I’m glad I did that mushroom trip, I think as I sit by my father’s bed watching him die.
The spry, white-haired doctor hurries into the room, his third visit that day. He bends over my father’s comatose body and lays the disc of the stethoscope on his chest, adjusts the cannula bringing oxygen into his nose.
In the four months my father’s been in this care home, Covid has swept through twice. This time it got him.
My mother and younger sister sit in straight-backed chairs beside me, their faces pinched and sombre.
The doctor straightens up. “We could send him to the hospital and they’d give him IV fluids,” he says to us. “But if he recovers, he’ll probably be worse off than he already is.”
My father’s advanced Parkinson’s means he can’t wash or dress himself. He wears diapers and spends most of the day slumped in his wheelchair.
“Or,” he continues, “he could stay here and we’d keep him comfortable.”
In other words, morphine.
My mother, sister and I confer in hushed tones. Denying my father medical intervention feels like soft murder. And yet, for months he’s been saying he wants to die.
On his first day in the care home my mother and I unfurled his navy blue duvet, hung his clothes in the veneer armoire, and sat with him while he ate his lunch of meatloaf and mashed potatoes. This same doctor bustled into the room to conduct his new-patient assessment, wrapping a blood pressure cuff around my father’s thin arm, shining a penlight into his eyes. They’d both been born in Eastern Europe and they exchanged a few words in a common language.
“The place is clean,” my father said to us when the assessment was over. “The food is fine, the people are helpful.”
I felt my shoulders relax down my back. He hadn’t wanted to move here, but he required more care than was possible to give him at home.
“All I need now,” he continued, “is a gun and a bullet.”
We all burst out laughing.
My father didn’t crack a smile.
Now, the doctor removes the stethoscope from his ears and drapes it around his neck. “A window has opened,” he says to us gently. “It might be kindest to let him go through it.”
The three of us look at each other. After a minute my mother turns to the doctor and offers a silent nod.
Three weeks earlier I was sitting on the porch of a farmhouse in the bucolic Ontario countryside, chewing on a handful of mushroom caps a friend had given me. Instead of the colour-and-light show I’d been promised, I ended up in the living room face down on a dusty red sofa, sobbing over all the losses in my life: my older sister to breast cancer five years earlier, an ex-lover who I missed so much my kidneys ached, an old friend who’d disappeared from my life after her horrendous divorce.
And then my father’s face popped into my head—his high, round forehead, his wooly sideburns, his commanding nose. My tears stopped and my body froze. I rolled onto my back and clapped a hand over my mouth. While one part of me was in pseudo rigor mortis, another part—the wise, mushroom-activated part—was watching what was happening. Why have you stopped breathing? the watching part asked. And moving? The two parts considered this for a minute. Then it hit us: frightening was how it felt to be around my father.
“Having children was just something you did, like installing air conditioning,” my father once said to me when I asked him why he’d had kids. Growing up, my sisters and I enjoyed some fun times with him—listening to Tijuana Brass in the living room on Sunday afternoons, taking slow summer walks around Montreal’s Beaver Lake. But most of the conversations he and I had lasted less than thirty seconds. If I asked him a question he didn’t deem worthwhile or interesting, he’d get up and walk away as if I weren’t there. According to him, I talked too loudly, ate too fast, acted too unruly. He wanted me to change so who I was wouldn’t annoy him any longer. “You’re still a wild animal,” he said to me often. “You need to become a mensch.”
And yet, he wasn’t a mensch. He cheated on my mother regularly and with no apparent remorse. He saw my sisters and me as female bodies that he could leer at or pinch at will. Hugging us goodbye before a trip he’d slide his hand down and pat our backsides. At the time, I didn’t know this wasn’t normal behaviour for a father. I just knew I didn’t want to get too close to him.
Getting married and having children made me into more of a mensch. But then the marriage wobbled one too many times and I got divorced. My father sat me down for another of his thirty-second talks. What did I think would become of me without a man? he asked. I wanted to say, this is your fault, you didn’t model respectful male-female behaviour. But instead I hung my head. The dark truth was, because of him, I grew up scared of men.
