Donald F. Austin, Sr.
We didn't have any kind of deathbed vigil over my father when he passed. No rites, no gathering, no advice, in either direction, no last words. He was in the hospital again, and a nurse called my mother and said, "I think you should come. He's breathing calmly, which isn't normal for him, and it looks like the end." And it was. A dozen minutes to midnight the evening before his youngest's fourth birthday. My mother liked to say that he was too much of a gentleman to pass on his child's birthday, and so he slipped away.
Dad was 39, Mom 34, and the kids 13, 11, 9, 7, 5, and 3. I'm the oldest. We were two boys, two girls, then two boys, so none of us ever had a bedroom to ourselves until we became adults.
My family is now scattered across the country, although still mostly on the West Coast. Val is outside of Washington, DC, Ginny and David are off the edges of opposite sides of the San Diego sprawl, Steven never left Orange County, our mother was still in the same house we grew up in, half of the OC wasteland away from Steven, until her last few years, when she moved to a granny cottage at Ginny's, I live in Oregon, and Bill was in Phoenix, Arizona, until his own untimely demise.
Our clan, though, has a family reunion every three years, hosted in a new location by someone willing to attempt all the prodigious logistics. It's not uncommon to have eighty to a hundred of us meet there.
And so it happened, a couple decades later, that all seven of us were in a hotel room, all together for the first time in quite some time, and the topic wandered onto that terrible nine months between the cancer diagnosis and Dad's death. And, as one memory triggered another, and we all told our stories, I realized for the first time how much more I remembered than anyone else, just because I was older. Down the line, each of the kids had fewer tales to tell, fewer neurons jogged by the current story, less of a clear picture of the events of those last days. I had never considered that. To a greater and greater extent, the memories that they did have were of the stories we had repeated about those days over the years.
This was an eye-opening revelation for me. We had all been there, we had all gone through it, but I had not understood that each of us had carried away less from it, simply because of our different ages.
And our mother contributed some, but mostly listened to us share our memories. And at some point, told us that she was unexpectedly fascinated by all this, because her husband's death, at such a young age, was a terrible event that had happened to her. She had never before realized or seen that it was a deeply personal event that had happened to each and every one of us. It loomed so large on her personal horizon that she had never imagined its effects on anyone else, not even us, especially since we were so young.
She was the unanticipated young widow with six children to feed, she had a mortgage to pay, she had to keep up the car payments, she had to cover the cost of braces and the private school tuition, and it was such an overwhelming proposition that she had never looked past it. The evening was an eye-opening moment for her, too. And, of course, her revelation was a surprise to all of us.
Dad's physician, our family doctor, Dr. Floyd Miracle, and you know, I don't have to make this stuff up, for me this is just normal, Dr. Miracle had been diagnosing Dad with a 'nervous stomach,' when Mom and Dad finally decided to see someone else. Dr. Someone Else, whoever he was, sent him for some tests, and the tests immediately and conclusively said, "YOU HAVE CANCER!" And he did. In all caps. An all-day exploratory sugery was scheduled. They sewed him back up after twenty minutes and said, "Fuck! It's everywhere!" The cancer was in his lymph system, and was, literally, everywhere, and spreading. Radiation was tried. It was a science in its infancy. This was 1967. It was experimental. It was inconsequential. Chemotherapy was tried. It was a science in its infancy. It was experimental. It was inconsequential. At some point, he did go under the knife again, to remove a testicle that was grossly invaded by a tumor, but very little else was possible. While they were trying to re-balance his medications after that, he began to grow breasts, and he was very proud of them. Apparently, he was very fond of breasts, even if they were his own. The tumors progressed until they began to interfere with vital organs, and when they filled his lungs, that killed him.
Now, don't get me wrong. We had nine months to accept this. That is a gift. Not many are given this gift. You can be struck down by a bus. I was on stage with a 45 year old friend, waiting for the curtain to rise on opening night, who fell over dead of a heart attack. There are many ways to go. Knowing it's coming can be a blessing.
Towards the end, breathing was often difficult, and we had a giant oxygen tank in his bedroom. One bad afternoon, he ran it dry, and was struggling. Mom called the doctor, and the doctor, knowing how long it might take the supply company to deliver more, called the paramedics. So the EMT vehicle and the big fire truck showed up, as they do, and all the neighbors gathered around, and Mom took the medical folks into the bedroom, and they looked things over and got another O2 tank set up. In the meantime, the police arrrived, and I led them outside the now-crowded room, and answered their questions about what was happening, which satisfied them, and they left, but not before I asked them why police got dispatched to a medical emergency. They told me that it was because it might be a suicide attempt, which was illegal. That really struck me as odd.
Quite some time later, in some conversation, this came up, and my mother couldn't believe that the police had been there. She had not even seen them, preoccupied as she was with the emergency at hand and a roomful of strangers. And, she was also surprised that they listened to a thirteen year old, and went away.
Especially towards the end, with the breathing difficulties, Dad was in and out of the hospital numerous times. The local hospital, St. Jude's, had a policy that no one under seventeen could visit. I never could fathom this policy, other than that it was such a conservative repressive culture at that time and place that children had no rights. At that time, women couldn't even get credit cards.
Now, of course, my mother was not the kind of person who allows people to tell her what to do, and make stupid rules for her to obey. She judged it unacceptable that her children were not allowed to visit their father on his deathbed. So we ignored that rule. We would walk in pairs, oldest and youngest, and if anyone said, "You have to be seventeen to be in here," we would respond, in unison, "Together, we are seventeen." Our instructions were to calmly continue to Dad's room no matter what, and let Mom run interference when necessary. And there were times when it was like the National Geographic shows where the mother lion, or tiger, or bear, was protecting her cubs. You did not want to have my mother lecture you about the unacceptable stupidity of her children being denied a visit when every day could be the last one. The staff quickly learned to just look the other way. And we were perfectly well-behaved children. In solemn circumstances. There was no valid reason for us to be excluded. We didn't run around or get into things or make noise or disturb others or cause any trouble.
There was one particularly hide-bound nurse who truly believed in strict adherence to the rules. She tangled with my mother a time or two, did not enjoy it, and could not muster support for her position. When she saw us coming, she would excuse herself, and take a break or go to another floor or another workstation, because she couldn't stand to see a rule broken, but she had learned that she wasn't going to shut us out.
Mom didn't remember telling us to 'be seventeen, added up by pairs,' which I found especially amusing, because that sort of clever thinking is exactly what I remember her for.
One of the oddest and saddest twists in this whole story is that my father was a fan of the tv series, Bonanza, which was the king of Sunday nights, and had he lived, that's what we would have watched. This was long before recorders, cable tv, and as least as far as our budget was concerned, a second tv set. We were fans of the Smothers Brothers original tv series, in which Tom played a hapless apprentice angel. A derivative of Topper and a precursor to My Mother The Car. So we were glued to our set for the entire run of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which I still feel had the greatest influence on me of anything ever. And we wouldn't have seen that show if Dad had been alive. We'd have watched Bonanza.
