Thanksgiving

As muted oranges of the morning’s first sunlight streamed in through the window, I sat up with a start. Had I been sleeping? Was my dad still alive?

Slowly, carefully, I slid out of the cramped hospital bed in which I’d spent an unbearably restless night with my husband as we bore witness to my father’s final fight for life. Settling uneasily into the chair at my father’s bedside, I hesitantly reached out to grasp the cold, bony hand that could not possibly belong to my dad.

We’d been summoned to the hospital the previous afternoon, the news that my dad was “actively dying” propelling me along the 10-mile drive from our temporary residence at my dad’s apartment to the hospital in record time. I’d burst into his private room fearing it was already too late, and was immediately confused by the scene that greeted me. There were no doctors running around barking orders, no one furiously administering CPR; just a kindly old nurse, the sort of woman who evokes warmth and grandmotherly spirit, tenderly straightening the blanket that hid the wasted shell of my dad’s once powerful six-foot-four frame.

My only real knowledge of death, gleaned from Hollywood’s interpretation in movies and TV shows, would be reconciled by real life experience that night. Death is not a theatrical last gasp for air followed by the victim’s body falling entirely limp, as Hollywood would have us believe. When cancer is doing the killing, the process of actively dying is long, drawn-out, and incredibly ugly.

“Come here, sweetie, look at his feet,” the kind nurse said as she gingerly pulled back the blanket, revealing horrid blue toes. “Feel them, they’re cold. When someone is dying, the blood all rushes to the center to protect the vital organs.”

I feebly reached out, but my hand had ideas of its own and immediately recoiled.

“It’s okay, honey,” said the nurse, as she tucked the blanket back over the lifeless appendages. “Hearing is the last sense to go. He may not respond, but he can hear you, so don‘t be afraid to talk to him.”

And with that, the nurse left us alone to welcome a trickle of final visitors, braving the November cold to bid farewell to their former tennis teammate, parishioner, longtime friend. The trickle slowed, then stopped, and as the darkness of the inky night sky seeped into the hospital room, I realized it was now or never: time to say goodbye.

I asked my husband to excuse us, and, second-guessing the kind nurse’s advice, lamely tried to rouse my dad from his final sleep. To my surprise, his eyes opened and focused immediately on me, a smile of contentedness spreading across his poisoned, cracked lips. And in that moment, he spoke the last words he would ever articulate, a final, private goodbye between father and daughter; a moment that paved the road to his departure, a moment that, years later, evokes just as much emotion as it did in the present.

Sleep was elusive that night as we listened to my dad breathe deeply, forcefully, seemingly chasing the belief that the harder he tried, the longer he might cling to this world. And then it was morning, and there I was, grasping my father’s cold hand. His breathing had slowed. He weakly inhaled, the tiny puff of air escaping his dried lips as more of a sputter than an exhale. A few more breaths, each fainter than the first, and finally there was no more.

It was Thanksgiving. On a day when many families would gather around a sumptuous spread and toast to health and happiness, I gripped my father’s hand and felt a different kind of gratitude, one I’d be quite pleased to never experience again: I was thankful that my father was dead. The cancer had poisoned him; the medicine had poisoned him further. His last months were spent in a hospital, where he was unable to get out of bed, his only sources of entertainment a small television, infrequent visitors, and hallucinations brought on by the toxins pumped into his body in an initial effort to cure him, and in a final effort to keep him comfortable. Yes, death must certainly be better than this.

Over time, the horrid appreciation I felt that day for my dad’s deliverance from pain has been reformed, revised, refined into a deep sense of gratitude for those last precious moments we were able to share. And when my son -- born two years after my dad’s passing, bearing his late grandfather’s moniker as his own middle name -- is old enough to understand, I’ll be eager to tell him about the grandparent he never got to meet, and the lessons my dad taught me about thanksgiving.