5:00

I fell asleep at about 1:00 a.m. Dad had beaten death so many times in his life. It seemed incomprehensible to me that he would succumb now. My phone rang at 5:00 a.m. It was the nurse. His heartbeat was getting slower and slower and more and more irregular. If I wanted to see him, I had better come on over. "How much time do I have?" I asked. "Not much. Be careful on the streets." I jumped in the shower. I hadn't bathed in quite some time. I was stinky. I slapped shampoo on the crown of my head. I rubbed. It didn't budge. This wouldn't do. I figured I had better do it right. No matter what happened, it was going to be a long day and I didn't need to smell bad on top of everything else. It's funny how such a simple thing like shampooing your hair, an easy almost mindless little task, can seem so perplexing when you're under such stress. Would I make it to the hospital before my dad passed? Would this tussle with the shampoo be the reason I'm not at my dad's side for his last moment of life? I woke Sue and she was ready to go in what seemed like thirty seconds. She drove. I don't remember where we parked. We went to the room. The nurse said she could only feel a pulse in the femoral artery but it was still definitely there, getting weaker all the time. I talked to him. Again, I told him it was okay to go. We didn't want him to suffer. We knew he was in pain. We knew he was afraid. It's okay to go, Dad. It's okay. You've fought so hard for so long. It's okay to let go. You're going to a better place. We'll be fine. We'll be okay. You can go now. Be free. As the nurses changed shifts they told us we could stay in the room; they wouldn't kick us out like they do when ICU shifts change. They usually kick visitors out from 7:00 until 8:30. Both a.m. and p.m. The new nurse couldn't detect a pulse. The old nurse could find one in the femoral artery. They called the charge nurse. The first time the charge nurse could feel the pulse in the femoral artery. Several minutes later, he couldn't. It felt a little strange to have the nurses arguing in front of us, one saying there was a pulse, the other saying there wasn't. Susan and Beth. Their names were Susan and Beth. And so are my only two sisters. Susan and Beth not agreeing. How familiar that sounds. At 7:45 a doctor I had met in the ER came in. "If you can't feel a pulse in the artery closest to the heart, the chances are the heart is no longer working and you are only feeling the impulses caused by the ventilator." He pronounced Dad dead at 7:46 a.m. We stayed on. I don't remember what we did. I don't remember if I signed anything. He was dead. What was I to do? The nurse said, "You can leave him now." It felt so strange. Just leaving him there. Dead. It had been a long, long life. He had far out-lived any other male member of his family. He had lived life, for the most part, on his own terms and the way he wanted to live. He had had enough money and time to do the things he loved. He had traveled, he had loved, he had bought what he wanted and lived where he wanted. He had escaped the oppression of the village in Ohio where he had found his childhood stifling, where he had lost his mother at 10, where he had changed tires and pumped gas at his strict German father's filling station, where he had played high school basketball and graduated second in a class of 17, where he had decided to commit his life to medicine, and where he had tried to hide his true identity. He was now gone from this world and, ironically, his remains will soon lie in the family plot, in the last space in that plot, next to his mother, his father, his sister and his ancestors, in that little village he ran from so many years ago. By choice, that will be his final resting place.