IN THE FALL OF 2011, within months of practicing my therapy homework, I found a boyfriend, which felt like I’d fulfilled much of my life’s work. There went the cause of much stress and worry, I assumed. My first date with Patrick was a lovely afternoon and dinner on Granville Island in Vancouver, then a warm make-out session in my hotel room. (I had a free stay at the Granville Island Hotel for the weekend because I was a guest in the Vancouver International Writers Festival.) The evening of our first date, we made out like fiends, but I declined sex so that I would take this slower than usual.
After I said my goodbyes to Patrick, I promptly went online and had bareback sex with a stranger in my hotel room. That, I vowed, in the same manner my father did each time he gave up drinking, was the last time.
My second date with Patrick took place the next day. He came to my reading at the festival, we went for supper, then we made out again, and it was even better than the day before. With our skinny limbs entwined together on the king-size bed, I decided he’d be the guy I’d marry. (My therapist and I had also discussed how I could live a more middle-ground emotional life, but I hadn’t gotten there yet.)
Patrick and I dated for the first three months using condoms, then got our negative HIV results, which always felt impossible to me, and decided to be monogamous. I was done looking. Waking one morning that fall, I felt my familiar panic return, so I envisioned the dark black absence—Gary had said to acknowledge the feeling—and this time, in the middle of that nothingness, I saw Patrick waiting patiently for me. The black of that placelessness was such a void, he looked illuminated from within, a colourful lamp in the middle of a dark warehouse.
From that point forward, when a man came along with some cruisy energy, I just imagined Patrick in my head and my heart shot out a sure-fire repellent. Patrick was a new object on which I could focus my OCD. I had many quiet months that winter when I got a lot more work done, more easily, because I wasn’t cruising online. In the same way that sobriety helps you to leave money in your bank account, monogamy gave me back my free time. I could put in a twelve-hour workday, talk to my boyfriend in Vancouver on Skype at night, and be in bed at a reasonable hour. I worked better and longer weekdays knowing I’d get to see Patrick two or three weekends a month. Week after week of compulsive calm was bliss. Productive bliss.
Dad’s ill health was concurrent with that romance. From the start of 2012, my father died in pieces. His decline was like watching a horror movie in small sections, once or twice a week, short episodes of violence and tension building to a climax. His slow-mo death was an excruciating blessing.
Early in the new year, Dad was admitted to the hospital for difficulty breathing due to complications from his weakened heart. We found out afterward from his ex-girlfriend Rose that not long before this episode, when she’d come to check on him, she’d found him in bed with soiled sheets. She said there had been feces everywhere in his apartment—a trail leading to the bathroom, the bathroom covered in it, an armchair ruined with shit. Because of his heart and poor circulation, which messed up his feet, Dad hadn’t been able to get to the toilet soon enough, and he hadn’t the energy or ability to clean any of it. My best guess is that he was planning to die in the apartment. If I wanted to be optimistic, I’d say he was expecting to get better and clean his place up later, but I suspect that would be magical thinking on both our parts.
Rose took a look around at the filth and told Dad he had to go to the hospital, but he dismissed this. She convinced him by saying he could go with the ambulance or with the police, a trick that had worked on his own agoraphobic mother years before, when she’d broken her hip but had lain on the couch for three days, refusing to get help.
During Dad’s first days in the hospital, Rose sanitized his place. She only told my sister how she’d found him after the apartment was cleaned. Some of his clothes and sheets had to be thrown out, she said, because they were too soiled to keep. The armchair was at the dump. Dad was sixty-two.
That month, he was released for about two weeks, then admitted again, and in February, he was transferred to Ottawa Hospital. My sister had tried to convince him to go to the hospital the second time because one of his legs was in such poor shape he couldn’t stand on it for very long. Dad refused. But the next day, the nurse who came to change his bandages persuaded him to go.
My sister and I had known he wasn’t doing great, but Dad had tried to keep from us just how poor his health was. He’d mentioned to me that his leg was killing him—he didn’t have enough blood flow to heal some wounds on his feet and calves, which is typical for diabetics—but not to what degree it was interfering with his health. He had trouble walking or standing for periods of time and less energy. I knew that much, but we soon found out that the impact of that was far more dire. With nobody making sure he was eating, he wasn’t.
After years of my father crying wolf and making excuses for why he was so broke, none of which involved the considerable expense of being an alcoholic or the fallout from that (like: losing your winter coat, losing a bet, losing at pool games for money, losing your paycheque to buying rounds at the bar, losing the loans you gave your friends), my sister and I were reluctant to help him financially. After his release from the hospital in January, Leica began to bring him meals he could freeze. She bought him small household items she thought he could use.
I considered giving him money for extra care, but I was in debt from using my line of credit to buy a condo. And I resented giving my father anything, after a lifetime of him giving me far too little support and far too much heartache. When I’d started my undergraduate studies, for example, he’d said he was going to give me fifty dollars each week, which never happened. At the end of that first year—when he began a process to declare bankruptcy—Dad invited me to play pool with him. It was the first and only time I got an invite like that. When I showed up at the bar, he asked me if I’d sign a legal document saying that he had paid me the money I never saw because it would help his case. He handed me an envelope of papers to sign before leaving.
Drunks are black holes. I knew this about my father because it played out over and over. Soon after Dad moved out, Rose sold the house my father had significantly helped to pay off, but she gave him only a nominal lump sum, far less than he deserved. Rather than fight it, Dad let it go and lived in poverty. Much of his financial difficulties, I knew, were of his own making.
In hindsight, I could have done a lot more than take his “I’m fine” word for it when I suspected he wasn’t. But I wanted him to be fine. I had developed a well-tuned strategy to help keep him from being a burden in my life. In part, that meant caring less—so the disappointments would be lessened—some of that was avoidance—especially when he was at his worst, like when he was found passed out in at least a week’s worth of shit and vomit in his trailer—and some was wishful thinking—if we willed him to be better, he might be.
In the Ottawa Hospital, my father admitted that his leg was so painful from rot that he couldn’t walk or stand on it whatsoever. The doctors tried to get both his leg healed and his heart troubles stabilized so that he could be released. The longer he was there, the more his body failed, not from any fault of the care, but because his body had hit its limit. Even if they got his leg under control, he had four stents in his arteries already, and a heart that was so big it pressed on his liver, making him retain fluids. His belly had grown round like a beach ball. Too many binges, too much wear from diabetes, too much smoking.
My sister visited him twice a week that winter, never missing a day off. I paid for him to have cable in his room so the TV could keep him company.
Late one Saturday in May, I got a call from Leica saying that Dad’s kidneys had now completely failed. Dad would be on dialysis for the rest of his life. It seemed clear that he would never be able to live on his own again, because the complications from kidney failure resulted in disorientation as the toxins built up in his system. Considering his state during his last attempt at living alone, he couldn’t be trusted on his own.
Dad was going to have a meeting on Wednesday with his full care team, she said, to decide whether he’d undergo dialysis.
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“He’s thinking he’ll refuse treatment,” Leica replied. “He’d have about two weeks to live.”
There is an excited clarity particular to the family of alcoholics when you hear the drunk in your life is dying. It is the potential for calm. Like facing the last, large ugly battle that is sure to end a miserable war, you look forward to it with a kind of disbelief that it may bring peace. You spent your early life feeling responsible for the alcoholic, because he was never responsible for himself. You felt culpable, because he never was. If you’re lucky and you gain clarity, in the later years you try not to feel responsible, not to feel guilty. Then when the alcoholic begins the worst of his decline, the first impulse is to suffer along with him again. Focusing on the peace that may come is a means to find distance, to find a path through, so you might live beyond his passing.
I woke up on the Sunday morning with my back completely out. I couldn’t stand or sit or bend over without considerable pain. In stressful times, my body had a bad habit of holding itself so tightly that my pelvis would slowly wrench and mess up the alignment in my spine. I flew into Ottawa that Monday in terrific pain so I could be there for the meeting and Dad’s decision.
The afternoon I arrived, my mother met me at the airport and, rather than going to the hospital and leaving my mom in Ottawa with nothing to do, we drove the hour to Cornwall. I wanted an evening on the couch with muscle relaxants.
I wasn’t home an hour when I received a text from my father saying that he was leaving the hospital. He was moving in with my sister. That seemed unlikely. I phoned Leica to see what was going on.
“What?” she asked. “What do you mean? He’s not moving in here.”
“His text just said that.”
“He didn’t answer.”
“I’ll get hold of Lara at the hospital.”
Leica texted Lara, his social worker, while I drove over to my sister’s house.
Lara phoned us back in about half an hour to say that she’d found Dad tucked safely in his room. There was no plan to release him. I was sitting next to Leica on the couch so I could hear Lara talking.
“He’s fine. He’s not going to be released, but he seems to think he’s leaving. Your dad just told me that he sold a painting for 4.2 million dollars. I know this likely isn’t true, but I should confirm with you.”
“No,” Leica said. “That definitely isn’t true. If we owned a painting like that, we’d have sold it a long time ago.”
“Of course,” Lara said, with just enough of a professional chuckle to say she could appreciate the joke. “I don’t know what his long-term situation has been like,” she continued. “Has your father been delusional like this before?”
“I’ve never heard him say anything like that before,” Leica said. “Never. He doesn’t talk like that.”
Lara said she’d make sure the nurses knew to phone us if Dad made any move to be discharged. But that didn’t seem likely. “I’ll go talk to him again before leaving for the night. I’m just on my way out, so I’ll stop in and make sure he’s settled.”
Leica thanked her and hung up. Her face was drained, with a wrinkle in her brow. “Did you hear all that?” she asked me.
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t think we have to worry. It’s not like he’d get very far. He can’t walk. He couldn’t even get himself into a cab.”
“Or a pair of pants,” Leica said.
“Or a pair of pants. Right.”
That thought calmed us enough to get me through the night without the worry that he’d discharge himself.
The next morning my sister, brother-in-law Rolland, and I headed to the hospital first thing. We checked in with the nurse’s station to get a report before seeing him. They told us the meeting with Dad’s care team had been moved up because Dad was due for dialysis the next night. If he refused treatment, they should establish their course of action before then.
Dad had been clear with both my sister and his doctor that he wanted to avoid dialysis. He’d told two of his brothers the same when they’d been in that weekend. The outcome of the next few days seemed obvious.
Dad’s room wasn’t far from the nurse’s desk. Rolland crossed straight into the room saying to my father, “Hey, Mike, how you doing?” but Leica and I took a deep breath and looked at each other. She smirked as if to say, Oh well, here we go.
