You Come Now You Leave Now by Ramona Emerson

You Come Now You Leave Now
by Ramona Emerson

It’s impossible not to take the people we love for granted. All that appreciation. How could we live? But there are a few things I would change if I could go back. I would have insisted we stand in line to see where the Constitution was signed when my dad came to visit me in Philadelphia a few months before his death instead of asking, “Do you really wanna wait?” I would have worked harder to loosen up when we went to Iceland on our last trip together. I would have taken more videos. Pictures are great, but videos bring a person to life in a way I never even thought about before I realized I’d never see him in motion again. I only have a few, and I don’t play them often. I don’t want to build up tolerance to his ghost.

The timestamp on this one says it was taken at 9 p.m. on February 8, 2023, one month before he died. My dad, sitting in his red recliner, is the only person in the frame, but I know my mom and our longtime family friend Cathy are there too. Over the months of his illness, the wooden table next to the recliner had slowly filled up with all his little items: incentive spirometer, headlamp, his weed vape in the elegant holder he’d made from a square of 2×4. Mugs and glasses of unknown contents. Drinking was easier than eating by then, and he always had several beverages going at once. 

You can hear by my halting breaths that I’ve been crying, or still am. I don’t remember taking the video. I’m sure I’d taken an Ambien, which I was doing a lot. (You can add that to my list of regrets.)

Cathy tells my dad he will continue to live in her memory as long as she’s alive. He doesn’t appear to take much comfort in this, saying that while he may be remembered for her lifetime, by the next generation – “In which we have absolutely no oar in the water” – “I’ll be gone.” 

Although my dad has apparently forgotten that we do have an oar, and she is sitting right in front of him, I take his meaning. “Should I have a baby?” I earnestly ask the room at large. I’m roundly ignored. It wasn’t until this year that I ever really thought about the fact that, absent some intervention, I’ll be the last person in our family. I’m a childless only child in my mid-30s without even a single cousin. This thought has become intermittently terrifying. I remember sifting through boxes of family photos as a kid, asking, who’s that? Hearing how my grandfather called my grandmother, Helen, his little hurricane. Who will I tell our stories to?

Several months after my dad’s death, the father of an investigator on the study I work on died. During a meeting a couple of months before, he had told the group he might be less available for a bit. His parents were ill, and he didn’t know how it would all shake out. I had told him I understood. That my dad had recently died after several years of illness. I remember how he’d looked at me sharply, and said, “We’re not there yet.” I’d been trying to empathize but, on some level, he’d taken it as a threat. This is what’s coming for you. And now his father is dead, and when I write him a condolence note I wonder if there’s some part of him that thinks I’m saying, I told you so. And I wonder if there’s some part of me that is. Grief doesn’t make you a good person. It just makes you a different person.

It’s a bright blue day in Iceland, and we’re headed west along a peninsula we refer to as, “Snuffles” because we couldn’t pronounce the Icelandic word and Snuffles is funny. This is our favorite kind of humor. The kind where you just laugh at words. It’s September, the fall before his death, and we’re on what we had enthusiastically declared “our last trip.” This wasn’t because we’d come to a circumspect acceptance of his mortality, but to guilt my  mom  into turning a blind eye to the exorbitant amount of money we hoped to spend.

That morning, he’d had another neuropathy related foot-slip while driving, and I’d taken over again. It probably would’ve been fine, but I hadn’t wanted to worry the whole time. I was feeling annoyed because he, thinking he’d be doing most of the driving, had insisted we get a manual, even though I hadn’t driven one since high school. I was sad too. He’d always been such an elegant driver: cocking his head just so and raising two fingers from the wheel at a passing acquaintance, turning his palm toward the shifter and pushing rather than pulling it into fourth, decelerating so smoothly you hardly noticed you’d stopped.

