Fort Collins, Colorado, Spring 2002.
In 2002 my father died on March 27—my birthday—in Billings, Montana. Although the relationship he and I shared was, at best, contentious, the fact that he died on the day of my birth is a reminder it had not always been. People who think they’re being supportive when I tell them this date say something like, “Geez, he couldn’t even let you have your birthday in peace.”
But I don’t see it that way. I imagine he was trying to hang around long enough to wish me one final happy birthday. It was the one holiday he always celebrated through a card or a phone call, just a moment to let me know he was thinking of me.
It is March 24. When I went out to get the newspaper this morning, the air was chilled. Now, holding a cup of hot tea, I glance at the clock radio, which reads six o’clock. I have another hour until I have to be ready to head to the junior high where I student teach. I look outside and see that the day is already gray; large, white clouds dim the sun. I jump as the telephone jangles, then knit my brows in confusion; no one ever calls this early.
“Hi, Sue, I’m sorry to call you so early in the morning.” It’s Norma, Dad’s wife, my stepmother. “The doctor says it’s time to call and give you a chance to get here. Your dad’s here at Deaconess Hospital. I had to bring him in about an hour ago; he was really struggling.” I tell her I will be there by midafternoon. Rick helps me get ready by dragging out the suitcase and packing some clothes as I take a shower. He places a carton of Earl Grey tea in my purse and a supportive note, which I will find later. I am numb as I move through my everyday activities, the shower, a bowl of cereal, filling up the car with gas before I start down the road. These movements, rutted and defined, hold at bay the memories and emotions that swirl just beyond my consciousness—until I’m on the road. Then I try to separate them, like fighting children, so they don’t overwhelm me, slamming my spirit all at once. I am fragile; I will break.
Forty miles north the temperature in Cheyenne has dropped to fifteen degrees. Snow flies horizontal to the highway, nearly obliterating the nearby landscape. I recall the stories I’ve heard from western cattle ranchers of their herds being caught in early spring snows, dying in pairs, mother and calf. I give a wry grin: here I am, American Indian thinking of cowboys. Sixty miles north of Cheyenne the storm ends, but the day remains gray.
Norma has taken care of Dad since they were married, in 1979. He was one of those guys who liked women to do things for him. This says everything about him: he loved Zero Mostel’s performance of “Tradition” in Fiddler on the Roof. Dad saw his eastern European roots as very traditional, in the sense that the man ruled the family. I imagine he would have appreciated it if Mom and I saw it as traditional too, but we didn’t. Evidently, his mom didn’t see it that way either. She ran the house, and people did what she said without question, well, at least without audible questions. I think my dad didn’t like his mom much. In fact, I don’t think he much liked women, until he met Norma, who filled that compliant role and didn’t complain. I’ve seen her get irritated at times, but she always waves it away like it was a mosquito and keeps on going. I, on the other hand, am not compliant, and that’s where Dad and I often butted heads.
My parents adopted me when I was two years of age. That was the only story I knew, that I’d been adopted. There was no stork, no dark secrets—until years later. They made adoption sound wonderful, that I was chosen. When I was young I conceived adoption as people going through some kind of cafeteria line, where they got to a cash register, ordered a baby kept in the area behind the swinging stainless-steel doors, and paid for it when it arrived on the counter. I imagined my parents counting out their dollar bills as a nurse carried me out. As a young child, I had seen that this is the way someone acquires something; it was plausible.
But not everyone was so accepting of my adoption and becoming part of a new family. In fifth grade one of my friends asked why my parents looked so different from me. We had just gotten off the Bookmobile and stood beneath the plum tree that grew outside of our house. I told her that it was because I was adopted. Her look was worried, the same look I had associated only with adults. And like an adult, she said, “Oh, I’m so sorry.”
