My Father

If someone told me my life would change so dramatically in one week, I would not believe him. And yet here I am, one week after a death of my father, with the disbelief written all over my face and my life.

It was a truly sad Monday afternoon when my mother called me to come home. ‘It’s time to come and see him, he’s been taken to the hospital this morning’, she said. I was driving back to London in a car, and I started crying uncontrollably there and then.

‘I will book the ticket first thing in the morning’, I promised. The moment I got back to London, I was on the computer placing an order for a return ticket, knowing I might have to change it as and when I needed it. But I hoped for the best outcome.

Simple preparations followed- Danny’s dad was in the UK so he was at mama’s anyway. I got ready and left on Wednesday morning.

The evening before my flight I spoke to my mum who assured me my father was a little better. But that could not have been further from the truth.

As I arrived at the train station in my home city, Zilina, my middle sister was waiting for me at a platform, a solemn expression fighting with the happiness at seeing me. I started questioning her right away. How was he? Was he feeling better?

 'He’s very bad’, Dana, my sister, replied. ‘You know Mum wouldn’t send for you if it wasn’t serious.’Crying, I demanded to know every single detail. ‘Please don’t show him you’re shocked at how he changed. Don’t cry in front of him’, she instructed.

Easier said than done. Still crying, we made our way onto Oncology department, me remembering my nursing years at that exact hospital.

Dana led the way directly to my father’s room, sadly but firmly. I toggled behind, feeling as if I were in a bad dream.

Then the door opened and I froze in shock, tears I couldn’t control were flowing down my cheeks as I saw him. My father. Or rather, a shadow of my father. Once a strong man who even faced a bear on his wanders, he was now a skeleton with a yellow skin, only one eye open and an oxygen tube around his face. I knew there and then- the cancer had spread to his lungs. It was terminal.These were his final days.

My mum and my youngest sister were there too. No one spoke much, although he was conscious. ‘Go and wash your face, don’t let him see you cry’, said my mum after we hugged hello. By now, I was sobbing, a heavy flow of tears I could not stop running down my face, sadness so overwhelming it was choking me. It was coming from the deepest part of me. It’s physically impossible stop this flow.

‘Look who’s here’, said my mum in a forced cheerful tone when I emerged from the bathroom. ‘Ivanka came to see you.’

My father opened one eye- the other one was closed due to the pressure of the cancer on his spine- and looked straight at me. I was looking back at him.

‘Welcome’, he said in a hoarse whisper. ‘Thank you for coming’.

I bent down and kissed his cheeks, still wishing it was a bad dream and I was to wake up at any moment.

He then wanted to go to the bathroom. My mother helped him sit up, supported by my sisters from both sides. I stood frozen to the spot, now knowing how to react in this situation, when he suddenly stretched his thin hand to me. It brought fresh tears out of my eyes, feeling his bony hand in mine, so much so that my mum sent me outside to calm myself down.

I could not believe he was dying. From the years studying nursing, I knew once the cancer gets into the lungs, it is the end. But when it’s your family, you don’t believe it.

'What do you think? How does he seem to you?’ questioned my family on the way from the hospital. I went against everything I’ve ever learned, firmly wanting to hold on to the thread of hope. ‘We need to stay positive’, I said. ‘He could still have months to live’.

Bleak days followed. Someone was always by his side. I came on Wednesday and my mother stayed with him both Wednesday and Thursday until 11 pm. We were there when we could during the day, but Dana, my middle sister, did the most, alongside my mother. I have not been living with them, I have not experienced it as they had, I still felt like I was living out my worst nightmare. And I felt a piercing guilt for living so far away from them.

Each day we were told he was asking to go home. Heated debates followed. My fathers’ sisters suggested we took him home, we also wanted him home; but the doctors were advising against it. ‘Let him finish his treatment’, they were saying.

We didn’t know what to do. By Friday, he was too exhausted to ask about coming home. He lethargically opened his one eye, still bright, dark and clear, and looked at us. I’ve never felt worse in my life- I felt like we failed him. It was his wish to come home and we did not grant him that wish.