“Well, there you are,” Dad said when we came in. “Hey, Sonny-boy.” Dad had gone white since I’d seen him last in the winter. His hair was white. His skin. His lips.
“Hi, Dad, how you doing? A bit rough, I guess, eh?”
“Ye-ess,” he said, the way all men from Madoc say yes when they wish it wasn’t so.
Leica leaned over him and kissed his forehead. I imagined he felt like paper, tasted like chalk.
“So are you taking me home today?” he asked, looking up at her. His voice was slow, like legs trying to walk through deep water.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Dad. How are you going to leave the hospital?”
“I got it all covered. I sold this painting.”
We all had just a second’s pause.
“What painting, Mike?” Rolland asked.
Leica shot me a look—what was going to happen?
Dad said he’d sold a painting to an Austrian for $4.2 million, who then sold it to his neighbour for $6.5 million. We asked him a bunch of questions, expecting he’d get flustered and we could then tell him we thought maybe he was confused, but his answers were calm and reasonably detailed. He saw the image in a magazine, he said. The painting had been stored in an attic. He’d been wheeling and dealing for forty years. Under another name. So he could afford to go to Leica’s home and live in her basement.
Her basement was unfinished. And there was no way Dad was going to be able to use the stairs.
“I can put in a lift,” he said.
He was clear and adamant, so we tried another strategy, not to trip him up but to try to keep him settled in bed. We asked how the money was going to help him; he was still sick so how was he going to get better at Leica’s home?
“I found an herb,” he said. “It’s going to fix me.”
“I can’t say,” he answered soberly. “It would flood the market with too much demand.” He happened on the cure, he said, by reading up on his illness. “And I thought, well, if it does this and this other thing, I bet it works for this too. But only six of us in the world know about it. We met online.” He looked at us and dropped his voice. “And only one of us can afford it. I had dialysis this morning. They took my numbers for my blood and couldn’t believe the results.”
Dad hadn’t had dialysis.
The three of us tried to counter him, asking questions, but Dad had an answer for everything. They hadn’t put his dialysis on his chart. Some nurse he hadn’t seen before had come in and taken him down overnight, because they had an opening. She must have been from another ward. The nurses here didn’t know he’d gone.
He seemed so reasonable that later, when we were in the hallway, my sister asked me if I thought it was true. Did I think he made millions on a painting? The circumstances were so charged, and he was so calm and convinced, I had the same impulse to believe him. We wanted to believe him.
He hadn’t had dialysis, I reasoned to Leica, so he’s not thinking straight. It wasn’t true.
“But he sounds so sure,” Leica said.
“I know, right? But he can’t have been dealing in art for forty years. We’d have known.”
A nurse walked by pushing a wheelchair. I lowered my voice, because just saying these things aloud made me feel pathetic. “If it’s true, where did that money go? This is the first time he’s made any money? And it’s millions?”
Leica sort of nodded, watching the nurse retreat down the hall.
“And what does Dad know about art?”
“Right,” Leica said, suddenly clear. “He’d better have paid me back by now,” she said, with mock-bitterness for having helped him out for so many years.
When I chuckled, Leica’s shoulders relaxed. “I could use some of that million,” she said.
“He’s just desperate. And it’s made him delusional, I guess?”
She looked into the room, at the shape his feet made under the covers of the white bed sheet. “He just seems so convinced.”
Dad’s social worker Lara arrived then. She was bright and warm, with curly ringlets of brown hair around a calm face. She said Dad’s care team would meet us now in the consultation room. She could take us there.
Leica, Rolland, and I sat with Lara, Dr McCullough, and Mike the renal assistant, around a faux-wood table in the small meeting room. The chairs were metal frames with square seats and backs in gold vinyl. The walls were beige, with three framed inspirational posters, poorly placed. They were photographs of animals in the wild—a whale underwater, a tiger with her cubs, a hummingbird above a lily—and one word of text underneath. Courage. Love. Inspiration.
Dr McCullough began by reviewing Dad’s ailments. Then he gave a précis of what to expect if he underwent dialysis. A diabetic with kidney failure would have five years if it was just the kidneys, but given Dad’s complications, he estimated Dad had one, maybe two years. We all agreed, each in our turn, that Dad had said no to treatment while in his right mind. Each of us at the table knew firsthand that Dad had signed paperwork saying he didn’t want his life sustained by machinery. Dialysis sort of qualified.
Because Dad had had a coma induced years before, when he was intubated after a collapse, Leica and I had power of attorney for medical care in case that happened again. The decision today, then, was up to my sister and me, but neither of us wanted to answer the unstated question.
We asked what the next two weeks would look like for him. What would that mean?
Given the condition of his heart and liver, Dr McCullough said, he’d have only one or two weeks of consciousness. He’d become increasingly tired, and then he’d sleep and slip into a coma for a week or so. He’d be increasingly disoriented, as he was this morning. And then, essentially, he repeated, he’d just fall asleep.
“I think that’s what we should do,” Leica said. “It’s not what I’d prefer. I’d like to have more time with my father. But if that’s what Dad says he wants, I’m not going to disagree with him.”
The room felt too beige and cramped for the moment in your life when you tell the doctor to allow your father to die. The words were too easy to say. “Yes, I agree, it’s what Dad said he wanted.”
The moment felt both not real at all and too real. Unreal but believable, like a dream. I had the sense that the language we were speaking was too simple to carry such consequence. These words were clumsy containers for an enormous moment. They cheapened it, so that reality didn’t feel true. I had to bite my cheek and grip my hands under the table to stop myself from screaming.
Everyone around the table agreed that this was the course of action. We stood. We pushed our chairs in. Lara and Dr McCullough collected the papers in front of them. Mike followed them out the door. As we made a parade back into Dad’s hospital room, Leica took my hand.
Once we had all stepped into the room, Dr McCullough informed Dad that we had agreed to honour Dad’s wishes, to not continue with dialysis.
I held my breath, to see if he’d offer again his crazy story.
“Yes,” Dad said, a bit gauzy in the mouth, “I’m tired. I want to go home. No dialysis.”
Dr McCullough sat against the arm of a chair, put his hands together, slipped them between his legs, and leaned toward my father. “You remember what we talked about yesterday, Mr Smith, about dialysis?”
“Yeah. I want to go off it.” Dad stared at Dr McCullough, his expression drained. They locked eyes.
“And do you remember what I told you would happen?”
“I’d die.”
“Yes, that’s correct.” Dr McCullough glanced around the room at each of us, briefly, to confirm that we’d all heard that. It was clear. He knew what was happening. “You’ll live about a month and then you’ll die in your sleep.”
“I know,” Dad said, and lay back on the bed, closing his eyes.
That evening my boyfriend Patrick texted me to say hello. He was also a professor, but in botany, working on plants in intertidal zones. He’d had a busy day in the lab pulling seaweed apart.
Rather than texting back, I phoned him. My day with Dad was too large for texting. Patrick wasn’t checking in to ask what had happened that day or to see how I was doing in crisis. He didn’t ask if my back was better (it wasn’t). Mostly, he wanted to discuss our plans to be in Italy for the month of June. I told him what was going on anyhow. He hadn’t signed up for this when we started dating. Still in the midst of a divorce from his ex-wife, he wanted something casual, and I wanted to get married—my father’s death wasn’t convenient in that chasm.
On Wednesday morning, Leica and I drove the hour of flat farmland from Cornwall to Ottawa. We were both resolved that this was the beginning of the end. I felt like a sponge that had been squeezed through a very tight wringer but was filling out again with fresh water.
When we arrived in Dad’s hospital room, we noticed immediately that he was clearer. His face had brightened. His eyes were sharp, in place of the dull focus of the day before. He was easier to recognize. We later found out that they’d given him a drug that worked on the buildup of toxins in his system. His blood was cleaner, so he had his faculties back.
First thing he asked me was, “How’s your back?” He’d remembered how gingerly I’d had to stand up the day before.
Leica and I tried to gauge his clarity by asking questions. He remembered that we’d got him Swiss Chalet for supper the night before but not the stories about his painting or healing herb. He only remembered the things that were true. He had no recollection of the crazy-talk.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “I want the dialysis.”
“Are you sure?” we asked. We confirmed three times that he was certain.
Leica ran to tell Lara, who then called Dr McCullough, who said he’d come see Dad later in the day. We spent the morning hanging out, waiting for Dr McCullough to arrive to confirm the change of plan.
For me, there were two fathers in the hospital at this point—the alcoholic fuck-up and the terminally sick father. In practice, we were dealing with the father who was ill, so it was easy to be compassionate and offer a minute-by-minute helping hand. Dad was exhausted. Of course we fetched him plastic cups of ice and bought him braised chicken from Swiss Chalet. Of course we shot the shit about inane things to make the time pass for him. Of course Leica gave him hand cream, and I fetched him a Magnum ice cream bar from the store on the first floor.
But the other father, the historical artefact, was an ass. I’d already mourned him when he’d drunk himself into an induced coma (on my birthday) two years before. Over my forty-one years with him, we’d had his multiple suicide attempts to contend with, Leica way more than me. We endured his hundreds of sobbing fits, hints at being bankrupt, lies, exaggerations, and slurred phone calls. His reversal on his dialysis treatment felt like another great cheat on what could have been an easier relationship. He could have just let this happen; we’d go through two weeks of a predictable process and then all our suffering at the hands (of the aftermath) of his drinking would have an end. But he had to prolong this process, which pissed me off royally. Up to two more years of his yoyo-ing health and struggles. I didn’t wish him dead, but I certainly didn’t wish to have another half dozen death scares each time he changed his mind.
While we entertained Dad bedside, two women arrived from physio. Dad was lively with them, flirty and smart-assed, which was way more familiar. He was too weak to walk and could barely stand, but he joked around with the youngest of the physiotherapists enough to make anyone blush. She didn’t. Clearly, she’d seen enough of men like him in her time in the hospital. And neither did she shoot him down; she gave as good as she got, which seemed above-and-beyond generous.
Both women were patient with him, coaxing him to take a single step, which he couldn’t do. When they placed him again on the bed, he lay back on the pillow with his eyes closed, his mouth limp, exhausted from standing. Within seconds he was sleeping.
We spent the times he was awake trying to fill the silence with chatter until, around noon, Dad was given a sponge bath. My sister and I went for lunch up the hall. When we came back, he was nearly done, and behind drawn curtains he was getting a fresh diaper put on, so we waited in the hall.
Just then, the palliative care team came to talk to him. Two sober, soft-spoken women had been assigned to visit him because of his decision the day before. They waited a few moments until Dad was robed again, then went in to talk to him behind the curtain.
