WHEN THE OLD MAN DIED (Part One : "It Could Be Worse")

“What did I do to deserve this? What did I ever do to deserve this!? Oh, Steve, Steve, Steve, the pain is indescribable! I never thought it would end like this! I never thought I’d end up like this!!”

Me dad was dying. Or was he? If somebody is still alive, it’s hard to know for sure. He was definitely in a bad way. A bruised and battered if still breathing corpse, his bloodshot eyes welling up with tears.. “I thought I’d never see you again!”

I have no idea what he was seeing when he looked at me, some familiar phantom amid the ghostly blur, buzz, hum and occasional clatter of Ward B2. Not B1, not B3, B2. And he didn’t want to be here in B2. He didn’t want to be anywhere but his own home, his own house, where he’d lived for well over fifty years, an Englishman’s castle! Everything would be better once he gets home. He wasn’t ready for this just yet, he had stuff to take care of, all that stuff in his closet…

And he needed to pee so badly. But he couldn’t. They’d shoved some kind of catheter up his private-part. “I need to piss so badly!” He writhed and moaned and groaned and wept. I held his hand and gently massaged his scalp. “I bet you never expected to see your dad like this!?”

But you’re still me dad, dad. And you didn’t do anything to deserve this. It’s just life. It happens to everybody. You’re eighty-six years’ old, you deserve to be helpless, nobody is going to begrudge you it! You just have to let it go… What else does one say to dying man in indescribable pain? You have to let it go, father All this mental anguish just adding insult to injury. You have to let it go!!??? I have no idea what it feels like to let go of something when you know you may never get anything back ever again.

Because there didn’t seem to be any returning from this. Not in any shape or form I could imagine. Not in any shape or form I wanted to imagine. Whatever force was compelling this critical juncture, there was no way I could wish him to have to face up to it again. May as well be now, dad, in B2, B4 it gets any worse! But if his mind still wasn’t at peace…?

Then suddenly he broke wind, several times in quick succession. His body relaxed. “I’m just a dirty old man!” he said. A faint flicker of thin-lipped humor. “Give us a kiss?” So I kissed him, on the lips, my cheek brushing against his two-day-old man’s stubble. “I love you”, he said. For the first time in my conscious memory. I love you too, dad!

I guess he’d managed to take a pee? Or maybe one better, maybe he’d moved his bowels to a much better place? I didn’t pursue that possibility, I figured I’d let the sheets soak that one up. Besides, there were professional people around in Ward B2 to deal with such things. Some crisis had obviously passed and he wasn’t dead yet.

“That feels nice”, he said, my hand stroking his scalp, “I feel like a dog!” Or a baby, I thought, welcoming any benevolent touch without questioning its’ motive or morality, simply trusting to its’ benevolence. Helplessness seems to be a pre-requisite condition of innocence. He looked at me through drying eyes.. “So how are you doing?” Well, I thought, it could be worse…

Three months previously I’d gone back to visit my parents, in England, from America. I’d traveled through space, and time, passed through a time-zone, lost five hours of my life, though, of course I knew I’d get it back on the return-trip, cause time is like that, you don’t really lost it, you just put it on your credit-card. MY sister had forewarned me on the telephone about my dad’s dramatically altered physical appearance, but still it was one hell of a shock when the front-door opened and this tiny skin-and-bone creature in over-sized jeans and suspenders stood there, in a little white tee-shirt vest and slippers, these thin white tousled wisps of hair clinging to his scalp for dear life! A skeleton with glasses on. Fragile as a saliva-web. You could have knocked both of us over with a feather, me dad literally..

Apparently his liver was fucked-up, couldn’t handle the bile. His belly would bloat up, he’d have to go into hospital, they’d drain it out, but then it would just bloat up again. The day before I arrived they’d drained out the bile and it looked like they’d sucked all his meat out with it! I think the only muscle he had left was focused in his toe-bones, the only thing standing between him and total collapse. HE could barely manage a shuffle never mind a walk.

Suddenly me mam is looking rather sturdy and vibrant. “I wish I could lose that much weight!” she said, without a trace of irony or malice. Maybe a hint of mischievousness? Cause at various times in their marriage, apparently me dad had given her a hard time about getting too fat. And the complex had gone deep, no matter how much weight she lost. And now she was going demented, suddenly she could roam freely over her resentments and me dad’s past frailties as an emotional support-system. “There was one ‘do’”, she said, “he wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t stand next to me, cause he didn’t like me hairstyle, said it made me look like a tart! At least I don’t snore like a pig!”

