Scenes from the Death of a Devout Man | Norma Sims Roche
He’d played the organ at 7:30 Mass for as long as most of the other retirees could remember. When the small white man with thick white hair stopped showing up, there was no music for a while. The man’s friends explained, “His heart’s going. He’s 94, after all.” The priest found someone to play the piano, which nobody liked. He promised to keep looking for another organist.
At home, the man grew weaker. Everything he did took more and more effort. The day a neighbor found him still in bed at midday, she called his daughters. His good daughter flew south the next day and took him to the doctor. “Your heart’s going,” the doctor said. “There’s nothing more we can do.”
His daughter set up Hospice care for him at home. The Hospice doctor stopped all the expensive pills: the Lasix, the Plavix, the Vitamin E. “There’s no point to them now,” the doctor said. The man put away his pill organizer with the slots for each day of the week. There was nothing more to remember.
His bad daughter, the one who’d left the Church, flew south to join her sister. They brought their father his favorite foods, but he wouldn’t eat. “I just want to die and be with your mother,” he told them. They asked the priest to come and see him. “God will call you when he’s ready,” the priest said. “He chooses the time, not us.” Then he squeezed the man’s hand and said, “Don’t be afraid.”
The man could no longer stand without help. He was going back to childhood, not only becoming more dependent, but losing his sense of time, waking and sleeping at any time of day or night. When he called, or more often, when they heard him trying to get up by himself, the daughters both jumped out of bed, usually the good one first. Eventually they put a mattress on the floor in his room, and took turns sleeping there, so that each would get at least a few solid hours of sleep.
A Hospice nurse came every other day to take his blood pressure and pulse. “You’re doing a fabulous job,” she told the daughters as she left to see her next patient.
The man tossed and turned and called God’s name, and murmured something that sounded like “my sins, my sins.” The daughters asked the priest to stop by again. They put their father’s hearing aids in, then stepped out of his room, just in case he had something to confess that they shouldn’t hear. After a while, the bad daughter heard the priest’s and her sister’s voice in the living room. The priest greeted her. “I was just telling your sister about our renovation plan for the church,” he said. “I know your father would want to be part of it.” He named a sum of money. Her jaw must have dropped; she wasn’t good at keeping her face blank. But she didn’t want to offend the priest or her sister. “We’ll have to talk about it,” her sister said.
The dying man seemed more and more restless. “Maybe we should leave him alone for a while,” said the good daughter. “I remember when my kids were little, sometimes they wouldn’t go to sleep until we left the room.” They each had a glass of wine and they watched TV, a marathon of M*A*S*H reruns. They didn’t look into his room for five episodes.
The Hospice nurse said it was time for some pain relief. The morphine had to be delivered by the pharmacy. The nurse couldn’t bring it with her. “If word got out that we were carrying that kind of stuff,” she said, “we’d get robbed at every stoplight.” The pharmacy courier called, and said he was on their street, but couldn’t find the house. The bad daughter went outside with her cell phone and stood there, but she was invisible to him, and his red van was invisible to her. A neighbor saw her and came out of his house. He took the phone, and determined that the courier was on a street with the same name in another town.
A friend who was a lay minister came by after Mass to give the man communion. She said to the daughters, “You girls are saints.” No we’re not, they thought. We’re not girls either, thought the bad one. Saints wouldn’t talk about their father in his presence as if he couldn’t hear them, even though he couldn’t. Saints would know when to sit by the bed and hold his hand and when to give him some time alone. And they wouldn’t get his legs tangled up and hurt him when they rolled him over in bed. Saints wouldn’t resent being away from their grandchildren for so long, or wonder how much they could get for the house.
The priest came one more time. He gave the man confession, communion, and the last rites. He absolved the man of his sins without his having to speak. He began the consecration of the host. “Jesus took bread and said to his disciples …” His cell phone rang.
He answered it.
“No, I’m sorry, it hasn’t been scheduled yet. Call the office tomorrow. You’re welcome. Bye.”
He continued the consecration where he’d left off. Then he melted a piece of the host in a spoonful of water so the man could swallow it.
They all waited. It was quiet in the house with just the three of them. On Halloween, the good daughter bought candy and handed it out to the kids that came to the door until it was gone. Between doorbells, they watched their father breathing. Was his breathing pattern more erratic? They weren’t sure. They wanted it to be over, but still hated the thought of his dying on Halloween.
The next morning, the good daughter woke her sister and went to get ready for 7:30 Mass. The bad daughter took her place in her father’s room. She gave him his morphine and recorded it on the chart. Soon he breathed more comfortably, though not easily. The radio was playing organ music, so she turned it up. It was a program of sacred music for All Saints’ Day. As the stately chords filled the room, she saw that her father’s breathing had paused, for longer than she’d seen before. Then he breathed again. Then a really long pause.
The good daughter came in. “I think he’s gone,” said her sister.
She felt for a pulse. “There isn’t one,” she said.
They hugged and wept for joy, as if they’d all been planning an escape and he’d just made it over the border.
Suddenly there were lots of people around. They all talked about the devout man ascending to heaven on wings of organ music on All Saints Day, at just about the time he would have been sitting down to play at 7:30 Mass. Even the bad daughter, the atheist, repeated that story. She didn’t believe such stories literally, but she could see why people didn’t want to live without them. She wanted to remember what she’d seen of death, as unpleasant as it was, because it was real, and because it was what she’d have to do some day, but rituals swirled around her, words designed from the beginning of civilization to make her forget, so she did.