ON BECOMING ONE HUNDRED

Everybody thinks it’s a great achievement to live to be one hundred. It’s as if you’d won a triathalon or one of those super-grueling foot races that takes twenty-four hours. You get your picture in the paper sitting in your wheelchair at the old folks’ home surrounded by beaming staff and family members whose smiles look a bit like grimaces while you’re straining to blow out a big candle on a cake they’re holding beneath your chin. Everybody out in the world seems to be convinced it’s a goal we should aspire to. Somebody’s bound to ask to what do you owe your blessed longevity. Down at the place where my Dad was living, they even have a club – The Centenarians – for such high-achievers, and their names are inscribed onto a plaque hanging in the dining hall. (People still think it’s a big deal even though according to a website devoted to these long-livers, the U.S. has about 72,000 available for worship and admiration at the moment.) If you’re going about out in the world escorting one known to be a centenarian, you’ll hear, “One hundred! My, how wonderful! Congratulations!” followed most usually by a personal anecdote about how Auntie made it to 101 or even 103 and could still manage to water-ski and divide 347 by 13 without using a calculator.

About a month ago, I was pushing my Dad in his wheelchair down a hallway in the facility where he lived, just to get him out of his room. He was about one week short of 100. In marathoner’s terms, he’d supposedly passed the “despair” stage of miles 18-22 and had slogged into the “exhaustion and elation” stage where the finish line is either literally or figuratively in sight. As we turned a corner, we rolled up onto a group of visitors being led about by a marketing director. The group looked to be about a half dozen members of the same family, one alert, early-elderly fellow in a wheelchair and his fully ambulatory wife, accompanied by adult children and spouses. When the saleswoman spied us, I could see it all in a flash in her eyes: my Dad’s very popular with residents and staff, known for witty banter and good cheer, and she’d spied an opportunity to make a little innocent use of him as a living endorsement of the facility’s beneficial practices and judicious selection of clientele.

“Well, here’s Bill!” she gushed. “People tell me you’re about to be one hundred! How marvelous!”

“One hundred?” crowed one visitor. “Wow!”

Then two women from the group rushed over to pat his shoulder; one kissed him on the forehead. The other bent down into his face and declared, “One hundred! Mercy! What a wonderful, wonderful blessing!”

He looked right at them and said, “Please somebody just give me a pistol so I can shoot myself.”

The marketing director might’ve been surprised, but I wasn’t. This had been coming on for some months. Up until about age 99, he’d spent his life as an upbeat optimist, a non-complainer, known for his resilience and his power to put adversity behind him, including the loss of $250,000 worth of stock in the Enron debacle and the death of his wife of 66 years. He did feel that being in his 90s was somehow unseemly, uncalled-for, especially since my mother had died in her late 80s. It troubled him that he was of no use to anyone, that there were no eyeglasses on the planet strong enough to let him read or do his own account books, that he couldn’t enjoy conversations because he couldn’t hear well enough when people spoke to him and they apparently couldn’t hear him, and his teeth fell out faster than his dentist could refashion dentures, so he wound up gumming mush at meals. His balance got shaky and he had to use a walker and then eventually a wheelchair.

 He’d driven his own car safely into his early 90s but voluntarily gave that up and had to rely on others to go places. Although no one ever complained about having to help him, he suffered from the old-fashioned, traditional belief that what separated men from boys is that men took care of things. Men did not get help; they gave help. He told us he knew he was a burden and always thanked us for anything we did for him.

But until after his 99th birthday, he’d never been in the hospital and rarely got sick. Broke a collarbone as a teen, had an ulcer at forty, a nasty spate of hives and shingles late in life, but, generally speaking, he’d never had much practice at feeling sick. He was kind of an innocent that way, and, when he fell and sprained his neck, he wound up in the hospital just before Christmas Day of 2015 where the first medical moron overdosed him on a very powerful sedative and the second moron – worried that his system was so sedated he might stop breathing in his sleep, tried with two reluctant assistants to jam a tube down his throat while he flailed about and screamed in protest until they gave up.