As I drive up Twenty-Seventh Avenue, I am reminded of how little Billings has changed since I went to high school here in the 1970s. As a result, I am able to locate Deaconess Hospital easily, pulling into a relatively full parking lot. As I open the car door, my hands tremble, but I’m not sure whether this is from falling blood sugar or rising adrenaline. By the time I’m out of the car, my entire core is shaking.
The hospital doors open with a pneumatic whoosh, and I am immediately aware of the smell, the one that administrators try to mask, the smell of killed germs and dying cells. I approach the volunteer behind the desk. “I’m looking for the room of Jed Devan? I’m his daughter.”
“Upstairs, third floor, the nursing station will tell you where he is.” Her answer is clipped but not abrupt, and she throws me a smile to take the edge off.
On the third floor a nurse points down a hall to where Dad’s room is located. I stand outside his door for a moment and close my eyes and feel the knot in the pit of my stomach begin to tighten. My hands are still shaky, and now they’re cold and damp. I wipe them on my jeans, take a deep breath, and push the door open.
My father is tangled in white cotton bed linens. His eyes are closed, and a clear, plastic oxygen mask covers his mouth and his nose. Beyond him a lone, bright-yellow daffodil sits in a cobalt-blue vase on the windowsill. He is dying of the lung cancer that surgery revealed five months ago.
Sensing my presence, he turns his head toward me and extends a skeletal arm, his hand motioning me inside. My throat closes, and I can’t breathe. Tears threaten my composure, but I refuse to let them fall, to let him see me so naked in a grief I said I was never going to feel. I place a smile on my face and come forward, hugging him. He removes his mask and grins. His teeth are missing. “He had his last two pulled a couple of years ago,” Norma says, at my unguarded reaction. My smile remains in place, hiding the shock at his thinness; he now weighs no more than seventy-five pounds.
When I was three he was the tallest man in the world. I would wait for him to come home from work, and when he did he’d lift me up and throw me into the air so high that I giggled at the weightlessness and anticipated the free fall into his arms. I never once doubted that he would catch me. One evening, however, when he came home he picked me up and wrinkled his nose, immediately handing me off to Mom. “She needs changing,” he said, his tone accusatory. He had no idea how hard I’d tried, evidently unsuccessfully, to hold it just so I could see him and feel the joy of his happiness at seeing me.
I bite the inside of my cheek to ground myself in the here and now, as I turn my attention to Norma, who fills me in on all the details, assuring me that this isn’t the first time he’s been in the hospital. There’d been three other times where they’d patched him up and sent him home. “Who knows,” she said, brightly. “It just might be the rest he needs before he can come home again.” Denial never announces itself. Having not been privy to the intimate nature of caring for the dying, I believe her words, for the simple fact that I can’t accept the alternative. And I try to be helpful. Being maudlin, I tell myself, isn’t helpful. The inside of my cheek is now bleeding.
I walk to the window and look out at cars, lined up in unforgiving and regimented rows. The sun is now shining, casting sparks off the polished metal. These cars remind me of the cars parked outside the home of the family we knew in Missoula; they were longtime friends of my parents, and we visited them often. They lived in a bungalow near the campus, an old neighborhood where the maple trees were tall and yards well maintained. The younger kids and I often played tag. During one such game, when I was six, I ran out into the quiet street, in an abrupt, evasive maneuver. When I returned to the grass, my father, out of nowhere, caught my arm, his grip pinching its underside and leaving bruises. His face was angry, with the corners of his mouth pulled down, and his pupils black pinpricks in his widened brown eyes. I felt the slap of his left hand against my temple and I cringed. His hands grabbed my upper arms and he shook me, his face inches from mine. “You run around like a crazy person, never looking at where you’re going. I don’t know why you don’t think about what you’re doing. You get around these kids, and you just lose all your sense.” He then illustrated my craziness by lolling his tongue out while waving his arms about his head and rolling his eyes.
