The most miserable time of my life were the five days in the early spring of 2017 that I spent trying to find a place for my father to die. He was 86 and after three heart attacks, open heart surgery, and carotid artery surgery, his body was just giving out. We’d sold our family home when my mother died, six years earlier, and he’d moved into a nice, comfortable apartment in the same town. Devastated as he was, he didn’t retreat from living, from going out, taking himself for a meal, seeing his friends and family.
But in just a few weeks that year he had gone from still driving and caring for himself to being unable to walk from the living room couch to the bathroom without having to stop and get his breath; then not being to walk on his own at all. My father’s cardiologist had called me and told me he had three to six months left. In a week that was down to three to six weeks.
With no siblings, I was caring for Dad myself, needing to get someone to be with him even if I just wanted to walk from the apartment to the supermarket half a block away, and it was soon very clear he needed more help than I could give him. The hospital social worker assigned from the world-renowned clinic where my father got his medical care insisted that it was too soon to move him into the $3000-a-week hospice connected with the clinic, even though the man in front of her, who would be dead in two weeks, couldn’t stand without help, couldn’t take five steps without gasping for breath. So I began trying to find a place that would take a man with no savings. The absolute nadir of this was a visit to a place where the woman I talked to told me and my Dad, who had somehow managed to make this outing, that we would have to apply for assistance that would take twelve weeks to be decided. It had to have been clear to her that he didn’t have anywhere near that long. Permanently engraved in my mind is her saying, “I already have a number of financial-assistance patients. If Hilton built a hotel, they wouldn’t rent out forty percent of the rooms for free.” I think only the fear that I would be botching the chance to get my father the assistance he needed kept me from looking this foul bitch dead in the eye and saying to her that I had no idea I was dealing with Conrad Hilton.
In the midst of this awfulness came a ray of decency, my father’s nurse practitioner, a woman who had been attentive and concerned about his health in a way his hospital-assigned GP never was. I will never forget the grace and tact she showed when she undertook the impossible task of coming to his apartment one evening to say goodbye to him.
And there was the savior of the story, the VA hospital in the town next to my dad’s. The various horror stories that had cropped up in the news about veteran’s hospitals leapt into my head when a cousin called to tell me she had made inquiries about placing my Dad, who had been in the Navy in the ‘50s. But at that point it was my only option. An hour after I called the hospital, on a Monday after a weekend during which there seemed to be no hope for him to go anywhere, I was touring the facility. The supervisor showing me around said to me, “You have to understand, once we take a veteran, he’s ours, and we will not turn him out and you won’t be billed a dime.” I think I was too stunned by the profound decency of that to do more than nod and mumble my understanding. Two days later, he was in his own sun-filled room and, for the eleven days left him, getting care I can only call heroic. Soldiers in battle live with the uncertainty of whether their comrades will survive. The doctors and nurses in a VA hospice work with the certainty that the people they often form bonds with will die. When, at his graveside, a soldier in uniform handed me a folded flag “on behalf of a grateful nation,” I felt like I should be the one talking gratitude.
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