He was a terrible backseat driver, but his suggestions were so earnest and idiosyncratic that it was only moderately annoying instead of homicidally so. Still, I had to tell him to seriously stop after he said I wasn’t wiggling the gear shift the right way when checking whether the car was in neutral. The crazy thing was that I was doing it “the right way” – placing my hand loosely over the ball and giving it a rapid jiggle. It was a move I executed flawlessly because I’d watched him do it a thousand times.

It was a small thing, but the fact that he’d missed this detail showed his decline. There’s a possibly apocryphal story about a man throwing a punch over a game of pool and my dad catching the guy’s fist in his hand. Whether or not it’s true, it’s believable because it illustrates one of his most marked characteristics. He was unusually observant. He noticed the moment the guy started to swing.

At his funeral, my mom told me the most frequent thing people said to her after my dad died was that they liked him but never really “got” him. He lived on the same end of the same Pacific Northwest island for 48 years, and going anywhere with him included a stream of nods, hellos, and fingers raised from the steering wheel, but he had only a few close friends. He liked people and loved to chat but could quickly go from affable to far away. At dinner parties you’d look over and see him staring dreamily into the middle distance. “Is your dad okay?” I remember a friend asking one year at Thanksgiving. He wandered, and not just in his mind. You’d be on a trip walking around some foreign city and suddenly he’d be gone. This was very annoying, as was his response to being called on it. “What? I was just over there,” he’d say, gesturing vaguely away.

He was a specific kind of person, but it would be hard to say which kind. He had a dry sense of humor but wasn’t sarcastic. He was mischievous but almost never unkind. He had an easy physicality, probably from the years he spent outdoors chopping wood for a living, but he couldn’t have cared less about sports. He loved animals. Dogs especially. He always gave our late dog Bella the last bite of whatever he was eating. The effect was that he started hurrying through his food, becoming more and more anxious as she stared at him expectantly. Only once she had received that final bite could he relax. 

He taught middle school for years, and one of his most strongly held convictions was that children shouldn’t spend all day sitting in a classroom. One of his classes was called Adventure Education and it culminated each semester in a week-long outdoor trip. I went along on one during my junior year of college. It started with a 36-hour train ride from Seattle to Southern California with 16 eighth graders and only got more harrowing from there. I swore I would never do it again, but he loved those trips and could remember them in elaborate detail even years later, always referring to his former students by their last names as he recalled the little quirks of their personalities. He took children seriously, which is probably why so many of his students adored him. A few absolutely hated him, and he got a kick out of that too.

After he died, my mom showed me a piece of worn yellow paper with a list of names written in his distinctive all caps handwriting. He’d told her that these were people who had been especially kind to him during his illness. During his last few weeks, she would frequently see him gazing at it, or sometimes just holding it in his hand with his eyes closed.

❇

Has anyone you loved ever died really slowly? Toward the end of my dad’s life, I told my therapist Roger that I sometimes wished he would just die already. It had been over two years since his diagnosis, which is not even really that long, but I was tired of the false alarms, the dire phone calls and emergency trips home, sobbing in the gynecologist’s office because my mom had just called to tell me he’d decided to take the medication he’d been prescribed for when he was ready to go, but by the time I got to the airport that afternoon, he’d changed his mind.

Roger said this was the kind of thing people usually keep to themselves, but he was smiling because he loves this kind of stuff. He paused, seeming to weigh what he was about to say, and then told me that his first wife had died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. A week later at the wake he had caught his son laughing. Or at least his son felt caught. The color drained from his face when he looked up and saw his dad see him, but Roger had told his son what he tells me now, “Don’t ever apologize for living. Life wants to be lived.”

We celebrated what would be my dad’s last birthday on a balcony in Reykjavik. Seventy-four years old, and a plate of fresh bread, apples, Camembert, and a sliced Snickers bar. We toasted with Coke Zero in wine glasses, both of us wrapped in gray blankets against the evening chill. The trip was almost over, and I was feeling bad for how irritable I’d been. Annoyed at his memory loss and then feeling guilty for being annoyed.

