One Last Goodbye

I have said my good byes a thousand times.

The first time I left him at his long-term care home.

Every March break.

Every Christmas

Every Birthday

When we left for 6 weeks to Australia.

Most recently, as COVID started to hit, I made a special trip.  “Better go have a good long visit with my dad, just in case.”

Each time I leave I feel a poignant sense satisfaction.  I have had a good life with my dad.  I have been an attentive daughter.  I have done my part.  I have said goodbye.

There was no chance that I might suffer any regrets.  

Was there?

 He has lived a good 92 years.  (I got the best 42 of them).  We have left no word unsaid, no stone unturned.  My relationship with my dad is the most uncomplicated of all relationships in my life.  And although it has altered and fluxed as his dementia ascended on his brilliant mind, it has held firm in the tenants of love, respect, laughter and tenderness.

Last night, incidentally, I heard word from my mother that COVID has entered my dad’s Long-term care facility.  I had been expecting this.  It was no surprise.  I took it as complacently as my mother typed it.  Yet at 4 the morning it hit me in the deepest parts of my heart.

I just want one more goodbye.

I want to feel his face in my hands. I want to see the familiar spark of recognition light up in his eyes when I enter the room.  I want to tell him how much I love him.  It’s not much, but it’s enough.  It’s him. 

I am not naïve.  I am a health care worker.  (At one point I considered becoming a virologist…. I understand how viruses work.) I always knew that the end of the world was going to be blamed on a virus.   If I could have taken stocks in this prediction I’d have been a millionaire, but I never could have imagined that I would have had anything but a pragmatic approach to my own father’s  demise.  He is 92.  He has lived a good life.  We have left nothing unsaid, no stone unturned.

And as much as this satisfies my intellectual prowess it negates any chance I have a protecting my greatest fears from the age-old act of naivety.

I just. Want. One. More. Goodbye.

What a cruel twist of fate that I have dedicated my life to making sure every patient of mine is granted their idyllic and self-proclaimed perfect ending. The hours I spend, counselling family members at their loved ones death beds so that they are not left with remorse or complicated grief.

And yet I can’t offer any of that to my father, or to myself. I can’t escape the images of him dying alone, gasping for air, in the confines of his hospital bed at the long term care facility in Toronto.

In this great age of uncertainty I don’t know how to reconcile this.  I don’t know how to be there for him while not exposing myself or my mother or my family or my patients.  It’s impossible. I only know one thing:  my deep longing to know that I still have one more chance to hear his voice recite poetry, feel his firm hand gently hold mine, see his joy of visiting his grandchildren…

I realize that this is the piece of grief that lies at the essence of all loss.  No matter how young or old, how good or evil a life, how perfect or strained your relationship, how deserving or undeserving of treatment in the midst of a global pandemic, the grief over the finality of life is manifest in that longing for just one last…anything.   

I just want one more goodbye.