Lara arrived again to speak with us in the hall about nursing home options, now that he was going to undergo dialysis. She explained, sympathetically, how patients switch their minds all the time like this.
I was distracted, trying to overhear Dad’s conversation with the palliative counsellors from behind the curtains. “I don’t want to die,” I heard him say. “I don’t know why I don’t want to die; I just don’t.”
The doctor from palliative, Dr O’Connor, showed up then too. He was a fifty-something, no-nonsense chubby Irishman with an accent. We had to inform him as well that our father had reversed his decision.
“Okay,” the doctor said. “Let’s have a wag with him and see.”
We all entered Dad’s room.
“Mr Smith, I’m Dr O’Connor. I’m a palliative physician. Nice to meet you.”
He asked Dad a bunch of questions, but by this time in the early afternoon Dad was in pain as his meds wore off, so he was distracted or fuzzy.
Dr O’Connor listed Dad’s ailments to him, including cirrhosis of the liver, which we hadn’t heard before. My sister told him that this information was new. Dad was clearly surprised and disheartened.
O’Connor said, in an Irish trill, “Well, Michael, I understand you liked a drink back in the day.”
“Yeeeeeeess,” Dad answered.
“When was your last drink?” O’Connor asked.
“I haven’t had much in the last four years.”
“But when was your last drink?” he insisted. His tone was assertive. He refused to sidestep a point regarding Dad’s history that didn’t seem entirely relevant, but I was kind of grateful he was raising it all the same. The doctor was letting him know he was in this hospital bed for a reason.
Dad repeated himself, avoiding the question.
O’Connor dropped his chin in a schoolmarm sort of way, looking at Dad from under his brow. “I understand. You drank a lot back in the day, though you drink less now.”
“Compared to thirty years ago, it’s been great. But thirty years ago—phhhew,” Dad said, blowing out his cheeks.
“A bit rowdy, was it?” O’Connor asked, rolling his r. He was adopting a buddy-buddy tone.
“Oh, it was bad,” Dad said. “It was ba-a-ad.”
“That must have been hard on your family?” the doctor asked.
The question surprised me. I could feel myself holding my breath. Dr O’Connor wasn’t talking to the sick patient; he was talking to the alcoholic.
There was a noticeable pause, then Dad pursed his lips slightly and gave a little shake of the head. “I was more or less alone,” he said, not looking at either Leica or me. Some thirty years ago, my mother, sister, and I were all living with Dad. I was eleven and Leica was thirteen.
“Well, if you want to change your mind, that’s up to you,” Dr O’Connor said, ending the conversation. “I wish you well, Michael.”
He turned to Leica and I, said, “It was nice meeting you,” which sounded more like good luck than goodbye, shook our hands warmly, and left.
The rest of our week visiting Dad was far less dramatic. I took him outside for fresh air, just the two of us, the next morning. We ate an ice cream bar while sitting in the sunshine. It was a spring day with sparrows having choir practice in the bushes. The sun warmed our faces for half an hour until it was lunchtime and I wheeled Dad back in.
Months later he’d tell me that he hadn’t been outside since because coming in had been too hard. He’d rather just never go out than have to give up the sun again.
I spent the following day packing up my father’s one-bedroom apartment. It was clear, Leica said, that he wasn’t moving home again. She was terrifically practical. On a limited income, Dad would be better off not paying rent. The hospital would charge him every day he was there, once they moved him out of care and into the “holding floor,” as they waited for a retirement-home bed to open. So to save money he didn’t have, we would move all his things into Leica’s storage. Since she’d done all the work visiting and running errands these last months, I’d offered to do the packing.
I wasn’t thinking ahead at all, so I went to the apartment alone. Never under any circumstances will I ever be that stupid again.
Boxing up the food containers—the canned beans, the pasta, the half-used bags of rice—was beyond depressing. Each item was something he’d bought but which he’d never eat. I wondered, Could we use this food to cook for him, so that at least he’d get to use up what was here? The idea that he’d never finish the food in his cupboards seemed obscene. Wasteful. He was still alive, in the hospital, in that physical place. The unused boxes and cans of food were an ugly marker of how much he’d lost. He’d never eat in his kitchen again. He’d never eat the brown beans in this cupboard.
There was an intimacy, being in his home, that I’d never before experienced. It was my first time in that apartment. The building was a boxy two-storey walk-up, a fixed-income residence with narrow cinder block hallways and old windows. Dad had had a place on the second floor, but after a year of asking he finally got moved to the main floor. A resident had complained to their manager that she’d found him passed out on the steps, which gave credence to his “I have to crawl up the stairs” issue—they’d moved him before they got sued.
I wasn’t accustomed to spending time at my father’s place. I had when he lived in Cornwall, but in the last dozen years, he’d more often than not drive the hour into town to my sister’s. Our visits were short and on his terms. He’d drop in for an hour, maybe two, and then drive back home. Decades had passed since I’d eaten a meal at his place or since I’d so much as opened a cupboard drawer or the fridge. I was trespassing in a space I’d never been invited into.
In small domestic ways too—that food in the cupboards, his cassette tapes, the colour photocopies of his parents framed and hanging on the walls, the daily intimacies of the kind of life he was living—my father had shut us out. Now the markers of his home life were mocking him. Choices he had made about his health and drinking had pushed aside even the everyday life he knew.
Having struggled for years with my own ever-evolving addictions, this was heavy shit.
In the large storage closet in the centre of the apartment, where he kept his tools and fishing gear, I found a box of miscellany that included photo albums. They held pictures of my sister and me, his parents, some friends, and ex-girlfriends. In amongst the photos was a newspaper clipping of a drawing I’d had published for a weather column when I was about eleven. In between the pages of the photo album I found a story I’d written in grad school that Dad had asked to read at the time, a dozen years before. I didn’t have a copy of that story—I barely remembered it.
Dad had moved more than a dozen times over the years, sometimes leaving with what we thought was little more than the shirt on his back. He’d been thrown out, or left in a fit of drunkenness, on a number of occasions from a number of women’s homes. It didn’t seem possible that he could have these mementos still. All this time, from one apartment to the next, he’d managed to bring the photos of us with him. I wept for an hour over them, beside myself with a feeling I can only describe as relief.
I didn’t see my father again until after I’d returned to Kelowna, taken a difficult trip to Italy with Patrick, and on my way back east, made another stop in Ontario, solo, for a visit in June. That visit, thankfully, was uneventful. Dad was still in the hospital, his leg was still bad, and his dialysis meant that every three days his mental fogginess was cleared and he enjoyed a day or so of rational thought.
In the large cafeteria on the main floor of the hospital—with its wooden walls and 1970s orange décor—Dad and I sat eating our usual ice cream. He’d wanted to get out of the room. When I mentioned I’d just come back from Italy, he asked with whom I’d gone.
When I said Patrick’s name, Dad gestured to the room, asking, “Well, where is he? Why isn’t he here?”
It was the first time in years he’d asked anything about my love life. I could tell him things—and sometimes did—but if ever he had a question, he’d wait to ask my sister. He didn’t want to talk about it with me.
“He had to get back for work,” I answered.
“Well, you could have brought him. I’d like to meet him.”
Dad took a bite of his ice cream. He didn’t notice it was running down the side of his hand.
The moment I said goodbye, I stood by his bed and we looked at each other, both of us choked up, silent. My eyes pooled, his grew glassy. It was the clearest we’d ever loved each other, without the sullied mess of our past, I think, and so neither of us needed to say it. I wished the world for him in that moment, a much different world than the one he’d been given, and he saw it all in my face and knew it was true.
I kept in touch with him mostly by text or messages from my sister over the next two months, until the end of that September when his leg got worse. My own mental health took a nosedive in that time.
Once back in BC, I made plans to spend six weeks at a retreat with Patrick for half of July and August. Our great love affair wasn’t going well, though. He wanted more affair and less love. Patrick had been a great boyfriend, but he was a rotten match for me. My “enthusiasm” scared the pants back on him so that, by June of 2012, I gave him an ultimatum: if he wasn’t crazy about me, he should say so and end it.
He asked for a six-week break.
In those six desperate weeks, which were a kind of sullied summer bonus to me since they were freed up, I took full advantage of the weather. I went to a three-day outdoor music festival, camped at Johnson Lake, with the clearest water in BC, went horseback riding, swimming, and canoeing, and a few mornings a week went cycling to the top of Knox Mountain. I ate goat milk gelato three days a week and bought new clothes whenever I felt like it.
Six weeks later, when he was back from his work retreat, Patrick broke up with me. It was an exceptional split, given the care we took with each other. We both cried and hugged and tried not to sleep together one last time, which we didn’t, more from my resolve than his. After nearly all was gently said and superlatively done, I asked, “If we’re breaking up this way, with this much kindness and care, isn’t that a sign we shouldn’t be breaking up?”
Patrick sighed and said, “That doesn’t change anything for me.”
I was devastated to be single again. All my eggs had been in Patrick’s sizeable basket. When you have serious abandonment issues and the guy you think is the love of your life—who you’ve waited the last twenty years to meet—then breaks it off with you after nine months, it’s like picking up a sledge hammer and whacking the wooden beams on your emotional roller coaster. Comingled with the heartbreak was a healthy terror of what my future nights might look like. I was sick to think my sexual compulsion might all start up again. I went back to therapy immediately, to try to dam the tidal wave.
I had surprisingly little sex in those first weeks, mostly because I spent the evenings sobbing. I sobbed over ice cream, sobbed while camping, sobbed cycling up and down Knox Mountain. Everything that I enjoyed doing I did through the gauze of sadness. For the first two weeks of September, I went to work each day, taught great classes—my student evaluations at the end of that year would be my best yet—and once home, was barely able to move off the couch. I ate anything in the fridge that could be eaten raw or heated in ten minutes. I spent the better part of most nights trying to calm down the sobbing long enough to call someone.
When depression comes, it feels like you’ve always lived it. The emptiness is so acute, it can convince you that you’ve never had a reprieve from it. You lose sense of your own history; it colours your memories, so that the depression is a dark grey tint that infects everything you know. Study the images of your past, and the scrim of depression will convince you it was always there.
The blackness returned, an impenetrable emptiness, but in place of the typical feeling of hovering over me, this time it enveloped me like a dark cloak. The sensation was beyond reason. Everything felt emptied out, like the inverse of animism. There was spirit in nothing. At home, I felt immobile. I could barely breathe, abandoned by more than parents or joy or love, abandoned by the will to live, abandoned by every little thing that lives. Cut from the living world, that darkness was a weight beyond sense.
