Taking Some Time.

Yesterday it was five years since my father died of his alcoholism.

By the time he died, Dad’s body was wasted. The cancer had eaten through his left humerus—fracturing the upper arm-bone. The nurses splinted his arm. The cancer had colonized his lungs and his entire GI tract. Coupled with his cirrhosis, his gut couldn’t function, and his belly blew up like a hot-air balloon. Between his arm and his abdomen, he was in severe pain. I’d stand next to his bed in the hospital feeling helpless and wishing I could insert some kind of valve just to let off the pressure inside his belly.

I wanted to scream, Couldn’t they invent a device like that to ease my father’s suffering? Instead I stood there, just watching him, and holding his hand.

He didn’t complain. He lay there, passively. He was a pretty passive guy when you got right down to it. He never took care of his body, he only rarely confronted my mother about her aggressive ways. He drank instead. It numbed him out. It “calmed” him.

I’d come to the hospital with little cans of tomato juice—the only thing he liked to drink in lieu of beer. I used to wish I could bring him a six-pack.

The nurses were giving him morphine, which exacerbated the blockage in his gut, plus a small 25 microgram fentanyl patch. I used to want to fight with the nurses (I was my mother’s daughter; I’m expert at arguing, at fighting, at digging in my heels, at thinking I have the answers—these are habits of mind I’ve tried to give up in sobriety) and get them to ditch the morphine and up the fentanyl because fentanyl is a cleaner drug, it has fewer GI side-effects than morphine by far, but I didn’t want to give away the fact that I myself had vast personal experience with opioids (“How do you know so much about this, Ms. M?”).

So in this way, I failed to advocate for my father’s care. Because I was in my addiction, I stood by and let him be in pain. It’s hard to forgive myself for that, even after five years. I see him now, in my mind’s eye, in the dark room, lying there on that last day, breathing shallowly, his body draped in a white sheet, wasted except for his swollen belly, unable to move, unable really to speak. I picked up his bible and read the first chapter of the Gospel of John to him. It begins:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

As I read, the tears fell from the corners of his eyes. John I was his favorite chapter: Dad believed in the Word. Not quite in the same way I believe in words, but we had that in common—love for the power of language, the power of communication, and belief in spirit.

Dad taught me never to stop talking with people I care about.

Dad died quickly. He was diagnosed with cancer the first week of January and he died February 1. I told a friend recently that I thought he just wanted to get back to my mother. “That’s romantic,” my friend said.

“It’s not romantic, it’s religious,” I snapped. “He believed in heaven and he believed my mother was waiting for him.”

“It’s still romantic,” my friend said. “You might believe in heaven, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you want to be with the person when you get there.”

Huh. I hadn’t thought of it that way. Dad was a romantic. He used to buy my mother jewelry—sometimes big jewelry, extravagant stuff that she was too afraid to wear. A six-carat garnet cocktail ring with diamonds on either side (“Joseph, where the hell do you think I’m going to wear this?—we don’t GO to cocktail parties”). Ruby-and-diamond earrings. He used to take me to Bailey Banks & Biddle to pick stuff out for her. I loved standing next to him at the bright jewelry cases, looking at the rivers of gems, knowing that Mom was due for a surprise and that Dad had let me in on it.

My mother was a beautiful woman but she never learned to accept her own beauty. I learned that from her, too, and that’s another thing I’m trying to change.

I bought myself a diamond ring when I sold my first book. Over Christmas I took my friend Lucy to our favorite jewelry store to help me pick out a moonstone-and-diamond ring, a big one that Dad would have liked.

Daddy gave me my mother’s most prized piece of jewelry after she died: a gold replica of the rose window in Notre Dame cathedral. He brought it back from Paris in 1984 and she wore it every day. My son used to chew on it when he was a baby sitting on her lap. Now I wear it pretty often, along with the pearl earrings Dad bought me when I turned 40.

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I was out walking yesterday in the 60-degree day with my spiritual mentor, my 72-year-old surrogate mom, and we were talking about how hard it is to get old and the decisions she’s made to take care of herself so she can enjoy as much of her life as she can. I told her that it had been five years since my dad died, and that he had only stopped drinking in the last month of his life—after he was diagnosed with cancer. “That’s counter-intuitive,” she said. She’s right.

I’m taking the month of February to rest from this blog. Since I started Guinevere Gets Sober two years ago, I haven’t had significant time away, and I need to look after some other stuff.

My life has expanded so much in the two years since I started writing for you. I’m planning even better things in the time to come, including a redesigned site.

Fear of abandonment is one of my strongest shortcomings, so I hope you don’t leave me. But if you do, you do.

If you don’t, see you in March.