I don’t remember what preceded it, but he started talking about how he had become invisible in old age. He said he’d first noticed it when we were visiting New York City 15 years before. The feeling of not being able to get the bartender’s attention. The sudden impossibility of ever getting the bartender’s attention again.

I told him this transition was probably more jarring for women since the difference between the vocal attention of youth and the later invisibility is so stark. He sat for a moment before responding and then said that invisibility is women’s consolation prize for having had to be at least a little bit afraid almost every moment of their lives.

I remember I was taken aback by this clarity from a person who by dinnertime yesterday couldn’t remember where we’d eaten lunch. I realized I’d stopped giving him the benefit of the doubt pretty much the minute we touched down in Iceland. I’d been so intent on cataloging his slips that I had stopped listening. Earlier, I had mistaken a joke for an earnest question and asked if he was being serious.

The way he held my gaze when he said, “No.”

In January, I call my parents and find them still in bed. I picture their wonderful room. The muted colors, the immensely inviting king-size bed, the sun flooding in through the French doors that open to the backyard.

They’re in a light mood. My dad starts talking about the dog, but stops mid-sentence, asking, “What is there really to say about the dog?” He moves on to the plot they’ve just purchased at the cemetery up the road. “It’s right next to Renee Neff,” he says, sounding delighted. Mrs. Neff was my fifth-grade teacher. She and her husband lived behind my parents until she died of pancreatic cancer a few years ago. 

I ask my mom if she got a plot next to my dad and she responds with her usual pragmatism that she will be cremated. I suggest her ashes could be buried, but before she can respond her phone rings. I hear her say, “We’re not diabetic bye,” and hang up. Then she texts me a picture of the casket they’re considering.

The Titan Seagrass is a coffin-shaped basket woven from willow branches and decorated with lengths of seagrass. It has two bittersweet reviews, giving it four and five stars. From Bob in Texas: “Beautiful and exactly what my wife of 50 years would have wished for had she been able to choose for herself.”

We were lucky my dad was able to choose for himself because it meant we had time. Two and a half years, and for almost half of that we knew he was dying. It’s surprising how hard that was to admit – even in the face of overwhelming evidence, even for the doctors (maybe especially for them) – but doing so was strangely enlivening. 

A year before, my dad was at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle for surgery that would remove the tumor by cutting out a part of his colon. It was supposed to last six hours, so that morning my friend Jamie and I had gone on a long hike as a distraction. The trail was called Mailbox Peak, so named because there’s a mailbox at the top that people leave stuff in. Even after almost five miles of steady climbing, Jamie somehow picked up speed on the final incline. She went straight to the mailbox – lowering the door with the reverence of an archaeologist opening a tomb – and began rummaging around in its assorted “treasures.” After setting aside a half-smoked joint and several troll dolls, she pulled out a crumpled piece of paper and asked if she could read me a letter to the universe. “No,” came my swift reply. 

We were almost back to the car when my mom called. By this point, it had been almost 12 hours since he’d gone into surgery. For a moment she didn’t say anything. I heard her ragged intake of breath. I felt dizzy. I remember thinking this is how it happens. “He’s alive,” she said. Then she told me the bad news. When they’d gone in, they’d found the tumor had spilled into the surrounding tissue, the blood stream. They’d spent the entire day removing as much as they could, but that didn’t change the news we got when he woke up. The cancer was terminal. Jamie drove me straight to the hospital. I remember it was a beautiful summer evening.

Because of COVID, only one visitor was allowed at a time. My mom came down and I went up. When I walked in, my dad opened his eyes and smiled weakly. “Boo Boo,” he said without raising himself from the pillows. I pulled the chair up to the bed and sat down. We talked for a bit. He recounted a story a staff member had told him about fleeing Chinese oppression in Tibet by walking across the Himalayas. As he spoke, his eyes filled with tears. I grabbed his hand, and we sat for a while just looking at each other, not saying a thing. I wanted to offer something comforting, and if not comforting then just anything. I wanted to look away. But I didn’t. No platitude could save us now. He wouldn’t get better. This is how it happens. How you go from one thing to the next. How you give comfort by not allowing yourself to get comfortable.

