DOING THE WORK // 12.05.02

SAILING AWAY
By Harris O'Malley

December 3, 2002

The Thanksgiving holidays have come and gone in the U.S. Normally I'd probably blatantly steal a gag from Garrison Keillor and talk about the frission-potential of the nuclear family, but I just don't have it in me right now.

No more jokes.

I've just gotten off the phone with my father for the last time. For more than a year, my father has been battling extremely advanced cancer, and tonight, he's finally lost the battle.

On Monday, I got a phone call from Carol, my step-mother: Dad was in the hospital and every weak. She passed the phone to Dad. "Hey, how're you feeling?" I asked. I tried to sound upbeat; I mean, for the past year, Dad's been living proof that God can't destroy what the Devil owns. "I think I'm going down for the last time," he said. "So how are you doing?"

My father just told me that he's laying in the hospital, dying, he's never leaving there alive, and he wants to know what I'm up to.

HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO RESPOND TO THAT?!?

It's almost funny. There are just some things that you're never prepared for, no matter what you may think. For more than a year, I've known that the end was near; when Dad found out, the cancer had already metastasized, had already spread to his brain, his liver and his lungs. Any treatment at that stage is a bandage over a sucking chest-wound. It's weeks, maybe months added to your life expectancy.

So it was not like I didn't see this coming. I'd even accepted it, intellectually. But there's still that bastard kernel of hope that stays lodged within your mind, that tiny little voice that says "Hey, he's got the Devil's own luck already. He's taken on psycho ex-wives, hordes of divorce lawyers, even City Hall. Cancer's a fucking pussy." And Lord knows for a while, it looked like he beat it. Even while he was on chemo, he kept most of his hair, didn't lose any weight. Sure, he was looking a little grayer, a little more pop-eyed than usual, but that's to be expected, right? I mean, they're pumping poison into his body.

So nothing really prepared me for seeing him in that hospital bed last Monday, shriveled up and weak. The only way I could compare it is that he went from looking like the Bond-era Roger Moore to looking like James Woods in Ghosts of the Mississippi. Like he had aged 30 years in the three weeks since I'd seen him. His face was sunken in, while his eyes bulged. His gums had receded, leaving him with almost preternaturally elongated teeth, what witch's teeth look like in those Hallowe'en decorations that were plastered all over not so very long ago.

The fact that he had on the crown from when he was the Rey Feo in the Battle of Flowers parade and was holding court with all and sundry didn't help things.

Everybody was there. My uncle, my cousin, my sister, desperately trying to act as if she still had her Long Island accent, and her husband, all people I hadn't seen in years. During that week, it seemed like every prominent businessman, councilman and lawyer came in to visit, to pay their last respects, to say good-bye. Perhaps most touching, his old sailing buddies from New York came down to see him.

He was always an avid sailor, my father. From the time he was nine years old, Dad had been sailing in the Raven boat races out in Babylon and Bayshore; and damn if he didn't win the lion's share of them. We all spent a lot of time talking about sailing that week; reliving races from decades past, remembering the funniest mishaps, the most incompetent crews while Richard Burton sang in the background about what the king was doing tonight.

At times, I think that the worst of it is, once I was recovering from the shock (which I did a good job of hiding, thank the gods), I was thinking about comics. I was sitting there, watching my father die before my eyes, and I was making mental notes. Examining the lighting, how it refracted through the IV's just so. The way the Ancira's were huddled around the bed, holding his hand and leaning in to hear him. And I was thinking about how I was going to put this all into a comic. If I didn't find a way to incorporate it into something I was already working on, then by God I was going to do a comic about my father dying; straight up PEDRO AND ME meets OUR CANCER YEAR, by way of FORTUNE AND GLORY.

There's no feeling worse than sitting in the room with your father, on his deathbed, trying to provide whatever comfort you can, and in some corner of your brain, you're dispassionately doing panel layouts and deciding on the style you want to use to render the scene.

Except one.

On Sunday, my brother had to go back to trying to get his MBA and flew back to Boston. Studio Underhill is my day-job. I set the hours. I didn't need to go back to Austin.

Damn me, I did. I left that day. I needed to get away, away from the smothering closeness of a hospital room, even a very large one, crammed to the bursting point with family, friends, people I never knew, and in the middle, my Dad, just laying there, watching. Quiet except for the bubbling of the humidifier on the oxygen tubing. I had to get back, get away, drown myself in work so I wouldn't have to constantly be thinking "Today may be the last day I'll ever see my father. Today may be the last time I ever talk to my father."

So I get back to Austin. I go through the motions of getting my apartment straightened out; I contact the handyman about the repairs that need to be done, I assemble and brace my bookshelves, my CD tower. I do the grocery shopping, I buy a couple games for my computer and I just sit in front of it trying to squeeze out any drop of creativity I can because I need to stop thinking about this and I need to shake this feeling of dread I get every time the fucking phone rings because ever time I'm convinced I'm about to get that phone call and none of it works because he's still in the fucking hospital and I can't do anything to fix it.

And I've just had my final conversation with my father. I got to tell him that I love him and thanks for everything he's given me and done for me. That's about the only thing I feel good about right now. I don't know if I should drive back to San Antonio because I can't stand to be alone in this city, and I don't know if I can leave because at least here I have things to at least try to distract myself with and in San Antonio all I really have to do is to sit there and just stew in the knowledge that I'm never going to talk to my father again and have to face the stark cold reality of it.

fuck.

Requiescat In Pace, Dad. Happy sailing.