Gone years

Get it while you can

I’m staying at my father’s house at the moment; alone, because he is in hospital, and it will probably be at least a week or so before he’s discharged. The last time I was here alone it was for the same reason. It’s strange without him: quieter and tidier. I have cleared the dining table of his perpetual clutter as it deranges me. I never turn on the television except at the very end of the day, when I collapse at last to watch The Pitt or a Vanderpump Rules re-run. I let his dog sleep on the forbidden couch, since I run the vacuum beneath its leather cushions. She jumps up there silently and looks at me with a sober, conspiratorial expression. We both understand that her sofa tenure is limited.

Alone here, I do the sort of deep-cleaning that I don’t have time to do on an ordinary visit. I sugar-soap the skirting boards, wipe down the outdoor furniture with warm water, scrub the laundry trough with bleach. Dad won’t notice I have done these things, but that’s all right. I do them for myself, and also for my mother’s ghost.

It would not be right to feel resentful. Sometimes I do anyway.

My father is okay, or will be, in the short term. He still has terminal cancer. This current crisis was caused by the sort of thing tertiary to the cancer: a blocked bile duct and ensuing complications. One day he was fine. A little jaundiced, but cheerful, pain-free and certainly not unwell. The next, he was undergoing what would be the first of five attempted surgical interventions to fix the problem. His liver function worsened rapidly. He developed blood and chest infections. A day procedure became a weeks-long stint in hospital.

*

I was in the United States when he fell ill. I was in New Hampshire undertaking the final days of a prestigious artist fellowship program where I had spent the last five weeks.

At first, it wasn’t an emergency. In fact things began to feel more urgent on the day that I left the residency. I was on an Amtrak train headed for New York, where I planned to spend a few days before flying to the west coast to visit family and friends. I would fly home to Melbourne from there.

On the four-hour train trip I message my sisters the entire way, discussing Dad’s condition, his prognosis, treatment for that day. I can change my flights and come home early, I say. They both agree this is unnecessary.

In New York I wander aimlessly. I visit museums and galleries; sit alone in my favourite wine bar, reading a book by a new friend from the artist residency; browse a fancy cookware shop. But it feels shameful and indulgent. My father becomes sicker and my sisters’ updates more frequent. I love the city but I cannot find pleasure in it.

At this point Dad is two, maybe three, surgical attempts in. I browse flights; weigh the costs. My sisters maintain that it isn’t necessary. The thing is, I write, by the time I get home, he’ll already have had the surgery and he’ll be better. I sincerely believe this to be true. We all do. But I also dread the idea of a thirty-hour journey home with limited to no ability to receive updates. Somehow being on the other side of the world and knowing what’s going on is preferable to enduring a day without news.

In New York sleep eludes me. I am a poor sleeper generally. The last few months, in a narrow, nun-like bed at the residency, I have tossed and turned; waking twice a week for a 4am work call; attuned to strange sounds and a soft mattress. In this wide hotel bed I lie awake, listening to the city, to people in the corridor, to my neighbours beyond the thin walls. They seem to be returning from parties. Everyone is coming back from joy.

In New York it rains incessantly. The collar of my shirt is soaking cold against my neck when I sat in a bar. It makes me shiver. The city feels dirty after a month and a half in rural New Hampshire, where the air was clear and a foot of snow blanketed everything. One evening I attempt to distract myself by going to see a film at the IFC Center. I don’t know much about it, but have seen the trailer, and read that the sound design is very good. The movie is so intense that afterwards I walk laps around the block in the drizzle trying not to throw up. It has been a long time since a film had such a bodily effect on me. It was not gory or gruesome. In fact it was very good, beautifully shot. The sound design was excellent. But my body behaves as though I have witnessed a beheading.

On the day that I left Melbourne, back in late January, my father insisted on driving me to the airport. He tapped at his CarPlay screen, selecting songs one by one, as we flew down the freeway. I don’t know if he knows how to make playlists on Apple Music.

At one point he put on ‘Because I Love You’ by The Master’s Apprentices, and we sang along. For a long time—maybe until that very morning—I thought the song was corny. I have a dim memory of it being covered on a television commercial for a cruise line or fibre supplement or something. But in the suicide seat of Dad’s station wagon I was touched by Jim Keays’s lilting, almost shy vocals through the verses; the driving bass and harmonies as the chorus swelled.