My dad was different after he found out the cancer was terminal. It was like a wall had come down. He was now easily moved to tears. Less witty perhaps, but so tender. He drew people to him. At one point, Cathy came to stay with him so my mom could visit me on the East Coast. She later told me it was the highlight of her year. That’s the thing about visiting the dying. We walk in, nervous we won’t say the right thing. Worried we’ll give up the game, accidentally reveal that they’re dying, but they know they’re dying, and worse (so much worse), they know we are too. We look down with our faces arranged in sympathy, and they look up and see the ignorance of a cow on slaughter day. They know how it goes by in the blink of an eye. 

On some level we know this too. It’s why we tend to avoid them. But if my dad’s death taught me anything, it’s that finding out you’re going to die is a good thing. Even if this knowledge is fleeting, which it always is. Like I’ll be looking out the car window watching the trees go by and suddenly think how someday I’ll be dead forever. I’ll never know anything again. Never have any idea how it ends. Usually, these thoughts don’t carry much weight. It’s hard to feel them, but sometimes I’ll get this drop in my stomach and a sense that everything is moving away from me impossibly fast, and for that second, I’ll know. 

On a phone call later that summer, my dad told me about the tuck. He’d been taking these long walks through the fields on the outskirts of town. One day he came upon a spot where the tall grass had been tamped down by a deer settling in for a nap, and it being an August afternoon and just about that time, he had decided to follow suit and laid down right there and fallen asleep. Since then, this had become a habit, and he called these places tucks. He said that when he woke up from one of these naps, he felt like he had become a part of the place. Something about the vulnerability of sleep anointing it as his, or rather, him as its. Of course, not all tucks are created equal, and he would sometimes lull himself to sleep in his current tuck by thinking about an even better one. He said the Ur-tuck would be at the base of a Hemlock tree where the branches fan out and sweep the ground like a twirling skirt. You crawl in and curl up with your back against the wide trunk, and after a while you fall asleep. 

When he stopped talking, we were quiet. I think we both understood what he was saying. Years before his cancer, he’d told me about how a sick wolf would leave the pack. Find somewhere quiet to die. I think that’s what he was doing – practicing. We never explicitly discussed his feelings about dying, and after his death my mom remarked that she didn’t think he ever truly believed he would die. But this conversation made me think he did, and that he wasn’t overly frightened, and that he was maybe even looking forward to returning to the earth where he had found so much joy and solace. 

❇

We’d always talked on the phone a lot, sometimes several times a day. When you speak that much there’s no fear of phone calls, of long catchups, compulsory rundowns of how you’ve been. We picked up and hung up with impunity. We came with little observations, a funny person at the dog park, a petty complaint, a song recommendation. We got off as breezily as we got on, gotta go bye and towards the end, gotta go I love you bye and sometimes, alrighty well, I’ll let you go, a little joke where we tacitly blamed the other person for the goodbye.

Our last phone call was a week and a half before his death. After talking for a few minutes, I suggested we watch an episode of Succession. He hardly watched TV his entire life, but in the last three months he’d fallen in love with this show, a family drama filled with cruelty and twisted love. We got off the phone so my mom could get him into the bedroom where the TV was. She’d set everything up so that when I called back all we had to do was put our phones on speaker and count down 3 2 1 Play.