The three-day stay pretty much wiped him out. Wearing a foam neck brace ($79 at Medicare or $9.99 at Walgreens), he went into rehab for several weeks, astonished at how quickly strength had seeped out of his 122-lb. frame almost overnight. During that rehab stay, he passed out while on the commode and went back to the hospital – low blood pressure and extreme dehydration. (Once he became incontinent, he drank only in sips.) More time in rehab, then last spring he finally “graduated” into assisted living where he spent a couple months before falling again in the lobby and cracking his pelvis enough to be mighty painful, ensuring still another hospital stay followed by another 100 days of rehab. When he got out this time in early December of this year (2016), he “graduated” into full-time skilled nursing. He was too weak to walk more than a few dozen feet with the help of his physical therapists, had to be helped when he ate, dressed, went to the bathroom.

He’d become bowels and bladder incontinent. He suffered from constipation from antibiotics and then diarrhea. “I just wish those nurses wouldn’t give him those stool-softeners,” one aide told me. “When I come on shift at 6 in the morning he’s just sitting there in a puddle of poo.” Likewise, when he pissed himself, it was uncomfortable especially because he was so thin his diapers never fit tightly enough, and he often had to wait a while for someone to answer his call to put him on the pot and change him. These were deeply humiliating moments for him because a lot of the time he was one-hundred percent certain of where and who he was. (One percent for every year of age  - Happy Birthday!)

He had me take the TV out of his room because he never liked TV much, anyway, and couldn’t see anything on it, but all the help and nursing staff seemed to believe that having it on was mandatory, and he couldn’t reach the controls or see well enough to use the remote. Before his first fall, he had enjoyed listening to books on a machine lent to the blind by a Texas state agency, and he was a lifelong fan of classical music. I downloaded the books from a website onto a flash drive that he plugged into the player. He’d devour biographies, histories, books on archeology, anthropology, science, and religion, and enjoyed summarizing and reviewing them for me. For him, the most delicious read might be a book about the ten most important scientific discoveries and how they came about. (His tastes were higher brow than mine.) 

But as time went on he complained that something was wrong with the flash drives because they kept skipping ahead. (I figured out he’d begun to sleep through much of the reading.) And then he lost his ability to manipulate the buttons on the player, and with that went his ability to dial even his large-button phone.

At some point, his only working hearing aid vanished and was never found.

Then he started disappearing into lucid dreams that he couldn’t distinguish from reality. He went to Peru for a while, where a bevy of big black women took him into a forest and held him captive. People kept coming into the room and getting into his bed with him during the night. Little kids were running berserk in the hallways, letting their dogs loose to sniff about the corners of the room, and the kids snuck in to hide in the his closet and under the bed.

“I’m thinking none of that is real,” he said.

“Right,” I said.

He’d had a itinerant psychologist chat with him once a week for the past few months; she reported that he kept saying he wanted to die but didn’t know how it might be done, and I told her that, yes, he’d told me that, too, but it didn’t seem like an expression of despair (his tone was matter-of-fact) so much as it was a rational recognition that he’d passed beyond the point of possibly enjoying any aspect of living. We used to go out for Mexican food for lunch once a week; we had tasks and chores we could do out in the world, such as getting a pedicure for him or our hair cut (the same barber had cut mine for 35 years and cut my son’s as a child), and going to doctors’ appointments, as well as enjoyable outings such as sitting on a bench at White Rock Lake and smoking our pipes and talking about our genealogical research. But he’d even become too feeble to get into a car seat from a wheel chair by himself, and then it got to to where much of the time he didn’t know where he was, who he was with, or even what time of day it was.

Some of that confusion was due to urinary tract infections. That such a thing could cause delusions and disorientation was a great surprise to me, but it’s a truism among those in geriatric care. Where you and I might get a little fever, old folks go bonkers and batty. Damp hot piss saturating your clothing makes a ripe culture for growing bacteria, so UTIs are common and frequent. But treatable - he’d developed a pressure injury on one heel that had opened up and required antibiotics, and when he was treated for that, some of his fog of confusion lifted at least temporarily.

