Requiem for my father: Jack M. Davis, 1924-2012

Last Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2012, at the age of 88, my father expired after a brief illness.

I use the word "expired" because I hate the expressions "passed away" or "passed on," and I cannot bring myself to say "died."  I don't know what it is about that four-letter word that sounds so rude and abrupt.  "Expired," however, cannot be used in everyday conversation without the speaker sounding hopelessly pretentious.

I sat beside my father's sickbed for five days as the life gradually withdrew from his poor wasted body, fragile and small like a baby bird.  Stage four lung cancer ravages the body.  Only two weeks before, he had been walking around, thin, gray, but communicative and alert.  Then, two weeks ago, he couldn't breathe one morning and called 911.  He was kept in the hospital for a couple of days after they drained the fluid from his lung.  Then he was released to come home to hospice care and a 24/7 nurse's aide whose job it was to turn him, deal with his incontinence, feed him, and administer morphine, sedatives, and oxygen.  Thanks to this care, he was comfortable, not in pain or suffering from fear and anxiety.

Dad's doctor, who is also head of the hospice in his area, assured me that he would suffer no pain.  She advocated for him to be released to hospice instead of a nursing home, for which we were all grateful.  A hospital bed was moved into the front room, a cheerful, sunny room with a picture window framing the bright autumn leaves on the trees outside.
He lay there surrounded by his books and music, in his sanctuary, as his visiting nurse put it, where he felt safe and comforted by the familiar.

Once I became used to Dad's dramatically changed appearance, I was able to read to him and listen to music with him.  I also spoke to him with the assumption that he heard and understood.  I was determined that there would be no further assaults on his dignity--having to rely on Depends was bad enough--and as long as he was still alive I was going to speak to him as if he was a human being.  I read Wordsworth and Blake to him, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, one of the first poems he read to me as a child.  Not only did he read it (he always said that poetry was meant to be read aloud) but he also explained why the language was so great.  I read Jabberwocky and the chapter in Alice in which Humpty Dumpty declares that words mean what he wants them to mean, and goes on to define the silly words in Jabberwocky with even more ridiculous definitions.  Dad loved this chapter.  He also loved Pride and Prejudice and Emma (the latter, he said, was Jane Austen's greatest work, containing the deepest moral profundity, but I could never choose between P & P and Emma.)  He read all of Jane Austen to me and all of Dickens.  And lying in a morphine-induced haze, he was still able to move his lips along with poems by Delmore Schwartz as my brother recited them.

I read the first chapter of P &P to him, then closed the book. "The Bingleys move in next door," I heard him mumble.  This, in fact, is the next occurrence in the book.  When his friend Jerry came to visit one day and asked, Jack, do you know who I am? he answered, "An eminent philosopher."  Close enough.  At another time, he had a hallucination of "a woman's leg coming out of Jerry's mouth."

I had wanted to read Proust to him in French and English, but there wasn't time.
Company tired him out quickly.  I had the sense that he was waiting for his son to arrive, and sure enough, he was much more aware after Joe arrived.  He asked for ice cream twice and fed it to himself.  I have no doubt that he knew who we both were.