On the evening of my father’s fourth day without fluids, my sister leaves to have dinner with her family and my mother and I go for a walk. The stores are shuttered, the cafés closed. We amble wordlessly along the quiet streets. I’d heard that some people need to die alone, that expiring, like defecating, requires privacy. I want to allow my father the time and space to exit quietly, should he wish to do so.
An hour later we take the elevator back up to his room. I enter cautiously, braced for the worst, but his breathing is steady. My mother settles herself in the recliner on one side of the bed, I sit in a hard-backed chair on the other. I study my father. His nose looks smaller and skinnier than usual. His face has become mere skin stretched over bone. Remarkably, his color is still good.
Time-keeping is unreliable on mushrooms. After what felt like hours lying rigid on the sofa, a new image came to me of a small, frightened boy boarding a train in Chernovitz, clinging to the suitcase and bag of sandwiches his mother had packed for him.. My father didn’t talk much about the war. He told me only once what happened the day after his bar mitzvah in October of 1939 when his parents, hoping to save his life, had sent him to relatives in a distant town. He’d been kicked out of school, separated from his friends, and now he didn’t know if he’d ever see his family again. I only know bits of what happened after. Hunger, forced labour, clearing away dead bodies after air raids. Trauma freezes a child in time. A part of my father had never moved beyond his twelve-year old self.
When the war finally ended and the Communists marched in, my father and his best friend snuck across the Romanian border. They walked for seven weeks to a Red Cross centre in France, eating grass and weeds along the way when food was scarce. Then he sailed across the ocean to a new life—to us.
When my body eventually relaxed into the sofa, I mourned for the unprotected boy and for all the years of childhood he lost.
Lying on his back in the narrow bed, my father looks so small and alone. I wonder if he’s frightened, if dying is as arduous as birth. I feel a sudden impulse to be near him in a way I never wanted to when I was younger. Gingerly, I raise the blue duvet. He is wearing a familiar green t-shirt, softened by years of wash and wear, and diapers. His legs—creased, papery skin sagging off bone—stretch down the length of the mattress. He’s been old for so many years that any fear I had of him has been neutralized. His rheumy eyes can no longer leer or shame, he has no capacity for pinching or squeezing of any kind. I am finally safe.
I slide in beside him and line my head up with his. The smell of laundry soap intermingles with the pungency of his unwashed body. A fine grey stubble carpets his sunken cheeks. I wrap an arm around him. He’s shrunk so much in the past few days that I feel only hard bone. My arm along his chest rises and falls as he breathes.
A caregiver sticks her head in the door. “How’s he doing?” she asks, her voice respectful and grave.
“He’s still here,” I say, rising up on one arm.
She leans against the frame. “Sometimes they need to hear something before they can go,” she says. “Talk to him, tell him things about his life. Say something you think he needs to hear.”
I smile up at her. A call bell chimes from another room and the caregiver slips away to answer it.
I lie down again and press my chin against my father’s shoulder. I am so close to him I can see the thicket of coarse hairs clustered in each of his nostrils, the enlarged pores in the space between his eyebrows. I know what I need to say. I place my mouth against his ear. “I forgive you,” I say quietly.
The mushroom-mind slips into bed with us. I hug my father more tightly and say again, “I forgive you.”
His breathing slows, the gaps between inhales widen. There is a bright charge in the air, similar to when my first child was born. This is death, the mushroom-mind says, the partner to birth.
“I forgive you,” I say, one last time.
My father gasps, then a deep rattle sounds in his throat. His chest falls and doesn’t rise again.
My mother tiptoes over to the bed and peers down at him.
Seconds tick by and my father remains still. His lips thin. Color fades from his face.
I hold him for a few more minutes, then I ease the duvet aside and crawl out of the bed.
I take my mother’s hand, cool in mine, and we stare down at him.
Grieving will come, but for the moment, I feel only peace.
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