Everything took on a sickening poignancy: the boisterous din at our Saturday brunch place where, just a week before, my girlfriends and I had scrolled through the latest celebrity facelifts and griped about our jowls; the Santa Monica mountains coming back to life after the fires; Henry’s flag-football mouth guard on the kitchen table, imprinted with his teeth; the pissed-off scrawl on the Post-it Molly had left on her bedroom door (“Free first period DON’T WAKE ME UP!!!”); Frankie, our eldest, on the location-tracking app Life360, her face inside a tiny quote bubble floating over her freshman dorm, and her text a while later that nearly did me in: “Mama I need a drawstring bag for my laundry.”
We couldn’t tell the kids yet; there was nothing definitive to say. I braced myself to act plucky when Molly and Henry got home from their tournament, but in the end it didn’t matter. My sister called: our father was about to die. Our parents, long divorced, were both in hospice, on opposite coasts. Our mother’s had started in June, but our father’s was only a week in, so we hadn’t expected him to go first.
I flew to New York. I didn’t make it before my father took his last breath, but I got to see his body before it was taken from his apartment. My sister, who is a doctor and usually the stoic one, wept. I just stood there in a state of morbid fascination. I had never seen a dead body up close before, let alone someone so familiar to me. His hair was still the same—thick, mostly brown—and my sister and I thanked him for our own abundant heads. His signature club thumbs, which were the only fat, brutish things about him, were the same as ever. But his mouth was open and drooped peculiarly to one side, and his skin was sucked into his skeleton like a vacuum storage bag. I felt guilty for not crying, but at least I got a reprieve from guessing how much longer I had to live.
He’d been dead for two hours when the “removal team” arrived from the Greenwich Village Funeral Home: two men in black suits, who put me in mind of the Blues Brothers. They suggested that we step into the other room while they transferred our father out of his rented hospital bed. I wasn’t sure whether this was because there might be bodily leakage or because of how disturbing it would be to see the person who’d raised us—whose shoulders we’d ridden on—zipped into a body bag that looked like it came from the props department of “Law & Order.” We sat on the couch with our stepmother and made small talk—partly, I’m sure, so that we wouldn’t hear the Blues Brothers working away in the bedroom.
As soon as my dad’s corpse was out of sight, I was free to panic about my cancer again. In a few minutes, he would be carted away forever. My mind should’ve been flooded with memories, like the time he pulled the car over to make me and my sister listen to “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” followed by a disquisition on why Jim Croce was one of the great American lyricists, or the time he told me, at age eleven, that I should make my own living and never rely on a man for money.
I tried to stop thinking about myself. I flipped through my stepmother’s hospice pamphlet—“Gone from My Sight: The Dying Experience”—in which the end-of-life expert Barbara Karnes outlines the process of “transitioning” week by week, up to the final minutes. I made a mental checklist of which milestones my mom had left to hit. Karnes encourages you to think of your loved one in the throes of death the same way you’d think of a chick struggling to hatch. The last couple of pages listed the rest of her œuvre, including “I Am Standing Upon the Seashore: End of Life Coloring Book.” It annoyed me that the hospice-industrial complex offered such rinky-dink leaflets to the bereaved. My mom’s team had at least given me a heftier brochure featuring tasteful photographs of lilacs; this one was literally stapled together, with cartoonish drawings like the ones on airplane safety cards that show your aircraft making a pleasant water landing.