My craziness must have followed me the whole time I was growing up, because the slaps just kept on coming. In my late twenties I remember reminiscing about something in his backyard. He sat, legs crossed, near his begonias; lit his pipe; and inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs. The familiar far-off stare visited his eyes, as he shook his head and looked, unseeing, into the distance. “You just never had good sense as a kid.” My sense of self scattered, directionless, like dandelion seeds at his breeze of words. When I married, he praised my husband for taking over my care. “Maybe you can slap some good sense into her, because I sure couldn’t,” he said, laughing. My face burned; by then I knew I’d hated him for quite some time.
Behind me I hear his bedclothes rustling. I turn and study the shriveled person I almost don’t recognize. In the brief moments since my arrival, my father has left this world and entered another; he now inhabits a morphine-laced dream where people, long-deceased or maybe just unseen, have stopped by to converse with him. He speaks in broken phrases, sometimes coherent, most times incomprehensible, while his arms, hands, and fingers are busy illustrating images visible only to him. Perhaps he’s outlining a management plan; perhaps he’s explaining population statistics. The doctor arrives and asks Norma if there’s been any change. “Not really,” she answers, “but he’s only recently begun doing this.” She gestures to my father’s liquid movements and unintelligible speech. “That’s normal,” the doctor says and scribbles something on a form that hangs from the foot of my father’s bed. He tucks his pen into his front pocket and says, with no eye contact, “Let me know if anything changes. I’ll be doing rounds this evening.” He leaves, his white lab coat flaring behind him, his feet marking time on the shiny, linoleum floor.
Since my father is occupied with his invisible guests, I tell Norma to take a break and grab something to eat down in the cafeteria. She hesitates and then, with a guilt-ridden look of relief, she walks out. I sit in the nearby chair and pull out a piece of embroidery I’m working on and glance at my father.
When I was in second grade, my father, for some reason, decided that we needed to take Fridays off—he from work, me from school—and go swimming at the hot springs up Lolo canyon. The first time we went the sky was a brilliant blue (cerulean—my father’s favorite color), and the water literally danced, reflecting the sun’s blazing rays in flashing shards of light. We each dived off the springboard and swam to the deepest edge. “Get on my back,” he told me. I climbed aboard and wrapped my skinny legs around his chest, while my small hands grasped his shoulders, their muscles sinewy and hard. I held my breath and we dove. My eyes slit against the water, I watched in blurry fascination as the ripples undulated in bright patterns on the blue floor of the pool. I wondered if this was what it was like to ride a whale. We went the entire length of the pool before coming up for air. For the next two hours I loved being the center of his attention. We visited the hot springs six Fridays in row, and after that we never returned. Responsibilities of work had taken him away.
Norma has returned to the room, but my father hasn’t. He is now somewhere else, slipping in and out of a restless sleep, talking to unseen people, spending less time with us. In the meantime Norma and I murmur in half tones late into the evening. At some point the nurse arrives, checks my father’s vitals, and suggests we go home. My father is so medicated, she explains gently, that he won’t be lucid until the morning. As we leave we both realize the doctor hadn’t yet made his evening rounds; we should have seen him a couple of hours ago.
We return to Dad and Norma’s house, where Norma begins her nighttime routine, and I escape to the guest room in the basement. It’s been a long day. The last time I saw Dad was nine months ago, when he wasn’t frail and dying. In fact, he’d looked healthy, and when he smiled he had a full set of teeth. I am shocked to realize they’d been dentures; no one had mentioned this fact. The drive and the unsettling experience of seeing him in this state leave me hyper and on edge. I walk over to where his small library collection stands at attention on shelves flanking the makeshift desk. I run the tips of my fingers over the spines of the paperback, hardback, and leather volumes of his most cherished books. There are scholarly books on the Bible, worn and tattered; and how-to books—one detailing how to build a log cabin, imprint 1916. There are academic botanical tomes and fiction and nonfiction texts that cover all aspects of American Indian history. With a wry smile I acknowledge my father’s love-hate relationship with American Indian culture, with American Indians in general.
