Part 4 (Friday night): Listening to Cheyne-Stokes Breathing on a ‘Project Nursery’-brand Baby Monitor

Apparently, Winston Churchill was best friends with a racist named Frederick Lindemann who allowed Indian people to die like unnecessary crops. On the other hand, Churchill uttered sentences like “if you’re going through hell, keep going,” and “if you see a Nazi, punch him in the balls as hard as you can.” While he may have been dreadful with Asiatic policy, his tenacious-sounding quotes have been keeping me from collapsing in my darkest hour. I don’t know what kind of society you need to grow up in to internalize strength like that, but today I have figured out strength for the first time.

When I was going through my divorce, I thought I felt legitimate sadness for the first time. I felt the kind of sadness that leaves you heartbroken and bed ridden. I looked at all my past sadness with bemused pity: girl, you have never known heartbreak. You have never known loneliness. You have never known sobbing withdrawal from a person whose presence you are addicted to and whose friendship you have failed. I lost 20 lbs. I laid in bed shaking on Christmas Eve. I thought I would die of heartbreak. I had failed at love and I was gutted.

I was being a big fucking baby.

I give divorce it’s credit for being a burn-your-world-down kind of pain, but have you ever helped your favorite-and-only father die? Hold on to your back teeth. Buckle up, Allison, because the only thing that will help you now is Winston Churchill quotes and the ability to imagine yourself as a war nurse at all times to keep your shit together. In order to keep my shit together I literally had to keep imagining way-worse shit.

What if you were trying to deal with this in 1919? What if your entire family was dying of dysentery on the Oregon Trail? What if you had to do this in a country that didn’t have tender and knowledgeable hospice nurses putting in catheters for you? What if you didn’t have liquid morphine? You would clench your jaw and get to work.

It is hard to stay sharp. Mom is tired. She doesn’t want me to accidentally kill him with Morphine because she still needs to have the retirement in hand before she can actually let go. I have come to the conclusion that it is easier to focus on paperwork than it is to admit that you are objectively terrified to let go of the man you’ve been in love with since you were 15 years old. I do not blame her at all. My goal, however, is to keep my dad from the degenerative agony he is in.

He was coherent when he woke up, and there was something kind of hopeful about it. We had planned to put him on the bed hospice set up in the downstairs sun room. He will have a view of birds! His land! It’s sunny and bright in there! When his favorite cousin comes (sorry other cousins) they will have pretty chairs to sit on.

I heard him calling to me in the early afternoon. He was shaking uncontrollably from pain and he was freezing.

“I’m really really cold,” he told me. He was shivering. I think the word “shivering” is overused. It wasn’t “a shiver,” it was a series of vicious muscle spasms. It was a full on, Babylon Berlin style seizing breakdown. I piled blankets on him. Mom was, for reasons of full panic and sleep deprived insanity, mowing the lawn.

I gave him Morphine because he hadn’t had any that day. I felt like a cat waiting for a bird while I watched him trying to do anything I can to make him not in pain.

Mom was downstairs, in sleep deprived insanity, vacuuming for guests.

He got up to go to the bathroom after a couple of hours and he sounded like Darth Vader. I called called hospice back to put a catheter in. Again, monstrous amounts of pain. On a scale of 1–10, he was a 9. He was horrible. I turned back into a pain-management cat, ready to pounce. Everyone I know called 4 times and needed updates and logistical explanations. I was proud they were looking to me, Mister Manager, who was also helping mom and dad.

Kristen came over, and magically, she tackled the disastrously messy house.

I walked outside for a minute and started crying like a lunatic on the phone to Mike. Kristen whisked me away to Costco for one of the best vacations of my actual life. I hadn’t eaten anything and they had samples of bread and capri suns. I bought food and helped an old lady put a TravelPro suitcase into her cart.

David came and took over. I could write 400 pages about how incredible David is but doing so would make me cry. I was suddenly relieved by my baby brother: a medical student with a stethoscope and glasses. He was so much better than I am at this. His bedside manner was professional, he knew what to ask, he knew what to look for, we called hospice together to get the medicines fixed, and he knew what I didn’t know I didn’t know.

Then he and Hannah and I talked in the living room about things that weren’t even sad. I love them and I love their marriage.

It is midnight. I am off duty, but I have a baby monitor in my room so I can listen to my dad’s heavy breathing so I can hear my name if he calls.

Until tomorrow.