By Kari Shemwell
The doctor was young and had a difficult last name. After she introduced herself, I wrote down the name’s pronunciation and whispered it over and over in the cafeteria checkout line so I wouldn’t say it wrong. Later, when she met with us in the waiting room of the palliative care unit, she said:
“I’m going to explain to you the process of dying. Now, let me preface this by saying that we simply can’t speak in absolutes. This can go many ways. However, there tend to be certain steps, certain stages, per se, that people pass through as they shift from living to dead. You may think there are only two states—alive or dead—but no. Instead, there are—what shall we call them? Degrees? Yes, there are degrees between the two. A person may traverse these degrees all at once or, more likely, one at a time, over the course of days or even weeks.
“Please don’t ask me how long it will take. I really can’t say. This is one of those non-absolutes of which I previously spoke. Still, if I had to guess, I would say close to but under one week. It could be longer, or it could be happening as we speak. Which brings me to my next point: you probably won’t be there when it happens. People always want to be there. They always imagine they will be. Where else would you possibly be in a time like this?
“In the bathroom, actually. In my experience, people usually die while their loved ones are in the bathroom. Perhaps it’s on purpose. Perhaps humans are like dogs in that way, though that’s admittedly not true either. It’s just a myth Dogs almost never wander off to die peacefully, you know. They’re mostly euthanized. This is our fault, really. We’ve removed them from nature, so their deaths are prolonged beyond natural limits. If we didn’t euthanize them, they’d generally starve themselves to death.
“Anyway, that’s all to say, I don’t know why people die when their loved ones are using the bathroom. I really don’t.”
The doctor paused to scan the room. She asked if we were doing okay, if we were ready to continue.
“Now, for the degrees: the first sign often arrives in the form of weeping skin. If you touch the arm or kiss the forehead, it will feel cool and damp. It might remind you of an eggplant sliced and salted on the counter. The taste of this liquid will be bitter, like earwax. I’m speaking of the skin, not the eggplant, though the statement applies to both. The organs are losing their ability to function, particularly the liver and the kidneys. Body temperature drops slightly. Skin swells, turns purple, and sometimes tears. You may not be able to do much with this information now, but perhaps later you could form this swelling and tearing skin into a metaphor for something. If you get a moment, give it a shot. Maybe try it out for your mother divorcing your father, to describe how your father never did quite get over missing the next decade of Christmas Eves at your Nana’s.
“At a certain point, a dark, black liquid will clog your father’s throat. He may choke on this. It might run down his chin. If there are no nurses around, and there will likely be no nurses around because so many people on this floor need tending through the various degrees of their deaths, then you should hold a tiny paper mouthwash cup under his lips to catch the liquid as he spits. If done correctly, you will recall a fuzzy memory of sitting in a bubble bath when you were only three or four years old. Something in the soap caused a painful skin reaction, and you woke up in the middle of the night to burning swollen labia. You woke your father, crying. He took you to the bathroom to rinse your body in cool water. He gently applied baby cream to the area. It’s an odd memory to appear in this moment, but what you are mostly remembering is that it wasn’t weird at all. As you’ve grown into a woman, you’ve come to understand just how many children have weird fathers, but you did not. Anger may pool within you as you consider how many weird fathers are still alive while yours spits black ink into a paper cup. Alongside that anger, you’ll also wonder what could possibly be happening inside a human body to cause such a dark fluid to dribble from the nose and down the chin.
“Next, your father will curl inward like a fern. He won’t speak to you or your sisters. The three of you will sit beside him for days on end, but he will act as if you aren’t there. He will speak to me. He will speak to your cousins. He will speak to his pastor. He will speak to your husband. He will even speak to your mother, of all people, but he won’t speak to you. We call this detaching. You’ll have to decide for yourself why he only detached from you.
“The delirium phase follows, and I recommend preparing for the unsettling nature of this stage. That way, you won’t be surprised when he jolts from the bed and rips the myriad cords from his body, flinging little droplets of blood across the papery sheets and white walls. You’ll be able to forgive yourself for letting your ten-year-old niece, his first grandchild, into the room to see him when he’d asked you not to. It’s only partly your fault that the last image you’ll have of him is four nurses restraining him while he flails his arms in panic, all six feet and four inches of his body trembling. Take your niece to the waiting room and tell her the story of euthanizing your first dog. You were ten years old, just like her. The dog was your mother’s. She’d had it since before you were born, before she even married your father. When it was time to put her to sleep, your mother refused to go. It shocked you to learn that your mother would let her dog of eighteen years die alone. So, you demanded to go with the dog instead. Your father wouldn’t let you go alone. It wasn’t even his dog, but he took off work and drove you to the vet. He held the little chihuahua against his chest while she died. He cut a tuft of her hair for you to keep in a Ziploc bag.
“This is what the end will look like: sharp inhaling, gasping for breath, jerking back and forth while groaning. Your friend may tell you about looking into her own dying father’s wide, gaping mouth for hours, but this won’t necessarily happen to you. If, against all odds, you are there when it happens, if you are not in the bathroom but rather somehow there alongside both your sisters and your uncle, you may each hold his hands as the breathing descends into turbulent panting. He is going into cardiac arrest, and he will soon, but not soon enough, slump over.
“It’s okay if, in this moment, you call him Daddy. It’s okay even if, eleven years ago, your undergraduate writing professor said any adult who called their father ‘Daddy’ had a mental illness, so you made yourself stop calling him Daddy all through your twenties and into your thirties. That professor was a drunk, which is a mental illness.
“Afterward, you’ll have to drive two hours home from the hospital with your sister. You’ll sit in the car discussing the fact that you just watched your father die. Does she remember a time when you were all happy? Does she remember anything? You’ve always had a bad habit of touching your face. Consequently, your fingers inevitably end up on your mouth, and in that moment, you’ll taste the bitter liquid from his skin. In all the chaos, you haven’t been to the bathroom or washed your hands. You may sit there stunned for a moment, but don’t tell your sister that you just inadvertently tasted your father’s dying skin sap.
Some things simply shouldn’t be shared.
“And it’s okay if you find the idea of God pathetic, but, for a few short minutes, you let yourself hope with an alarming childlike fervor that he is real, because your father looked so afraid, and you really want his mother to hold him wherever he is now. Still, deep down you’ll probably know he is no longer anywhere, except for on your skin in the form of bitter liquid residue accidentally swiped across your lips.
Kari Shemwell holds an MFA from the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. Her publications include the Pushcart Prize–nominated story “Fish Head” from The Normal School; “This Road May Flood” in The Masters Review Volume V anthology; and the short story “Shirt Eater,” which was published in The Lascaux Review. She teaches creative writing at Murray State University.
New Ohio Review 