On Saturday morning, my sisters went to the hospital in the early hours of morning. We were minding their children with my mother, sitting in the garden, when the phone rang.

‘Mum, we need to take our father home’, Dana said in a broken voice. ‘Why?’ asked my mother. ‘You have to come and see him yourself’, replied my sister. That phone call was short and abrupt. Little did we know it was the beginning of the end.

I don’t remember who took me and my mum to the hospital on that Saturday morning. I remember little things: my jeans were dirty, my hair needed a wash and I was talking about anything and everything as we rushed from the car park to the hospital. ‘It’s going to rain’, I observed, feeling my strength failing me. My poor mother needed me strong.

When we got to the ward, my auntie, father’s sister who is a nurse, was there. ‘We are taking him home’, she said. No one needed to say anything else. We were taking our father home, although he wasn’t asking to go home anymore. He didn’t have the strength.

The next few hours were the blur of preparations, blind preparations that only a grief-stricken family can make. Watched by astounded but understanding nurses, we stock piled medicines, bed covers and even persuaded the hospital to give us his oxygen mask.  Supplies to last us a few months. Yes, we have noticed the nurses were looking at the floor as we were packing his stuff, unwilling to meet our eyes that needed reassurance; but we kept busy.

Then the doctor called us to the side room.

‘I’m not going to lie to you’, he said. ‘The end is coming. He might even die in the ambulance. He knows he’s going home, he might let go of all the pain and die’.

I couldn’t listen to it. I hurried back to my father’s room and sat on the chair next to him.

All the children are waiting at home for you. Everyone is there to see you. Are you happy?’ I asked him, looking for the hopeful signs. He opened his tired eye, nodded, said a very quiet ‘yes’ and closed his eye again. He seemed to be falling into a deep sleep. My auntie came to the bed and woke him to give him some more drink. He said a word we couldn’t understand. ‘Say it again’, we encouraged him and he repeated it two more times. We couldn’t understand. That was his final word, but we did not know it at the time.

Seeing him asleep, his oxygen mask on his face to help him breathe, I was left alone with him in the room. The room felt stuffy so I walked to the window and opened it. I almost felt backwards as I felt an abnormally strong wind hit my face. It took my breath away and suddenly I knew- they were coming for him. All the dead before him were coming for him. I saw him stretched on the bed, waiting for an ambulance to take him home, when I knew they were coming for him. Too late for anything.

Just then, my mother walked in. ‘I opened the window and the wind almost knocked me down’. I said.‘What are you talking about? It’s sunny outside.’ But I knew. They were coming for him.

My auntie came towards the bed and opened my father’s good eye. By now, he did not react. As she opened his eye, I saw his eye was in front, not at the back as it would have been if he were sleeping. He wasn’t sleeping, he was dying.

She swiftly looked at me to see if I noticed. I noticed. We went outside to talk.

‘It’s too late to take him home, he’s in coma’, she said to my frightened mum. I nodded. I saw where his eye was.

Crying, we were deciding what to do. We did not have long. I wanted to call my sisters to come and pray with him. My auntie was against it, cautious not to raise panic. My mum wanted him home. We decided to let him die at home, to grant him his last wish.

The ambulance just wasn’t coming. Where were they? We waited. My auntie put my father’s hands together and wrapped a rosemary around them and I was praying next to him. He was taking short, rasping breaths. I wished I could breathe for him. It all felt like a badly written Hollywood movie script. The doctor came in to check his reflexes, shook his head and walked out. The time stood still and all I could think about was my sisters. They so wanted to be with him in his last moments. Instead, I was there, who wasn’t there that much throughout his illness at all as I lived in the UK. Now I was there with him. And I was so sorry, and I couldn’t do anything more. I just prayed for his forgiveness.

At 1 pm, the ambulance finally came. Two hours too late for my father. I had to go to the bathroom; I could not watch them hoist my dying father onto the stretcher. He did not have his oxygen mask on anymore- he did not need it to die.

