Yesterday evening I saw a dead man for the first time.

It was my father.

I. O, Fortuna

I am both fortunate and unfortunate in being able to say that. Fortunate in that, for much of the rest of the world, the sight of death is likely to come both too early and too often, and certainly not in the relative comfort of a skilled nursing facility, or at home under hospice care, as had been our plan.

Unfortunate in that, as a member of a society devoted to denying age, dying, and death, I really have no place to put the experience—or rather, it will take me a lot longer to encompass the reality than it would had I grown up in a culture where dying is understood as a part of life. I saw this with particular poignancy among the Latino women who served as drop-in caregivers for my father during his sudden, final decline. Many of them had grown up caring for their elderly parents or grandparents, and they evinced a matter-of-fact tenderness and competency that was both reassuring and shaming. If this is what “multiculturalism” brings to our country, I want more of it.

II. The Paths of the Dead

The curtains were drawn about his bed when Deborah and I walked into his room about an hour after his death. One of his roommates was outside in the hall, the other sitting in bed. I half-smiled and nodded at him as he silently indicated his condolences. My father had only been in that room for a day; he had been transferred from a transitional unit when he refused to continue radiation treatments. So I don’t know the man’s story. Is he waiting for death to find him there, or does he hope and expect to go home? What was it like for him to hear that death had visited so close, to wait there until the mortuary came to take away the body?

Another first for me came when I pulled aside the curtain and saw the white-shrouded form upon the bed: a visceral understanding of what the word “uncanny” points to. For just a moment I wouldn’t have been surprised to see it sit up or float into the air. Terrified, of course. But not surprised.

It was hard to draw back the sheet from his face. The woman who called on the phone had said he looked “peaceful.” I suppose so—there were no signs of pain. As a child I was fascinated by the illustration of Jacob Marley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol, for I didn’t understand why he had that band of cloth under his jaw and over the top of his head. Now I knew, for my father’s gaping mouth opened on the darkness that awaits us all, and his eyes, half-lidded, gazed with milky unsight upon the undiscovered country. As I am, so shall you be. And there was nothing left of the handsome, powerful man I remembered from my childhood.

Chuck Trowbridge with his children, 1956

III. Time Enough for Love

What killed my father was prostate cancer, which metastasized into his spine. While his doctor had no hesitation in prescribing whatever level of opiates was necessary to control his pain (fentanyl patches and hydromorphone), his sudden death was nonetheless a mercy. There was nothing to look forward to except increasing pain, higher doses of opiates, and decreasing awareness of his surrounding. His collapse was quite sudden, from “independent living” to the hospital to death in the skilled nursing facility in about two weeks.

But there was time enough for love. Our relationship had not been good for many years, for he could never acknowledge the damage my mother’s alcoholism did to him, my sister, and me—not, at least, until she died in December of 2006. Then, slowly, faint signs of who he might have been without her—the merchant mariner who gave up the sea he loved when she told him to choose—began to emerge, even though he never stopped loving her. And I had a little time to discover the man I could have loved far more than I did, and understand how much he gave me.

Just four days before he died a memory surfaced, of a song I’d heard years before. I didn’t know the title, only that it was by Mike and the Mechanics. It was, of course, easy to find: The Living Years. I listened, weeping, and two days later finally told my adoptive father what I needed to say, and what he needed to hear:

I learned a lot from you, Dad. I was lucky to have you as a father.

Two days later, he was dead.

Say it loud. Say it clear.

Don’t wait.