Sharing a Special Moment

My father and I didn’t know each other very well.  At least for the first 50 years of my life that was true. I think that when I was a toddler he took an interest in me.  There are a bunch of photos showing us together when I was small enough for him to hold me in his arms.  And I remember a few times when he took me places by himself.  But by the time I was in elementary school we lived in the same house but on different planets.  To me, he was like one of the pieces of furniture. Because he was a commercial fisherman, he had long since left the house by the time I got up in the morning.  When he was home during the day he was either reading the paper, dozing in a chair or asleep on the couch.  I don’t know what he thought he knew about me, as we never conversed and had little interaction except for a goodnight kiss.  He (and my mother) often did hold forth at our daily family suppers, mostly talking about local people he knew (he was a native) or relatives or reminiscing about their own growing-up years.  My sister and I were to be seen but not heard.

 But all that’s a different story.  This story is about our sharing a special moment.  It took place 23 years ago when I was 50, and he and my mother had been married for 52 years.  They weren’t all wonderful years, at least for her, especially during the years when I was growing up.  But that’s another story.  This story is about when my mother had lung cancer.

She had spent almost a month in the hospital the year before, having fluid drained from her lungs.  And when she got home, she implored us not to ever take her back to a hospital.  While she was there, I spoke to her doctor who told me that the only thing they could offer my mother was palliative radiation that would shrink the tumor, but the cancer would come back.  The radiation might offer her a couple of years.  

I encouraged my mother to have the radiation, which might have been selfish of me.  But I did it mostly because my father would have been helpless if she died quickly.  So she did have the radiation, which did reduce the tumor, but also damaged her esophagus so that she had difficulty swallowing.  She also lost most of her sense of taste.  So it wasn’t an easy two years for her.  But although she never spoke about dying, she did begin to teach my father to take care of himself.  She, a former bookkeeper, had always handled the finances.  So she taught him to write a check, and to keep track of the regular expenses.   She taught him to grocery shop, and to run the washer and dryer, and to hang up clothes on the clothesline, and she even taught him how to cook fish and grits, and to make a tossed salad or coleslaw. 

 

By the time the two years was about up, she took to her bed, too breathless to move about much. My father called me in a panic, and the next day I drove to Florida to “help out.”  The first thing I did when I took a look at my mother was call her doctor and insist that she be seen the next day.  (My mother, of course, had not called the doctor because she already had an appointment with her in two weeks.  The inability of these two old people to maneuver the medical system was the main reason I had rushed to the rescue.)  The next day the doctor did see my mother, and after listening to her lungs, sent her immediately for an X-ray.  She promised to call me that evening with the results. As soon as we got home, my mother went right back to bed.

Sometime after supper, the phone rang and I answered it.  It was the doctor with the X-ray results.  "Your mother’s lungs are filling with fluid," she said.  "One lung is totally useless and the other is filling, too.  I’m sorry, but there’s nothing to do at this point.  She’s going to die from this."

"When?"  I asked.  "It’s hard to say," she said. "But weeks, not months."

I hung up the phone and looked at my Daddy.  I could tell from the look on his face that he was hopeful. There was nothing to do but just tell him.

Daddy," I said.  "Mama’s not going to make it. It’s just a matter of time now."

Daddy’s eyes filled up and he cried out “Oh, my beautiful sweetheart!” and he put his head down on my shoulder and cried.  And I cried, too.

At that moment, something shifted in our relationship.  Any façade we may have had with each other was stripped away, and we were two people who loved another, and each other, and we were family.

From that evening on until he died 8 years later, Daddy and I were easy with each other.  We could sit together on the front porch in silence.  Or we could talk. Either way was comfortable.  Over time he told me a lot of things about himself and his experiences, and I did the same. 

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Everything between us had changed after we shared that special moment.