I wondered whether he’d chosen it as a kind of oblique sentimental transmission. He often quotes his favourite lyrics when writing to me. In a birthday card, the first verse from Bob Dylan’s ‘Forever Young’. In a text message, after I told him I’d been offered another overseas residency, and that I was hesitant to accept it because of both his health and my bank account: ‘Like Janis Joplin said, honey—Get it while you can’.

Driving out to Tullamarine that day, he also played The Beatles’ ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ and ‘Rocky Raccoon’, so maybe I shouldn’t read too much into it.

*

I fly from New York to Spokane, Washington. It’s a long journey from coast to coast, then to smaller airport inland, closer to Idaho. The entire way, my sisters and I message back and forth. I know it’s bad, or at least not good, because my chatty father has all but stopped responding to me. When he does write, it’s brief, full of typos and spaces, as though he is having difficulty seeing or typing on his phone.

Close to midnight, my aunt D and her partner J pick me up from the airport. I say ‘aunt’ but she is not blood but something else. It doesn’t matter. When we get home D fixes me a gin and tonic and a plate of cheese, crackers and apple. She and J sit in chairs side-by-side and I sit on the carpet. I know you’re a floor person, she says. Just as long as you’re comfortable. She also tells me that my middle sister, a nurse, phoned her earlier. ‘She asked if you guys could speak once you’re settled in here; once you’ve had a glass of something,’ D says. Immediately I think: He’s dead and I feel ready to vomit, and then I think No, I am catastrophising; if he were dead my sister would not propose I settle in at D’s with a drink before receiving the news, and anyway, I have been texting my sisters for the last seven hours, they would have told me.

We FaceTime, then: I prop my phone against a small potted plant on a coffee table. On the screen of my device, I am in the foreground. D and J are behind me, in their chairs. On the other side of the world, my sisters are side-by-side; pixellated, tired, exquisite. They do not look terribly alike, but you can tell they’re siblings. Seeing them together makes my stomach lurch. Maybe it is bad after all.

It’s bad, but not death-bad. It might be prudent, my sisters say, to come home early. There was a MET call earlier. Until today, my youngest sister tells me, I was like, nah, don’t bother, you’re good. But today was kind of fucked. It feels different, they report. As we speak I realise I am crying. They, too, are teary. All three of us are so accustomed to sorrow that we don’t acknowledge it.

It is after one o’clock; three a.m. east coast time. I have been weeping on and off all day. I am half a glass of gin deep, chronically underslept, feeling deranged. I tell them I will make a decision tomorrow after I have slept. I apologise to D and J for my tears. They call me honey and darling. They tell me to go to bed. Their eyes are wet, too. D says: We just love you guys so much.

The next day, I book a new flight home, one that will arrive sooner. D insists on paying. I fight valiantly but she will not hear an argument against it. We FaceTime my dad in ICU. His colour is poor but he is alive, conscious, talking, has been extubated. He smiles to see D, his dear friend and one-time neighbour. He looks very thin. Still a little yellow, though maybe it’s the blue of his hospital gown.

D, a retired nurse, says: He looked better than I thought he would. Oh, I’m so glad I saw him.

I leave the next day. D and J drive me back to Spokane International Airport. We hug by the car. I ask if I can take their picture—I haven’t taken any pictures while visiting; I’ve been hung up on Dad’s condition—and they smile. They look the same. They are wearing the same colour zip-up jacket. We are all crying. A sweet Delta attendant asks Do you three want a picture together? and I pass them my camera and we all smile. D and J are parked in a two-minute zone. We say goodbye and then I am alone in the terminal with my ungainly bag. The attendant helps me to check my suitcase as though I’m a dementia patient. Their kindness makes me weep all over again. My tears render me pathetic. All day long, people are nice to me. The guy at the check-in desk. The TSA staff. On the flight from Spokane to Salt Lake City, the flight attendant neglects to charge me for my drinks. At LAX, a stranger buys me a martini. On the long flight home, the attendant remembers I am vegetarian at breakfast-time. He sources a meal even though I booked my ticket too late to have noted my dietary preferences.

Perhaps a year ago, my youngest sister—a psychologist—observed me holding my breath as I prepared dinner, cleaned, and so on at our father’s house one evening. Did you know you do that? she asked.

I replied that I’d only ever caught myself unconsciously holding my breath when I was in the middle of a cognitively difficult or engrossing task; usually a job of translation.

The evening after I arrive home from the U.S., I am stacking the dishwasher when the same sister touches my arm gently. You can breathe, she says, and I realise I’m doing it again. We both laugh.

