Jon MacDougal
Different
Dad was different. Different in that he shielded his eyes and turned away watching Braveheart, insisting the scenes were, “Too real. Too violent.” He once choked my sister by shoving a sleeve of peanuts down her throat and clasping her mouth closed with his size sixteen fingers. Another time, he forced my head in a toilet, for chewing gum in his house. “SPIT IT OUT!” he screamed, “SPIT IT OUT!” as my tiny arms trembled and my little hands slipped through his dark syrupy piss on the rim of porcelain. When he was dying, he winced while overhearing talk about the durability of Charmin toilet paper. The subject was “too gross,” too upsetting. What can I say? Dad was different.
In the months leading up to his death, Dad grew smaller and mom grew elated. For years, his weight had been a prominent household issue. As kids, Mom would pull me and my sister aside, anytime we were about to indulge in treats or take-out, and issue a warning; “Look at your father. See how fat he is? You don’t want to end up as fat as your father.” After that, with no further commentary, she would send us back to the kitchen, to sit in the exhaust of Dad’s heavy breathing and enjoy whatever calorie-dense food was provided.
One day in the summer of 2010, while bringing in groceries, Dad fell to the floor vomiting. Flu-like symptoms persisted for months. During that time, my mother viewed his impromptu weight-loss as a blessing. She placed daily calls to update anyone still willing to answer their phone. “Down eleven pounds since last week! He hasn’t been this size since our wedding!”
The cancer came as a shock, and not because Dad was the pillar of health. The surprise was the fault of lousy recordkeeping at our town’s blood clinic, which had been mixing up Dad’s monthly test results. All the days spent waiting, grumbling at nurses, and sitting through punctures to ensure his weekly shots of methotrexate weren’t killing him had been a waste of time. The town’s only other sixty-year-old Dougal MacDougal must have been anticipating a forthcoming death. The clerical error got sorted on December 23rd. I like to imagine that this was the other Dougal’s happy holiday. After the news came, my sister and I, who were living in faraway cities, broke a lifelong commitment and returned home for Christmas.
When I arrived, I found a yellow-skinned, average-sized version of my father lying in a loaned-out hospital bed in my mother’s dandelion-yellow Reiki room. The locale of Dad’s death was chosen for its proximity to the downstairs bathroom, and it featured Mom’s many artistic interests and endeavours: a papier-mâché sculpture of her face, split in two, with Styrofoam brains spilling from the center; a painting of my stone-faced, red-bearded father wearing pink eyeshadow and a transparent blue negligee; paintings of chakra symbols and tarot cards; shelves adorned with New Age books, crystal wands, and more tarot cards; as well as an assortment of strange instruments that no one in my family could play, like shak-shaks, singing bowls, djembes, rawhide hand-drums, and rainsticks.
Going home this time was different. I wondered if it always smelled so strong. Were the floors that dirty when I left? My new wife tried to conceal her discomfort, as my mother handed her my childhood bedspread, and its musty, pilled fabric crunched against her fingers. I was sure it hasn’t been laundered since the last time I used it. I began to remember all the things I forgot. I realized what, as a child, I only thought: my mother is insane. My wife looked concerned, listening to her animated soliloquy, as one mother hissed curses at the other, whose tone was pitiable as she pleaded for mercy. It had always been like this, but now it was no longer white noise. Even the cats were different; they’d lost all affection. They were skittish and afraid, which was a good thing.
I decided that, since my lifetime of communication with Dad was mostly a prolonged exchange of commands and verbal abuses, I would seize the awkward and short-lived opportunity to have real conversations with the man. At least, I tried, only to find it was like pulling teeth from an ornery patient, between their revolving oration of grievances. A popular grievance was Christmas, even after the holiday passed. “What a treat! Dyin’ for Christmas.” “I always hated Christmas.” “Everyone always dies at Christmas.” “Surprise surprise—should’ve known I’d die over Christmas!” There was also the timely, “I’m dyin’ here!”