I’d always bought him Hershey’s miniatures to have around – and to offer his helpers to entice them to stop by – but he’d grown too fond of them out of boredom and messed up his gastric system, then got too blind and feeble to locate the bowl they were in. For a while he enjoyed being rolled about the premises and grounds as a break from being in his room but soon he just complained that it was too hot or cold or windy or that he didn’t want to have to try to talk to people encountered in the halls. When they spoke to him, if he was lucid he couldn’t see well enough to identify them and was embarrassed. I carried on who’s-on-first conversations with him by shouting. The facility’s very able and wonderfully upbeat social director tried to engage him in daily activities, but he was too blind for Bingo or crafts or movies, and only the occasional musical performance enticed him. It did cheer him up for me, Holly, Marcia, his therapists or the psychologist to visit, and if he wasn’t in a confused state, he always thanked us for coming. Often when I got there, he’d stored up a hundred complaints, but after I’d rolled him around the gronds outside for a while and chatted him up, his dark moods usually lifted.

For me it had become an almost-daily practice to come and make out the menu or bring his “protective undergarments” or sanitary wipes, or candy, or to read him the mail that came to my address, see that his laundry was taken or returned, update him on his accounts, check with nurses or the PA about his mental and physical condition. Is the heel healing? Is he still on antibiotics? Oh, he’s not? Maybe that’s why he had that spell of uncontrollable sobbing.

The nurses, all from African or Caribbean countries, would call me and leave wholly unintelligible messages on my voice mail which I would have to replay a dozen times to decode because if you called back you could only reach the switchboard and had to be routed to the nurse’s station where often the phone went unanswered and you had to leave a message. “Hello? I just got a message form someone whose name I couldn’t catch telling me something about my father’s condition that I couldn’t understand.” 

What about an anti-depressant? the psychologist asked. 

For me? Ha ha ha. Hard call. She wasn’t pushy, and I was pretty much sure she wasn’t sure if that would help. On one hand, they might level him out or numb him, but on the other, he’d never been depressed in his 99+ years – sad, yes, but not depressed. And, having never had them, the consequences both good and bad were wholly unknown. And when his storms passed, he usually returned to his cheerful state. I asked him if he wanted any kind of “happy pill,” and his lifelong resistance to any medication rose up to say no. (Every time I took him to a new doctor, they were amazed to hear that his only regular medications were eye drops for glaucoma and a statin.)

 Soon after we’d moved him into a new room on the full-time nursing floor, the date for that big birthday party loomed large and a bit threatening. If you weren’t thinking, you’d imagine that a 100th birthday party must be yuuuggge, maybe a marching band and a clutch of bewigged chimps on trikes, waltzing elephants, fireworks, a flyover by the Thunderbirds, the equivalent of a Super Bowl halftime show. But we’d thrown the biggest party anyone in our family had ever gotten on his 90th birthday. Friends and family from near and far, a rented hall festooned with balloons and crepe and banners, a catered lunch, speeches and champagne toasts, a pickup load of presents. I wrote some doggerel, a long folk ballad capturing phases of his life, and Holly made big posters out of old photos and hung them. He enjoyed it immensely, talked about it for months.

We figured then that would be the last big one.

Now, briefly, I thought that somehow the 100th would have to rival the 90th. My yoga teacher sings in a sextet called “SideBy Singers” who serenade the elderly and infirm, and I tried to book them. I thought of caterers, a place, and so forth, but, meanwhile, the fact of his condition began to sink in on me. One day I came into his room to find him lying fully dressed in bed, said he’d skipped lunch (it was just after breakfast) and didn’t feel like getting up. I could see that might easily happen on the day very elaborate and expensive plans had been made for the party, including getting busy adult grandchildren to juggle schedules to come from out of town.

Also, there was this: did he even want a party? We couldn’t tell him too far in advance about it because when you gave him future dates for almost anything, he fretted endlessly about them. No matter how small it might’ve seemed to me (a routine check up by his glaucoma specialist), it loomed as large in his mind as, say, the LSAT or his own wedding or a court proceeding where he’s the defendant, and he’d ask daily, “When is that now? Next Tuesday? Two o’clock?”

