Man in the Moon: Essays on Fathers and Fatherhood

Thirteen Views of Grief

160 I. Trapped “How old are you?” the doctor asks. My father pauses. For a long time. “One hundred and fifty-two.” He is sitting right beside me, on a hospital bed, but his voice sounds muted and hollow, as if floating up from a deep hole. The doctor arches an eyebrow. “My, you do look well-preserved for your age.” The expression on his face is not kind. You might even call it a sneer. “And who is the president of the United States?” “Jimmy Carter,” I shout, to myself. Maybe everything will be okay, if he gets this answer right. My father pauses again. He seems to know he’s failing the test. “George? George Washington?” “Yes, well. That’s enough for now,” the doctor sniffs and motions us to the door. “I can’t tell you anything definite. We’ll have to do more tests tomorrow.” Alone with us, his bedside manner improves. When he looks at my older sister, his eyes definitely soften. But that is true of most men. I stare down at the floor, at his brown shoes, his polyester slacks beneath the hem of his white doctor coat. I’m still shouting, inside Donna George Storey thirteen views of grief 161 thirteen views of grief my head: What kind of asshole gets his kicks out of making fun of a man with a brain tumor? What he’s just done is wrong and I know it, but I’m seventeen and he’s a doctor, and my mother, who is a nurse and might have embarrassed him into good behavior, is still downstairs filling out the admission papers. Before he got sick, my father had a way with words. But now, my mother explained, the growth in his brain is causing aphasia, which means his thoughts become twisted on their way to speech. The words he wants to say are trapped inside his head. At that moment I know exactly how he feels. II. Wired There are no chairs in the rooms in intensive care, so I have to stand by the bed and look down at my father. The suture on his shaved skull looks like a zipper. His chest is dotted with round sensors, attached to wires that run to the beeping machines beside his bed. Since the tumor was removed, he’s had several heart attacks. He keeps clawing at his chest. Years later, when I read Lauren Bacall’s account of Humphrey Bogart’s last days, she’ll describe him doing exactly the same thing the night before he died, grabbing at his chest as if trying to pull himself free of his own body. How did we get here? If I think back, I can piece it together. My father began acting strangely around Christmas, withdrawn, not himself. Then he decided to take a few weeks off of work for no real reason—just a break to do a few things around the house. Then he needed to go to the hospital for tests, but it might just be a virus or an abscess. Then they told me it was a tumor, but it could be benign. Then they admitted it was malignant, glioblastoma, the very worst kind, but he might live for a while, even a year, after the surgery and radiation. 162 Donna George Storey Amazingly, I believed them at every step. Because I wanted to. But the day after Valentine’s Day, the phone call comes. He is dead. There’s no way to put a spin on that one. That afternoon, after the crying, after my mother takes her sleeping pill, I’m sent to the grocery store to buy coffee and milk, boxes of cookies. We’ll be having many visitors in the days to come. “And how are you today?” the cashier beams. I consider telling her my father just died this morning, but instead I smile. My lips move slowly, like a stick through clay. “Just fine,” I say. III. Receiving Line I’ve seen a corpse laid out in a coffin once, my great-aunt Bertha, but she was ninety-two when she died. I was eight. I remember watching my aunts pat her blue-veined hands, a rosary woven through the waxen fingers. I wanted to try it, too, but was afraid. My father wears a suit, a strange thing to lie down in. His chest seems...