I stood at our usual pickup spot, which was the first bench at "Arrivals." This had been the designated place for airport pickups since I’d left for college so many years ago. I’ve stood here shivering in the December chill and sweltering in the July heat, always looking for the familiar car, my dad’s silhouette, the ancient green parka and the white sun-hat that he wore almost every time he went outside.
I realized with a pang that, in all likelihood, he would never pick me up again. It was my brother I was waiting for on this October morning, my eyes burning from lack of sleep and the tears that threatened.
How many times had I searched for my dad in a crowd? As many times as he’d come to get me, of course. Which was a lot. He’d be here on this morning, but he was waylaid by the only thing that would have ever kept him from being here.
He was dying.
I’d been to Minnesota the previous weekend on a planned trip with my children to see my dad, who had halted treatment of his cancer. During that long weekend we spent as much time together as we could doing everything and nothing: eating, talking, watching football. The Vikings looked good. He read books to my daughter.
He was having trouble with his balance and had gotten a walker, which he was not happy about, and I mean, who would be happy about that? He’d found some tennis balls and asked me to put them on the feet of the walker. I didn’t know if he really needed or if this was something that people did because everyone else has tennis balls on their walker, but I did it. With each part of the task I was hyper aware of his increasingly rapid decline: dragging out Dad’s heavy toolbox (that he could no longer lift) and using a box cutter (which he was no longer steady enough to control) to cut Xs into the balls (I googled this) and fitting them on the walker. I pictured him putting training wheels on my lavender banana-seat Schwinn a million years ago and tried really hard not to cry in front of him.
Every night of that trip I drove the kids back to our hotel (in Dad’s car which he could no longer drive) so they could swim, and each night of that trip I cried the whole way, shoulders heaving and gasping for air while first merging first on to I-94, then to I-280, past the mall, exiting the expressway and into the parking lot, finally wiping my cheeks and taking a huge, shuddering breaths to collect myself before ushering the kids through the crisp October night to the whoosh of the automatic doors to the hotel lobby.
And if he seemed frail that weekend, he was still very much alive and I left most reluctantly to go back to Chicago. My mom urged me to go home, the kids needed to be in school.
“You’re a hour plane ride away,” she’d said. “I’ll call you and you’ll be here when the time comes.”
And now, five days later as I watched for my brother at the first bench at Arrivals it seemed the time had come.
:::
“I’m scared,” I said to my brother Evan as we pulled up in front of my parents’ condo building.
He looked at me, the older sister. I wasn’t sure if it was surprise or sympathy in his expression, Maybe both. He’d told me on the drive from the airport that that morning he’d helped Dad go to the bathroom and get dressed. I couldn’t imagine this—not that he’d helped but that Dad needed this help, had allowed this help to happen. I was almost 100% sure that I wouldn’t be able to help in this way. Would I be able to?
“I need to warn you that he looks awful, especially when he’s asleep,” Evan said.
“Okay,” I whispered.
We sat there for another long second.
“We’ll go in together,” Evan said.
“Okay,” I said again.
And I took a deep breath and opened the car door.
:::
Dad was sleeping when I walked into my parents’ condo. I could see him through the open bedroom door, and he did indeed look awful. He was so thin, his skin a sour, sickly chartreuse, his mouth slack, his hair and eyebrows still missing from chemo. He looked like he could be dead.
My mom and sister were reading in the living room. My sister, Laurel, had been at the condo since the previous day, when my dad had fallen in the bathroom and been unable to get up. Mom didn’t want to be alone.
“We have wine,” my mother said by way of greeting.
:::
When he woke up from his nap, a flurry of activity began. Mom and Laurel rushed to gather up the walker and medicines and whatnot. I wandered into the bedroom.
He opened his eyes, his blue ones finding my green.
“Megan’s here,” he said, a note of suspicion (or resignation?) in his voice. “Don’t the kids have school?”
“Scott has them,” I said lightly. “I came to spend some time with you.”
My mother and Laurel helped him to the bathroom, a process that required both of them to help him lift himself upright, a strap placed around his chest allowed my mom to help him off the bed and into the walker. Laurel helped him to lower his pants and sit down on the toilet. I let all these things happen without helping, feeling a pang of guilt and shame that I didn’t want to, knowing that this is what I was here to do.
At least there was wine.
When Dad was finished in the bathroom and my mom and sister had helped him back in bed, he was alert, eyes open, settled back in bed.
I struggled to find something to say to this man I loved so much, but words failed me completely. I was there because he was dying. What could I say? What should I say? Do I act normally? Cry? Find some idle chitchat?
I let my gaze wander around my parents’ room, to familiar furniture and knickknacks, my mom’s antique dresser, the clay bowl I’d made in middle school that held buttons and change and safety pins. My eyes landed finally on a framed drawing hanging on the wall—a uniquely midwestern winter scene of snow drifts and a barbed wire fence, a lone scrubby tree to one side of center.
I turned back to my dad.
“That drawing,” I began, pointing at the wall.
His eyes followed my gesture and then looked the question: yes?
“Is that where you've buried the money?”
His eyes widened for a half of a second, but then his face broke in to a wide grin, his mouth opened in a silent laugh.
“Because I’ve always wondered where it is,” I finished.
His body shook with laughter and I was so glad I had come.