On Thanksgiving, we did manage to portage him to our house for a very traditional holiday meal in his honor with Holly and a friend. (Left on our own, we’d have gone out for pho in lieu of that turkey and dressing.) I told him we were planning a “little” birthday party for him. He said politely, “That’s nice.” Mildly – not wildly – enthusiastic.

So it would be a party in his room on his birthday – one hour, in the afternoon. We made a flyer, posted it around the facility, Holly got decorations, Marcia got a cake. We shoved the furniture about and added a few folding chairs. The guests were mostly people on site such as his favorite therapists, aides, and other residents, but also a few outsiders such as the dental assistants who knew and admired him from his many visits to their office. His last “girlfriend” now lived in a facility in a nearby town and had lost her memory of their connection, and all his old friends were dead. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren sent cards and letters.

Marcia, Holly, and I got there about 1 o’clock to finish setting up. He seemed fairly alert, though subdued. His CNA told me that he’d been so fretful and worried about the party that he hadn’t eaten lunch, that he’d claimed we were bringing it. I could tell that this party would be something for him to endure, not enjoy. For the first half hour, as folks filed into the room and we fed them cake and soda, he did smile, greeted and thanked them for coming, and we all sat about on the bed and the few chairs making small talk he couldn’t hear. I could see him withdraw, go inward.

Suddenly, he tried to stifle a sob and hung his head. “I want to go home,” he whimpered. “I want my Mama.” 

A stunned silence, then Marcia and Holly comforted him, and, after a moment, he revived a bit and tried to rally, though visitors took the hint and made their leave. However, soon even more well-wishers arrived, and he suddenly called out, “Marcia! Marcia!?” When she moved to his side, he said, “Can you get these people to leave?”

She rolled him out into the hallway, instead, and said, “It’s better out here; it’s quieter.” He seemed to realize that he’d been rude, though, and told her they’d have to go back in.

The party was on Monday, December 5th. When I came on Tuesday afternoon, he was disoriented, confused as to what time of day it was or whether he’d eaten any meal (I was told he’d been wheeled to the dining room but wouldn’t eat.) His glasses frames were broken again – I’d glued the temple pieces twice before – and although they didn’t help his vision much, they did make him favor himself. I rolled him up and down the hall as a diversion, but the ride didn’t perk him up. He complained that the wheelchair seat hurt his butt and he wanted to lie down.

When I came back on Wednesday, he was no better, though they told me he’d eaten “a good lunch,” said one CNA, while another, behind her back, was shaking her head no. I’d made some interesting finds in researching an ancestor who’d owned a restaurant in downtown Nashville in the early 1900s, and I was hopping to get his input and tell him about it. He’d done a masterful job of researching family history some years back – all without the internet, all done by writing and calling county clerks and cousins and visiting libraries and many cemeteries and such – and he and Holly had produced a magnficient tome (The Genealogy Study of the Smith and Leftwich Families – available in the Texas State Library and online as a pdf at my website). When I took the baton from him and tried to build on what he’d done, I did it because I knew he’d appreciate it, that this was a hobby we could pursue together, that he would know his work hadn’t simply disappeared into the ether of time, and because history had always interested me. In the past month I’d been at it feverishly; maybe I was trying as you might at an archeological dig to uncover as many artifacts as possible before the lease on the dig or the funds ran out, you could say, but also maybe I was trying to preserve our present, too. Using clues that he’d uncovered years ago, I’d determined that his maternal grandfather, Charles Henry Leftwich, had owned and operated a nickelodeon in downtown Nashville on Broadway St., right around the corner from where my mother’s great-grandfather, Francis Marion Hill, had owned and operated a popular restaurant (Hill’s) on Second Avenue at the same time. (My grandmother worked there as a cashier in her teens.) Could be that Francis took in a reel or two at Charlie’s place and that Charlie often had the blue-plate special at Hill’s. This was a dozen years before even my mother and father would be born and a good thirty-five years before I would arrive and thus connect the two fellows by my combined blood. It’s the kind of historical detail relished by geneaologists.

Eagerly, I tried to share this with him. I could tell he was trying to participate, though he was having difficulty raising his head. To my every question he had an answer that made me know he hadn’t understood it. I realized, then, that the man who’d been my mentor and guide, the teacher for whom I’d been such an enthusiastic pupil, wasn’t ever coming back. He wasn’t going to answer any questions, and he wasn’t ever going to hear what I said. I was alone with all this history now, and I had a terrific, childlike sense of loss. (Daddy, please play geneaology with me!)

