My father's death.

The Angry Baker's father is very sick. We learned last month that what was originally diagnosed as Parkinson's Disease is in fact a rare combination of both Parkinson's Disease and amyotropic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's Disease. The ALS is progressing at the expected rate: horribly quickly, and yet too slowly.

I lost my dear father over a decade ago, and so I have been through much of what the Angry Baker is soon to experience. It isn't just my father's gone-ness that hurts. I also had to watch my father change into a different person, lose his intellectual gifts, become incontinent, and experience all the other indignities visited upon the terminally ill. Consequently, I not only lost my papa, I lost my brightest memories of him. When I dream of him now, he is irrational and sick, not the brilliant scientist who once helped me solve an important, tricky problem, nor the gifted teacher who taught me the secret of how to grade on a straight scale. As an adult living far from home, those memories were perhaps more precious to me than the man himself.

My stepmother called me in desperation (and at the behest of social workers) in the middle of a hot, hot summer. I bought a one-way ticket, and arrived at my childhood home the day after I got her call. What I found was, it seemed at the time, too horrible to bear. Papa was wheelchair bound. He was unrecognizable, because he had developed Cushing's syndrome, a side-effect of the massive amounts of steroids he was taking. He was petulant and demanding, and ran my stepmother ragged keeping up with his childish whims. He was also inhospitable and embarrassed. He didn't want me to witness his deterioration.

I can't remember now how long I was there. Was it weeks, or maybe months? My stepmother and I hid inside the house, caring for him when he was awake, turning him when he slept, doing jigsaw puzzles and watching old movies together. Friends and neighbors brought us food. Sometimes we went for a walk around the block when the hospice nurse came, but it was too hot and we were always happy to go back inside.

His hospital bed was in his bedroom, pushed close to the bed that he had shared with my stepmother. We all slept together in that room, so that I could help her change his sheets and turn him in the middle of the night. Like a little girl, I held his hand through the rails of his bed while I slept.

As the days passed, he awoke only for brief periods, and was less cogent every time he awoke. He would ask one of us to read to him, as he had lost his sight a few weeks earlier. Eventually he stopped asking. We stopped feeding him, because he couldn't swallow. Only a day later, he stopped urinating, his lungs filled with fluid that rattled when he breathed, and then early the next morning the rattling stopped. I sat on the bed and watched him for a long time.

I lost (most of) my fear of death that morning as I watched his body turn gray and cool. It was so very natural, I thought. You're born, which is an amazing event, and you die, which is another amazing event. I realized that with good care, which my father was fortunate enough to have, death can be almost beautiful: painless, dignified, and, for those of us who remain, life-affirming. I realized that Dr. Jack Kevorkian is a sick fuck, and that a good physician can help his/her patients die without murdering them. I decided that day to have a child. I realized that religion had nothing left for me. I stopped calling myself an agnostic and became a joyous, unrepentant convert to atheism. I grew up. I didn't think I could live without my papa, but I've managed okay so far.

The Angry Baker returned home yesterday from the first of many trips he will make to help his father die. My dearest love, this is probably the hardest thing you will ever do. But it is also the most wonderful, most important thing you will ever do, and I love you all the more for it.

It would be so easy for you to just stay home and let the nurses do it all. My siblings chose not to share my father's death, and so they carry their memories of him intact. You will never regret going back, even though it means you will never be able to clearly remember your father without also remembering how sick he is now. Your strength and courage, and the love on which that strength is based, take my breath away.

I know your crushing grief, and how keenly you feel your regrets. I hope that you can embrace your grief and find some beauty in your father's death.