At its height in early-September, I spent about a week phoning friends at all hours of the day, weeping for fear that I might kill myself. I gripped the edges of the couch, willing time to pass so that I might survive long enough to get out of the black cloud. I tried hard to practice what Gary had taught me: to be aware of the moment, be the observer of it, and know that my life is larger than this particular feeling. However overwhelming.
I had to tell myself I’d be forcing my family to deal with my death just as Dad declined in the hospital. I couldn’t imagine dying before my father. My suicide would quickly ruin him. I couldn’t imagine putting my sister through two deaths.
In the second weekend of September, I took an urgent trip to Vancouver to see both my therapist and my doctor. I made my GP put me on an anti-anxiety drug, an SSRI, that I researched thoroughly. Having resisted pills for decades, I was sick of going through stress-loops and depressions once a year. I realized, talking with my sister who had been on Paxil, that her symptoms were identical to mine. I had about six different symptoms that I’d given six different names, but Leica had identified them as only one. Anxiety. When I started to identify exactly what it was and how it worked, I began to make sense of my compulsion. My OCD was partly a way to drop out of feeling to avoid the speediness, fear, and tension of relentless panic.
I entered Gary’s office for therapy that month to try to contain the inky spread of this hopelessness. I had a hard time even looking at him in his button-down shirt and crisp blue jeans. I was in a state of supreme detachment, resistant to being present. I had arrived in his office only by putting one foot in front of the other and not thinking about what I was doing. Every moment felt flattened or drained; it was like eating a meal rendered tasteless by a cold, but the lack of sensation infects all of your senses. Everything was dull.
I sat on the grey felt couch as Gary took his usual position in the chair opposite. He crossed his legs and placed a small yellow notepad on his knee. I reported to him about my recent days of feeling deeply suicidal and depressed. He asked questions, and we talked for some time about my blackened mood.
He leaned back in his chair and said, “Can you do this for me? I want you to put yourself in that loneliness. Imagine that deep black place; feel that feeling.”
I looked around the office at his desk, the box of tissues on the coffee table, and the large abstract painting on the wall behind him, unsure.
“You’re safe here, Michael.”
“I don’t know if I am,” I answered. “I don’t want to be in that feeling. I don’t trust myself with it.”
Gary gestured to the space around us. “There’s nothing in this room that is going to harm you. Look around. There is no threat here.”
That insight might seem obvious, but I found it surprising. The clear glass water jug on the side table, his tidy desk, the books on his shelves, and the sisal carpet under his coffee table, all of it was routine. The room was safe, of course. I was the threat. My thoughts were the threat.
“Okay,” I said, nodding slowly.
“I want you to be in that blackness. Feel that place.”
I closed my eyes and opened my mind to the feeling. I was quickly within the grief and panic. It was a heavy fabric of unfeeling, a blackened room wrapping around my body. I sobbed into my hands on the couch for a long time. In no small way, I was relieved to be sobbing in front of Gary. Few people saw the fierceness of it. I hoped he could save me.
“Now I want you to know,” Gary began, his voice calm and gentle, so that I could see he was about to put perspective on this moment, to help move me out of it, “that this feeling is never going to leave you. You will always have this feeling. It’s inside you. And there is no getting it out.”
The cruelty was sharp. His words were a slim bright blade in my chest.
I glared at him, incredulous.
“Why would you say that to me?” I asked.
He leaned back in his chair. “Because it’s the truth,” he replied without so much as a shrug.
I pulled a Kleenex from the box and wept uncontrollably, blubbery and shaking. A third of me felt safe enough with Gary that I could be this ugly, another third allowed myself to cry as hard as I felt to reveal just how threatened I was, and the last third was to demonstrate the effects of his cruelty. I wept with the relentlessness of the feeling, I wept for the years I had already carried it, and the years Gary said I would have it still. From the bottom of a tall, tall silo of hopelessness, I wept in a kind of frenzy, as I had as a seven-year-old, alone in my bedroom, terrorized by life, thinking I might lose my mind from the horror of being alone. My head rattled with grief.
Gary didn’t say a word. Some ten minutes later I calmed down enough to try to catch up to my staccato breath. Gary had his arms along the sides of his chair, patiently waiting. Three fingers held a pen against the chair fabric. His wedding band was silver and dull in the light.
He said, “Now I want you to see, Michael, that you can live with this feeling. That it passes. You can observe the feeling and let it pass. Now you know that it passes. And that you will survive it.” He turned his free palm upwards. “In fact, you’ve been surviving it all these years. And it hasn’t harmed you. It’s just a feeling.”
I took another tissue from the Kleenex box and pressed my face into it. My nose was coursing with snot.
Gary continued. “It can’t do anything to you. You get to decide how you act. This feeling can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. You’re safe, even in this feeling.”
I wiped my face. “I’m safe,” I parroted, thinking that over. “Even in this feeling.”
I glanced at the room again, at the closed door, the lights, and the sky outside, blue with two clouds in the upper corner of the window. Gary’s hand still held the pen against the edge of the chair.
“Can I write that down?” I asked.
That week, my Kelowna buddy John called to check in on me after I’d returned home. John’s a counsellor and perhaps the steadiest man I know. I told him about my visit to the therapist and how Gary had worked with me on feeling safe.
John suggested I try his strategy. “What brings you comfort?” he asked.
“Comfort?”
“What brings you comfort in the world? Where do you go for comfort?”
I hadn’t a fucking clue. “I don’t have a clue,” I said. “Ice cream?”
“Okay. Food is a comfort, sure. Do you have something more permanent maybe?”
I drew a blank. “What do you use?” I asked.
“I use my house. My home brings me great comfort.”
“Oh,” I said, looking around my condo. “Yes. Mine does too.”
There was an echo in that moment to sitting on Gary’s couch, realizing that nothing in his office was harmful. Certainly not on its own. I had grown up with parents who had a hard time paying all the bills, with a mother who grew hysterical when my father drank our money away or rolled another car. Home had never been a safe place. When I’d moved into my condo, it was three years old but had never been lived in. I was the first owner. No ghosts, I had said to myself. I was very conscious that I bought a place without a history and so was making its history each day. When I began cruising in this place, I was cognizant of the fact that I was adding that bad vibe to the mix.
I realized from talking with John that the choices I made put me at risk, but nothing in the condo was a danger to me unless I gave it the power to be. Including myself. I had thought for years that I was my own worst enemy, but this framing gave me a means to conceive of how to change that.
My condo was safe; I was safe within it. If I stopped being reactive to non-present threats, I would remain safe.
Concurrently that September, my father’s health took another nosedive. His leg was in such bad shape that the doctors said either it went or he did. They couldn’t get the blood flow to improve enough to make the antibiotics work on his leg. It had so much rot that it was now threatening to kill him via his bloodstream.
On September 26, I posted on Facebook:
Dad’s full care team meets today to discuss his options for the days to come. For those who have been asking, he doesn’t want the amputation, because odds are against him surviving the surgery. So today we look at what are the best strategies, and what is in store, with a man whose foot is rotting black.
With all the complications from his poor circulation, failing kidneys, blocked arteries, cirrhotic liver, plus the poison in his system from the leg rot, the care team told my father and sister that his chances of surviving the surgery were compromised. Dad would be lucky to leave the operating room still breathing.
My father didn’t think it was worth the risk. Better to have a few days left than none at all.
Leica and I told him we thought otherwise. A month of extreme pain wasn’t much time left compared to the pain-free years he might have if he survived.
By the next day, he’d changed his mind. My sister told me that when Dr McCullough walked into the room to see what had been decided, Dad greeted him with his wry sidelong grin.
“Morning, Doc,” he said, chipper. Then he squinted his eyes, and asked, “Do you have your knife sharpened?”
I was on a plane to Ottawa that day, September 27. Luckily, I had a great teaching schedule, Tuesday evenings and Wednesday mornings, so I could leave town and be gone for six days. I flew first thing that Thursday, with a black suit in my luggage, just in case.
I stayed at the Rotary Club hotel, which offers cheap rooms so that families can have affordable accommodation close to the hospital. I’d decided to stay there so that I could be with Dad all day, maximizing my hours and giving my sister a much-needed break. She’d been travelling to Ottawa on her two days a week for more than six months.
As I walked across the parking lot, then entered the hospital on that visit, I felt a kind of otherworldliness to the day. Disbelief, maybe.
When you’re visiting the dying, everything is layered with narrative—this is the route that takes me to the hospital, these are the bills I use to buy us an ice cream bar, these are the insignificant words I say. You feel compelled to share the narrative with everyone—if only they knew what a struggle you’re immersed in—but passing the smokers standing beside their IV poles in the courtyard, you realize everyone is in their own crisis. It’s lonely-making, knowing that every moment in this drama is only yours.
These automatic doors, I observe, open onto the hospital I am entering. This is the hallway with a man carrying flowers, two boys who hold each arm of a teddy bear, a young woman with dreads falling out of a blue toque. The elevator is more than an elevator. The buttons are loaded with import. They’ve been pushed by so many sick people—I use my knuckle to press them—they’ve witnessed a long history.
Each person in the elevator is in the midst of her or his own story. This senior in slacks silently passing a fast-food cup and straw to share with his daughter in a flowing dress, this man with his hands bandaged, this young kid holding the dress of a woman who’s trying not to act preoccupied, to pretend for her son that this is just another day. The son stares at the man’s hands. They begin to talk.
Everything feels connected, even causal. My father in that bed up there on the third floor causes me to pay for this ice cream, push this elevator call button, smile warmly at the people entering, watch the child speak with a man in bandages about an accident with fire.
We witness these moments while they are happening, making of them a narrative, a small whispering voiceover in our heads, because we want a sense of order, want to believe that random shit can make sense.
When I arrived at the hospital that evening, Rolland was sitting on the windowsill with one leg hanging over the ledge. Leica was in the chair by the bed. Dad looked over as I came in the door.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” he said, trying to sound animated, but he was so tired the expression on his face didn’t change. “What are you doing here, Mick?” Leica had told him I was coming. He was trying to make a show of it.
Had I not seen Rolland as I came up the hallway, I wouldn’t have recognized my father. Leica had warned me he looked eighty, so I was prepared, but there was little left of the features I knew to be Dad.
“I thought I’d take a look at you while you’re still in one piece,” I answered.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, his voice lilting upwards, then down again, pretending there was a question in there which he knew the answer to.
