Man in the Moon: Essays on Fathers and Fatherhood

The Wisdom of Sons

171 Final Words in the spring of 1994, as my father lay dying in the intensive care unit of a small hospital in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, my mother, brother, sister, and I were faced with the sort of decision families dread. My father was in a coma. A week earlier he had suffered cardiac arrest while having lunch with my mother, his wife of thirty -three years. They were eating cold-cut sandwiches, a platter between them of sliced tomatoes drizzled with olive oil, salt, oregano. It was his second cardiac arrest in six weeks. The first time he was also having lunch with my mother, a coincidence I have never made sense of except to conclude the obvious, that deep down inside he sought for his last moments on earth a simple meal with my mother. That first time, after my father slumped in his chair and struck his cheekbone on the edge of the table before collapsing to the floor, my mother called 911. Three local emts, all volunteers, burst into the house, cut open my father’s shirt with a pair of scissors designed for this purpose—it is equipped with a flattened edge on the lower blade to protect the victim’s skin—and with a thrust of current from a defibrillator restarted his heart in minutes. Several hours later he awoke in a hospital room. His short-term recall scattered, his voice croaky from intubation, he bore a purplish welt on the left side of his face that flooded blood into the white of his eye. His sternum Thomas White the wisdom of sons 172 Thomas White ached. I was in graduate school in New York City and upon hearing the news had boarded the first train to Providence. I found a patch of skin on his arm that wasn’t plugged with tubes or covered in bandages and placed my hand there. “Hi, Dad.” “Tom,” he croaked. “Shouldn’t you be at school?” It was a trip I would make frequently in the coming months, there and back, to hospitals and rehabilitation centers in Boston and Rhode Island, and each train ride had a pall all its own, a different flavor of sadness—one rooted in self-pity, one in loneliness, another in loss—and the tears that streaked my cheeks bore a unique taste on my lips, sometimes sweet, sometimes so bitter I could choke, always the same the entire trip. I told my father all I wanted was to be with him. “School can wait,” I said. Once stable he was transferred by ambulance to the Boston hospital where weeks earlier he had undergone surgery to replace two heart valves. This was a teaching hospital. Once or twice a day a group of impossibly young future doctors gathered round the bed with their white coats and clipboards and pens and stethoscopes dangling quaintly from their necks. Nothing much was ever said, neither by the senior cardiologist nor my father; certainly nothing was said among the young future doctors, who fought hard to never once glance at our family. Because they were usually such a confident bunch, I was surprised at the cardiologists’ willingness to confess their perplexity about the cause of the cardiac arrest. We had expected an explanation so tangled in medical jargon it would be beyond our comprehension, but an explanation nonetheless, something we could repeat to friends and family. Maybe even a hook on which we could hang our hopes. The valves were operating perfectly , they said, and my father’s heart was pumping blood into and out of its chambers with impeccable efficiency. Their work was done, and done well, they seemed to imply. After days of deliberation they decided to prescribe my father a medication that would regulate the electrical currents around his heart. These currents had most likely 173 the wisdom of sons misfired, for one reason or another, causing his heart to stop. This new pill would prevent another cardiac event. I remain to this day so disgusted by this solution—after heart-valve replacement and subsequent cardiac arrest, a simple pill was supposed to address whatever had stricken my father—that I refuse to research this medication, its name, success rate, whether or not it is still prescribed, for fear the old, seething bitterness over its prescription will return. While my father was transferred to a rehabilitation facility, I returned to New...