My father’s yahrtzeit and the common-calendar anniversary of his death were both in the last few weeks. On the eve of the anniversary, I attended the last session of a weekly bereavement group at my synagogue. Weeks before, perhaps the second time we’d met, we were asked to think about for what we might want to forgive, or ask forgiveness from, our loved one. I shared some. Not all. Then this morning I saw a call for an essay contest on the subject of mistakes. I likely won’t be submitting, but it inspired me to write, finally, something, about my father’s death…and about the kinds of mistakes that can haunt us, even as greater ones leave us be…

The nurse called me late at night, to tell me that you were close. I had been sick the last few days, and afraid to cause yet more infection, afraid to step inside the hospital walls; I’d sent your son-in-law, my husband, in my stead. He said you were doing as well as he’d seen you, your spirits high, your memory better than in weeks. You’d apparently experienced something called a surge, the body’s last attempt to rally before quitting. I learned about it from a television medical drama, maybe a week later, maybe a month, too late to be of use.

We thought, or at least we hoped, that you’d be moved back to your home of the last many years, for some comfort and familiarity, if anything for your books mainly, the floor-to-ceiling nearly-fire-code-breaking double-stacked and yet still long-decimated collection, reduced each time you’d moved, from house to town home to apartment to assisted living to your one-room domicile of the last 10 years. We hoped you’d be allowed to die among your books, your biographies of labor leaders and socialists, your histories, your mnemonic guides for the chronically memory-impaired.

I arrived just before midnight, and had to search you out. You’d been moved over the weekend from the ICU to a small room on the orthopedics wing, a choice which made no sense to me, except that your initial admission, a month before, had been for a broken leg. But in the time since, you’d aspirated yourself into a case of pneumonia, been sedated and put on a ventilator, invited infection upon infection, and now the orthopedics wing made little to no sense. The enlarged photos I’d put up on the wall in the ICU of your mother, your dad, your children (and your grandchildren, too, hoping upon hope that at some point, you might rouse from your post-ventilation fog and remember them finally)—the photos were crumpled into  a bag. There was nothing of you in the room but you, and you, just barely. It was a room to die in. It was no place to die.

I came to you and held your hand and you looked at me with such sad, pale eyes. I told you I loved you, you tried to mouth the same, you puckered an air-kiss. I said we wished we could have moved you back home, and you looked at me weakly, ironically, an eyebrow raised just slightly. You knew, and wondered how I didn’t.  I did, but didn’t want to say.

I slept in the recliner by your bed, and held your hand intermittently through the night, whenever I realized it had fallen from my grasp.  Early in the morning, I was awakened by the unmistakable strong stench of shit. The nurses were turning you this way and that, cleaning you up, changing your bed. It was standard procedure, and an indignity you’d suffered consistently at the hospital, and even at the nursing home intermittently. I imagined the discomfort you may have been feeling. Yet I did not comfort you. I didn’t realize it might be my last chance to comfort you. I’m sorry. I covered my head in the blanket over me, and protected myself from the smell.

When we both emerged, you were breathing ever so slowly, your eyes closed, your spirit barely there. Within a very few minutes, moments it seemed, your breath slowed to nothing. There was no gasp, no death rattle, just one last exhalation, barely of note. And then you were gone.  There was no smell. There was no discomfort. There was no Daddy.

And then I waited, for nearly seven hours, for the funeral home to come and take you to where others would sit with you instead. I sat with you in death longer than I usually managed to sit with you in life. I brushed your hair off your forehead with my hand. I touched your cold arm. I made the necessary phone calls. I had not yet started truly grieving, nor hitting myself for covering my head in what may have been your last conscious moments. That would come later, over and over and over. For now, for a few hours, for perhaps the first time between us, there was a very long stretch of only quiet, and peace.