Dad’s skin was so translucent and thin, the blue veins shone through his temples, along his wrists, and across the back of his hands. He looked as if a blood-crazed vampire had drunk so ferociously, he’d taken everything—blood, muscle, and layers of skin. His body was a brittle husk. A month before, he’d turned sixty-three. It seemed impossible that anyone sixty-three could look this old.
I took off my coat and hat and approached the side of the bed to say a better hello. Dad’s body heaved, everything tensing. His bony hands clutched the bedrail. He pulled himself onto his side, his mouth hanging open for a second then clamping shut.
“What’s going on, Dad, are you okay?” I asked.
His lips were pressed so tightly they made a blue line.
“Dad’s been having waves like this all day,” my sister said. “They just keep coming.”
“Wow,” I replied, without a clue how else to respond. “That’s shitty.”
The episode lasted thirty seconds or more, with Dad struggling for breath through his nose. As he gripped the edge of the bed, his arms looked like wet nylons hung over a shower-curtain rod. He was all bone.
As his body relaxed and settled back into the bed, he said, “You bet it’s shitty.”
“We’ve asked for more meds,” Leica said, “but they have him on a maximum dose. They can’t give him more.”
Dad was in a private corner room. He’d already shared a room in recent weeks with a man who had died in the night, then another man who was mute but bawled in pain for hours at a time until he too died. “That explains the noise he made,” Dad had said. “I felt sorry for the guy, but fuck if anyone could stand to listen to it all day and night.”
Pre-surgery, they gave Dad some privacy so he could rest better. The room was like every other, with a steel-railed bed, two uncomfortable vinyl chairs, a TV suspended from a bendable arm, and wood-veneer side tables with metal legs and framing. There was an IV drip next to the bed and a wheelchair in the corner.
Leica stood and gave me a hug. She said they’d been waiting all day for the staff to walk in and take him to the operating room.
“Do we know why they haven’t?” I asked.
“They were waiting for tests to come in. But they can only do it when the operating room is free. Dad isn’t on the list. They have to fit him in when they can.”
“I just want this to be over,” Dad moaned, gritting his teeth. He looked angry and incredulous and completely lost. “They’re just going to keep me waiting here all night?”
He stared at the ceiling for a few seconds then closed his eyes.
We sat with him that evening, trying to distract him from the waves that gripped him every two to three minutes. It wasn’t easy to find subjects fascinating enough to distract the attention of a man who was going to lose his leg. It was like chitchat Olympics, and the leg was winning.
Eventually Dr McCullough came by to say that Dad’s fluids were too high because of the pressure on the liver. They wanted him in better form before the surgery, so they had to drain his stomach first. They were leaving it for the night.
“So does he get in first thing tomorrow?” Leica asked.
“We’ll see. This doesn’t put us ahead at all. We still have to wait till the operating room is free. This doesn’t bump any scheduled surgeries.”
“Oh, no,” my father wailed. “I can’t do this all over again.”
“I’m sorry, Mike. We’re doing our best. I’m going to get you in as soon as I can. We don’t want you suffering.”
“Can we do something about the pain?” Leica asked. “He can’t stand it.”
“He shouldn’t be feeling any pain,” Dr McCullough answered, looking to Dad.
Leica clarified, “He’s been shaking with it—”
“It’s not pain,” Dad interrupted, spitting out the words. “It’s fear. I’m fucking terrified. They’re going to cut off my leg.”
“You’re having anxiety, Mike? We can get you something for that. We want you rested. I’ll prescribe some diazepam. They’ll bring it in shortly.”
After Dr McCullough said his goodbyes, the three of us spent the evening trying to keep Dad calm so that he might sleep. Around ten at night, Leica, Rolland, and I went back to the hotel. They’d decided to get a room too, in case Dad went in for surgery first thing in the morning. The walls between our rooms were so thin I was sure I’d hear the bristles scrape as they brushed their teeth. I was relieved that they were next door because I couldn’t invite anyone into my hotel room without them knowing.
I was jetlagged, still three hours behind, and wide awake, so I did what I always did when I was stressed out—I logged online. I chatted with a few guys, mostly the entertaining Don, a silver fox with great arms and shoulders in his photos, and at the same time with a younger guy, Adam, who looked to be in his early thirties, with the prettiest blue eyes and a rugby-player body.
In an effort to be more present—to turn off my zombie hunger—because I was terrified of what acting out might look like in these circumstances, I told both men why I was in town. My father is having his leg amputated, I wrote. Seeing the words didn’t help it feel more real. Language became unplugged. The containers of the words couldn’t hold the complexity or scope of that experience.
I chatted for a good twenty minutes, alternating between both men. My automaton was in gear, whispering its urgings. If I was quiet, it reasoned, I could leave the hotel, and my sister wouldn’t know. Years of soft-footing back into my parents’ house at any hour of the morning when I was a teenager, coming home way too late without waking anyone, had made me an expert in sneaking out. Being gay had made me an expert in reading a situation and anticipating. Cruising had made me an expert at finding alibis. If Leica caught me by accident, I’d tell her I couldn’t sleep, I had jetlag, so I was taking a long walk to deal with the tumult of the circumstances.
Once the automaton gets the idea in my head to get sex, it’s hard not to follow through. There is a sense of inevitability to it all. The automaton offers me an escape route from an emotional prison, and I will sit there suffering, wondering why I’m not taking that route. If not now, I’ll eventually act out, so it’s better to relieve the cruising energy when I’m still alert, rather than when I’m more tired, more desperate, and more likely to make worse judgments and decisions.
I doubted I could land Adam, because, despite making him lol, I just didn’t have confidence anyone with that body and face would be interested in this set. I wasn’t going to put myself at risk of rejection. I sent Don an invite to “hang out.” I knew what to do with older top guys. Their dominance made them easier to play—there’s plenty of the predictable in that role.
He was interested, he replied. But would I be into a threesome?
“With whom?” I asked. We were getting along well enough for me to use proper grammar.
“Hope you don’t find this weird,” he wrote back, “but you’re already talking to him. In another chat.”
I wrote back, “Busted.”
By crazy luck, it was Adam.
They picked me up in a blue Lexus. It was raining outside, so I shook both their hands after I climbed into the back seat. The car was so nice, I was afraid to get it wet. Oh, I thought, these guys are going to turf me as soon as we get to their place. I was sure that, after we were out of the car, they’d get a better look at me and call it a night.
To distract my negative storytelling, I asked them personal questions. They’d been together about a year. They lived on the other side of town and were just returning from supper at a nearby restaurant. (We’d arranged for them to drive me to their place in Wellington, and I’d take a cab back afterward.) Don owned the car. Adam was in school for something like human kinetics or massage therapy; he was a brainiac, on a scholarship. Don did something equally smart, with money, I think.
Once at their place, we chitchatted during the ride up the elevator. I made jokes, expecting them to find me out at any moment and say no thanks. I let the thoughts in my head race and my exterior remain calm. Don’t react to it, I told myself.
Their condo was handsomely furnished, with dark blue walls and a big lovely dinner table, which always impresses me. You don’t have a table like that if you don’t use it. Dinners are civilizing.
“Would you like a drink?” Don asked.
“I don’t drink,” I admitted.
“I don’t either,” Don said, “but Adam does, so we have wine. You want some sparkling water?”
“I can have tap water. I’m not that fancy.”
Adam chuckled.
Don said, “You don’t have to be fancy to have sparkling.”
“Okay,” I said.
I smiled warmly, but my brain was racing, determining that these guys were friendly and bright. There wasn’t much I could get away with, I thought. They were going to know I was a basket case. Maybe, I hoped, they would just think I was nervous.
As I stood in their living room, Don clearly tried to make me comfortable while Adam smiled sweetly, showing his dimples and blue eyes, following Don’s lead. I felt awkward because my body didn’t know where to be (it was out of sorts to find itself here, far removed from the hospital). I heard Gary’s voice reminding me not to react to this feeling, just to notice it and let it pass, trust that I’d be fine in the moment-by-moment. In short, don’t cause my own problems by freaking out or saying the wrong thing. I tried to hide my lack of confidence; I didn’t think that revealing how I was melting on the inside would help me get laid. My outsides, I reasoned, could be a great still shell to hold the slosh in, so nobody need see it.
Think of something clever, I told myself, but I had nothing. So I chose something sweet. “You’ve got great taste. I love your art,” I said, turning to Don.
“That’s the ex-boyfriend’s. I kept it.”
We chuckled and I said, “Maybe I should ask for his number,” to which Don laughed aloud.
“He hated it,” he said. “You’re in the right place.”
They invited me into the bedroom. We lounged on the bed, making out, slowly removing articles of clothing. The sex was straightforward. Both had huge, cut porn-star dicks, of course, the length and girth of salad cucumbers.
I kept hoping I’d get fucked by Don, who was clearly the toppiest, though I’d have been happy with Adam’s dick too. Each time Don ran his cock up the crack of my ass, I tried to manoeuvre him into the soft crevice of my hole, but he slid his hips forward, sliding along the perineum. They must have made an agreement before I arrived, because nobody got fucked—that energy was completely off the table.
I wanted to be taken, to disappear into their flesh, but couldn’t get my mind to step outside for a break. The sex was odd for me because I didn’t disappear into it. Don wouldn’t tease my hole, both of them were very sweet, and my mind kept talking to me about being inadequate but trying to not let on. Eventually, after a variety of triangulations of body parts, we all came and lounged on the bed. Don and Adam kissed for a long time afterwards, for a couple minutes, while I watched.
Then Don pulled me down between them and we lay there, puppy-piling. This was Adam’s first threesome, they told me. That kiss, then, made sense: they were communicating their care for each other. Adam was only in his late twenties. They decided to have a threesome because Adam hadn’t had one before and he was curious.
Everything about that evening was refreshing. They were kind men; the sex wasn’t detached or full of porn tropes. I was more present and aware of what I was feeling, and we didn’t do anything dangerous. The evening was a success and a relief for my rational self, and a disappointment for my stress-case cruiser. I had the rare sensation of having anonymous sex that hadn’t allowed me to disappear. I wasn’t sure I liked it; I was as awkward as a teenager.
After I was dressed, the boys said the nearest cabs were three blocks away. It took me twenty minutes to get to the main street, because as soon as I was on the sidewalk, I logged onto Scruff on my phone. I sighed with relief when finally a cab turned the corner with its overhead light on. I flagged it, and on the drive home, chatted on my phone with a nineteen-year-old kid who told me arrogance was sexy.
Bedtime was about two a.m. that night, so the next morning I was profoundly tired. At eight a.m., it was only five a.m. on West Coast time. Leica and Rolland texted to ask if I was ready to walk over with them. We’d told Dad we’d be over first thing in the morning. I threw on fresh clothes, brushed my teeth, and washed the smell of dick out of my beard.