I wasn’t the only one who struggled to communicate with Dad. Mom’s last attempts to help him get comfortable were often subject to the same manner of interruption. She would ask if he’d like another pillow, or offer to make him something to eat, and mid-sentence he’d holler, “Aw, for Chrissake, knock it off! Would ya? I’m dyin’ here!” Then Mom would get weepy, and Dad would sigh and roll his eyes. These exchanges were nothing new. One time, my parents were seated together watching Life as a House, and something prompted Mom to say, “You know, Dougal, people die if they go too long without human touch.” I was in another room, but I could see through the walls to his eyeroll. “That is the stupidest goddamn thing I ever heard,” he said. In retrospect, that was the year Mom had a tryst with the clairvoyant, whom she met at the psychic fair, and whose spiral-bound book still sits on her mantle.
Dad had little time or patience for Mom’s litany of strange interests. It was bad enough that she spent so much money on annual trips to the Wiccan bookstore, tribal instruments, and her modest collection of crystals, which she genuinely believed had supernatural properties. The ultimate slap in his face was the fact that she dedicated an entire room of the house to such foolishness. It was a great poetic injustice that Dad would die in that room, and during goddamn Christmas, no less.
If the setting of Dad’s death was emotionally injurious, the ongoing presence of my mother’s friend, Beatrice, was preposterously insulting. Coincidentally, my mother met Beatrice a year earlier at the Cancer Center in our local hospital, where they both volunteered as Reiki practitioners. In addition to being a fellow Reiki Master, Beatrice also shared spiritual communion with the dead, and she had a special room in her house, too, although hers also served as a refugee camp for lost souls, with whom she spoke regularly. In the months prior to my father’s illness, Mom became enraptured by this woman and followed her like a sidekick. During my visit, I observed numerous one-sided conversations between them. Beatrice’s healing powers were greatly superior, she said, and there was never any argument against that.
Beatrice is one of many likeminded or predatory characters who have been drawn to Mom’s myriad undiagnosed mental illnesses with the enthusiasm of a dog in heat. Considering her belief that purgatory is a lime-scaled room on Cabot Street, of all Mom’s fleeting friends, Beatrice likely lives the furthest from reality. In the three weeks between Dad’s diagnosis and death, my mother saw more of her than anyone else.
The first time I saw Beatrice, she paraded inside, straight to my father’s death-bed. She was a stout little woman of about sixty, with severely arched pencilled eyebrows, enough makeup to rival an ancient Egyptian’s, and her hair, which was teased up in the style of an electrocuted cartoon character’s, was dyed shoe polish black. She wore all black, too, including a floor length cardigan, with draped, wizardly sleeves, and about twenty pieces of costume jewellery, including many rings. She stood at the foot of my father’s bed and performed her healing ritual, while my mother stood in the background, looking on with awe and child-like expectance, as though a yellow cloud of cancer would whoosh from the room, and Dad would be suddenly cured. Instead, Beatrice held her palms toward my father, puffed up her cheeks, and started making trilling sounds like a little boy mimicking machine-gun fire. My father stared at her with jaundiced eyes and a tight mouth. Occasionally, she stopped making noises to ask, in a yell, “WHAT COLORS ARE YOU SEEING?”
“None.”
“HOW MANY ORBS DO YOU SEE?”
“None.”
“DO YOU SEE MY AURA?”
“No.”
“TELL ME WHEN YOU SEE IT!”
Afterward, she said my father’s spirit was weak, and fading, since he couldn’t see the multitude of colorful energy rays dancing around him. Mom was weak, too, for that matter, as she also failed to see them. My mother was greatly disturbed by the thought that Dad would die without being spiritually attuned. When Beatrice left for the first time, he set his innumerable gripes aside and told Mom, in a rarely-heard soothing tone, that he didn’t trust Beatrice, and that he feared my mother was going to get hurt. Mom pleaded, asking him to please al- low Beatrice to continue her services, as she felt the magic might save his life. He solemnly accepted, imploring her, in exchange, to recall his advice.
Dad’s death-related hardships had not yet run their course. One night, he awoke choking and frantically grasping at his throat. As if humoring talk of magical orbs and healing rays wasn’t farcical enough for the bitter deist’s dying days, Dad became afflicted by a delightful condition: fecal vomiting. Some things require no explanation. It was as though a mischievous child was writing the narrative of his death.
The unfortunate regurgitation was a pivotal point in Dad’s palliative care. The following evening, a doctor from hospice met with us to explain that his tumors were growing faster than anticipated, which had prompted a blockage, and so, it became a question of whether his system would shut down before the tumors caused a rupture and an agonizing death. The doctor proposed a solution to speed up the process, which was impacted by the fact that MAID was not yet legal. She suggested we hook him up to an IV, and every two hours, add another dose of hydromorphone “to keep him comfortable.” This would help to slow down his heart, she warned. As a result, Dad would enter a medically induced coma and die, “naturally,” within twenty-four hours.
