The Fullness of Time

I am walking down the hall in Archbold Hospital on Christmas Day 2010 while the nurse does some kind of procedure on my father that a daughter should not watch. At the end of the hall is a kind of sunroom with a gathering of armchairs. I walked my dead mother down this hall ten years ago in what they call a Geri-chair. She was frail and weak and had to support her head with her hand. She had just come back to life from a near death experience and any kind of light reminded her of the true light. She turned her face toward the sunshine and closed her eyes, trying to get back to where she’d been. “I’m glad you are better,” I had said to her when she’d come out of the coma. “I’m glad you’re glad,” she’d said with bitterness. Later she’d tell me that she hadn’t wanted to come back, but they’d made her do it, for me.

“You are always the one to accompany them through their life or death crises,” Margaret reminds me over the phone when she hears that I am again in the hospital with a parent. And it does seem like a fluke: my mother bleeding out within three days of my returning from Italy as though she had waited for me to get home before she actively started dying. My father’s heart attack the same: his waiting for me to get home from Italy. And now within a day of my most recent arrival we’d both come down with the flu and his flu has gone amok and landed him in the White Hotel.

He is not going to die of the flu, I tell myself. This doesn’t happen. But all the signs are with us.

I knew my mother was going to die the day I realized that all the nurses on duty had been my former students. I’d entered an altered state, an altered place. “Dr. Clough, is that you?” one by one they moved through the ethers, angelic beings more than human, each of them saying to me with a glance: “You planted me in the future that is now your present.”

There was the one whose grandmother died while she was in my writing class and I had encouraged her to write an essay about the death.” She had seen something out the corner of her eye and wanted to catch it and I wanted her to catch it. Some years later she appeared in my life to throw back to me what she had caught. It seemed no accident that Katherine was my mother’s nurse. Here we are, something pulsed between us. She greeted me with a kind of non-surprise.

Maybe it’s not time for my father to die. Katherine still works this floor, these years later, but she no longer seems to recognize me. Have I changed that much in ten years that I am no longer recognizable or is it the light, not shining on us the way it would in different circumstances?

At almost the moment I am convinced that my father will not die this trip, he begins what I’ve heard some people call “sundowning.” It is indeed just after sun down when he begins to tell me that my mother is calling him and it’s time to go. “Come on, “ he urges, twisting to get out of the bed, his I.V. pulling dangerously at his vein, the oxygen tubes slipping from his nostrils. “I’ve got to go!” he says in exactly the voice he would have used when he was thirty and impatient over my mother dawdling or misplacing her purse. He suddenly thinks I am my mother. There is no holding him back, though I do struggle and find a way to press the “call” button for the nurse without letting go of his arm.

The nurse who comes is, however, the kind of ghost from the past that may or may not herald anything. He is a black man named James Ivey, the grandson of Hazel Ivey, my grandmother’s maid…son of Hazel’s daughter Pineapple Ivey and perhaps the very baby grown up that I wanted as my own baby when my sister was born because James was tinier and cuter. Hazel had bought me a black baby doll to represent the little black baby I wanted. Lately that black baby has been coming to me in meditation so it seems significant that the baby suddenly grown up is now here attending to my dying father, if he is indeed dying. People don’t die of the flu.

“Of course he will be fine,” Dr. Westbury says as she makes her evening rounds, “just dehydrated. He’ll go home Sunday, maybe Monday. Go eat some dinner.”

I go out for awhile. I come back to the hospital far later than usual. When the elevator doors open, I find an undertaker with a corpse I believe could be my father. The corpse is under the burgundy velvet blanket the funeral home uses when they whisk bodies into the hearse. My mother once lay under the burgundy velvet blanket. My father will soon lie under the burgundy velvet blanket, I find myself thinking but remind myself that he is fine. The undertaker is the same undertaker who had come for my mother’s body. Rocky, a boy who had been in Margaret’s class in highschool. When he’d come for my mother, he had still seemed a boy in an over-sized undertaker’s suit. I had asked him how on earth he’d come to be an undertaker and he’d answered, “I don’t know. I just fell into it,” as though I’d asked him how he’d come to work at Wal-mart. Now he has grown into the role. He’s beefier and has a goatee. He is a man, not a boy. He looks like he was born to be an undertaker. His eyes meet mine as we change places. I get out of the elevator and he and his corpse climb aboard it. It feels like a sign, but I don’t want to believe in signs, at least not tonight.

My father is sleeping soundly as I climb in the chair beside his bed. This is my second night of sleeping in the chair that won’t quite lay back. I am suddenly excruciatingly tired. I, too, have the flu, I remind myself. Of course I am tired. As I settle into the chair, my father reaches out and pats my arm sweetly. “Do you need anything?” I ask him. He looks at me and communicates something I don’t understand with his smile: “Just you,” he says.

His last words.