The last time

Four years, almost, since he’s been gone. The darker memories still sit on the shelf.

My father didn’t come to my wedding in 2017. Jackie offered to travel with him, from Philadelphia to Wisconsin. He couldn’t manage it, he told me. Too much.

The week or so before the wedding, a package arrived in the Wisconsin mailbox. I remember one of the girls opening it in the back seat as we drove into town. It was a slim, braided leather whip, coiled like a snake in delicate tissue paper. A wedding gift from my father. I felt shame redden my face, as if I’d done something wrong. Yes, from Poppy. No, not sure how he meant it. Let’s just put it away.

Did my father and I ever have the conversation, about the whip? Or did I, like I had so many times with him, just imagine what I would have said?

Some version of me — real or imagined — asked him why he would think a whip would make a good wedding gift. This is my memory. Some version of him replied, “For all those kids. Can’t you take a joke?” This was him, even if this never happened.

My father had little interest in the life that was taking me west to Wisconsin. To him, I think it was just another character and setting to remember: the doctor with four children, the house on acres of lupines and prairie grass. New man, new zip code. You know Jennifer, I can imagine him telling his theater friends, and I wouldn’t blame him. Dad had his wine, his Marlboros, and his adoring fans; I had love affairs. Neither one of us thought much of the other’s habits, but it always made for a story.

In my single-mother days, when wine and anger had less hold on him, he was happy to feel needed, fatherly. Every few months, he would drive the five hours north to our little house in Massachusetts. I looked forward to his visits. There was always a bag of fresh soft pretzels on the passenger seat for me, and and several gallons of wine in his trunk. The wine never came into the house all at once. An unspoken concession.

There were good days with him, then. He liked that I needed his help. It was more comfortable for him when I was struggling, another thing I didn’t blame him for. I needed help more than I needed my pride, and I welcomed his handiwork. Dad hung a medicine cabinet, tube lighting over the kitchen sink, and installed a new doorknob and lock on the back door. He tinkered with wonky outlets, a busted sump pump, and broken shower heads. When our front porch rotted and sagged, he and my friends contributed heftily to the cause so I could get it rebuilt by proper contractors.

Dad loved to watch the guys work, a cigarette and a glass of wine in his hand at 9 a.m. When my dad joked that the only shoddy part of their porch construction was nowhere to put his cup of coffee, they returned with an improvised coffee rest that could be slid across the railing.

He looked a little worse for wear each time I’d see him.

“You need to see a doctor,” I’d say.

“Doctors are for sick people,” he'd say. “Why would I want to be around sick people?”

Sporadically, my brother and I took turns visiting him. We pleaded the case for some lab workups, floated the (very unwelcome) idea of rehab for his drinking. The dates are lost to me now, as nothing positive came of these wishful visits. At one point, Joe was able to get him to the ER, but there would be no follow-up by my dad — something Joe understood even before my dad was discharged.

A few years closer to the end, my dad told me I needed to come down to help him out. He was vague, which wasn’t uncommon, but his voice over the phone was strained. When he opened the door of his apartment, a wall of smoke, alcohol, and sickness shocked me. He was gaunt and looked like he hadn’t showered or slept in months. The apartment was in an unspeakable condition, with ominous dark stains streaked on the walls and the upholstery. Streaks of blood, maybe worse, in the carpet. His bedroom broke me: His sheets, pillows, and blankets were unsalvageable.

I got to work cleaning. That was the easiest choice to make in that moment, immediate and requiring no introspection. I went to Kmart for Pine-Sol, rubber gloves, and chisel. I retched silently as I scrubbed the toilet and the bathroom floor, not wanting him to hear me or feel any more shame than I knew he already did. What happened here? Was it my fault, in some way?

For a decade, Dad had been declining. That much, we had understood. He carried a wadded handkerchief, folded to make the blood less visible. His cough had gotten worse, but he didn’t want to hear about it. “Just getting over a cold,” he’d say. He’d lost weight he couldn’t afford to lose. But it wasn’t until I stood within the context of his apartment that I understood how much I hadn’t understood.

I went to Wawa, his favorite, to get us hoagies and more wine. If ever there was a time for wine, this was it. The 12-Step Program would not kick off today. He sipped his cup of cabernet in his mother’s rust-orange chair, hunched and miserable, while I started on the kitchen. The dishwasher was full of dirty dishes that had been there for several months, unwashed and unrinsed. The refrigerator was in the same condition, with cartons of curdled blocks of sour milk and colonies of bacteria building rival kingdoms. It was terrible for him, to have me here, like this.

“What if we go to the hospital tomorrow, Dad? We have to get you some help, figure out what’s going on.”

“Maybe next week, when I’m feeling a little better.”

Everything, including the pots and pans, went into the trash. What had he been eating? His kitchen cabinets were mostly empty, but hanging from the knobs were hundreds of tiny black plastic cats — a promotional topper for a time on El Gato Negro wine bottles. I threw them in the garbage, something I would never have dared to do had he been less desperate to keep me there. He liked his little collections.

I hauled Hefty bags to the apartment complex dumpster and heaved them in, feeling dirty to my bones. I took his Citizens Bank card and bought him new clothes, linens, and frozen dinners that I doubted he would eat. I made his bed with fresh sheets, stiff from the package, and a cheery comforter with the price tag I forgot to remove.

We left the apartment for a little while, for some fresh air, to run a few errands. We went to the Acme to dump three Folger’s coffee containers full of his spare change into the counting machine. The machine choked and spit a tooth into my eye. I held the yellow molar in my hand and showed it to my dad.

“Huh. Forgot that was in there,” he said.

It was a bizarre moment, something out of a dream that flits back to you the next day, stranger than before.

