As my mother lay shucking off her last hours on her deathbed, I approached and tried to offer some comfort. Angrily — furiously! — my father physically chased me off. He wouldn’t even let me come into her bedroom.
He never was especially empathetic to me. I believe he always saw me as a weird little kid — which I was, to a degree. But not allowing me to be with my mother as she lay dying? Not even after she had said she wanted me there?
WTF? How cruel could a man get?
During all these years that have passed since then, I’ve resented him for chasing me away from her. I’ve thought (as I’d often thought in other circumstances) that he hated me because I was a weird little girl. And because of my eccentricity, he didn’t want me around her.
No kidding: decades have passed, and those decades did nothing to offer any insight to what he might have been feeling.
Recently, though, an insight has snuck into my feeble little mind.
He didn’t want me around her because he didn’t want my last memories of her to be utterly hideous. As they would have been, had I lingered by her bedside until she died.
She didn’t even know I was there, so out-of-it was she. So…what reason (other than to make me miserable) for me to linger by her bedside as she slid into death?
Now, in retrospect, I think he didn’t want me there because he didn’t want me to go through watching her die of a ghastly enteric cancer. The vomiting. The horror. The agony. Dear God!
He wasn’t a real articulate guy. It would have been exceptionally difficult for him to have said that to me outright. But now, after year and year and year have passed, it strikes me: what we were looking at was hideous. Truly hideous: a ghastly death by cancer. The best thing that could have happened to me, during that unholy ordeal, was to have been kept away from it.
And that is what he did.
He stood between me and the worst moments of my mother’s dying. And that, God bless him, was probably the kindest thing he ever did for me.