The Terrible Call
thoughts from the Death Trenches
All day, I have been making The Call.
My mom can’t do it, she can barely speak without crying. She’s neglecting texts and letting the phone ring off the hook or go to voicemail, and I don’t blame her, she has enough on her plate and isn’t sleeping. My dad has stopped being able to use his cell—in fact he has almost entirely stopped speaking. Naturally, the task of Bad News Delivery has fallen to me, and frankly when I took it on, it didn’t even occur to me how horrible a job it was. I’ve been coping with grief by completing tasks and I was eager to have something added to my list, another concrete and practical thing I could do to distract myself from the pain of waiting. Anything to break up the stretch of Dying that leads to Death into manageable, bite-sized pieces of Action.
But now that I’ve made The Call a few times, it’s struck me what a massive job this is: telling people who love my dad that he is officially on hospice, and won’t be getting better. There’s a lot about it that sucks.
I have the power to completely ruin people’s day, week, month. My aunt is on a well deserved and much anticipated vacation, I keep putting off telling her until she comes back because I don’t want to destroy her peace. My cousin is opening a new bar with her husband this weekend, I don’t want to rain on her parade. Baseball season is starting and we have a pro player in the family and I would hate to mess with his starting pitch. Because I am living in a constant state of acute stress and grief and I know how much of an upheaval it is to live with the knowledge my dad is dying, I don’t want to pop the bubbles of blissful ignorance my loved ones are operating in and drag them into misery with me. I want to keep watching them live their lives, eye pressed to the windows of their doll houses, pretending I’m not about to deliver a terrible blow.
Most people I have told are shocked. He hid his symptoms for almost a year before his formal diagnosis, and up until this last week he’s been in staunch denial that he’s dying at all, doing absurd things like buying an ATV he can’t drive and refusing to leave the mountains to be closer to his primacy care physician. It has become increasingly clear to me how scared he was, and for how long. He concealed the severity of what he was experiencing to me and my mom until it was too late— of course his co-workers and friends and family knew even less. They keep telling me how floored they are, how he was “fine” only a few weeks ago, how he was “getting better.” Some of them I tell the truth—he was not fine or getting better, he only told you he was because he was lying to himself, but others I can’t bring myself to be totally honest with. I know, I say, choked up. I’m shocked, too, even though I’m not. I’ve known it in my gut since way back in 2023, when he started complaining to me about his stomach aches but brushing me off whenever I told him to get it checked out by a doctor. I’ve known it was something serious, and that he desperately didn’t want it to be something serious, leading to him treating it like it wasn’t serious, expediting the process. I don’t know why I’m being selectively dishonest—maybe it’s because he was. Or maybe it’s because I’m trying to meet people where they’re at, sit with them in their feelings, mirror them because I’m tired of feeling so alone in my grief.
I assumed that because I’m his daughter people would know whatever they’re going through when they hear the news is not as bad as what I am going through as someone here in the Death Trenches seeing him every day, but I was wrong. It’s been shocking to me how many people have gotten extremely emotional and required me to hold space for them, be strong for them, tell them it’s going to be ok, comfort them while they wail and cry. I don’t feel like I have this in me even though I’m offering it anyway—I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know some of these people personally, I’m not comfortable crying with them, I have nothing to give, so I just sit there saying I’m sorry, I’m sorry, feeling like they must see me as stilted and awkward, a cold, unfeeling daughter approaching death professionally rather than personally. I know they’re probably not thinking about me at all—they’re just bowled over by their own pain, but that hurts, too. I want to be thought of. I want people to consider the fact these are difficult phone calls to make, phone calls I’m making hour after hour, day after day. I want them to consider that I am not ok. I’m tired, I’m hemorrhaging money to pay for his care, I’m worn thin, I’m losing sleep. I can barely hold space for myself to cry—what makes people think I can act as a container for strangers mourning?
Furthermore, they are grieving someone they didn’t know. My dad was an extremely popular and social man, he had a way of making every neighbor and acquaintance and janitor at his job feel like his best buddy. Few of them actually knew him very well—they rush to tell me their impressions of him, share tearful anecdotes. He was always so happy, a contractor he worked with shared. He was always such a happy guy. As someone who truly knew him, not just his extroverted funny-guy persona but the actual man, I feel steamrolled over, erased, silenced. The truth was that he was not always happy— he was a complicated, angry, often hypocritical, deeply anxious, pathologically fearful man. He was also hilarious and sometimes sweet and he loved me very fiercely which did not stop us from butting heads a lot but always made me forgive him, in the end. He was ruled by illogical impulses and he was a terrorizing control freak and hated showing weakness and all of this has contributed to why his death process has been so difficult and stressful for me and my mom. I am grieving every aspect of him—the whole, messy, beautiful ugly person he was, but many people I am calling are only grieving the version of him he performed in their presence. I don’t want to take this away from them, as it’s neither the time or the place. But I also feel forced into a very tight box—surely, my grief as his daughter is bigger, more nuanced, and yet, there seems to be no room for it. It feels inappropriate to admit I am angry at him in moments, that there are feelings of resentment, abandonment, rage. How could I be mad at that Happy Guy?