On our walk to the hospital, I ate a small bag of trail mix and an apple. Crossing the pavement, I was wading into guilt for having snuck out to cruise the night before my father had his leg cut off. I tried to give myself a break because I was doing a decent job, considering. My thoughts were like lightning flashing between two metal poles.
“Did you sleep well?” Leica asked.
“I had trouble falling asleep,” I said. “Jetlag, I guess. So I got less than six hours.”
Dad was still fast asleep when we arrived, his breakfast tray untouched. When he woke, he was only a bit calmer. He’d barely slept, he said. Every time he heard a noise in the hall he thought they were coming to get him for surgery. When the nurse arrived to drain his extended stomach, he was panicked that it was time for surgery, then heartsick that it wasn’t.
Before surgery, Dad had had nothing to eat, but they gave him applesauce in the evening when it was clear he wasn’t going in. Then, on the second day, he also couldn’t eat before surgery.
The morning and afternoon were about as stressful as you might imagine if you were waiting for someone to show up to take your father to surgery where they would cut off his leg, a procedure he might not survive. I took a few short walks in the hallway to have a break from the intensity of trying to be optimistic when at every moment I was a wreck of nerves. My stomach hurt, my hands shook, I had waves of heat rolling through me.
During our efforts that morning to comfort him, my father said, “What kind of man am I going to be if I can’t walk?”
“You can’t walk now, Dad,” Leica said gently. “This way you won’t have any pain.”
“You worked with Gerry for years,” I added. “He only had one leg. You didn’t think anything of it.” His old friend Gerry had lost his leg to a train when he was twelve, trying to jump it. “This is the same thing, Dad.”
“Yeah, but he had a prosthetic. He could walk.”
Dad’s amputation would be high above the knee. Given how fragile he was, the doctors agreed that it wouldn’t be wise to try to save any of the leg, because nobody wanted to see him undergo a second surgery if the first wasn’t a cure. They wanted to eliminate as many risks as possible at one go because Dad didn’t have a lot of chances left.
“It’s better to be alive without a leg,” Leica said, “than dead with both of them.”
I laughed. “That’s true.”
“I guess you make a good point,” my father added.
Later in the afternoon, Dad rearranged the hospital sheet and yellow crocheted blanket a number of times, throwing them forward and back. I sat at the end of his bed on his left side by the bad leg, which I hadn’t yet seen. He’d always had it covered when I was there. Eventually, Dad took the blankets off of it completely. There was a quality to his fussing that didn’t suit him, which puzzled me.
What was he doing? It seemed he wanted to show his leg to me. At first I wondered if it was to gross me out—to make me uncomfortable—though there wasn’t much benefit for him in that. Maybe it was a way to show the leg to us before it was removed, like a last viewing—here I am, still whole—and to have company in this situation, maybe to put an end to the secrecy; it was something we talked about but never witnessed. Or maybe it was from some form of pride, so I’d believe him that it really was as god-awful as all that. This time he wasn’t just faking it. The obvious never occurred to me, that his leg hurt so intensely it couldn’t even support the weight of the fabric. After so many visits, either he finally felt comfortable enough with us to reveal the wounds, or the pain was so great that he no longer cared.
The sight of that leg was unimaginable. The chief issue was an effect of the diabetes and his poor circulation, which prevented sufficient blood from reaching his extremities. His heart couldn’t pump that far, so the sores on his body wouldn’t heal. Instead, they rotted. I had anticipated that they’d be open wounds, moist, red, and concave, but they looked like cavities filled with dirt. The largest sore on his foot was about an inch and a half in diameter and seemed topped up with brown dirt that had dried and crackled. There was nothing in that cavity that looked like it could come from a human. It was the absolute dried rot of the dead pockmarking a living leg. I don’t know exactly what the cavities were filled with—blood, flesh, pus; it’s the kind of thing I’m better off not knowing—but it looked like some kid had dug out a number of holes and filled them up with mud from the garden. Then forgot to water them.
Finally, in the early evening, they came for him. Leica and I both said goodbye trying to strike the right casual tone to diminish his anxiety inflected with You know I love you. They wheeled his entire bed out to bring him to the ER. Every nurse on the floor came into the hall to touch his arm or his shoulder or to grip his hand. Everyone wished him luck with such warmth and care I thought I might sob with gratitude. In those gestures from the men and women nurses alike, the way they looked at him, I could see that Dad had charmed them all.
We followed the bed down the hall toward the first set of doors. When his nurse from the day shift realized what was happening, she charged from the other end of the hallway and flew through the doors behind us to catch him before he was taken through to surgery.
“God bless you, Mike,” she said, placing her hand on his arm. “We’ll see you again. You come back to our floor,” which so clearly meant, You survive this and you’ll be back to recuperate.
It struck me even more forcefully that this might really be it, the last look at my father alive. I whipped out my phone as they were wheeling him toward the second set of doors to the prep room and recorded the bed receding down the hallway and through the doors. Because the orderly pushed the bed from behind, the camera couldn’t catch any of my father in it, except for a lump at the far end. His foot under the sheet.
It was so late in the evening, there was nothing much to do but wait. The hospital had a special holding area near the surgery with comfy leather chairs and couches, a TV mounted on a pillar, and magazines on every side table. Leica still had snacks we hadn’t finished that afternoon. We ate cashews and sucked on skinny straws in apple juice boxes. We watched terrible TV with the sound turned off. We could have gone to a movie, because he was expected to be in there for hours, but I suspect Leica and Rolland didn’t want to leave the waiting area for the same reason I didn’t, which none of us wanted to say—we anticipated that a doctor would come out soon to say that Dad didn’t make it.
I’d never waited for anyone during surgery before. There was an odd sense of anticipation and also relief, my first taste of it since my visits to Dad began. I had nothing to do. I didn’t have to respond to any requests, invent something to talk about, try not to drag his mood down by crying in front of him. I neither had to think nor pretend. My body sank into the chair and refused to move for hours.
There wasn’t a soul in the surgery area with us. Hours passed before a man in lime green scrubs walked by, which surprised us. The halls had been so quiet. Leica turned in her chair to watch him as he passed. We all watched him.
When the door clicked shut behind him, Leica asked, “Do you think that’s for Dad?”
Rolland and I shrugged.
“Don’t know, Leica,” he said.
“They’re taking a long time. I wonder if there’s complications.”
My brother-in-law said we’d find out soon.
There was a pause then. Leica and I looked at each other. Then time moved us along again and another hour passed.
As those first hours went by, before the guy in scrubs came through, we’d grown more optimistic, because no news was good news. That much seemed clear to us. But after that Medical Staff Only door clicked shut, at about the four-hour mark—the surgery was longer than any of us had expected—we all became more sceptical. Each minute seemed to confirm that there were complications.
Leica turned to me and said she was starting to get worried.
“I have been for an hour,” I said.
“Me too,” she answered.
None of us had thought to ask how long the surgery would be. Guessing how long it would take to remove a man’s leg was pretty much the epitome of bizarre.
Leica and I agreed if this was just another step down in his decline, if he was going to have to suffer like this again anytime soon, we hoped he’d die peacefully on the table. He’d be unconscious. It was a great death, compared to those that he’d near-missed.
Dad had been admitted to the hospital a couple years before and put into an induced coma to prevent him from pulling the breathing tube out of his throat. When the doctor called to tell me this, I said that Dad had a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) form, which he’d signed from his previous stay in the hospital. Leica would know where it was, but she was intentionally off-grid in Mexico, to force herself to get some rest.
“When she’s back,” the doctor said, “she can bring that in, and we’ll proceed according to those documents.” A polite way of saying my father would be removed from the breathing tube and die. The next day, my phone rang with a call from my father’s number. I suspected it was his girlfriend Rose or his brother calling to tell me the news.
“Hey, kid,” my father said. It was his voice, a little more gravelly from the effects of the two days of breathing tube. I felt such a thrill hearing his voice, such a jolt, it was like the scene in The Matrix where something has readjusted, blip-bam, where everything in the room seems the same but you sense that nothing is. That moment of dread, which disappeared like dust blown off a dinner plate, made it clear beyond and beneath and above every bit of grief he had caused me that I loved him. The feeling was a surprise, especially the unmistakable clarity of it.
When the doctor finally came out of surgery in his blue scrubs, a small cap on his head like in the movies, with a smile on his face, I felt the same sort of rush as I had when I heard my father’s voice on the phone. Equal parts relief and disbelief.
“He’s doing fine,” the doctor said. “He did a great job in surgery. There were no complications. His heart was steady and stable. So was his breathing. We couldn’t have asked for a better result.”
“That’s a surprise,” I said.
“It was a surprise to us too, frankly. It didn’t look good, the odds were poor. But,” he emphasized, “his heart was steady through the whole procedure. It was excellent. He’s a tough bugger. That heart refuses to quit.”
The doctor told us that Dad would be out cold until noon or later because of the anaesthesia and the trauma to his body, so Leica and Rolland drove home that night. They wanted to sleep in their own bed after such a stressful two days. Rolland said he’d be fine to do an hour behind the wheel.
I logged into my Grindr account before I’d even left the hospital, but once at the Rotary Club hotel, exhaustion managed to convince me to go straight to bed.
The next morning I woke early. I always woke early, regardless of how long I did or didn’t sleep. It was only eight a.m. I immediately logged into chat rooms and Grindr. I ate another apple and granola bar. I chatted and masturbated for hours and didn’t leave my bed that morning.
Around noon, my sister texted to say she was at the hospital already. Where was I?
“Just getting motivated,” I replied. “Didn’t sleep well.”
I left the hotel room without showering, in a rush, feeling like shit. My father was waking up from surgery, and I’d spent the morning in bed cruising for sex. I’d been simultaneously looking obsessively and trying hard not to follow through.
Walking across the parking lot in the crisp fall air and the sunshine, it seemed so obvious that I could have easily been there cruising online and watching over Dad while he slept. But the trick with being in a cruising mode is that you just keep thinking you’re about to quit. You’re going to turn it off and be responsible at any moment. Compulsive minutes do their tricky thing of turning liquid and pouring into hours.
When I phoned my best friend on the walk over to tell him what an ass I’d been, Colin said, “You’re having a really hard time, Michael. Don’t beat yourself up. These are extraordinary circumstances. You get to be stressed. You have every right. Just be mindful to take care of yourself within that.”
“These are extraordinary circumstances,” I repeated slowly.
I had barely enough brainpower to think, but I found comfort in being given permission to be overwhelmed.