There’d been a definite power-shift in their relationship over the past few years. Cause me mam was losing her mind, but she hadn’t lost her eye-sight or her hearing or her will to live, while me dad’s was waning rapidly. And her recall may have been generally random, but every now and then it was fiercely incisive and fearlessly expressed! One time me dad shuffled into the room, looked down at her on the sofa and asked if she knew who he was..? She gazed up at himn for several seconds. .”No, who are you?” He shook his head and went to sit in his arm-chair. As soon as he’d sat down, me mam turned to me : “we’ve only been married for sixty bloody years! Silly old bugger!!!”

Of course he didn’t hear that. He didn’t hear half of what she said and the other half made absolutely no sense to him. Even if it did he rarely had the energy to bother to respond. His wit was dried-up. She had him by the testicles, which I assume were also dried-up? “I’m not a man anymore!” That was his new mantra. Facing up to reality. Cause he hadn’t lost his mind, he’d just lost pretty much everything else. . including his wife…?.

They’d been sleeping in separate bedrooms for a while now. So she wouldn’t roll over onto his delicate bloat. And she could make her nocturnal dream-time meanderings without having to wake him up. But it was hard not to feel like somehow she’d broken free, after sixty-odd years of being Mrs. Bellwood she was now her own separate entity. She didn’t even have to wash her own dishes up anymore. Her apron-strings had been loosed! All she had to worry about now was tripping over ‘em!

Or tripping over me dad as he crawled around on the carpet looking for the battery to his hearing-aid, this tiny miniscule gadget without which his world would be a slow-motion Charlie Chaplin movie without the piano accompaniment, terribly out of focus. Even with his magnifying-glass his city lights had been desperately dimmed! he would have to kneel down on the carpet six-inches from the TV screen to catch a fleeting glimpse of a world going off that wasn’t just in his own head. He seemed more at home on the carpet. As soon as he sat in his armchair he’d collapse into this chin-dropping gaping-mawed stupor. He’d keep apologizing to me for having to go upstairs and lie down. Practically deaf and blind, he now couldn’t carry on a conversation for more than a few sentences.

That following Christmas I called my sister’s house, where the family gathered for Christmas dinner, and she told me my dad wasn’t even there, he’d stayed home, alone, by himself, in bed, cause he didn’t want to put a wet-blanket on the proceedings! That’s when I suspected something might be getting seriously terminal. So I up-shifted my scheduled visit, and the day before I arrived he’d gone into the hospital, at his own request, he needed professional attention..

MY sister told me they’d given him some medication to ease the discomfort and it had deranged his mind. No sooner had he entered into Ward B2, with these five other blokes in various stages of geriatric disintegration, he felt an uncontrollable urge to deliver a morale-boosting speech : “I’d like to thank everybody for coming here tonight. the weather’s not too good, but we’re here and that’s what matters! And I know if we all pull together we can really get the job done! Now my daughter would like to say a few words..” “Just sit down, dad, for God’s sake!” “apparently my daughter doesn’t want to say a few words”.. Come on, Mr. Bellwood, time to tuck you up for the night!”

They had to call my sister back to the hospital a few hours later to help calm him down. He’d been wobbling over by the window banging a cup of water on the sill. The old bloke in the nearest bed told him to stop it.. Me dad threw the water in his face. So the old bloke whacked him with his walking-stick! the nurse had to intervene before there was a full-scale if muscularly depleted rumble! Do not go gently into that goodnight, dad! And keep a walking stick handy?

Or a time-machine? So you can zip back forty-odd years and have a good punch-up with a full deck! Assuming of course that your timing doesn’t go back with you.. I mean, you don’t want to finish up eighty-six years’ old caught in the middle of the Wars of the Roses! A sudden downpour at the battle of Towton Fields? “I thought this was the winter of my discontent, who is that strange-looking creature in those ridiculous pajamas?” “Must be some ancient sorcerer, sire, should I chop his head off?” “Hey, I haven’t even been born yet!” “Then you won’t miss your head. Chop his legs off as well! Now where were we, Lord Northumberland?” “Approaching the castle of York, m’lud!” “Have I got time for a sandwich?” “Well, I believe the Earl’s over there just inventing one!” ** Seminal moments in the history of Western Civilization!

So I guess we’ll have to travel through time while we’re somewhat in our prime, right? Or build our machine out of super-condensed hybrid steel with anti-tank trimmings and a little periscope so we can witness time folding and unfolding with impunity? And really do our homework cause, let’s face it, there are a lot of warrings to maneuver, not to mention the Pox and the Plague of Locusts! Jesus, life gets complicated once you start elaborating on the basics..

** Richard the Third, also in a time-warp with the Earl of Sandwich…