Strangest of all, many of them won’t accept it. After we get off the phone they send me articles about misdiagnosed late stage liver failure, about miraculous recoveries from Cirrhosis, weird here’s how Bernie can still win! energy facebook posts about how prayer can save livers and how I shouldn’t give up. They insist there’s hope, and that I am giving up too soon. Me, who is there every day helping him hobble down the hallway with his walker, trying to force him to eat, trying to get him to stay awake long enough to meet the notary I hired to come to the house and notarize important documents. Me, the person the nurse pulled aside to gently tell you should really consider hospice—I don’t think it will be long. I know these people are just trying to comfort themselves, maybe even comfort me, but it’s fucking insulting to be treated like I haven’t done my research or am not doing enough. Grief makes people selfish—I know, because I am grieving. But I am aware I am grieving and doing my best to fight the urges I have to curl up and cry in utter overwhelm or throw my hands up in frustration and get short with my mom who doesn’t even understand the difference between a bill and a statement. I know I am not on my best behavior, and I am working actively to not take that out on the people around me. And yet, so many people I’m calling seem unable or unwilling to offer the same grace. I am surrounded in denial, in refusal to look reality in the eye. But the thing about reality is that wether or not you look at it, it’s still fucking there. Someone has to stare it down. Someone has to feed it. Someone has to play by its rules. Someone has to say ok he’s dying and hire hospice and notify his job and pay bills and start making The Call over and over. Not accepting Death won’t keep her from coming.
What The Call has taught me is that most people have terrible, non existent relationships with death. They fear her, they run from her, they snub her, they defy her thinking it will buy them time. Or, they are so paralyzed by knowing she’s coming for them eventually that they can’t even speak about her or work alongside her as an ally and friend. I knew this before—as a Santa Muerte devotee, I experience first hand how terrified and uncomfortable people are with the mere image of death, let alone the reality of it. But this experience has really hammered the truth home—this country, this culture, has such a massive sickness around saying goodbye.
I deal with things dying more than the average person, so I am uniquely capable of spearheading what’s going on with my dad. As a homesteader, I lose animals all the time. Sometimes to predators, sometimes to disease. I have held goat kids while they take their last breath, I’ve felt when the fleas start to jump ship off of a cooling body. I have buried more animals than I can count and watched others get carried away in pieces by vultures. I talk to my dead ancestors and I kill my own roosters and gut them and eat them. I’ve found beauty in death because it is a natural, necessary process. But even then, I am still afraid—I think we should be, because fear is linked to awe. I fear death the way I fear the sea: I love the sea, I bathe in the sea, I wade out into the sea, but I am endlessly wary and respectful of the sea, all the same. Because it can kill me. Because it is nature, and nature doesn’t care. Nature is true neutral, neither cruel nor merciful. And I think a little bit of terror (mixed with awe) is a sensical way to regard true neutrality.
So I am afraid, on some level. I am not at all claiming fearlessness. But as I talk to other people, I realize how much more afraid most people are, and how much their fear drives their bodies and breaks their bones and makes them say incredibly bizarre, unsympathetic shit to the daughter of a dying man over the phone. How much their fear makes them act selfish, and insensitive, and even hurtful.
The only good and rewarding iteration of The Call I’ve had is with a local friend up here who has known me since I was a kid, and who knows my dad, my real dad, better than most. She made me laugh (a blessing!) so many times when I told her— Not to speak ill of the almost dead, she said, but he sure as hell did not make this easy for you. She shit talked his stupid ATV purchase, she expressed how glad she was to throw away a rug he gave her that she passionately hates. She expressed anger that matched my anger, frustration that matched my frustration, because she knows him. She cried, and I could cry too, because I knew she understood that he wasn’t perfect, he was fucked up, and we still missed him so much already in spite of that. For a minute, I wasn’t alone in the complexity of this mess, I wasn’t looking in at a dollhouse, we were in it together, the right size.