Dad had a private room on a new floor for post-operative patients. He was asleep when I arrived; he hadn’t woken at all yet—thank god, I thought. Leica didn’t seem pleased that I was late, but I gave her a weak explanation that I was exhausted and couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. And I had three-hour jetlag, so noon was only nine a.m. All true and not true. Leica softened. Rolland didn’t say a thing.
Dad’s truncated leg was moving in his sleep, raising the sheets. About the size of a football or a fat loaf of bread, the leg looked as though it had been dropped through a hole in the mattress. It was clown-like, really. A little circus freak in the bed doing a routine under the covers.
The three of us clustered toward the end of his bed, speaking in whispers to pretend we were distracting ourselves from the obvious. But we were all staring. I felt like a sick fuck, but it was so damn fascinating. We watched the stump move like an animated watermelon rising and falling under the bed sheets. Had he been lifting his whole leg, his foot would have been four feet up in the air. But what remained was light, obviously.
The stub was unpredictable. Within thirty seconds, it went up and down, up and partway down, up again. Down again. Partway up, and it held there, then it bobbed, dipped, and rose straight up, pointing toward the ceiling. Then it dropped again. For an hour, the stump teased us under the blankets, so we couldn’t forget it was there. And what was missing.
Dad woke up groggily, slowly, his eyes peeling apart like those of a newborn unaccustomed to the light. It was close to one in the afternoon. When his eyes looked open enough that we were sure he was awake, we said hello. It took another five minutes before he said hello back.
We told him how happy we were to see him, how well the doctors said he did, how he was on the other side of this, and how relieved we were. For the first time in my life, I said how proud I was of him. “You did a great job, Dad,” I added. “You were super brave.”
He blinked, looked at the wall, then back at me, and blinked again.
“Are there any ice chips?” he asked.
A nurse came in to check on him and was pleased he was awake. She told him to let her know if he felt anything. He shouldn’t feel anything at all, so if he did, they’d give him a new dose of meds.
As the hour progressed, Dad grew a bit more restless. He winced from time to time, so that we asked if he was in pain.
“No,” he said.
“Are you sure?” we asked. “The nurses said to let them know if you feel anything.”
He looked at the table and asked, “What’s for lunch? Did they bring me lunch?”
“Are you hungry?” my sister asked, rolling the side table over to the bed.
“I haven’t eaten in two days,” Dad said.
“Lunch is still here.” Leica lifted the lid from the plate. “There’s soup.”
“What kind?”
“Split pea,” Leica answered.
“I’ll eat it,” he said.
Somewhere midway through his meal, Dad began to wince again. He denied being in pain and seemed irritated to have been asked. He wanted us to stop fussing. But as we talked with him after lunch, he continued to wince and pull in air. Unmistakeable pain.
Yes, he admitted, he had some pain, but it wasn’t that bad.
Rolland went to talk to the nurse immediately. When he came back, he reported that they said they’d get right on it.
When Gina the nurse arrived—young, efficient, with long blonde hair—she apologized. “His file is about a foot thick,” she said, gesturing with her hands. She spoke rapidly, like someone was pressing her fast-forward button. “I have to go through all of that before I can prescribe anything. We have to know what he’s been on to make sure we get it right. I wanted to let you know I’m working on it, but it’s going to take a while. I need you to be patient, Mr Smith, okay? We’ll get you fixed up soon.”
We thanked her.
“All new patients on a floor have to have their files reviewed when they arrive on that floor. We haven’t seen him before. He was on three? So now he’s arrived on four we have to go through all of his history again. We don’t want to make a mistake, because Mike’s got enough to deal with already, don’t you, Mike? Okay, I’ll see you soon. As soon as I can.”
She left, springing out the door in white running shoes.
Within the next twenty minutes, Dad’s pain intensified. He was agitated and sighing, gripping the handrails of the bed and breathing through his teeth. Each minute was worse, until he was crazed with pain.
His eyes pooled with tears. “I thought the pain would be gone,” he choked out bitterly, desperately. “They took my leg, but the pain is still here.” He looked around the room, as though beside himself to find someone to blame.
“Dad, the pain is temporary,” Leica said.
“But it’s still here.”
“It’ll pass,” I said. “Breathe through it.”
Leica stepped to the side of the bed and took his hand. “They can get it under control. They’ll get it under control, but you have to let them know as soon as you feel it.”
“It didn’t hurt before.”
“Not pain, Dad,” I said. “Anything. If you can feel anything, if you can even feel it a little, you’re to let them know.”
“I don’t want to disturb anyone,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“They’re busy.”
“Dad, that’s their job. They’re paid to give you medication. They’re paid to make sure you aren’t in pain. That is their job.”
He looked toward the door, then right past me, outside, toward the sky. I couldn’t tell if he didn’t believe me or if he was trying to.
I took another tack. “Managing your pain is one of their first priorities. It’s more important than nearly everything else they’re doing.”
He screwed up his face. “I know,” he said, “but I don’t want to disturb anyone.”
Like a bead of dish soap in greasy water, forty years of our relationship cleared.
My father was so self-effacing, he couldn’t imagine someone cared enough to respond to his agony. He would rather have suffered than push a button to make a request. If he couldn’t look after his own intense pain for fear of disrupting the person paid to do it, how could he have done any better by us? As my sister later said succinctly, “Dad didn’t think he deserved to love us.” He hadn’t failed me because he didn’t care. He’d failed me, that was undeniable—god knows my sister and I could take a very long time counting the ways—but not for any lack of love.
Dad looked around the room without really seeing anything. His eyes weren’t settling but roamed like those of a madman trying to look beyond the walls of a cell. He began to moan as the pain washed through him, and his eyes rolled back. His sounds were animal, like a bull moose baying beside the semi that struck it. The pain washed into his leg and then, briefly, receded. It had its own complicated rhythm, so that when I thought I could anticipate the next cringe it hesitated, then began again in earnest.
For the first few minutes, I did nothing. Leica and I had visited with Dad dozens of times after my mother moved us out, and all he could do was sob. In jean shorts, in his work clothes, at the stove, at the kitchen table, on the couch, at the sink peeling potatoes, standing in front of the picture window, in the driver’s seat of his Ford half-ton. That first year or two, Dad wept at least once every visit he had with us. Leica and I would check in with each other before visiting to see if the other had heard from him recently, to find out how bad he was so we could either brace ourselves or choose to wait it out until he was a bit more solid. The crying jags slowly tapered off but were unpredictable—sometimes he’d be fine, and if I left quickly, I could get out of his apartment before the tears started. Often his face would crumple the moment I had my jacket on. The trick was to sound as upbeat as possible, just at the end, and scoot out with little fanfare, emanating optimism, avoiding long goodbyes or tenderness, pretending I didn’t see the tears in his eyes.
He’d been chronically depressed. The drinking didn’t help. The one time we finally talked him into going to a psychiatrist, the therapist told him he could choose to not dwell on my mother, and Dad reached across the desk and put his hand over the therapist’s throat, telling him nobody could ask him to forget her. He told us that story to prove his right to be disgusted with the man.
In all the years when I was too young to know what to do, too dumbfounded by the display of his weeping, too locked into the mode of relating to him that we’d established, I never once hugged him. Through all his terrors of abandonment, I never once gestured with anything more than talk. It never even occurred to me until writing this memoir that giving my weeping father a hug all those years ago might have been a smart idea. Physical comfort was not part of our vocabulary. We never touched, except occasionally when saying goodbye in the years since I’d left Cornwall for university, or when he’d been a playful bully when I was a kid, twisting my arm or thumb wrestling.
In that moment in the hospital something rose out of me, something uncommon, something new. I could hear the situation calling for me to do something. I didn’t have a problem getting naked for a room of 400 people or wearing a skirt while walking down a busy street, but I had to convince myself I had permission to hold my father’s hand. I talked myself through it. Yes, you are allowed to do this. Your father lost his leg and this pain is exceptional and you can be the person you want to be and step forward, right foot, left foot, right foot, stand next to him, put your fingers around his, and rest his palm in your own.
So when I moved my chair closer to the bed and took Dad’s hand in mine and told him to squeeze it—a Herculean effort, just realizing that I could do this—the act felt like nothing short of a stroke of genius. I coached him through the pain for a slow half hour. “Breathe, Dad,” I said as his body clenched. He practically lifted clear off the bed. “Relax, let it go, let it pass, don’t fight it, let the pain roll through you and out.” I repeated that mantra over and again. Sometimes he squeezed my hand, sometimes he let it go. Leica, Rolland, and I went in cycles of trying this and that to see if anything would make it easier to bear the pain. Nothing did. But making the effort was necessary to fill the time until the medication came.
When Dad’s cries began to interfere with his ability to catch his breath, Leica raced to the nurse’s station. She returned, saying they’d be coming soon, they were moving as fast as they could.
When Dad released my hand again, Leica approached the bed. She noticed the drained look on my face, so I took the opportunity to step out too. I walked up the hall, my arms and legs vibrating. A kind of weeping was coming through my body, pouring out my fingers. I passed the end of the hall and into the small lounge with a television. There was a view of the parking lot outside, the Gatineau Hills in the distance. The sunlight was fall light, with an afternoon intensity in the yellow leaves of the trees. The room was dim. The furniture was cheap vinyl.
I sat in a chair, buried my face in my hands, and allowed myself to release. I freaked the fuck out, wept, heaved, gnashed teeth, pulled at my face, shook, and drooled snot down my upper lip.
That afternoon I would try to describe on the phone to Colin how intense this experience was, to encapsulate for myself the nature of the intensity. “It’s real-life horror,” I would tell him. “This is what horror is. Like … filmic horror. This is what gore films are trying to describe.”
Dad was a Frankenstein, his leg making clear the freakishness of the body, the unbelievableness of surgery, of cutting open a person’s skin and sawing parts off and sewing up the wound that the person simply had to endure. Our vulnerability is freakish. My father’s stump leg was the blackest of jokes, ridiculous, bathetic, terrifying. I hadn’t been able to stop watching it. I couldn’t stop imagining the rest of the leg in an incinerator, turning to ash. The meat of it, disembodied. Its density. Its weight. The white bone and all that red interior, sliced from his body, the end of his stump sewn up with skin strategically left over. And through all of that torture, there was nothing on god’s green earth that I could do to help. Except hope.
When I walked back into the room, Dad lay on his left side, holding the bedrails. My brother-in-law sat behind him on the bed. I marvelled at Rolland’s hand rubbing up and down my father’s back.
We don’t touch like this, I thought, envious.
