The Vigil

The air streaming out of the grocery store cooler is dry and cold and bracing. I stand in front of an assortment of premium gourmet ice cream in single-serve cartons with high calorie counts and higher prices.

What flavor to buy for a dying man to coax him into taking a little more nourishment, a few more molecules of fat and sugar wrapped in the dulcet flavorings of Haagen-Dazs? Chocolate? He has quite the sweet tooth. Coffee? He loves his morning coffee. Dulce de Leche? Oh why the hell not? I buy two of each, then drive a few blocks further to a liquor store.

I am waging a war against death, and my pathetic weapons are ice cream, chocolate pudding and German beer.

It has been nearly a week since my eighty-six year old father, already afflicted by dementia and Parksinsons disease, was admitted to the emergency room for the second time in a month with a perfect storm of converging handicaps—untreated diabetes, cardiac arrhythmia, a blood clot in his leg running from hip to knee, a raging bladder infection, and a foot in serious trouble from circulatory problems. Unable to speak articulately for months before this, he was unable to tell anyone the things going wrong in his body this time until they had reached critical mass.

He has now made it more than three days past the phone call from the hospital telling me—as I stood at the counter of a German gift shop buying him some more CDs of folk songs from his native land—that he would probably not live another half hour. This old soldier is tough…but he is still wasting away. He is now in hospice care, a method of care designed to ease suffering rather than aggressively try to change nature’s course. Treating him with something even as simple as an IV line for fluids and nutrition has been complicated by his dementia—he has spent most of the past month in hospital beds with restraints to keep him from tearing the IV lines from his arms. A hospice worker who knows nothing of the man wondered aloud whether he had pulled his IV lines out because he wanted no further treatment to prolong his life. No, I retorted, given that he spent four years as a prisoner of war, three of them working miserably in a French coal mine, I think he was more likely simply trying to escape.

The conundrums are many. Enough pain killers and sedatives to dull the pain in his tortured foot keep him too sleepy to eat enough to regain some lost strength. Intravenous fluids would require readmitting him to a hospital and placing him in restraints again, which must be a horror to him. The difficulty he already has swallowing make it more difficult to get any measurable amounts of food or liquid into his stomach.

And yet…I know I have made small inroads. A half cup of ice cream one day. A half bottle of German beer yesterday, a full twelve-ounce bottle this morning, sucked down through a straw to the accompaniment of German soldier songs on the boom box. I knew I was on to something the day before when I lifted the straw to his lips and he tentatively drew in the golden liquid. Afraid that he might take too much at one time, I pulled the straw away. He tried to speak, and I leaned closer to hear. It was one word. “Again.” Again what, daddy? More beer? Another single word answer. “Beer.” I look into his hazel eyes that still light up sometimes with recognition when he looks at me, and I know I will keep it coming. There is no “bar time” at this place.

I feel helpless to change the larger workings of fate, and so I focus on the smaller things that I can do. A promise to bring some Bitburger beer, an evening ritual from a family reunion in Germany a few years ago. The collection of German songs, which he sometimes taps his foot to or tries to sing along with. I try to remember to wear bright, colorful shirts, and perfume, and long dangling earrings to catch the light. My boyfriend, who speaks a little Deutsch from his time overseas in the Air Force, sat with us and spun a tale of taking my father to Berlin for Oktoberfest. We set up a bird feeder on a shepherd’s hook outside his window, and watched as goldfinches, bright as lemons, came to feed only minutes later.

I’ve brought my old chocolate lab to visit, tossing a bright yellow tennis ball around the hospice room to keep him busy. At one point I searched the room for the ball for another throw, but could not see it anywhere on the floor. It was only when I straightened up that I realized Bandit had placed it on my father’s bed beside his elbow. I don’t think my father knew this at all, but I still patted my retriever on the head in gratitude. “You’re such a good dog,” I told him.

This evening as I leave the nursing home I feel an inevitability settling in, a waning of hope. The odds are long against him.

And yet, as long as he’s still breathing and still smiles at the sound of my voice, I will keep trying to fend off death, one spoonful of ice cream, one Oktoberfest beer at a time.