Walking through the hospital corridors behind my dying father, registering just the blurs of scared patients who came out of their rooms to say good-bye to my father, seeing their own fate suddenly, we made it to the ambulance. I sat on his side while my mother held his oxygen mask. It was all a dream, a bad dream. Please, God, let me wake up. Let him wake up.

We were not driving fast enough. I watched his shorter and less frequent breaths. ‘Please go faster’, I asked the driver tearfully. ‘We can’t start the siren when we are bringing a person home’, said he, sadly but firmly.

Little things. The phone rang- my sister asking where we were there. My father’s phone rang. I watched, watched my father fight for his life next to me.

It was at the final turning, just before our village, when he took his last breath. I felt sick as I waited for something, anything, to raise that chest again. Please. Please. Pain, terrible pain engulfed my body.

 

He’s not breathing!’ I screamed at the crew. ‘Stop the car, he needs the oxygen!’

The ambulance stopped immediately. I jumped out, my legs shaking with terror, and the crew literally carried my unconscious mother out. My auntie was in the car behind us and stopped too.

‘What’s going on?’ she shouted. ‘My mother fainted and my father isn’t breathing!’ I managed to say.

She pushed us into her car and told her husband to drive. She got into the ambulance with my father.Was he dead? Was he alive?

We got home, the ambulance reversing into the garden. Our car stopped behind them and my mum and me rushed out.

 'Call someone for help’, shouted my mum in agony. I started screaming for someone, anyone, only to realise half of our big family were already there, waiting. How did everyone know?

I saw the ambulance crew shake their heads as they walked slowly towards the back to take my dead father out. My father’s brother saw that and stood transfixed to the floor, as if in the army; he kept staring at the stretcher. I needed to go and look after my grandma who was sick with terror. My other sister, Dana, came into the room too, wailing in agony at how bad our father looked. We still needed to believe he was alive.

We heard commotion and muffled sounds as they took him upstairs to the bedroom. I now ran to him. My two sisters collapsed next to him just as I burst through the door. ‘Don’t cry where there is death’, said my aunt. Do not cry where there is death. Do not cry.

My father. Four years of cancer pain had stripped him off the life he loved. He lay there, dead, still in his shabby hospital clothes, with this catheter still in. His oxygen mask and the supplies enough to last him months were next to him. He did not make it home. He died in the ambulance, too happy to be coming home. He let go.

We spent hours next to his body. We cried, we talked, we remembered. They washed him, we dressed him. The doctor came and confirmed his death. My sisters went to choose the coffin and organize the funeral.

People kept coming to look at our father, to offer help. We had to call the family. ‘He died’, I heard someone telling the family on the phone. The words echoed in the quiet room. No one spoke much.My father was dead.

The coffin came. Brown. Shiny.They brought him downstairs, dressed in the suit and the shoes he chose himself. They were ready, waiting in his wardrobe for weeks. Because he knew. When I saw how he prepared those clothes ready for death, I suddenly understood his fear of death. His desire to come home. He was terrified of death- we didn’t know he was ready for it.

The coffin had ruffled pillows and a simple cover. I watched, sitting at the bottom step, as people placed my tiny father, eaten by cancer, into his final resting place. No more hospital beds, not even his marital bed. A coffin, forever and ever.

They took him to the ‘House of Sadness’ as it’s called in Slovakia. It has a cold box, like a freezer. I didn’t want to leave my father there alone at night. I knew he would have been so scared.

The coffin people got him ready. They brushed his hair, again, we did it earlier; and they closed his lips. Now he looked like my father, slimmer than when he was before cancer, but at least that tragic pain had gone from his face. The death took him, but left his face almost smiling. Wrinkles straightened out by death that came for him, pain gone. My father lying in the coffin.

The next two days until the funeral were, again, a blur. Too many things to organize. No food, or very little food. Family, lots of family. And no time to think properly.

My father had gone. My father was dead.  Good bye. I Love You. Please forgive me if I wasn’t a good daughter sometimes.