I’d bought him three new shirts for his birthday and showed them before hanging them in his closet, but he seemed unsure of what I’d said about them. Down the hall, in the assembly room, there was a Christmas music presentation by a fellow in a fedora and a vest and a guitar, and I rolled him there for it and left him parked in a rank of residents similarly befuddled and befogged.

Thursday I shopped about for a set of frames that would fit his present lenses and found a pair at WalMart for $28, had the lenses inserted, and when I went back on Friday once again he was no better. I put his new glasses on him, but he seemed indifferent to having them. I went to the nurses’ station to discuss the possibility of getting a urine sample to test for another urinary tract infection, hoping that had caused this long spell of confusion. The test would have to be ordered by a doctor, of course, who’d have to examine him first, and, being that it was Friday, it might be Monday before they could actually draw a sample. Getting a urine sample from an incontinent person who is also delusional is difficult, I knew from experience. Either he’d already gone or couldn’t go, so they could only catch it by chance. However, their best bet seemed to be very early in the mornings when they woke him up.  

The nurse kindly explained to me they all have this, this thing, ever one on the floor, they have shouting and sometimes hitting but then they calm all over, it is part of being so old, like her over there. (Points to woman in a wheelchair whose head is almost in her lap.)

In other words, they’re all demented because of age and not a UTI, and I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it.

However, to humor me, she promised to get the doctor to see if a test was appropriate.

Saturday morning, as usual, I stopped by on my way home from my weekly Spanish tertulia, even though I knew that Holly had told me she planned to visit that morning. Holly was already there, sitting right at his knees, struggling to have a conversation. (She said later that she thought he’d might’ve had a small stroke.) His neck bent at a 45, face toward his lap, like someone napping on a long flight, and I had him look up at us. I asked him if anybody had come since I was there yesterday to get a urine sample; he frowned, concentrating, but just seemed bewildered. He was able to answer simple questions – “Did you eat any breakfast?” – but the answers didn’t seem reliable. I went to the nurse’s station to ask if they’d gotten a urine sample. Apparently not yet.

At 5:15 the next morning – Sunday – my phone vibrated on my nightstand. It might as well have had electrodes taped to my body: I shot awake, rattled, shaking, knowing even as I was coming to awareness that the call was from the nurse’s station as it wasn’t the first I’d gotten the past few months.

“Hello, Meestah Smeeth?”

“Yes.”

“Is wooffulu athfoahm. You fadduh we cahna gidda vahddasun.”

“I’m sorry – what??”

“You faddah we cahna gidda vahddasun on heem.”

Urine sample, I thought. “Are you saying you can’t get a urine sample?”

“Noah yis. We gidda sumple. But we come back cahna gidda vuddasun.”

“I’m sorry. You DID get a sample?”

“We sahee. You faddah – he pahss.”

“Oh!” It sunk in. “He died?”

“Yis.”

“I’ll be right down there,” I said, and hung up. Vital signs. They couldn’t get  vital signs.

And I instantly flew into a frenzy of action as if the call required an urgent response from me to ward off a catastrophe. Jumped up, tore open my closet door but stood in dumbfounded bewilderment looking at clothes on the hangers, not knowing what to choose. Marcia by then had caught up to the moment, and her awakened presence was a reality check: he would not get any deader. It would be a long day. Still, I felt vaguely guilty for not having been there, and I didn’t want him to lie alone somewhere, so, though the need for a mad rush passed quickly, there was still a need for hurry.

I chewed through a bagel as if it were balsa wood and had two cups of coffee and a banana, my mind a tornado in which swirled a thousand pieces of paper, documents that I guessed would need filling and signing, calls to make, the to-do list suddenly burgeoning wildly beyond control because it was beyond a known length and maybe endless. My heart was thundering. The funeral home – I remembered that we could call them at this point, and I thought I’d put the number on my phone but couldn’t find it and had to dig around in stacks of papers to get it. My dad was always pro-active and we’d gone months before to select a “bench plot” in the cemetery a few steps from where his Uncle Charlie and Aunt Clemmie were buried, and we’d also bought a cremation contract. I called and was told that they would come retrieve the deceased after he’d been released by the facility. A doctor had to come witness the death and notify them officially, and then they’d do the rest.