Over the next few days I observe this same pattern of inadvertent breath-holding. Of course, some reflex inevitably kicks in, but now it has been pointed out to me, I notice it more readily, and I am surprised at how many times every hour I have to remind myself to fill my lungs. I am sometimes made dizzy and headachy by it. Or maybe that’s unrelated. It disturbs me nonetheless. At the moment it is fashionable, among pop-psychology pseudotherapy girlies, to talk about embodiment. I say this not to dismiss the the concept: just to acknowledge that, like many other terms, it has become so bastardised and overused as to become almost meaningless.

*

My father is recovering, now, but is so weakened that he will be discharged not home but to rehab so that he can strengthen his legs enough to walk independently again. My father, who, until recently, was still boasting his ten thousand steps a day, even after two and a half years of aggressive chemotherapy.

When my mother was dying she wound up in hospital for all sorts of things tangentially related to cancer or its treatment. Her immune system was so destroyed that a cut on her finger might develop into cellulitis; a headcold into pneumonia. Many times over, the chemotherapy wreaked such devastation on her gastrointestinal system that she required hospitalisation. It is a cruel and exhausting fact of chronic illness—particularly a degenerative or terminal disease—that the ill person and their loved ones are always waiting for the next disaster. The ‘healthy’ periods, relatively speaking, are moments of slackness between the load-bearing beams of acute sickness and terror.

I’ve noticed a shift in my own language. For a while I said my father was living with cancer, which remains accurate. But these days I more often say he has terminal cancer, which is also true, but which—to me—implies proximity to end of life.

He is not yet, to my knowledge, considered palliative. Once he recovers from the present episode, he will resume treatment, but he is running out of options. Previous drugs have either ceased to work, or have become cumulatively intolerable. He has essentially developed an ‘allergy’ to oxaliplatin, a potent chemotherapy that was effective for over a year until one day, out of the blue, it led to a seizure and moderate anaphylaxis in the midst of an infusion.

The treatment options have dwindled to a single chemotherapy drug and a phase-one clinical trial so new that its immunotherapy drug is still stuck in a warehouse somewhere overseas, likely months away. He may be too sick or no longer eligible to receive it by the time it makes its way here at last. In this way terminal cancer has come to feel more appropriate.

*

‘You know that meme,’ my psychologist sister says, ‘Fuck my stupid fucking chungus life?’ She tells me that when things were really bad with Dad, just ten days ago, when his blood pressure dipped so low that he had trouble forming words and the staff ran the MET call, that phrase was all she could think of. It pinballed stupidly around her brain even as she left the room to leave the nurses and physicians to their work. She had decamped, along with my other sister and their respective partners, to the adjacent visitors’ lounge, where patients’ loved ones can sit on a couch or make a hot beverage or stare through the window at the road and helipad and sprawling medical complex below.

My nurse sister shows me a photo she took surreptitiously during that same MET call: her partner—a tall, stocky man with terrifically broad shoulders—and my psychologist sister. They are seated opposite each other at a table meant for children, colouring peacefully. The picture is funny because of the near-optical illusion proportions of two adults squeezed around toddler furniture. It is also touching to see the two of them, in-laws to each other, wordlessly at work with coloured pencils. They are solemn and focused, heads bent toward their papers. Staring at the image on my nurse sister’s phone, I recall what the other sister said, and imagine a speech bubble floating from her head while she colours: Fuck my stupid fucking chungus life.

In a room next door, a doctor was assessing my father’s rapid deterioration, his falling oxygen saturation levels and blood pressure, and deciding that he should be moved to ICU.

*

I began this wanting to write more about the residency; about the sharp-minded and generous people with whom I spent my weeks, and maybe even about the book I am working on. I still hope to do that in a different dispatch.

I do keep thinking about a writer-friend I met there—let’s call her S.—and a conversation we had one morning over breakfast. At this residency, dinner is communal every evening. Breakfast is optional. I am not, by nature, a breakfast-eater, but I grew to love mornings with the few who showed up reliably. Something raw about those conversations; perhaps the nearness of sleep that made us all a little more porous, more open to frank discussion, before a veil settled over us all once more. Anyway, on this morning, a few of us were talking about time lost to grief, disembodiment, survival, etc.

S. described surfacing after decades of dissociation—almost the entire duration of her marriage, some twenty years—and emerging with a sense of serenity, as though her body had developed an immunity to fight or flight. Another writer-friend at the table, smiling, described this ellipsis as her gone years.

S. set down her cutlery over her plate, a smear where her eggs had been. She didn’t remember her gone years, but had emerged from her fugue state with a feeling of profound acceptance. ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ she asked, and then answered her own question: ‘A painful death.’