When someone’s dying, they have good days and bad days. Doctors ask that question all the time to people who are dying: “Was today a good day or a bad day?” Of course, what they mean is, How’s your pain? But dying people actually do have good days. A good day can be nothing more than a few quick moments of normalcy, so it doesn’t take much. Walking a few extra steps, laughing at an old joke that never gets old, or having the strength to hug you back with both arms. My dad’s good days were built around exactly that. Anything that let him forget, even for a second, that he wasn’t going to be our dad for very much longer. He wasn’t in denial, he knew what was up, but on days when he needed a win, he usually found one.
Early on in his treatment, after maybe his third surgery, I went to visit when they had him at a downtown hospital not far from where Rich and I were living. I walked in with a double banquet burger, fries, and gravy stuffed deep in the bottom of my bag so nobody would smell it as I made my way through the long halls, avoiding every nurse I saw.
Dad was propped up in bed, wearing the VR goggles I’d got him for Christmas, playing his Sony PlayStation. I wheeled his tray over. I tapped him on the leg and squeezed his foot to let him know I was there.
“Hey, son!” he said with that big smile I hadn’t seen in forever. It had been months since we laughed together, and even longer since I’d seen him excited about something. “Guess what happened?” he whispered, really dragging out that last word, while slowly raising his hand as far as he could for an incoming high-five. “I got a boner this morning.” This was a good day.
When someone you love is dying, you have good days and bad days too. For me, a good day was one I was able to get through without being reminded that my father was dying. At the beginning of all this, I really did try my best to do all the things and really be there for him. I made him kale soup, because I read in the New York Times that dark greens were good for cancer patients. He hated it. I tried to get him up and walking around. He did his best. I sat with him during chemo a few times. On those days, when this all started, I was the good son. I didn’t know what to do, so I did everything I thought I was supposed to do. In a lot of ways, I was acting the part of someone who was about to be half-orphaned, because that seemed easier than the alternative. This wasn’t denial—it was just the truth.
My dad had shit hair his whole life. A great moustache, but shitty hair. I don’t think he ever had a full head of it. He wasn’t a vain guy, so it never bothered him, until the day his hair didn’t do what it was supposed to do. I actually think, in a weird way, he was looking forward to losing it during chemo. But that didn’t happen. They pumped his body so full of poison that he should have had nothing left, but his thin, wiry, three-toned shitty hair refused to fall out.
While he was in the middle of his second round of chemo and radiation, we drove out to see him and my mom and spend the night at their house. I brought my clippers. I sat my Pops in a chair in their kitchen, wrapped one of my mom’s good towels around his thin, bare shoulders, and took care of it for him. Row after row, I slowly shaved it all off, gently wiping away whatever was left with my hand and kissing the top of his head as I went. I remember standing behind him because if I saw his face, I wouldn’t have been able to get through it. I took my shirt off too, so it didn’t get covered in clippings, and every time I reminded him to sit up as straight as he could, his back would touch my chest. He leaned into me, and I held him up with everything I had. When I was finished, I wrapped my arms around him from behind, and tried not to hug him too tight. He was too tired to lift his arms to hug me back, but he managed to turn just enough that our foreheads touched. That was the best he could do and all I could hope for. That was the last time I remember hugging my dad while he was still alive enough for it to mean something.
That was the night I said goodbye. He still had time left, but that was it for me, and I knew it. That’s the last memory I have of me and my dad together while he was still him. Thanking me and telling me I was a good kid, and me saying “Thanks, Pops” as I kissed the top of his head. Those are the last words I remember sharing with him.
Not too long after, he went in for what would be his last surgery. This is the one that should have killed him—it was so incredibly invasive that he shouldn’t have made it out alive. But he did. The plan was to go in heavy and rip out anything that didn’t belong. His body was so riddled with tumours the surgeons didn’t know where start, or when to call it. Taylor was with me in the waiting room that night. We weren’t officially back together, but she was right there with me through it all. Somehow, I managed to fall asleep slumped over on a chair with my head on her lap, while my brother, his girlfriend Leanna, and our mom slept on the floor. I don’t know what time the doctor walked in, but it was late, maybe almost morning. He flicked the light on before saying anything, and we all jumped awake the same way you do during a lightning storm or a bad dream.
“We did what we could,” he explained. “We managed to get a lot of it out, but we couldn’t stop the bleeding. He’s still in there. We packed him with all the cloth, gauze, and sponges we had in the room to try to get it under control. That’s all we can do right now.”
I put my head back down on Taylor’s lap and waited it out. I was more numb than sad. The sadness I did have wasn’t because my dad was in there dying. It was because he was in there dying alone.