Marcia drove us because I was too rattled. The streets were dark and empty, and a spitting rain stained the windshield. The starter gun for the annual Dallas marathon was about to fire, and in many years past the route encircled our neighborhood and locked us in for hours, but, thankfully, they’d altered the route the past two years.

Looking ahead to when we’d get there, I wondered how he’d look. Would I be frightened to see his corpse? He’d told me several times about being made as a child to go up to a coffin and kiss the forehead of a dead man and how scared and repulsed he’d been. I’d only seen corpses at open-casket wakes and funerals and never that of anyone so close to me – at age 76, I’d lived a charmed American life, I knew, that I could claim such a thing.

We were parked in the lot by 6:30. Oddly, we had to knock on the glass of the front door to gain entry to the wing (a first for me), and someone in the dim distance inside pushed a button to unlatch the door then vanished before we’d come across the threshold. I was glad the place seemed emptied: I was embarrassed by what had happened, though I couldn’t have explained why. Something or someone had failed, and it was on us. We went through the lobby past the empty receptionist’s desk and to the elevator. I’d been there many dozens of times,  but my dad’s death had suddenly altered my perspective of it – though logic held that early on a Sunday morning you’d always find it quiet, nonetheless the empty arm chairs, the lighted but unused lamps, the dusty piano with a closed keyboard, a vase of wilting flowers on a nearby table, and the tired carpeting seemed to participate in the event as if the spirit of all these objects had evaporated in a secular Rapture.

On the third floor, a nurse and an assistant were bent over a ledger behind the nurse’s counter; they looked up as we passed, but it seemed urgent to get to his room, so I pretended I didn’t see them and strode like an Olympic walker down the hall. The door to his room was open.

“Hey, hey!” I burst out as I came in. Big, jocular, like a fanfare, fairly chortling. “What’s going on!?” This was how I usually behaved, in part to jolt him out of a doze and in part as if to alert him like a carny barker that there’d be fun times ahead now. I wasn’t thinking – this burst up out of me unmeditated. Maybe I was pretending he hadn’t died, and maybe I was trying to wake him up from being dead.

A lamp was on but not the overheads. He was lying in bed with the cover pulled to his chin. His head was arched back slightly and his mouth was wrenched open in a big upright oval like a cartoon yodeler or like someone who was imitating a coyote’s howl.

I stepped right to his side and put my palm on his forehead.

“What’ve you gone and done?” I asked him.

“Is he cold?” Marcia asked.

“Yes.”

We sat for a while, twitchy, not knowing what else to do. Turned out I wasn’t the least bit afraid of my dear old dead dad. About the frail bag o’ bones lying in the bed I felt a weird tenderness, the way you might feel when your kindergartner gives you something handmade for your birthday.

The manager of the third-floor dining hall came lumbering in with arms outstretched to hug us both. I’d only recently learned her name: Brenda. Very short, square, one front tooth, one leg shorter than the other, she’d always seemed taciturn in our many exchanges about the menu, maybe one skosh short of unfriendly I thought, but now she was florid with sympathy. I was touched, gratified because her warmth was so unexpected and welcomed.

My Dad and I had been to two family funerals together in years past. My mother was both phobic and oddly outraged by funerals, and she’d asked me to accompany him when his brother Holley died. He’d died of cancer just after retirement, and he’d been well-known in the small North Carolina town where he owned a building supplies company, a member several civic and social clubs, a church. Dozens at the wake in a room choked with flowers, hundreds at the funeral. By contrast, when my grandmother – known to me as Big Mama – died, her body was shipped from Huntsville where she’d been living up to Nashville where she was to be buried beside Big Daddy. There’d been no funeral service, but at the graveside, only my dad and I and a rented preacher constituted a kind of service. I read the 23rd Psalm, the preacher mouthed something boiler-plate, and we watched as the casket lowered. Just before a worker cranked a lever, though, my dad leaned over, patted the casket, said, “I’ll be seeing you, Mama.”

