The Vanishing

My dad is dead. He's been physically dead since 9:30pm on April 6, 2020.  He died of Covid19 in the nursing home he had been in since October 16, 2019.  It was not the end I wanted for him, not the end he ever imagined.

While he physically died in April, I can say that he had been disappearing for a few years before that.  The father I knew began to fade and be replaced by a man who didn't make sense, became more and more unhappy, became unable to drive safely, work on cars with sense, began to fall for no real reason.  His ability to communicate constricted to a litany of complaints and paranoia.

It was hard to be around him and yet we had to do it nearly every day as he needed the grocery store, a doctor's appointment, the bank. Just keeping him feeling as in control of his life as possible after he wrecked his car in late 2016 and we had to find a way to make sure he never drove again.

I can't go through the litany of all the things, events, and moments that led to him being placed, against his will, in that nursing home.  I've done it in other, more private places.

What I will record here is that my father didn't die as much as he vanished.  First he faded and grew transparent in the world, then he faded more in the SNF, and finally, when Covid barred us from the SNF he just drifted away to a place I can never visit. 

I have to remind myself frequently that he is dead, not just sitting in his wheelchair in F3A, Greenbank Wing of Brandywine Nursing and Rehab on Greenbank Road in Wilmington, DE. He died in his room, alone. He was removed by our funeral director and cremated. I never saw him.

In a "normal" death there are rituals. We attend our loved ones as they die, we hold their hands, we stroke their hair. After they die, we wash their bodies, hand them over to the funeral home.  We have funerals, wakes, gatherings. We mourn in a collective, supporting each other and grieving together. There is a scattering of ashes, a burial, a stone, flowers.

In this, there is none of that. We were not allowed to be with him as he died. Didn't view his body. There was no funeral, no gathering, no wake, nothing.  A couple of weeks after his death we went to the funeral home to sign paperwork and pick up his ashes.  A quick drive home and now he is in my guest bedroom, waiting.

And so we wait. We wait for the pandemic to pass, though it feels like that is never going to happen. Should it pass and we can finally gather, he will be released into the Brandywine River, where he once fished, as he requested.  Further on we will have a memorial stone placed in the family cemetery in VA, but that is a long way off.  We sit in suspension, in the vanishing.