A father's death
Corbett, Jennifer
A FATHER'S DEATH CHISELING AWAY NORMAL ASSUMPTIONS My father, James A. Corbett, died October 20, 1989 of pneumonia secondary to Alzheimer's disease. He was eighty-one. He had retired from the...
...We prayed the "Our Father" to which at one moment he was able to grunt his Amen...
...His ability to smile at the sound of our voices left him, and left us...
...My father was diagnosed about three years before we moved him to the nursing home...
...He was still firm in his grip of our hands...
...I had to decide how I would participate in this long and torturous path of dying and death and I have not wanted to forget the effect of this time for my own life...
...It was the feast of St...
...Each of us, at different times, thanked him for everything he had taught us and graciously given to us...
...San Francisco was experiencing the aftershocks of the earthquake...
...His fever from the infection did not respond to aspirin...
...We cried in our own ways...
...This "supper" brought a look of joy we had not seen in some time...
...Talking did not constitute the essence of our visits and relationship anymore...
...We were silent with him...
...I came to focus on what we could still do together...
...I went out and bought a chilled bottle of champagne and chocolate yogurt...
...I felt the impact of the many well-known moments associated with this disease...
...He had retired from the University of Notre Dame in 1973, as professor emeritus of medieval history and paleography...
...My mother offered a toast to him that forever will be in my heart: "Jim, this is until our next reunion, until we see each other again...
...I learned to appreciate this moment and what it was, rather than to focus on what it wasn't...
...We could only imagine what he saw when his eyes closed...
...He smiled...
...He told me one afternoon in a rare complete sentence the summer before he died, "I feel like my world is being turned inside out...
...I began to introduce myself to him and tell him where I had come from, and that I had come to see him...
...He seemed delighted to have something other than water or juice...
...When my brother and brother-in-law Bob arrived a short time later, we prayed the Office for the Dead...
...It was time to go...
...My father rose from the power of this terrible illness...
...The doctor told her he would not rally from his latest infection, and we would not begin antibiotics...
...I learned to stop correcting all of his impulses with reasoned answers which would set the world right for me, but often only added to his muddle and sense of being wrong...
...She told me that earlier in the afternoon, my father's temperature had gone up...
...He had lost the firm grip in his hands which were now cool...
...I admitted how much I hated so much of what this disease was doing to my father...
...The Paschal Mystery which we celebrate often is truly painful when it is experienced in one's own life through the loss of someone you love...
...He remained very affectionate...
...He had been one of the founders of the university's Medieval Institute, as well as of the university's credit union...
...James according to the sanctoral cycle of the Eastern church...
...We could still breathe the same air, we could sit together and watch a Notre Dame game, though in time he became bored with this fall ritual we had performed since my childhood...
...The order in which he ate his food, and how he ate it became secondary to his eating at all...
...At 4:20 P.M., he stopped breathing...
...What he could do would in all likelihood be lessened or accomplished only with greater effort...
...I also realized that I would get one chance to do and say some things, and it was important to act on some of my intuitions...
...This was all in keeping with requests he had made during his "well" life...
...His hands were no longer pink even with the help of oxygen...
...As a family we had decided in January 1989 that we would do no nutritional support once he could no longer swallow, nor would we initiate any diagnostic tests or treatments that would require hospital-ization...
...My father was free...
...Slowly, it didn't seem all that necessary to tell him who I was...
...His weight loss, even with our efforts to help him eat, changed his physical appearance...
...For him and me, it was a time of mutual chiseling away of many assumptions of "normal" life...
...Symptoms which we did not recognize as indicative of Alzheimer's dementia probably began to appear as early as 1982...
...During the days and evenings of that week, in his presence, my family and I made the plans he had asked of us for his funeral and burial...
...When I left for Chicago on Sunday afternoons, I came to accept that the next time I would see him-even if it was the following weekend-he could have changed...
...On Wednesday night, the feast of St...
...We were fortunate to find a physician and a nursing home staff who supported our decisions...
...his smile was enough to know that he knew me from sometime ago, and that he had good memories stored somewhere in his body...
...About 4:18 P.M., his body relaxed, his eyes closed completely...
...It was an apocalyptic setting for the shifting that was taking place in our own world and which we were helping along...
...no more pureed food, no more embarrassment, no more fatigue...
...What had taken about forty to forty-five minutes now stretched to an hour-and-a-half or two hours...
...By the end of the summer of '89,1 began to pray for his death...
...JENNIFER CORBETT...
...I heard a silence that I had never heard before...
...When I told him that I loved him, at times, he could manage to repeat this sentence intact...
...My older sister Mary assured him that we would be all right, that he had been a wonderful father for us, that mother would be well cared for, and that we were O.K...
...If I wanted to walk with him I had to slow down my speed...
...we knew by his smile it was good and we were comforted...
...To honor his love for the Middle Ages and his scholarly contributions, we sang the Salve Regina...
...There was so little left for my father to give up, and it was so painful and wearing to keep this vigil with him as he was robbed of so much that was so important to him and that gave him pleasure...
...Afterwards we anointed him with oil...
...This too demanded a whole new kind of attentiveness...
...My mother, my sister, and I pronounced him dead...
...No more fever, no more struggle, no more feeling lost for words, for money, for a car, no more restraints of any kind...
...He had turned blue and was on oxygen for comfort...
...In a man that never expressed his anger violently, he now became more combative over the simplest of rules: what to eat, and how much, going to bed, and staying in bed, appropriate clothes for certain activities...
...I had the privilege to keep watch for the last four nights of his life, sometimes alone, and sometimes in the company of my mother...
...My father spent the last thirteen months of his life in the Morningside Nursing Home in South Bend...
...In the afternoon of October 20, my father's breathing softened and became slower...
...Even the World Series, one of dad's favorite baseball "seasons," was stopped...
...Luke, my brother Phil, my mother, and I had a last meal with my father...
...We read the readings we thought of using...
...we prayed the Office of the Hours and the prayers for the dying...
...I came to see that many of his random comments were a code trying to say what this was like for him...
...I have written this essay to remember some of what happened to him and to me as I came to realize this unwanted new member of the family-Alzheimer's disease-accounted for the erratic and permanent changes that were happening to him...
...During that time he attended an adult day-care center, and I began attending support group meetings...
...A heavy, wet snow came that evening taking with it much of the power source for the nursing home...
...This night he could still take some liquid from a straw drip...
...It took a couple of months to realize that my father no longer called me by name...
...Eventually he could no longer speak, or walk...
...We celebrated the liturgy of the Resurrection on the evening of October 23 in the parish where we had grown up...
...We could hold hands, and we could pray...
...I began to wait for a phone call that would summon me home for the last days...
...On October 16, around 4:00 P.M., my mother called me at Columbus Hospital where I work...
...There was a growing sense of purposelessness in his life that he worried over, but could do nothing to stop...
...His body became more cramped into a fetal-like position...
Vol. 117 • November 1990 • No. 19