I remembered that when we were driving from Huntsville to Nashville, he’d been quiet but then suddenly choked back a sob. “It’s terrible to watch someone you love go down,” he said.

I went into his bathroom to pee and discovered the plastic urine-catcher attached to the underside of the ring, recalled the 5:15 a.m. conversation, so I went to the nurse’s station in an effort to get a fuller understanding of the sequence of events. The two staffers on duty were solicitious and sympathetic, though the story I got was garbled, and to this day I don’t know if he died while they were putting him on the toilet to get that urine sample or whether they’d successfully gotten the sample and put him back to bed, then when they came back later they discovered him gone. I told them that the funeral home had said that the facility would have to release him before they could take charge of the deceased, and they said yes, of course, (this must happen at least every other day, I realized), but the doctor he come first. How long did that usually take? Depends – one hour, maybe, or two three.

But the attending physician, Ken Park, showed up within the hour. He’d known my dad for a year now, had been his primary doctor since that neck injury – he was the one who’d rightly diagnosed it as a compression fracture. We stood over the bed, he on one side, we on the other, and talked about him, about what had happened. I asked what would the death certificate say – natural causes? He said that “they” (meaning the authorities, whoever they were) no longer liked that pronouncement as it was too vague. He’d think of something, he said. (Later when I got the death certificate, it said “natural causes,” and I suppose that when the deceased is one hundred, that declaration bears more unassailable credibility.)

After he left, more waiting. The funeral home called to say someone was on the way. That someone turned out to be a smallish young woman, Grace by her nametag, wearing glasses and dressed as if to clerk in an insurance office, and she entered rolling a narrow gurney. She clutched a folder to her breast and a single red rose in that fist. She offered formal condolences and passed the red rose to Marcia, who seemed momentarily bewildered as to where to put it or what to do with it.

I presumed that Grace would be followed by two hefty fellows in overalls, but I was wrong. You’re alone? I asked. Oh, yes, she said. Not a problem. She asked us if we wanted her to step outside so we could have some private time before she took him – a formality considering we’d been alone with him for what seemed hours – and we said no. She peeled back the afghan and covering blanket. He was clad in a hospital-styled smock, his usual bedtime attire, and she asked if we wanted to keep that. No. She asked if we wanted to send along clothing with her to dress him in later. No. Did he have on any jewelry, or did we wish to send any along? No. Did he have dentures? No, I said, and needlessly explained that he’d lost so many teeth so recently that there was nothing to hook the dentures to. She asked if he had any implants or pacemaker. No.

She presented me with forms to sign. One inventoried the items she would be taking – or would not be, in our case. One gave her permission to remove the deceased. She wanted to know if I needed to make an appointment the following day to discuss the funeral plans. 

She raised his bed and adjusted the gurney to the same height as she prepared to move him. I felt I had to help her, fearing a clumsy choreography where he might be dropped, but also I felt called upon to participate as the able-bodied man in the room. A kind of unfamiliar ceremony was transpiring without a rehearsal, and I must have a role in it even if I didn’t know exactly what: that gurney was going to serve as a pall, wasn’t it?, so didn’t I need to be a bearer?

I moved to the other side of the bed. Grace unhooked her two corners of the bottom sheet on her side, and I aped her action on mine. She then gathered the sheet around him. Without hesitation, she reached across his legs and easily swung them out over her gurney and set them to rest, while I leaned over the bed and offered up my hands like platters much too late to be of use. She then grabbed the gathered sheet over his chest with one hand and slid the other under his waist, and I was quick enough to assist this time, and in one quick smooth slide had him transferred.

She unfolded a large black shroud and arranged it over his form and the gurney, the way you cover your barbeque grill in the winter. Marcia took the rose from where she’d set it on the dresser and placed it on his chest.

I told Grace we would walk out with her. So our cortege rolled into the hall and down to the service elevator large enough to accommodate the gurney. By now, nurses, aides, attendants and residents were about coming and going from breakfast. TVs in the rooms were blaring Sunday morning news shows and church services, and we got a few nods of condolence on our way – a nurse coded the elevator for us and stood aside respectfully as we entered - but for the most part our passing as a result of his passing seemed commonplace.

