My father died horribly just before his 70th birthday. By then he had been ill with a form of Parkinson's disease for the better part of a decade. It's an insidious illness that slowly eats away the victim's motor ability. In the last year of his life, my dad was trapped in his own body. Everything that was him — his voice, his smile, his touch, his wit, his love, his knowledge —was locked in his flesh. It was his body, but it was not my father.
I can't imagine that my father, the person inside that deteriorating shell, was happy the last few years of his life. But he was alive. Arguably, in an earlier century, perhaps even an earlier decade, or in a country not as blessed with medical care as Canada, he would have died sooner. I think about that often.
It was horrible to watch him die so slowly. He was never, not really, on artificial means of support. He did have feeding tubes. And, he did get medication that aided his motor ability, until he reached that critical point where the illness could no longer be controlled. The official cause of death was pneumonia, and he died naturally; that is his body shut down on itself. It had begun that slide years earlier. He couldn't hold a cup of tea in his hands; then his legs forgot how to walk; later his throat didn't know how to swallow; and, finally his lungs filled with water.
Perhaps I misspoke earlier when I said it was not my father inside that body. I think about that a lot: who was my father? Was he the flesh or was he the voice? It is sometimes hard to distinguish the body from the person; but, for me, my father died at least a year before his body did. I can't imagine a greater loneliness: to have around him the people that he loved and loved him, and not be able to hold them, to talk to them, to share with them a cigarette or a beer.
Which was my father? Where was the man I loved?
I don't know the answer to these questions; but I do know that it is one increasingly asked in our times. During the Terri Schiavo debate this past spring, this was the great question. Shiavo was a woman perpetually locked inside her body. Her parents wanted that body to continue its heartbeat; for her husband the body was not his wife. But, the body was alive because medical technology was capable of being her heart and her lungs.
Much was uttered during the heated public debate about death with dignity. I don't know what that phrase means; other than, it is a loaded ideological statement, the way life and choice are political statements in the abortion debate. Did my father die with dignity? I don't know — he died as naturally as one can who has spent more than a year in a medical institution. There were no machines attached to him; but, then again, my father seemed barely attached to that body.
I can't imagine, though I witnessed it, having to die like that. Take me quickly, please, and then shed few tears, have a big party, play lots of Bing Crosby and Bob Dylan. If what I believe is true, then I will be free from the physical bindings of this increasingly unreliable body. And yet, my body, my face, my voice are who I am. My body's shape, its abilities and its limitations have defined my character. I might well have had a different personality in a different body. This was equally true of my father, and Terri Schiavo, but, when I see either of their last bed-ridden photographs, their faces look like death masks, leathery skin stretched over the skeleton and big teeth. They don't look like living people, because there is something in the spirit that is us that makes us look different. The way we look different, sometimes very different, when we are happy or sad.
The loud debate over Terri Schiavo was very disappointing because it was rife with the typical right-left nonsense. Medical technology forces us to think about very complicated and necessary definitions of life. What is life? For me, that was not my father, breathing though his death mask. I felt pain to realize that his own flesh abandoned this once proud man. Inside that thinking part that was him, that for me is the core of the spirit that is us, he must have wept every moment of every day. Perhaps I am wrong about that. I was never able to ask him. But, 15 years later, I still weep for him.
