My father died on November 3, 2009.  The man I knew as 'Dad', died on  April 20, 2007, the day he entered Courtland Gardens Nursing  Facility in Stamford, Connecticut.  'Dad''s death;- the first one;- was brought on by the first stages of senile dementia.  The second death ;-the death of his physical body, was  due to the ravages of colon cancer. Witnessing his decline and passing made me realize how death entails a process of 'unbirthing' or a return to the void which precedes creation. Just as he must have held my mother's hands  the morning I was born, I held his hands and told him it was okay to let go and so he did, later that night..

Everyone must die, some sooner, most of us  at some juncture between the ages of 55- 85 , in our culture. How we die  and when. precisely the hour of our death  will occur, is something we cannot know with any absolute certainty.  My father never made his final wishes known to anyone in our family. My brothers and I  were the stewards of his final passage , helping him to cross the rubicon between  old age and senility. What is frightening and appalling to me at this juncture in my own life,  is that my own decline and death is something  I've avoided like a taboo subject  up untill the age of 55.  Now that both my mother and father have passed  away, I am being forced into a rude awakening about the facts of  old age and death.

The dementia ward where he died was a floating limbo-land of beige and green rooms peopled by men and women in different stages of  the slippery descent into that gray zone between being and cognition. In his prime, my father was an excavating contractor whose pride and joy was the  battery of heavy equipment he owned and operated. Seeing this once-agile and strong steam-shovel operator confined to a wheel-chair and a bed was  only the half of it. Dementia  manefests in  aphasia;- impairing speech;- and disphasia;- impairing cognitive functioning. What ensues is a loss of one of the cornerstones of  personality;- the idiosyncrasies of  verbal and vocal expression which 'tag' us as individuals and members of  the human species.  Engaging my father in anything resembling a normal conversation even on a 'good' day became an exhausting ordeal   during my weekly and then monthly visits to him in  the nursing home.  If I asked him if he'd like a cup of coffee and a donut from the local Dunkin' Donuts, he'd become fixated on  the idea and then ask me repeatedly When (!?!) I would be going , untill I was forced to carry out my mission. Upon my return, it wasn't unusual  for him to to look at me with a confused gaze and ask: 'Are You the Nurse?'.. 

I was  my father's advocate and  power-of-attorney concerning all his health-care issues. What I have learned is that people who cannot speak for themselves any longer, either become wards of the state or trusted family members. I was the one who barked orders at nursing-care staff who were remiss in their duties, such as the time I found my father sitting in bed with only a diaper and a hospital gown on, heavily sedated, his clothes nowwhere in sight. What is frustrating about a slow, degenerative condition like dementia is that there is no way to  accurately and   physically measure  the progression of the  disease , as with  cancer. My frustrations were met with reassurances from doctors, nursing-home and hospice staff that accepting the slow approach of the inevitable and making my father as comfortable as possible, was my best option, given my father's frail condition. When he was diagnosed with colon cancer in the Spring of 2008, the attending oncologist told me that surgery and treatment would only add to the burden of his suffering. I told him I wished my father would  die sooner than later and asked him  for his prognosis. He replied that in his estimation, it was just a matter of time before my father succombed  to pneumonia,'the old man's blessing'  and that there was nothing more to be done. Later that week, in one of his more lucid moments, I  had a brief conversation with my father and told him that he had cancer.  When I asked him if he were afraid of dying , he laughed and said " It's only natural'...

The impulse to help, to heal, to comfort  one's nearly departed one , will persist up untill the very end. I was told by a hospice social worker that  just to be there, just to be present,is about the best and kindest thing anyone can do when death walks into the room.  I am honored to say that I  did just that;- I came and spent the  last few days of his mortal existence at his bedside for hours at a stretch, swabbing his fever-parched lips and mouth with lemon-flavored glycerin swabs and  wiping his hot brow with a cool wash-cloth, untill I knew the time had come for me to go..

What I didn't know about death in a nursing-home was that there are no refrigerated 'holding rooms'  for  dead bodies  and that there is a very high turnover rate for vacant beds in most extended-care facilities . Nobody told me that the funeral home would have to be summoned in the middle of the night to retrieve the last of Dad or that  I was eligible for up to $1800- in State Death benefits to cover or offset cremation/burial costs  as per Title 19 . The thing which hurt more than the news that my father was dead, was the way the news concerning  the status of his 'remains' under the auspices of the nursing-home regulations was delivered to me by a Haitian  overnight staff aide. who told me she would 'try' to find an empty bed for his body....

I didn't have a chance to view my mother's body immediately following her death, because she lived in New Hampshire, three states away and had made all her final arrangements  five years before her death in November, 2004., so as to rest assured that her children would not have to be concerned about  cremation or burial.   Both my maternal and paternal grandparents died  when I was very young, and I never had any direct experience with dead people;- that is to say that I never saw a dead body of someone near and dear to me before my father died. 

As a visual artist,  I have often used the human body;- especially my own;- as a point of reference for my work.  Throughout my father's term-of-stay in the nursing-home and his last few days of life, I brought my sketchbook and camera to record  the final phase of his physical existence.  The day I was summoned to the funeral home to  view his remains and pay for his cremation, I  neglected to bring my camera. The funeral director who handled the arrangements asked my brother and me if we wanted to see the body. My brother gulped and asked if the eyes were shut. The director stepped out to prepare the body for viewing and then returned a few minutes later, reporting that the eyes were shut, but that the mouth was wide open.  Sure enough, there was Dad, or the last of Dad, laid out on a cold metal table in the holding vault, just  off the casket showroom.  He looked as if he  had fallen asleep in a snow-drift and had  been snoring loudly at the moment of his final departure..

Now that he is gone , my two brothers and I are making our peace about what type of urn he'd probably like for his 'cremains ' and whether or not a  metal tool-box or  something equally emblematic of his working-class values and virtues  wouldn't  suit him just fine. Grief is now giving way to a greater sense of relief about the cessation of his pain and suffering. There is really nothing left to do or say about the facts of  his death. It is his life that we will remember and celebrate this Thanksgiving, which would have been his 91st birthday.