The Process

ANNA WILHELM THE PROCESS

A week or two before death, the skin begins to lose circulation and the nail beds and fingertips turn a purple-blue. At least that’s what I’ve read. What I noticed is that his skin got softer with each passing day. It was constantly coated in a layer of oil that felt like beeswax.

For the years running up to Don’s death, all the corners in his house turned to the crumbled dust of abused sheetrock and caved-in door frames. Don was ninety-two years old and his Hoveround, a motorized wheelchair, had run into the edges of every doorway and corner countless times.

Four years before

Three weeks after graduating high school, I moved to Boise, Idaho. Within a month, I was hired to get Don breakfast and lunch and keep the loneliness at bay. His wife, Evelyn, had died in a house-fire a month after 9/11, five years before.

All I knew from Don was that he couldn’t carry her out. What I knew from his children was that she only ever cooked on high (most of their meals were charred), she was a school teacher back when they couldn’t be married and still keep their jobs (it’s why she reached thirty before settling down with a younger man), and she was kind and compassionate and put up with having an obsessive compulsive husband and six children without ever complaining. Don never even said her name.

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I was eighteen and had decided within a month that I would stay with him until the end.

Five Months Before

For the last day, blood had discolored the urine in his catheter to burgundy before even that stopped flowing. A nurse pulled blood clots through catheter tubes, and his body quaked. His skin turned pale and damp with sweat.

The first night, the nurse got me a blow-up mattress. I hoped that if he died from this, it would be with me so none of his kids would have to see it. Six months after I was hired, he told me that he thought of me as another daughter, and I thought of him as a grandfather, more distant than a father but closer than just another patient.

That night, my attempts at sleep were disrupted by cries of “get it off” or “help me hold this,” as he swatted away imaginary bugs or worked on something in his woodshop. He had been hallucinating on and off all day. I was relieved that his make-believe woodworking seemed to be going well. Three years before, he had nearly cut off his thumb under my watch, slicing it from tip to base.

Two Months Before

At noon, I found him with his head hung over the breakfast Andrea, another live in care-giver, had made for him hours before. If his spine hadn’t been fused together at the neck, his chin would be resting against his chest. His fork rattled against his plate, as I set my hand on his shoulder and squeezed.

Every morning, Andrea or I would spend hours

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coaxing him to eat and take his pills. Three hours later and the food would be unfinished. He would expect it to be put in the fridge and would scold us if the food left on his plate was thrown-away.

I glanced at the head of hair that was full four years before. He could no longer spend time working in the woodshop that had turned his shirts and pants into a smattering of soft material and crusty glue patches. Instead, he spent that time lying on the couch, slowly pulling the hair out of the top of his head and inspecting his fingers for debris. He now had a bald patch on the top of his head, a byproduct of OCD with no outlet. I ran my fingers through the hair around it.

“I was beginning to think you’d moved out,” Don said in a voice that had aged without weakening. I heard this nearly every day.

I raised my voice, “You can’t get rid of me that easy, mister.”

We had visited the hospital a half dozen times in the last six months, each time for an infection worse than the one before. He was ninety-two, and I didn’t think he would hit ninety-three. There was nothing he could do to get rid of me.

The rattle of his fork increased while he pushed food onto it, the silence as the fork ascended broken by the occasional bellow of a cow in the pasture. As soon as his mouth was full, his head descended, my hand resting on his shoulder.

One Month Before

The doctors said he had six weeks. He didn’t quite make it five. Once he had been given permission, he died without battle.

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The year before, I had started nannying his greatgrandkids as a second job. Often over his last six months, I brought them to Don’s. The last month, we kept the visits to a minimum, but every time they came, he would sit up straighter and call them by the nicknames he gave them as babies.

Kielty, the eight-year-old he called Kettle, was especially good with him. She let him reach out and tug on her hair just a little too hard and smile up at him like it didn’t hurt. The ever present smell of urine and vinegar didn’t even earn a wrinkle of her nose.

William, the six-year-old he called Billy Boy, would head straight for the toy box. I directed him to Papa Berger and told him to say hello. Eventually, Papa Berger would be a legend for him in the way Evelyn was for Kielty. He would have little mementos, a pocket watch and a lockbox from the woodshop, among other things. There was a little sister on the way that wouldn’t even have that.

Brody, the oldest at twelve and the only greatgrandchild without a nickname (he was the first and thus easier to remember by name), didn’t say a word.

The Week Before

He no longer reacted to his children’s greetings. I sang old hymns I couldn’t remember the words to into the quiet. I couldn’t raise my voice loud enough to hit the proper notes, a shock to anyone who hears me sing around the house and across mostly vacant parking lots.

“Diane doesn’t think he knows who we are,” Kathy, his daughter, told me. She said this in a tone seeking reassurance.

“Does it matter?” I asked. “I think that, even if he

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doesn’t, he knows that the people standing over him love him.” His hand was wrapped around mine, clenched hard enough that I wondered if I would find bruises later.

Kathy tried to smile, but the areas under her eyes were purple and her hands trembled.

I looked out into the cow pasture where a onebedroom house sat, its roof collapsing and the wood turned gray with age. The cows wandered in and out for shelter. There was a time when Don lived there with Evelyn and their six kids. I imagined them all cramped together in one room, overheated, and wondered about the perspective of love.

Three Days Before

“Do you think not being able to sit with him makes me a bad person?” Diane asked.

“You know someone is with him.” I ran my thumb over his farmer’s knuckles, still brown with sun and age spots but smooth.

The summer before, we had decided no one should help him onto his tractor. One day, I found him sitting in the dirt next to it, surrounded by bees that would send him into anaphylaxis if they stung. When I got him back into his Hoveround, he could barely lift his head, but he held onto my hand and said, “So are you gonna help me onto the tractor now?”

Diane interrupted my memory. “I’ll take over awhile,” she said.

I squeezed his hand and got a harsher squeeze in return, “You don’t have to.” In the way that she couldn’t stand to be near him for long, I hated to be away.

She nodded, “Yes, I do.”

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The Morning Of

“It’s time, if you want to say goodbye,” Cheryl, Don’s eldest daughter, said from where she was hovering over me. I had just lain down a couple hours before.

I stood beside Don’s bed and placed my hand on his cool shoulder. He was taking rattling breaths. The gaps between them spaced further and further. It felt like only moments after his last breath that his skin turned to plastic.

After

The day after his funeral, I sat in a classroom full of other students. Some of them had lost someone recently and others had never felt this hollow feeling just below their ribcage, the haze in their mind that forestalled emotion. I couldn’t point either out. It was a classroom full of people going on with their days, and I was one of them.

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