Goodbye to All That

By Garrison Keillor

My father John, a carpenter and cabinetmaker and railway mail clerk, is taking his leave of this world in a bedroom that was mine when I was 18. I lay where he is lying now, in the northeast corner of the room, and looked out the window at night to a red blinking light on a distant water tower and imagined living in New York City and other grand things, and now at 87 he lies in the bed and imagines the risen Christ meeting him with open arms, as in the hymns that his morning nurse Ramona sings to him.

She is a woman of great energy and compassion who brings her guitar and sings When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, Abide with Me and other old favorites, and the other morning she got him to smile by singing When Johnny Comes Marching Home. Ramona is an angel.

My father has chronic pneumonia that many rounds of antibiotics couldn't clear up. Twice in the past year, an ambulance had to be called to haul him to the hospital for suctioning procedures that he found dreadful, and after talking it over with my mother, he decided he wouldn't go down that road again. He was brought home and put on hospice care, and the decision was made to take him off antibiotics. They simply weren't doing him any good. There were e-mail exchanges about this decision, which seemed grave, and my mother and sister notified the funeral home, and my brother began to plan the service, and Dad went off the antibiotics and got a little better. That was a few weeks ago.

My father built this house he now lies in. He poured the concrete and framed up both floors and hoisted the roof beam and shingled the roof and nailed the siding and the flooring and the insulation and the drywall, and planted the apple orchard and the half-acre of vegetable garden to feed his six children.

Six children is about what you need if you're hoping to die at home and not in a warehouse. My younger brothers and sister take turns on night duty, along with my niece, and of course my mother is there, seeing to everything, administering the liquid nutrients and Tylenol through a feeding tube, adjusting the oxygen. It is an up-and-down business. At various times, he has seemed to be at death's door, and distant family have flown in to say goodbye, and then the other night, with my little girl standing at his bedside and poking him, he seemed ready to pick up his bed and walk. "All I do is nap all day," he said to me. "They keeping you pretty busy?"

The handbook on dying that the hospice gave us advises you to forgive the dying person and express your love and your gratitude, and to say goodbye. It doesn't explain how to do this with someone who is extremely hard of hearing and who, even when he could hear, never went in for such declarations. And what about all those things you're not sure whether to forgive or feel grateful for?

When I was 18, he told me he wouldn't pay a penny for my college education, and so I worked my way through school and thereby got the gift of independence, an inestimable gift. But I stand in the doorway and look at him, asleep, and I am afraid of him. He is still my dad, and his power is greater than that of the New York Times.

I remember when my Grandma Keillor lay dying in a little hospital in Onamia, tended by her daughters, and my father and his brothers came to bid farewell to her. They drew up their chairs to the foot of the bed where she lay unconscious, and they were very still and solemn for a while, but in due course they got to talking about cars. It struck me at the time as callous--I was 20 and a poet--to sit by your dying mother and discuss a particular low-mileage Ford station wagon you'd seen on a used-car lot in Anoka, and now it seems like the most natural thing in the world. Life goes on. Your mother is dying, but a man needs wheels.

The best gift I can give my father is to bring my daughter to visit him. She touches his foot, and he wriggles his toes. She throws a ball at him; he throws it back. She smiles a beatific smile. She kisses his hand and his cheek. She waves bye-bye. She has no words for this. It is pure love.

She is three, the age I was when he wrote a letter to me and my brother and sister in 1945 from New York, saying how much he missed us while he was in the Army, billeted in a hotel at Broadway and 29th. He thought about us every day, he said, and wished we could be with him but didn't think it wise for children to grow up in a city among so many people. It was signed, "Love, Daddy." I never saw the letter until a week ago. It never occurred to me that he loved me, but of course he did, and it was nice to hear about it at last.