After he adopted me from my fractured reservation family, I think he believed if he could raise me just right, I wouldn’t be Indian anymore. If I was white I would be free from prejudices, free from the hatred so entrenched in Montana culture. But in the American West, being Indian is what you are, not what you choose to be, especially if you look like one.
Norma and I return to the hospital early the following morning, and my father is less lucid than the previous night. “Has the doctor been here?” Norma asks the chaplain, who, judging by their familiarity, has been a frequent visitor. He shakes his head, “Not yet.” Norma and I look at each other in confusion. Maybe he’s in his office. Following the labyrinth of hallways, we take the elevated walkway that crosses over the street, connecting the doctor’s building with the hospital. A few more halls and doorways later we locate him. He is sitting in his office at his desk, actively avoiding our presence. I know because he holds a manila folder in his hands, and he looks at it intensely, never touching a page. After several moments of awkward silence, Norma asks, “Did you go up to see Jed last night?”
He shakes his head.
“Were you planning on seeing him this morning?” Her tone requires an answer, and he looks at her with weary but unsympathetic eyes.
“There’s no point,” he says and returns his gaze to the opened file. I look at her face searching for a reaction, and I realize she’s not going to argue with him, she’s not going to contest his unprofessionalism. Instead, tears fill her eyes while she stands there mute. The awful truth of his words collides with the myth I’ve created, and the room spins and I stop breathing. My gaze catches sight of the yellow daffodil occupying a vase in the window of the doctor’s office. And suddenly I hate that flower, and I hate the doctor; I hate this place, and I hate the fact that everyone else seems to know this is the end except me. Instead, I’ve decided to believe Norma in her goddamned delusion, and now I find out that she didn’t really believe it herself. The tranquilizing numbness of grief engulfs my body and mind, and I follow Norma, like a calf, back to the other side of the hospital, because there’s nothing else to do. The terrible reality of the situation has set in.
In the meantime my father has been moved to a room on a different floor, saved only for the immediately terminal patients. There are no daffodils in this room, and the colors of the wall are an unidentifiable tan. His bed is now surrounded by netting, the same kind that keeps babies from crawling out of their playpen. His gentle hand motions of the previous day have been replaced with the frantic clawing of someone trying to escape; however, whether it’s out of death’s grip or into his concept of heaven, I don’t know. The netting forbids him from trying to get out of bed, which he attempts frequently. This is a good, because he’s now hooked up to monitors and drip lines. And although the netting keeps him safe, I smile sadly at the irony—for him there is no more safety.
Each horrific coughing spasm produces copious amounts of blood, phlegm, and lung tissue. These are orally vacuumed by a nurse on a regular basis, and the contents are then stored, bright red, in a plastic jar by his bed. When the jar is filled, someone comes and empties it. It will not dawn on me until months later how many times someone has had to empty this half-gallon jar. At some point the chaplain arrives and talks with Norma in quiet tones. He asks how much chemo the doctors gave him, and he nods at her answer, replying, “Well, that’s enough to make him think like he’s doing something about the cancer, but not enough to make him really sick.” Their betrayal leaves me ill and painfully aware of my naïveté; no one thought to let me in on the joke.
That evening, without warning, my father wakes up from a brief nap, his sudden clarity a stark contrast to the incoherence of an hour ago. His soft brown eyes are now clear, and they look at me with the adoration of that man who threw me into the air, of the father I went swimming with. With a large, unguarded smile, he says, “Happy birthday, Suz.” His voice does not contain the rasp of disease, nor does it have the airiness of the dying.