I’m not sure how much time that last surgery bought him, but he made it home for one last stretch. The good days, from that point, were hard to come by no matter how much fight he had left in him. There was no optimism, and there wasn’t going to be a miracle. It was only a matter of time, and the best he could hope for would be a few minutes on the phone with his boys. That would have been a good day. He didn’t want much, he just wanted a couple of minutes a day to forget all this and just be a dad. He needed to feel that he still mattered.
I took that away from him.
In a lot of ways, I killed him off long before he died. In my mom’s kitchen that night, when he was wrapped in a towel, while I shaved his head, that’s when I let him go. I did my best to start living my life without him, trying to get over his death while he was still alive. It was almost like some morbid obsession. I knew losing him would never get better, but I hoped it would get easier, and I wanted a head start—to just fucking get on with it, already. My dad went through his last months alive without me. He was dying, but I was the ghost.
My mom called, after Dad had fallen asleep one night, to beg me to talk to him. “You know he sits by the phone all day hoping you’ll call, right? Please call him. Just talk to him. Can I tell him you’ll call?”
“Of course,” I replied. I promised I’d call after dinner the next night. I didn’t. I never called.
“When’s the last time you talked to Pops?” my brother asked. He wasn’t so much asking as confronting me.
“I don’t know. Not that long. The other day?”
“It’s been three weeks. You haven’t talked to Dad in three weeks.”
I knew exactly how long it had been. The only times I did talk to Dad is when I walked into our living room while he and Rich were already on the phone. Rich would hand me the receiver. Even then, I couldn’t get off quick enough. It was cruel. This was a man who’d given me his absolute best his entire life, and I couldn’t give him five minutes on a Tuesday.
I never learned how to grieve because I refused to acknowledge loss or the sadness of being hurt. My entire identity was built around coping mechanisms and distractions. It was easier to take responsibility and ownership over things that happened to me than it was to deal with, or even admit to, being hurt by someone else. I owned it all.
Hiding scars from burning myself was easier than admitting what they were actually covering up. I was never sad, rarely angry, and I would never dream of taking anything out on another person. I was just stuck. I was stuck in that closet with that family friend when I was nine. I was stuck in every moment where I wished I could have said no. Every burn, every drink, every hotel room or back seat of a stranger’s car. Every fight I knew I couldn’t win. All the times I cancelled plans at the last minute because I was too paralyzed with fear to leave the house. I was stuck in every situation I’d made myself a target because it was easier than trying to fit in. I hid my tics the same way I hid my wife leaving me. I let the things that hurt me continue to hurt me every day.
Nobody teaches you how to grieve. It’s not something they go over in school, and it’s always the one topic you try your best to avoid with anyone who’s already gone through it. We all grieve differently, and no matter how many people you surround yourself with, we all do it alone. Grief is natural. That’s why most of us don’t need medication or counselling and usually find or fight our way out of it. We’re built for this. We don’t know it, but we are. We’re built to deal with incredible loss, pain, and sadness.
I didn’t understand that then.
If you Google “grief,” or how long it’s supposed to last, what you’ll find, right there at the top, are the famous five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. What they don’t tell you is these don’t always happen in that order. It’s not a map. I skipped the first four and forced my way to acceptance, and I was never going to look back. There was no anger and no room to bargain, but I deliberately and selfishly denied both myself and my dad the experience of losing each other.
It wasn’t meant to be cruel. I tried to convince myself that this was all coming from a good place, a place of love. I wanted to get on to grieving with love, and not because of heartbreak and immeasurable sadness. I wanted this year to be over. I knew that if I did this, that eventually, when the time came, when that phone rang in the middle of the night to tell me it was time, I’d be better prepared.
It was only much later I realized that none of what I did was done out of love.
Guilt isn’t one of the five stages of grief, but it should be. I was dealing with such incredible guilt. I blamed myself for all the things my dad wouldn’t experience. When someone dies young, your heart breaks for the things they’ll miss out on. I took all the blame for this. I blamed myself for not being good enough or fast enough for my Pops to see me shine. His whole life, I was always on my way to becoming something, and he was never going to see his hard work fully pay off. I jumped into a marriage that was never going to work out and I robbed him of the chance to be the best grandfather any kid could ask for. He didn’t get to stand beside me at my wedding, and as my marriage fell apart, I realized that any woman I met after Taylor would have no idea how incredible he was.
And to my own kids, if I eventually had them, my dad would be nothing more than a story I told. For those last few months, when I didn’t call, it wasn’t because of denial. It was guilt. I’d let him down, and I didn’t know how to say sorry.