Soon after I returned, the nurse arrived with medication. It took another twenty minutes or so before Dad’s pain dissipated. He slept for the rest of that day, so Leica and Rolland went home just before suppertime. They both had to work the next day. Always looking out for me, Leica had driven up in Dad’s Pontiac. They left it for me so I’d have a vehicle in the city.
I hadn’t made plans to see Ottawa friends because I knew I wouldn’t be good company, and none of them were close enough that it was fair for me to be miserable or sloppy with them. I wouldn’t normally call them in a crisis, I reasoned, so why would I rely on them now? It was stupid thinking—friends only become better friends when you trust them. Given my state of mind, I didn’t have the wherewithal to risk it.
When I’d had a moment of downtime, I’d called one or two people in Vancouver, but what do you say when you don’t even know what you’re feeling? I’d check in with a new report on what had happened that day.
“This is overwhelming,” I’d say. “It’s so big I don’t know what I’m doing.” I’d zombie-talk my way through feelings. But beneath the little I could articulate, a panic trembled within me, foreign, intangible. It was like standing on a wooden bridge and feeling the tremor of the river underneath that you can’t see but know to be there. When I ran out of ways to say that I didn’t know what to say, I hung up the phone and logged into Grindr. If I was in my hotel room, I picked up the computer. Sometimes when friends phoned, I didn’t answer because saying the same dumb things felt worse than being alone in it. To be conscious or articulate was too much.
Later that particular afternoon, while I mindlessly chatted online, Don texted me. “How’s your Dad doing? How are you?” he asked, which was likely the sweetest gesture of my cruising life. I gave him an honest answer—that it was a new kind of nightmare. I don’t recall his reply, except that it was caring.
I asked how he and Adam were and Don answered they were great. “Adam had a great time,” Don wrote. “So I owe you some thanks. You’re a great guy.” I wanted to marry them both instantly.
After we said our goodbyes, I realized that by all accounts, my night with them had been a success. I’d gone cruising when I could have been sleeping, but within that experience I’d been forthright about my emotional life and it had served me well. These guys were respectful. Don’t ruin it, I told myself. Let that hookup be enough. But immediately I went back online.
I desperately tried not to follow through, not to act out, not to bareback, not to contract HIV, not to confirm my sense of ironic fatalism that said while visiting my dying father would be a classic time to get infected, a perfect storm.
Nobody was biting that afternoon—I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to come to the hotel and everyone I did talk to couldn’t host. I went back to the hospital around dinnertime, but Dad slept for the rest of the evening. I alternated between answering work emails and cruising until it was approaching ten p.m. Still nobody was able to travel. I decided to drive the Pontiac to a bathhouse I’d read about online. Even though the sign on the doors said it was open for another three hours, the bathhouse door was locked shut.
I went back to the hotel, took a shower, and slept.
The next morning, I woke with my alarm, which I’d set for just before nine a.m., visiting hours. I had about five hours of sleep. I ate my last apple and granola bar for breakfast. I skipped a shower—I was less likely to cruise later in the day if I was dirty. I knew these choices put me at risk: my cruising was worse if I didn’t take care of myself. When my blood sugar was low, when I hadn’t slept enough, when I felt poorly about myself, I was more likely to be compulsive.
Dad was awake when I arrived. He was chipper—chipper!— and said, “Well, good day, Sonny-boy,” like I’d dropped in unexpectedly.
I asked how his night was.
“Not great. I was up about midnight and cried all night,” he said, his voice dropping, “but nobody heard me. I didn’t disturb anyone.”
“Fuck, Dad,” I said. “You could have bawled all night and woken the whole floor. Nobody would blame you.”
“It was fine,” he said. “I didn’t want to disturb anyone. It’s not my place. But I’m better this morning.” His face was lit and bright-eyed.
That afternoon Dad was going for dialysis, which meant he’d be gone until suppertime. It took more than four hours to clear out his blood. After our morning visit, we arranged for me to come back at five p.m.
He hadn’t eaten a supper in three days, so I said I’d get him anything he wanted. “Chinese,” he said decisively.
“Okay,” I said, chuckling. “I think I’ll get Chinese.”
“Good man,” Dad said.
After they wheeled him out of the room for dialysis, I returned to the hotel, avoiding the woman at the desk who’d been sweetly asking me how my dad was doing, how I was doing. I didn’t want to say the same things as the morning before and that evening. In my room, I lounged across the bed, plumped two pillows under me, and tried to nap.
I lasted about two minutes.
My gut was wired. My foot jiggled like the tail of a rattlesnake. I wanted to disappear. Try marking, I thought. Do some work. But the mind wanted distraction. It was so speedy, I could barely think. It was like my body was racing so fast in place that I could barely catch a breath.
I picked up the computer and logged onto my cruising websites. I opened two apps on my phone and signed in. Despite reminding myself that I’d cruised already this visit, that I’d been successful with a threesome, that I could leave it at that, within a half hour I invited someone to come over to make out.
After we’d signed off and he was on his way, I began tidying a bit, just throwing dirty clothes into the side pocket of my luggage, picking up my wallet and hiding it among my books. In the midst of this, I realized I couldn’t recall what this guy looked like. Who was coming over?
I checked our message history on my computer and his profile, and sure enough, I’d chatted with so many different guys I’d lost track and invited someone over without a clue what he looked like. He had no stats listed, so I hadn’t any information about his age, weight, or height. Any man could knock on that door, and I wouldn’t know if he was a concierge or a trick.
The man who showed up was a big guy, about twice my weight, white-haired, and a little sweaty and panting either from walking up the flight of stairs or being nervous. He looked like a friendly small-town cop about to retire, from an episode of Murder, She Wrote. Harmless, maybe bumbling, and friendly. He did not fall into my very large category of hot.
I invited him in immediately because I didn’t want anyone to hear me in the hall turning down a trick. As the door closed, he introduced himself as Bill. We shook hands. He took his shoes off.
I didn’t know how to tell him that I wasn’t interested in fooling around. If he left, chances were I’d find myself online all over again. There likely wasn’t enough time to find another guy, and if he left, I’d be alone in my room. I really wanted the distraction.
The table and chairs hadn’t been totally cleared, because after realizing I’d invited a total inconnu over, I had lain on the bed shaking my foot in stressed-out anticipation, so Bill helped himself to the bed. He lay back against the pillows. I sat next to him, looking at the painted cinderblock wall.
We chitchatted about where I had travelled from and how long I was in town. He must have guessed I was here for something medical, because why else would I be staying at the Rotary Club hotel next to the hospital? But he didn’t ask.
He turned on his side, put his arm over my waist, and kissed me. I was not at all interested—the machine of my addiction hadn’t turned on, even that was shut down—so I barely kissed him back. My regular mind talked away in my head trying to figure out how best to vacate this situation. I decided to tell him the whole truth. I explained that my father had lost his leg. I told him that I was sorry he’d come all this way but I wasn’t making good decisions, that I was compulsive because of the stress, and I wasn’t in the mood to fool around. This wasn’t a healthy decision. Then, without warning, I wept.
Bill reached his large arm around my shoulder and pulled me into a hug. “That’s okay,” he said. “You cry all you want. Let it all out.”
With his arm around me, and the stubble from his cheek against the top of my head, I smelled his sweat and laundry soap. His padded palm cupped the back of my head. I could tell I was soaking the pillow and the cotton collar of his shirt, but I surprised myself by weeping as hard as I wanted to. I’m having a real moment, I told myself. Cruising can be fixed by being honest in the moment.
When I’d cried myself out, I apologized to Bill.
“That’s just fine. Sometimes you need a hug, right? You’re having a hard time.” He ran a hand up and down the length of my hip. “You know what you need? Some stress release. A blowjob will help.”
“I don’t think I’m up for it, Bill. I’m sorry.”
“You’ll feel a lot better,” he said, his hand slipping to the inside of my thigh. “Just relax and close your eyes.” His hand pushed gently on my hip, to roll me onto my back.
“I don’t think so, Bill.”
“That’s fine,” he said, his tone acknowledging he knew I wasn’t interested. “You just have to lay there and relax. You don’t have to do anything.”
His left hand undid the button of my jeans, then unzipped them.
Bill and I knew that this is how loneliness works. You don’t care that the man doesn’t find you attractive, because you want the comfort that comes from the heat of his body. You get validation in being able to touch him, regardless of how you managed to arrange it. If you manoeuvre your hands onto his genitals, it’s the warmth from his skin that matters. The transgression of what steps it took to get his pants down is partly the cause of your arousal, and the comfort in that arousal makes your actions justified.
We construct these ethical mind games because our loneliness drives us forward in a desperation so acute we are rendered unfeeling, until the moment the heat of someone else’s skin warms our own, and we can immerse ourselves in the sensuality of their flesh. We are alive in their responses; each sigh they make proves us right, each groan is proof we matter. In the moment.
I knew what Bill was doing, so I let him do it. Closing my eyes and using the discomfort of the micro-aggressive dynamic to arouse me was easier than trying to get him out of the hotel room without hurting his feelings, without invalidating him, without having to negotiate an emotional confrontation or finding the right words, without putting me at risk of simply finding someone else to come over, when I hadn’t the time to do so.
That evening, I was about half an hour late for supper. I’d found a Chinese restaurant not far from the hospital. It was perfect greasy-spoon Canadian-Chinese food.
When I walked in to Dad’s hospital room, I apologized for being late. I lied and said that the take-out had a longer wait than I’d expected.
“No worries,” Dad said. He wasn’t as chipper as in the morning but still surprisingly alert.
When I asked how dialysis was, he said, “I spent the afternoon with my leg. When nobody was there, I touched it. I hadn’t even looked at it yet. Not really. But I touched it all over. Okay. Okay, this is it, I thought.” His tone changed, explaining to me, “This isn’t what’s left of my leg.” His hands gestured to either side of the stump. “This is my leg.”
Dad ate more of his supper than I did, even though I was starving. After three days with barely any food, he nearly licked the paper take-out containers. The visit was relaxed and surprising. Dad was calm, even jovial. He seemed steadier than I’d seen him in all these months. He was recognizable, his face more like his face. On the other side of his surgery, I realized that he’d never been sober for more than a few weeks at best, and here he’d been in the hospital without a drink for eight months.
We didn’t visit for more than a couple hours before Dad was exhausted and wanted to sleep. He’d been up most of the night before. I was leaving early the next morning, so this was our goodbye.
I wish I could say I remember it, but I don’t. We had so many goodbyes in hospital rooms from night to night and visit to visit that I can’t recall this one. It was just another goodbye.