The Night My Father Died

Many people have asked over the years why I decided to go into hospice social work. It is often a difficult profession and sometimes acutely painful. In searching my heart for reasons and motivations, I keep returning to my father's death when I was a young woman of twenty-two.

My father was a Merchant Marine Captain during and after World War II. He was gone a lot of the time, and was alone most of his life. But he was the quintessential officer, a ship’s Captain. His whole life evolved around the fact that he was The Captain. This was his personage, his existence, and the source of his strength and also his weaknesses.

My father died alone in a small room at the end of a hall. The whole family was home that night. My mother was asleep in the room next door. I was at the kitchen table playing Monopoly with my husband and my aunt. No one was with my father as he took his last breath. No one knew if he was frightened or in pain, if he struggled, or went gently. It was not from lack of love that my father met his death in heart-numbing isolation. It was simply the culmination of escalating fear and careening ignorance.

My mother had called me months before. “Your father has cancer,” she said. After many months of increasingly unusual behavior, my father had been diagnosed with a large brain tumor. Surgery was performed that afternoon.

The doctors explained that my father’s brain tumor was not a primary cancer, but rather a metastasis from his lungs. The cancer was widespread throughout his body by the time it was discovered. My mother turned to my brother and me and said very simply, “We will not discuss this with your father. We will not say the word ‘cancer’ in his presence. We will go on as if nothing has happened.”

And so we went on as if nothing had happened. Except, of course, for the changes. My father went to daily radiation treatment. We all managed to abstain from
ever using the word cancer in my father’s presence. And my father accommodated us by never using the word cancer in our presence. And so the word was effectively
Eliminated from our world--except for the large sign above the door of the Cancer Center where he went for his daily treatments.

It is impossible to block one word from our vocabulary. Words carry meanings and concepts, and it was the meaning of my father’s illness that we were all colluding to deny. The absence of speaking is silence. And for every word unsaid and every thought unspoken, huge gray slabs of silence were laid between us like the stones in Frost’s “Mending Wall.”

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling out or walling in
And to whom I was like to give offense.
...Something there is that doesn’t love a wall
...That wants it down.
--Robert Frost


Spring came and my father planted roses on the side of the house. He spent long afternoons resting on the couch with my infant daughter cuddled against him. I don’t know what his thoughts were as he whispered into her tiny ears. I don’t know what he wanted me to know or if there was something special he wanted me to remember about him. I don’t know if he was in pain. The silence had won. We were strangers to each other.

My father died on a chilly November night. My mother had called and said to come and bring clothes to stay overnight. She did not say why, and I did not ask. My father was lying in a hospital bed that Mom brought to the house. He was in the last bedroom at the end of the hall. He could not see out the window from the bed. He could not see the roses he had planted. He could see little more than the ceiling and the walls. I’m not sure what he saw that day. His eyes were flashing about, unfocused. He was shaking terribly. He could not talk. I sat at his bedside for a few minutes, holding his hand and trying to find words to say. My mother became very upset and insisted that we leave the room “Your father needs his rest.” Even then, I knew it was a peculiar thing to say. I checked on my father from time to time throughout the afternoon and evening, but I never stayed long at his bedside. If I remained with him for more than a few minutes, my mother would come for me.. “Your father needs his rest.”

About eleven o’clock I lost the Monopoly game and went to check on dad. I remember pausing and listening for his breathing. I didn’t hear him breathing… Or did I? I paused three or four times before I found myself standing in the doorway to his room. His chest didn’t seem to be moving and I still couldn’t hear his breathing. I walked very slowly into the room, watching and listening for any sounds of life. There were none. The silence we had placed between us was thundering. Even the walls were throbbing.

On this site, you will see many stories of triumph over fear and isolation. Stories of people who pass peacefully in the arms of loved ones. Stories of people who share their journeys and who find meaning and resolution at life’s end. But for me, the real impetus for this site and for my life's work came from the death of a man who was not able to do any of these things. Who was not allowed to voice his sorrow, his pain, or his fear to any of us. A man who walked in his path in stony silence and who died alone in a small room at the end of the hall. More than anything else, this is my apology to him.