed!” And damn if that didn’t work—I should’ve known the overt lying approach would be the one that worked with him.
The thirty days Dad was given to live just after Christmas turned to spring, then summer. I’d become accustomed to the hospital bed being a part of the furniture. Less noticeable was how weak he’d become as it’d been so incremental. By month seven he could barely speak. One evening he experienced a fitful sleep. I watched with anguish, feeling helpless to ease it. I debated but thought I should chance it. I whispered to him, “If you’re ready to let go, it’s okay. I’m right here. You can let go, Dad.” His eyes flew open and he grimaced with his teeth bared; his body shuddered violently with his hands stretched rigidly wide as though going into seizure. Then his body relaxed, he opened his eyes slightly and gave me a sidelong glance, followed by a hook-line-and-sinker grin and mumbled laughter. I shook my head and walked away muttering, “Very cute, Dad.” He continued milking all the chuckles he could out of it.
I’d never seen a dove at my place, but one day about ten of them showed up nibbling and roosting right outside the windows. Dad loved watching them; it was about all he could do at that stage. As days went by, I pointed them out to my sister. She noted that there were fewer of them on Wednesday than there were on Tuesday. The following day there were only three and the day after, just two were left. I went to bed that night and I heard my father become agitated. I got up, brushed his hair back, put on Enya softly, and returned to bed. When I woke up, I knew.
I crept into the living room that had harbored so much life, but it felt still and vacant. Dad’s skin was gray and cool, his eyes half open. No breath. I’d been fully expecting his death, yet shock overtook me; then stupidity for feeling so. I stood there taking in the gravity of the immediate, pursing my lips, taking in his lifeless body. My eyes stung; a confetti of memories dropped out of the air—him shining the chrome on the Chrysler before vacations, his raucous laugh giving my lost sister and I an indicator of his location, him standing in his Navy uniform with Nana and Papa, his loud, extended “Ahh” after his first sip of coffee. A deep exhale was all I could manage.
I thought he should be sitting up to make a demand on me or yanking my chain about something. I petted his silvery hair, startled by the cold of his skin. I whispered hoarsely, “Well, it looks like you did it on your terms anyway, you darlin’ son of a bitch.”
I called the coroner and two guys in ill-fitting suits came around with a stretcher to take his body away. Wheeling him out the slider doors is when I noticed: one last Mourning Dove was perched on the sill. The gurney clattered away. In the silence where my father used to be, I heard the soft flap of the Mourning Dove’s wings as he lifted off and flew away.
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Ciel Downing is an army vet residing in the Pacific Northwest in the rugged coast range. Her writing works have been published in multiple journals to include The Timberline Review, The Squid, Word & Image, etc. Her debut novel will be published mid 2024 about her experiences in South Korea. She’s previously won the Academy of American Poets Prize.
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