What Happened Here?

My father coughs and opens his eyes. “How do you want to remember me?” he asks. He has a tube in vein in his neck, a tube in his nose. These are just the tubes I can see. Others are hidden by the bed sheet. The last few strands of what he once called his Donny Osmond hair fall over his forehead, and I move them away from his eyes.

“How do I want to remember you?” 

“Yeah. Do you want to remember the jerk, or the days when I was a decent man?”

“Dad,” I say. But I can tell from his breathing that he has drifted off.

Later, at home, my wife Cindy asks how things went at the hospital. “He seemed to be comfortable,” I told her. She hugs me, and pressure of her hands on my back feels nice.

We sit down for supper, and Cindy hands me a plate. “Could he talk?”

“A little,” I tell her. I compare the hot roast beef on my plate to the sandwich I’d had at the hospital cafeteria that afternoon, when I’d left my father’s room when my father’s bed and dressings were being changed. “He asked me how I want to remember him.”

“I think that’s sweet,” Cindy says. 

“I didn’t know how to answer.” The kitchen and the food are warm.

“Did he want an answer?” Cindy passes the salt for my green beans.

“He fell asleep before I could say anything,” I tell her. “He was still sleeping when Phil showed up.” Phil is my older brother.

“How nice of him to visit,” Cindy says.

“He’s been pretty good, Cindy.”

“And he makes sure that everyone knows he’s going out of his way to go see his own father,” Cindy says.

“Well,” I say. Phil has never been reliable, but has been trying lately—trying to stay sober, trying to do what he can. My family story is that our men cannot hold their liquor. My father and I learned that early in life, but Phil seems to be more like our grandfathers and uncles, men who drank and didn’t care. They are legendary for how effectively and efficiently they abused anyone who crossed them. Phil and I got lucky in one way because by the time we got to junior high our father had gone sober. Some of our cousins, though, didn’t fare as well.

“When are you going back?” Cindy asks.

“Tomorrow, I think. After work. Phil told me that he’d go again in the morning.”

“You sure he’ll be there?”

“I have to be sure, don’t I? Don’t beat Phil up too much. He’s trying.” I know that Cindy never really liked Phil, and there are good reasons for that. Still, there were a lot of times when I could count on him when I couldn’t count on my father.

“So, what did you tell him?” Cindy asks.

“Phil?”

“Your father. How would you answer?”

“I don’t know,” I told her.

At work the morning Susan, my boss, calls me into her office. “How are you doing with all of this, with your father?”

“Pretty well. I’m headed back to the hospital after work.”

“You can leave early if you need to.”

Years earlier, when Susan was going through a divorce and Cindy and I were having a rough time, we’d gone to the brink of an affair. One day we were in her office, and we decided that we couldn’t go any further. We stepped back from that brink and felt good about it afterward. Susan had let her hair grow out since then, and now was letting it go gray as if challenging the aging process to take its best shot. I liked her confidence.

“Phil should be there now,” I tell her.

“Okay,” Susan says. “I just thought I’d check in with you. I know this is hard. How’s your wife?” Susan had never been able to say “Cindy,” even when their paths crossed.

“She’s fine,” I say. “Helping me get through this.”

Traffic is heavy on the way to the hospital after I leave work, and the fifteen-minute drive turns into thirty. I walk through the lobby and take the elevator to the third floor. I sign in at the counter and get a visitor’s badge. I don’t recognize the young man—maybe a nurse—behind the counter. Over the last few weeks I’ve grown accustomed to the same faces, mostly young women.

The man checks to see whom I’m visiting. “Oh,” he says, looking at me.

I can’t tell if he wants to say anything more, so I walk to my father’s room. Phil’s there, sitting in the vinyl chair that is set too close to the ground. Something’s different in the room.

“Stan,” Phil says, and he stands up and hugs me. He has always been taller.

When Phil lets go, I look at the bed. My father’s eyes are closed, but his mouth is opened slightly. The tubes are gone from his face. “Dad?” I say.

“It happened before I got here today,” Phil says. “Just a little while ago. I told the nurses you were on your way, so they said they’d be back in just a bit.”

“What happened, Phil? What happened here?” I edge by Phil and get closer to the bed so I can touch my father’s face. It is barely warm.

“Look, Stan…”

“Phil? What happened?”

“He did it himself. Pulled the tubes out right before I got here.”

What? Why didn’t somebody stop him?”

Phil points to the sign above the bed. “DNR. You knew about that. And the advance directive. Nobody was supposed to stop him.” Phil had inherited my father’s hair, and he used both hands to pull it away from his face.

I sit in one chair, and Phil sits in the other. I want to cry, but I can’t.

“He was always tough,” Phil says. “I couldn’t do that—take those tubes out of myself.” He sighs. “I wished he’d talked to me, you know? Every day I’ve been here for the past week, he hasn’t said a word.”

I can’t think of a thing to say to Phil. I slide back in the chair and stare at the bed and think about my father’s last question.

Phil sighs again. “He was tough when we were kids, too. Remember the time when we were kids, before junior high, when he chased us out of the house and told us never to come back? He was drunk and pissed.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” I say.

“What? How can you not remember that? It was winter, and we were running away. Dad had a baseball bat, or something, and Mom was yelling at him from the front door. We didn’t even have boots on, and my feet were freezing in the snow. You were bawling and wouldn’t stop.”

I look at my father’s body, at its diminished form. I look at Phil, at how unkempt his hair is. “I have to say that I don’t remember anything like that,” I tell him.

Phil looks at me and seems like he wants to ask me a question.