Something Like Love

Janice Northerns

Daddy sat in the kitchen, waking enough from his brain’s oxygen-starved doze to tell me a joke, a groaner I’d heard before from his collection of clichéd and sometimes politically incorrect stories: “Did you hear that the Pope has bird flu? He caught it from one of his cardinals.”

 A few days before, my brother had called.

“He’s going downhill fast,” he said.

“Should I come?”

“I don’t know. I can’t tell you. But I don’t think he’s going to make it till Thanksgiving.”

My father’s trips to the hospital had suddenly become a weekly event. Each time, the doctor administered heavy doses of Lasix to drain the fluids Daddy’s heart could no longer pump. He’d then come home for a few days; the fluid would build up again, and the cycle would repeat.

After my brother’s call, I made the six-hour drive from Kansas to our farm in Texas. Daddy was out of the hospital for the moment, and I watched what had become his morning ritual: he’d step on the scale and weigh himself, the number creeping up a pound or two each day, with feet so swollen that the skin stretched, paper-thin, like balloons ready to burst. The blood pressure cuff came out next. Daddy recorded that day’s measures in a spiral notebook, in handwriting so shaky it was barely legible, handwriting that someone once told me looked like mine. But it was the other way around. My handwriting looked like his.

That weekend, the man I watched was not the invincible father I remembered: the man who’d fractured his back but survived when he rolled a tractor; the man who nearly severed his foot with a pickaxe while splitting a stump but walked without a limp; the man who sauntered back to the house like nothing was wrong the day he’d fallen out of a pecan tree and suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. That father kept telling jokes, bluffing his way through mishaps, and telling doctors that he “beat his wife up every day,” meaning he got up before she did in the morning.

***

That Saturday in October, he was not yet awake when I tiptoed into the kitchen before dawn to start the coffee. I flipped on the light and my breath caught.

Mama had laid everything out for Daddy’s breakfast on the table, anticipating his “beating her up”: bowl and spoon, packet of maple and brown sugar instant oatmeal—the cheaper store brand, a buying habit ingrained by years of living from bank loan to bank loan on our small farm. There was also a box of prunes, a cinnamon-sugar shaker, a few generic vitamins, and a plastic container of shelled pecans—pecans he’d picked from his own trees earlier that autumn. His tumble from one of those trees years ago had not dissuaded him from climbing ladders.

This scene—breakfast, down to the tiniest detail, laid out for my father, something I’d never known Mama to do—is what broke my heart that first weekend I was home. How tenderly she eased his way with acts like this, he who now stumbled, sleepwalking, through the last weeks of his life.

I’d once thought my father’s death wouldn’t bother me much. He was 91; he’d lived a long time, and more to the point, the parent I was closer to was my mother. I regarded my father as an egotist, a shallow man whose conversation consisted mostly of corny one-liners and Biblical exhortation. He and I disagreed about religion and politics and most everything else.

But now I found, watching my father disappear before my eyes, that it did bother me. But why? I’d been gone from home for 30 years. I visited several times a year, but in between, my mother was the one who had stayed in touch with frequent letters. In them, she wrote news from home, sent birthday checks, and made queries and comments about the grandkids and my life. She shared her pride that I’d finally earned a degree and was now a teacher. In contrast, the letters from my father were rare and consisted solely of Bible verses and admonitions to “get right with the Lord.”

***

Over the next six weeks, I came home each weekend and watched, stunned, as my father became slack-jawed and sunken-eyed, his skin yellowing because of his failing liver and kidneys. His hospital gown gaped open as he sat on the bedside toilet. When he asked me to help him back to bed, I saw my father’s sagging backside for the first time.

I drove home to Texas on the last day of his life and sat by his hospital bed with my mother. My brothers were on their way. His breath came in ragged gasps now with long pauses in between. The doctor told us, gently—this sound, this death rattle—meant it was almost time.

“He waited for you to get here, Janice,” my mother whispered.

My mother held him and cried on one side while I held him and cried on the other as Daddy gurgled, gasping for breath, until, finally, he was gone.

Most of those last weekends are a blur now. But what has never faded is the piercing grief I felt that first visit when I stumbled into the kitchen in that predawn dark and discovered the bowl, the spoon, the oatmeal—the simple morning still-life my mother had laid out for my father. And with it, my realization that he was dying.

Today, I think about that man, whom, truth be told, I didn’t like very much. As the years have passed since his death, I find myself examining his life by writing about it. I write about his hardships growing up poor with a stern father who made him cut his own switches for whippings, who made him work on Christmas Day, and to whom words of love did not come easily, just as they did not come easily to my father. Writing about him has freed me from resentment and has opened a space in my heart for understanding. I recognize now what I felt for him in the surge of grief that overwhelmed me that October morning. To my surprise, it was something a lot like love.