Before I left, I told him I didn’t think I could stomach another visit like this again. I told him I had one of these visits in me, but that was it. He blew smoke out the corner of his mouth, just out of my direction. He looked like he had something to say, but was exercising a rare bit of restraint. I hugged his bones goodbye. He was grateful, and told me so.

But this was the second time, not the first, that my father had asked me to clean up. In the mid-2000s, after his sister died, his drinking worsened. He sent me to North Carolina, to check in on my aunt’s log cabin. “There was a fire,” he told me, slurring. “You have to go. You have to go for me, Jennifer.”

His grief at her loss trumped ours. We couldn’t understand, he said. She was the best person he ever knew, and now, she was gone. Why was he still here?

I went to North Carolina; David stayed with the girls. I arrived alone at my aunt’s cabin in rural North Carolina to find the door kicked in and the living room floor gone. I heard someone bolt into the woods from the screen door in the back of the house, and I froze: Was anyone else still here?

A burnt crater was all that remained at the center of the cozy log cabin my aunt, a prolific writer, nun, and peace activist, called Peace Hill. I should have left immediately, I know that now. This was, after all, not just a fire, as my drunk father had said. Had he known? The horror of needing to know kept me frozen in place. Razor blades were strewn all over the floor and in the sinks. Profane graffiti covered the walls, and there were handcuffs dangling from doorknobs. The desecration made my stomach churn.

I ran back to my rental car and ran blindly down a driveway to find a neighbor. When the sheriff arrived, we found the head of a deer in the unplugged refrigerator. There is too much terribleness to tell, about the crime of my aunt’s North Carolina cabin. I felt obligated to go for him, to do right by him, to do what my father swore he couldn’t do.

Maybe I just want to say it once, that the debacle of his apartment was the second time I’d tried to set things right, the best I could. I struggle writing any of this down, knowing he was not one who enjoyed being looked at too closely.

But that was so long ago, so long ago, my aunt’s cabin, and his grief over her loss. I couldn’t even tell you the year. You will tell me there is nothing to apologize for, certainly not for telling a rambling story out of sequence. You understand. You know that memory does not like numbers and cannot be coaxed into chronological order, and that’s why you are here.

So forward, again, to the last time.

I went just one more time to my father’s apartment. I want to say it was late 2018, early 2019, before the pandemic took hold. Again, he needed me, and the apartment was beyond what he could manage.

I couldn’t do it again.

In my mind, two cleaners come. Two Latina women, kind and not inclined to judge. Did they? Did I imagine them, scrubbing my father’s toilet and the well of his washing machine?

A cousin of my father’s is what I remember, who I remember, that last time at the apartment. A big, jovial cousin, booming small talk in my father’s living room. His forced good cheer made me dizzy, in the middle of all the disorder and sadness.

“I need your help here,” I remember saying. “He says you buy him his groceries and his wine. You can’t keep bringing him wine. He needs cleaners. He needs a social worker. And a doctor.”

My father could not even stand up for this conversation. But he was adamant that it would not happen again, that he was fine. The two men told me this was fine. Everything was fine enough, for now.

“It’s not fine. None of this is fine. Do you not see the wall? Have you seen the bathroom, his sheets?”

“Shut up, Jennifer,” said the cousin.

Time moved faster, then. The feeling of a deadbolt in my chest, locking into place. I grabbed my things. My father struggled to turn in the old armchair, to tell me to hang on a second, wait.

I saw panic, then, something he’d always told me not to do. Don’t panic, I’ll tell you when to panic.

He reached for me with one bony arm. He said he loved me, but for the first time I heard resignation in his voice. I would not come back. It’s possible he knew this before I did.

I left him with his cousin, still waiting for my father to write him a check for another box of wine and some Stouffer frozen dinners.

Everyone has a last time I saw him story about someone they loved. You’ll never hear a happy one, and they’re not in short supply. We turn them over and over in our hands, trying to make sense of what was lost, trying to remember what we said and what they said. Did we touch? Kiss? What did their hands look like?

My father didn’t die that month. But he worsened fairly quickly. The equation that started the domino spill was an acute collapse, an ER admission, a hospital stay, then weakness enough to merit two different stays at two different rehab centers.

“You have to come get me, Jennifer,” he said on the phone to me near the end, on one of those last calls. “You have to get me out of here. It’s hell. We’re family. This is what family does.”

But I couldn’t come get him, and even if I could have, I don’t know what I would have done. It was high COVID season, and no one was going anywhere, especially not onto any healthcare unit.

Someone called to say my father had come down with COVID at the rehab center. They admitted him to the hospital that had sent him here, and he never left.

“This is probably the best outcome,” my brother said. “He won’t feel anything. The morphine will take care of the air hunger.”

The nurse wouldn’t let me on the phone with my father, at first.

“You know, he’s very, very angry at you,” she told me. “He doesn’t want to talk to you.”

I told her my father was angry with the world, and I had decided not to take it personally, a long time ago. I told her she should do the same, and let me talk to my father.

But still she refused to let me speak to him, until my brother made a stern call in his official capacity, as Dr. Joe Mattern. An hour later, the nurse relented and held the phone to my father’s ear.

“Dad, it’s Jenn,” I said.

He was hard to understand, a mix of the meds, the missing dentures, the kidney failure, the oxygen. He mumbled something, and then a little more. I thought I heard something close to warmth, close to relief.

“It’s okay, Dad. Don’t try too hard. Why don’t you rest, and we’ll talk later, okay?”

He seemed to understand this. He said something I couldn’t quite catch.

“I love you, Dad,” I said, hoping he was still listening, that the nurse hadn’t taken the phone away.

After a moment, I heard his voice again, and I heard what sounded like peace, maybe a little like forgiveness, in the space between sounds.