In his mid-60s, my father unfolded a United States road atlas, laid a ruler across it, and drew a straight line from Cape Flattery, Wash., to Key West, Fla. “It’s downhill all the way!” he boomed. Then he drove that line, from the northwest corner of the continental United States to its southeastern endpoint — alone.
“I made a rule for myself,” my father told me later. “No going beyond 50 miles either side of that line.” At the halfway point in Kansas he found a chunk of cottonwood and buried it where he could find it again.
“That’s for when I go the other way,” he said proudly. “Next year I’ll drive from Maine to California! I’m calling it ‘America on the Diagonal.’ I’m going to make an X across the country.” And he did.
My father’s cross-country road trips were pure joy for him. He had traveled on business to places like Thailand, Slovakia and the Cayman Islands. But in the American small towns, where he encountered checkout clerks, bartenders and car mechanics, he saw parts of himself.
A decade after those epic drives, my father embarked on another journey, one for which he had no map or compass. At 75, still a strong man, he was having trouble with night sweats and a flulike cold. It was not like my father to be sick. When he was given a diagnosis of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, we never doubted he could lick it. Even at 75, his immense power — 6-foot-4 and a will of iron — always made me think of Mount Rainier in his home state of Washington, one of many peaks he’d scaled in his 30s.
Dad and I sat in the oncologist’s office and discussed treatment. The doctor told us that he had a strain of leukemia that people often live with, that chemotherapy made the odds for living a “quality life” quite high.
But Dad had some concerns. “Several of my friends have really suffered with chemotherapy,” he said. “What would happen if I didn’t do the treatment?”
This was 2003, and the doctor looked at my father as if he’d just spit up a hairball.
“You would die,” he said. “My job is to keep you alive; this is the only smart choice.”
“But has anyone actually chosen not to take this course?” My father folded his large hands in his lap. The doctor paused in dismay, then shook his head. “No,” he said, closing Dad’s file and ushering us out the door.
After a month of treatment, though, Dad contracted an infection and had to be hospitalized. When I visited him at the huge Seattle medical center, he fumbled with the straw in his water glass and groaned when a nurse asked him to turn over.
Dad’s infection soon turned into pneumonia. High fever made him slightly delirious, and he claimed to see people we didn’t see. He would occasionally gasp with pain. To make things worse, the hospital was renovating the intensive care unit on the floor below my father’s, and our conversation was regularly interrupted by the earsplitting sound of jackhammers and the crash of crumbling plasterboard.
“This is exactly what I did not want to happen,” my father said from his damp, rumpled sheets. “Do I want this to be my life?”
The next morning, my brother and sister called from the hospital. “You have to come right away,” my brother said. “Dad says he has something important to tell us.” When I arrived, my father was radiant, sitting up in bed and smiling. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed so he could sit up and command the room.
“I’ve made a decision,” he said. We leaned forward. “I had an epiphany in the night.” He closed his eyes. “I was awake, sick of the noise going on below, sick of this hospital. But then I heard singing.” Hallucinations? But his story had none of the feverishness of the previous night.
“I looked up,” my father raised his hand. “And the night nurse — her name was Kristy — was singing a spiritual.” Dad paused and took a breath. “I said to her, ‘Could you sing that louder?’ She told me she’d love to and closed the door.
“She began singing ‘Amazing Grace,’ and the sound filled the room.” My father stretched his arms out to his sides, his hospital gown draping off his strong shoulder like a Roman soldier’s tunic. His eyes glowed not only with tears, but with a clarity we had not seen in weeks.
“I felt as if I were being freed,” he said. He took another long breath. “I realized” — he paused; his ice blue eyes bright — “that I don’t have to do this! I don’t have to have chemo or do this awful hospital!”
Against the advice of his oncologist, my father was unplugging himself, demanding to be released not only from the hospital, but from life as we know it. It felt like a victory.
“Are you afraid to die?” I asked him later. He shook his head. “No! I sent three children to college, I climbed some mountains, I saw a lot of places on the earth, and had a wonderful marriage and family. I think I’ve done everything I’ve wanted to do in this life.”
Our family always went as a group to the airport to pick up whoever was coming home from Boston, London or Lagos. But at some point, we had decided not to belabor farewells, so the departing traveler would head to the airport by shuttle. “No sad goodbyes!” my father would boom from the park ’n’ ride.
This time was different. We’d see Dad to the gate.
A few nights later, I stayed overnight on the foldout sofa in his room at the hospice center. As he slept, his breathing was labored. Often, he’d reach up above his head for something I could not see.
At one point, Dad groggily awoke and thanked me for looking after him. He asked how I learned to do it.
“Well, I learned it from you, Dad. You always took such good care of me.”
“I always will,” he said and closed his eyes.
When my father woke again he said, “Check, please!” and waved his hand toward an invisible waiter. I gave him the nearest thing I could find, one of the cards sent from friends. I found a pen and Dad scribbled a bit on the card and then passed it to me, exhausted. “Will you sign it, Christine?” I did.
Not long before dawn, my father began speaking of airplanes, flight plans. At one point, he asked me if he had his passport.
“Yes, Dad,” I said gently. “You have it. No problem.” I smoothed the coverlet across his chest.
“But what about you?” His voice carried the urgency of the one in charge of travel plans. “How will you get there?”
“Don’t worry, Dad,” I reassured him, stroking his solid forearm, “I have my passport, too. I’ll be there. I promise. I’ll just be on a later flight.”
Christine Hemp is a poet, writer and teacher. This essay is an excerpt from her new book “Wild Ride Home: Love, Loss, and a Little White Horse, a Family Memoir,” coming in February.
