Ten seconds before my father’s death, I have a premonition – that the breath he is taking will be his last. Of course, I’ve had these premonitions before. As he breathes out, I watch and listen, and I hold my own breath, and wait for him to breathe in again. And every time I think he won’t, but he does. It’s getting harder, but he does, as he is doing now.
That’s the good part – the intake of air. Then comes the terrifying part, when the carbon dioxide comes back out. Then there’s a gap, followed by another uphill climb, another attempt on the summit.
I urge him on.
Come on! You can do it! He is 86.
We’re in a ward, in a hospital, eight beds, eight very old men. It’s 9.35pm. I’m supposed to leave the ward in 25 minutes. But I can’t imagine my father will be alive in 25 minutes. That would be a lease of life, a bonus. I want it, but I don’t want it. I want to be with him when he dies. But I don’t want to be with him when he dies. But, of course, I do. My brain is confused. I’m entering a period of shock.
We were never close, by the way. This, these last few days, is the closest we have been for years, maybe decades. Since the weekend in Montreal in 1979, I keep thinking, and then driving through Nova Scotia for, what, a week? Since then, I have seen him a lot, but we’ve never talked much.
He stopped talking three days ago. And then there were the days of the hand signals. I would talk and he would move his hands in response. Now I just talk. I am pretty sure he can hear me, that it matters, that I matter to him, a very self-centred thing to think. I am very self-centred.
But these last few days have made me think how different things might have been. I might have been different, might have been closer to my father, if … Oh, come on! What about that last time I bumped into him in town? When we didn’t go to a cafe, didn’t have a cup of coffee? Why did he not want to, I keep thinking? But of course he had his reasons, must have had his reasons. He said he wanted to do this and that on his own, had made a plan, wanted to stick to the plan.
Well, fine.
Not many more chances, I thought even then. Not many more chances to sit down and have a chat. Father and son, chatting away. But he had his plan. So it never happened. And here we are. I’m talking. But I don’t know what to say. And he can’t say anything. All he can do is breathe.
So really this idea, the idea that things might have been different, is probably just a deathbed fantasy. We were never close. He was always disappearing, my father, always living in different countries, and visiting yet more countries. Superficially, it seemed to make sense – he was a professor or a visiting professor here or there, Germany or Holland, say, and he worked for Unesco in Geneva. Hence the travel – to Africa, to the Middle East, often to dictatorships or communist countries. As a teenager, I met him in Swiss and German hotels. Twice he moved to Canada.
I liked him.
He moved back to England after I left home. Soon after that, something odd happened. One day, I found him in his room, his study I suppose, and he was looking at all these dictionaries – Dutch, German, Swedish – and taking notes. It was his hobby, his passion in life, he said. Tracking words across different languages. And this took my breath away. Because it was my hobby, too. As a student, I would get stoned and read dictionaries for hours. That thing of being slumped, surrounded by dictionaries. Hey, I said to my father, I do the exact same thing. After that, we would buy each other books on linguistics.
The last book I bought him was Guy Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass. Shortly afterwards, he cut his leg and it wouldn’t heal. And now this. It’s all happened so fast. A cut that won’t heal; a collapse, a couple of days in hospital, a course of powerful antibiotics. He was supposed to be in hospital for one night. Then two.
But now he can barely suck air into his lungs. I’m watching his face, his chest. He’s going to try to take another breath. He’s like a weightlifter.
Come on! Come on!
My mother and brother have left the hospital for the day. Now it’s just me and my father. We have been – I have been – talking about various things. His love of languages, how he inspired me, which I suppose he must have done. I remember when he moved to Utrecht for a while and could pronounce Dutch words. I was maybe 12. He had been in Germany before that and told me how Dutch was close to German and also Flemish. I have been saying, over and over, what an inspiration he has been to me, how much I loved him, dropping in memories here and there, all in the tones of a talkshow host.
There is a barrier between my performance, on the one hand, and my feelings. My feelings, unexplored, are on the other side of the barrier.
He was always very tolerant. I would be drunk or stoned, and he never seemed to mind. Once he made me a drink and I actually bit into the glass, had glass and blood in my mouth, and he said, “You OK?”
And I said, “Yes, I just bit the glass, but I think I’m OK.” And that was that. I spat the bits of glass out of my mouth and then we watched a late-night film.
The deal in this hospital is that every so often I ask my father if he wants morphine, and if he does, he taps his chest. We have a system. If he does want morphine, I go to find a nurse, and there is a procedure to be followed – signatures, clipboards, a five-minute wait. Then he gets a morphine injection. Then he is drowsy for a bit, and then he perks up.
This time, though, he has not perked up quite as much. He breathes in, and out. I look at him. He begins to breathe in. That’s when I get my premonition.
And then something strange happens. I have an urge to stand up, to walk away from my father’s bedside. Which I do. Driven by something – fear, an acute stab of self-centredness perhaps, I stand up and take two paces, and then look back over my shoulder. I’m at the corner of his bed. I tell myself I’m looking for the nurse, or the doctor, or anyway that I’m looking for something.
And now he starts to breathe out. I turn now, and watch him. I’m no longer running away. I’m at his bedside, I will tell myself. I watch his face as the air leaves his lungs. Such a weight of air! I know he cannot pick this weight up again, know there is no way. His face is still. Eyes closed. He is still alive, probably, but not breathing. And now maybe he is not still alive.
Or, I’m thinking, maybe he is. Because what do I know?
I walk across the floor of the ward to find a nurse. Busy, she turns around. I find myself unable to tell her what I have just seen. So I tell her something else. I say I think my father looks uncomfortable. I say I think he looks like he may be in trouble. I’m sorry to bother her, I say, I know she’s busy, but anyway.
She looks at me. She will check. I wait in the corridor, in the reception area outside the ward. It’s the first time I’ve been outside the ward for a while. I smile at people. The next part is odd. A nurse I’ve never met walks towards me. She is looking at me carefully. She tells me that my father has died.
I say: “Yes, yes – I think you’re right.”
Now I want to go and check. My thinking is that my father has probably died, has almost certainly died, but it’s been so sudden, all of this, and he was definitely alive less than five minutes ago. There are still things I want to say! What if, I’m thinking, what if he is not quite dead? Do these nurses really know for sure? Look how busy they are, I’m thinking.
They have drawn the curtains around his bed.
I say, “Look, do you mind if I just …” I don’t say the word “check”.
The nurse says, “Of course.”
I part the curtains. My father looks sort of OK. I place my fingertips on his forehead. His eyes are closed.
“Anyway,” I say.
And: “I’ve just been talking to the nurses.”
And: “And they think …”
And: “But I’ll still chat to you. For a while.”
For the moment, everything feels OK. The curtains are closed. No need to rush.
Father and son. Chatting away.
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