A well-lived life is flush with cinematic moments, and usually I love feeling like I'm cruising through celluloid. Not this time. I am moving through days like their events are predetermined; I have no control over the script or direction. I wake up, I go through the motions, I remember little, I respond to less, I have nothing to do but wait for the end.
Since understanding what death is, I have always feared losing my father. Just thinking about his eventual death choked me up, even as a child. And I have always known that I would have to go through that final separation at a relatively young age — an unfortunate side effect of being born when he was 47 years old. That doesn't make it easier. It becomes harder now, with time working against us.
I went home last weekend. I spent hours at the nursing home, trying to record as much of my father as my mind and heart would allow. I felt an urgent need to keep him. Then I finally understood why years ago, my mother kept all of my baby teeth in a small box next to the china. The desire to preserve a moment — or who a person is in that moment — becomes frantic when such a time will never repeat itself. Most of our time slips by unrecorded, and even the important events don't always reveal themselves until they're long over. But when we know what's in the future, whether it's a child growing up or someone we love dying, every minute is weighted with significance. You can't help but mentally document each small gesture, each sentence, because it might be the last time it happens.
So last week, while watching my father nap, that instinct supplied me with a fleeting flash of grotesque thought: Could I keep part of him? I'm ashamed and somewhat repulsed to admit that I considered clipping his fingernails or snipping a lock of his cottony hair. My eyes scanned his whole body before I snapped back into the world of non-crazy. (Then, I laughed at knowing that at its morbid best, that would leave me with only the parts that were already dead.) Still, with the naive desperation of a child, I wanted souvenirs of my father. I wanted to sleep in his old shirts, to know what his favorite movie was, to record, record, record.
We still have some time together, and for that I'm grateful. But I keep looking back, recording in the present, and avoiding the inevitable for as long as we can.
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