Immediately it was annoying. I could hear his audio just slightly out of sync with mine and I’m sure he was experiencing the same. We had valiantly endured ten minutes of this when he asked, “Can I hang up now?” He was often pretty muddled at this point, and I realized he’d forgotten why we were even doing this dumb thing. He told me that when I’d suggested we watch together, he’d thought I meant together, like I was in the next room instead of on the other side of the country. I’d come in, and we’d cozy up together in that bed that’s like an ark and watch the Roy siblings battle for their father’s empire. We’d laugh at their foibles, secure in the knowledge that it was a question we’d never have to ponder: no company, no siblings, no problem.

I got there three days before he died. My mom had tried to prepare me, but it’s hard to be prepared. He was lying in his hospital bed in their room, his mouth slightly ajar with the corners pulled down. His eyes were open and rolled up. He looked like a saint in a Renaissance painting, like he was being pulled in two directions. I’d last seen him only a month before, but this was the first time he’d looked like a person who was going to die.

Two days went by in a strange haze. Sometimes he was lucid and other times not. He fretted and picked at invisible bugs. My mom said he was hallucinating. He’d asked her why there was a naked man in the backyard but didn’t seem overly troubled by it. His speech, when he was able to talk, was soft and mumbled, mostly unintelligible. We’d passed the point of last words, so I held his hand. I tried to match my breath to his like I’d read about in a book. My mom gave him water from a green sippy cup, and I lay down next to him and slept.

On the third day, my mom lifted his covers to turn him and saw that his legs were mottled and blue. This happens when someone is very close to death, as the heart loses its strength. She said she hadn’t realized how close he was. Our capacity to be surprised by what we know is coming reveals the tenacity of hope, and once again I was so grateful for her. That steely pragmatism, undercut continually by love.

I slept in their room that night. We lowered his hospital bed to the same height as ours, the mattresses forming one continuous field. We drifted to sleep.

I woke in the dark. Something had changed. At almost the same moment, the dog raised his head. So did my mom. She got up and went to my dad, putting her arms around him. He took three ragged breaths and died. 

I looked at the clock. It was 11:18 p.m. It was March 8, 2023. We turned on the light and quietly removed his catheter and oxygen line. We arranged his body, touched his still face. After a while, we went back to sleep. 

❇

In the weeks after his death, I saw my dad everywhere. Not literally, but I’d be stopped in the street by the odd twinkling of Christmas lights strung up across a second story balcony. Old men on bicycles in Costco jeans.

I told my therapist I was embarrassed that as an ostensible atheist I’d suddenly become consumed by wondering where he was. Roger said not to worry too much about what made sense. That it wasn’t necessary to have a totally cohesive world view right now. Maybe not ever. This is how grief rearranges us. Someone is reincarnated – the person who lives.

I had physical symptoms. My body ached and I felt hot and cold but when I took my temperature, I didn’t have a fever. My left leg buzzed, and I slept three hours at a time. I sometimes felt a sense of hyperreality and a strange energy. 

They don’t tell you about euphoric grief, which is the buoyant feeling of becoming suddenly aware that you’re alive. It’s the other side of vertiginous grief, which is the dizzying experience of realizing your mom will die, and everyone you love, and you, and not necessarily in that order.

Sometimes the grief creeps up, surfacing when you least expect it. Like when I was signing for a prescription at the pharmacy and the little screen asked, “Are you the patient or the caregiver?” Or when I was walking down the sidewalk and found a crescent moon charm with an engraving that read, “I love you to the moon and back.” The tears came so fast. Even though he’d never said it. Never would have said something so schmaltzy. Never will say it. 

Other times I went looking for it. I listened to our songs. Our taste was bittersweet oldies. John Prine. That part in “Lake Marie” where he asks, “You know what blood looks like in a black and white video?” My dad would always finish the line, yelling, “Shadows!”

It was on the playlist I made for his memorial. The title was YCNYLN. It was an acronym from a long-ago joke that had started on the drive to a friend’s twelfth birthday party. We had been laughing about how they’d put both the party’s start and end times on the invitation: you come now, you leave now. We were indignant, like, who are they to tell us when the party’s over? But it turns out that’s exactly what happens.

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