Grace had parked the funeral home’s van in the underground parking garage. We had to access that by traveling through the labyrinthian hallways of the building’s basement. I’d been down there many times before at least as far as the laundry where I’d tried to track down a blue cardigan sweater that often went missing, but the hallways had offshoots and confusing intersections. The halls were dimly lit by ailing flourescent fixtures; discarded equipment such as a traction sling, broken chairs, and desks with empty drawers hanging open like the tongues of dead varmits lined the walls and obstructed easy passage. The walls had not been painted since the building was constructed, and every door knob or handle had a backdrop wreath of gray hand-grime. Time clock. Bulletin board with safety flyers. It was easy to get lost, and we did. We went a hundred yards down one hall, opened double doors at the end of it to find ourselves looking into the parking garage but nowhere near where Grace had parked, apparently.

We backtracked. This impromptu ceremony – our Charon duty – took on the unpleasant aura of that bad dream where you keep struggling to get something urgent and important accomplished only to be thwarted endlessly by unexpected obstacles. We all fairly shouted hoorah when Grace finally declared that she recognized another set of double doors to be those she’d originally come in, and so we went through them and into the dark garage.

Her van was a couple hundred feet away, and we rolled swallowed by our own echo to the rear of it. She swung the double-doors open, and in a quick nimble flurry of action she maneuvered the lowered gurney onto a trolley that slid out from the van, and rolled it back in. The latch made a loud clack when it locked into place.

She looked at us, waiting. Did we want to follow her?

No.

I leaned in and patted my dead dad’s feet. I knew that under that cover they were very white, very skinny, with nails tough as cow horn.

“Thank you for your life,” I told him.

Toward the end of the 100th birthday party, the facility’s director stopped by to wish my dad a happy birthday. He told us that Bill was now qualified to be a member of the Centenarian Club, eligible to have his name put on a plaque that now hangs in the dining hall. I asked how many listed there were still up and active. He said a couple of women still living independently in the other wing could boast 101 and 103. I asked what happens when a Centenarian dies – are their names scratched from the plaque? I was half-joking. He said that they put a “D”  beside the names.

And then he asked my dad, innocently, “What would your wish be on your one-hundredth birthday?”

Those in the know all held our breath. He’d become very unpredictable about how he might respond at any time to any comment or question. Once, I was watching as he was helped along the parallel bars by his favorite therapist, Rima, when he paused for a long moment and looked pleasantly pensive into a far distance. Rima waited a bit, and when he didn’t resume, she said, “Bill, what are you thinking about?” He said, “I was thinking I’d like to be breast-fed.” We all burst out laughing. Rima said, “Well, we will not be doing any of that today!”

But given his recent descent into gloom, I was afraid we’d hear a repeat of the “gimme a pistol” death-wish.

My dad frowned in concentration.

“Antelope,” he said.

We all laughed.

“Antelope,” said the director. “That’s a good one.”

Of course, that non sequitir got a good laugh, and he chuckled along. 

Days later, it nagged at me. Why antelope? Was he still thinking of “home” and so were the lyrics to “Home On The Range” floating through his mind: “...Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam, and the deer and the antelope play….”? 

I remembered, then, the actual antelope. Back in the 1950s, in the vast semi-arid desert of southern New Mexico and west Texas, herds of wild pronghorn antelope ran free-range across the mesas and scrub and cacti. 

We always saw them when I went with my dad on his trips to the field to collect gas samples that he’d later analyze in his lab at Gulf Oil. Unlike the self-domesticated deer that casually ravage Texas suburban gardens, the antelope were feral, disdainful of humans, like some vestigal feature from the older American West – not by accident are they paired with buffalo in the song. They were wary and skittish, fleet of hoof with a top speed of 55 mph, and you couldn’t get within a few hundreds yards before they’d bolt. My abiding memory is of standing on the top of a sand dune and watching them in the far distance running through shimmering waves of heat that made them appear to float above the ground as if ascending while they vanished, ever elusive.