He knew he’d never wake again, but Dad left no final wishes nor offered farewells. I took the first and final bedside shift. He met death with the disdain of someone who dies every other Tuesday. As the night wore on, his breathing changed from roaring apnea snores to quiet little gasps. Every two hours, as I administered another dose of lethal injection, I thought about a handful of early morning fishing trips he took me on, which amounted to our greatest instances of bonding. Each trip began with an assurance that we would catch nothing, as I always slept past sunrise, and was followed by an order not to speak, as my racket would scare away the fish. I was six the first time but felt as though I waited so long to finally go fishing. The prospect of reeling a live fish from the Bras d’Or lakes to the grey and misty shore was surreal, especially considering my failure to wake pre-dawn.
Dad and I stood on a large, flat sandstone rock and, after a few heart-pounding bites, my bob dropped. Sensing that I was going to lose the unlucky fish on my line, Dad helped me bring it ashore. Reality overwhelmed me when the flap-ping two-foot cod emerged from the surface, violently wriggling in the air for its life. Dad grabbed it, yanked the hook from its mouth and laid it at my feet. I knew he wanted me to finish the fish, whose bloody mouth was opening and closing in a hopeless bid for life. To hasten my hesitation, he said, “You’re only making it suffer. Hurry up and whack its head on the rock.” I tried to kill it, but the fish was too big. My frustrated father ripped the stunned and dying fish from my small hands, hoisted it up by the tail, and brought it down to the rock like he was swinging a great hammer. On the drive home, our silence remained.
The fish sat in our freezer for years. Infrequently, I would revisit it. I would remove the plastic bag it was wrapped in, inadvertently sprinkling my socked feet with ice from the frost layer, and, while touching the bone where its head was severed, I would marvel at its size. One day, without warning, the fish was gone.
It snowed overnight, so I shoveled through sunrise. When I returned to Dad before the two-hour mark, his head was cocked sideways, and he was mouth breathing. His head would tip back with each faintly audible inhale, then lean forward as he dreamily sighed, “aaaahhhhh,” and snapped his mouth shut. Then, his lips would pop open, and the cycle would repeat. I left the room to find my mother. She was already tinkering in the kitchen, humming.
“Have you heard Dad this morning?” I asked.
“Yes!” she replied, very chipper. “He sounds really good! Y’know, I think Beatrice is right. He’s gonna pull through!”
Ten minutes later, my father was dead. Before he died, his eyes opened, vacantly staring straight ahead. They remained open as he grabbed at his chest in a pained manner. Meanwhile, my smiling mother stood at his bedside, assuring him that he needn’t worry, Beatrice would usher his soul to safety. That afternoon, my mother laid on the kitchen floor screaming. By evening time, her voice had hoarsened to a whisper. She stood at the kitchen’s landline, simultaneously spinning its cord and the story of my father’s eternal departure. I hope she sincerely believes that he opened his eyes, looked at the faces around the room, extended his arms like Christ and announced to us, with a smile, “I love you all!” then closed his eyes and peacefully passed. Every time she tells this story, I hear his wry snarl, “Over my dead body!”
The wake was three days later. My father had strong feelings about—well, everything, really—but especially the practice of embalming. He wanted to be buried without any preservatives. Unlike at most funerals, where family members comment on the youthful appearance of the deceased, the talk overshadowing Dad was about how quickly he’d turn odorous and bloated. When I first saw his lifeless body on display, my mother beckoned me beside his casket with clandestine urgency.
“Does he look all right to you?” she asked, in a whisper, followed by, “Can you smell something?” She loomed over him inhaling. “I don’t think that there’s a smell,” she continued, “Give ‘em a whiff and see what you think.” Following the wake, anxiety swirled about whether his scent-free condition would hold out until after the funeral.
The day after Dad was buried, my mother approached my sister and me, requesting that we join Beatrice and her husband, Walter, a bail bondsman, for dinner. After two ‘no’s and a guilt trip, my mother, sister, brother-in-law, wife, and I, were seated with Beatrice and Walter, at Swiss Chalet, where Beatrice made a very vocal to-do about paying for everyone’s meal.