“Are you hungry?” Norma asks, and he replies that he’s starved. The nurse brings him dinner, and he carves the meatloaf with his knife and fork, asking about Rick, about our sons, about how my crazy mother is doing. He asks Norma about his garden, and if she’ll remember to turn the canal water on for the plants in the next month. I am sure this is a miracle, although I don’t believe in miracles. I have no other explanation. After dinner we sit on his bed, Norma one side of him, me on the other. I grasp his hand and am surprised its skin is not parchment. Instead, it is as soft as an infant’s, and I contemplate how long it has been since I’d even touched my father.
Thankfully, my memories, the brutal reminders of my lived life, cease during my father’s last hours. A heavy dose of morphine has placed him into a near coma, ending the incessant clawing that had begun again. Like the previous night, the nurse suggests we go home; she’ll call us if there is any change. I return to my bedroom in their basement, where I can finally cry the heavy, wracking sobs that shred the depths of my soul, wave after painful wave until I fall asleep. The phone rings at four in the morning; it is the nurse telling Norma my father has passed away.
It is my birthday.
Norma and I begin the rituals that signify the end of a life, beginning at eight that morning. We go down to the funeral parlor, choose the urn, and choose his resting place—mausoleum or columbarium? After his cancer diagnosis my father couldn’t make up his mind about how to deal with things afterward. “Being buried underground seems dark and claustrophobic, but I don’t know that I want to be baked either.” He decided at some later point that baking was a better way to go.
Awaiting the arrival of my family, I sit in the quiet of what is now Norma’s house and look out on the garden he took so much pride in. When I was five, my father headed up a project that involved bringing back the trumpeter swan from the brink of extinction. I wasn’t familiar with this part of his job because the birds were large and I was small, and he worried that I’d get hurt. But one late afternoon in early summer, he asked if I wanted to help him feed the swans. I immediately agreed. He drove the Jeep to the large aluminum grain bin, which stood near the edge of the lake, and I bounced along in the passenger seat, its ripped leather scraping the backs of my legs.
At the bin my father opened a small door at the bottom, and the golden grains of Montana wheat fell onto the ground. He shoveled grain from this small pile, filling the small rowboat that was tied up to the shore until the hull sat low in the water. He got in, tipping the boat slightly, and held out his hand to allow me to steady myself before we shoved off. The shore was covered with the new green of emerging grass, and I watched this grow distant as the lake grew seemingly larger. Gulls and other waterbirds wheeled overhead, calling, their sound carrying across the lake. Dad placed the oars in the iron swivels, which screeched in protest, and rowed steadily, splash-pull, splash-pull. Droplets from the raised oars made small rings that trailed behind us in the water. After a while he stopped rowing and set down the oars, and we drifted until the boat came to a stop of its own accord. As my father dumped shovelfuls of grain into the shallow depths, the swans swam toward us with surprising speed. With each stroke their massive size became more intimidating, and I felt better when my father rowed us away from their feeding place.
It was so quiet, except for the muted honking of the birds. The sun lay low on the western horizon, casting the air in a golden light, while the jagged summits of the Centennial Range drifted toward a shade of light violet against an evening sky of peach rimmed with red. Insects moved just above the water’s surface. The only sound that broke the stillness was a splash that seemingly came out of nowhere. This splash was followed by a ringed circle that grew larger until it disappeared over the water’s smooth surface.
“That’s a fish rising,” my father said, his voice soft, like we were in a sacred place. “It happens when a fish comes up, and its mouth breaks the surface. The fish is eating the insects that land on the water.” His finger then pointed to a circle a little ways from our boat. “That’s called ‘rising,’ when it comes to the surface. Like when the sun rises in the east.” A smile formed as he scanned the surrounding landscape, and that smile reached all the way to his eyes. And suddenly, I’m not sure if I’m still in memory or in the present, because I hear his words and see his extended arm reach toward something unseen, his fingers moving rapidly to illustrate a point he was trying to make, what happens to fish when they eat and where they go when they’re finished. Tears blur the world around me as I recognize these hand movements as the same ones at the hospital. I realize then that this is the place where he was talking to someone, perhaps me, about the one thing he loved best—the swans.