Our waitress was about twenty, had several unfastened buttons on her blue company blouse, playboy bunny earrings, and a powerful hold on my middle-aged brother-in-law’s attention. The two of them traded many smiles, and while ordering, he managed to spend five minutes explaining how, “Down in Indiana—that’s where I’m from . . . Well, no. Actually, that’s where I live. I’m from Tennessee, I just live in Indiana, which is about an hour-and-a-half from Chicago, Illinois. That’s where I work, Chicago. Have you ever been to Chicago?” After her predictable response, during which his beady eyes stared longingly at her cleavage, he continued, “There’s no such thing as ‘iced tea’ in the States. Down there, folks call it ‘sweet tea.’ No one’s even heard of ‘iced tea’ before.” The waitress kept saying it, “sweet tea,” like she was trying to memorize a complex phrase in a foreign language. Meanwhile, my sister looked to be having an even worse time than I was. As their flirtation continued, my mother nodded soberly at Beatrice’s wise teachings about her special brand of Reiki. My wife and I mostly exchanged telling glances, and Walter sat silently, periodically checking his watch.
As my attention wandered between Beatrice’s explanations about her visions, and my brother-in-law’s compliments to the waitress on her pretty earrings, I recalled the only bit of sagacious advice I remember my proud-to-be-a-Mensa-member father ever giving me; “You should always listen to what people have to say. You learn something from everyone. Sometimes, all you learn from someone is that they’re an asshole.”
Back at Mom’s house, my sister and her husband immediately started arguing. She was threatening divorce, again, it seemed, and he was insisting that, after drinking two Long Islands, he was too drunk to comprehend her frustrations. As their outburst went on in the background, my unfazed mother pulled me aside and informed me of the truth about dinner. Her words were relayed with the most seriousness any human ever mustered.
“Your father wanted us to go to Swiss Chalet with Beatrice,” she said. My father hated a great many things, and Swiss Chalet was one of them. He probably hated Beatrice, too. The big news came next; “Your father has returned.” If you can imagine the somber tone of your own mother telling you, and wholeheartedly believing, that your father, her husband of over thirty years, has returned from the dead, then you can imagine my mother’s disposition. Worse still, Dad was back because his soul was lost, and he required mediumship before he could finally be accepted into the spirit realm. Until then, he was two inches tall, forced to live on the doorknob in Beatrice’s bathroom, and, to Beatrice’s frustration, he wouldn’t shut up!
Mom’s intense sadness turned to rage while she explained all of this. She felt cuckolded, hearing that her husband returned in a miniature form to watch another woman in the washroom and jabber at her incessantly. She tearfully complained, “He hardly spoke to me!” To make matters worse, Beatrice insisted that Mom couldn’t see him, as he would only present himself to the spiritually gifted.
The next night, Mom left to attend another dinner with Beatrice. Later, they went back to Beatrice’s house, where she was granted access to the coveted room of lost souls. When Mom returned late that night, she came in skipping. She hopped up and down, flinging her arms in the air, like a child running through a sprinkler on a hot July day. I watched with a familiar feeling of dread as Mom rushed to the Reiki room. She grabbed a Mediæval Bæbes CD and played it at deafening volume on Dad’s old Sony hi-fi system. Next, she grabbed a djembe and ran through the house while wildly wailing her hand on the drum, which was barely audible over the chanting Bæbes and Mom screaming, “I am free! I am finally free! I am free and I am colorful! I am colorful and free!”
The following morning—exactly a week from my father’s demise—Mom stomped through the house wearing a newly-purchased leopard print satin chemise, while angrily dumping dresser drawers and pulling coats from racks, stuffing the remnants of Dad’s existence into garbage bags. Everything went, from our childhood crafts to the presents we watched him open a few weeks prior, knowing he wouldn’t live long enough to use them. When Mom finished, she approached my wife and asked if, before we left, she could help her make an online dating profile.
Driving home, I thought unwittingly of my grandfather’s funeral. I was seven and hadn’t wanted to go. My dad hated his father, so I disliked him by proxy. When we got there, I was surprised that my father was crying. I asked the mother I knew as a young boy, the one who could reliably comfort me, why Dad would cry about someone he hated. Whispering into my ear, she said that one day, when I was much older, I would understand.
Jon MacDougal is a writer and storyteller living in Atlantic Canada.