It was Christmas night and I was set to leave for LA in the early morning. We had just said our goodbyes a few hours earlier, but the knot of guilt in my stomach was wearing down on me. I had a habit of calling his hospital room multiple times a night in the short time period I wasn’t there with him. I had already called him twice that hour, but I had to call again. He answered without his usual gleeful greetings, which was expected given the prognosis of his chronic kidney disease a few days before. I was trying to conceal the crack in my voice, “Do you feel like I’m abandoning you?”
I knew the condition of his disease was bad based off of what the doctors had said, but I wholeheartedly believed that the doctors were not considering the “Papa” factor. They may have years of experience, but they didn’t know Papa. Papa was too young to die even at 90. He was too smart, too quick, too special. I had convinced myself that his extraordinariness could outlive the statistics.
I set my alarm for 4:45 that morning to make sure I could say goodbye in person. He was excited to see me since he thought I had already left. I can’t remember what we spoke about and that bothers me. I wish I could remember the details of every single conversation and hold that with me forever, but I can’t. It fades and it hurts that it does. I do, however, remember this. As I was getting ready to leave, he said to me “Thanks for always being my shoulder Chris. You don’t know what that means to me.” I hugged him tight, kissed him goodbye like it might be the last time, and cried the whole car ride home.
I called him a few hours after I had gotten settled in LA. He told me, “I had a dream you were on your way back to me.” There was an instant ache in my chest. Abandonment.
Within the next 48 hours, he no longer answered my phone calls. I had told myself that he was just too depressed by the doctor’s prognosis, but he would get better as the days passed. I didn’t even consider that it was the disease taking over him. My sister, Michelle, would call when she visited him. The sound of weakness in his voice as he tried to speak was shocking. It had only been 2 days.
I had stayed a full week in LA before Michelle called and told me that she thinks it’s time that I come home. I booked the earliest flight out the next morning and returned home to find a man who barely resembled my grandfather.
Michelle walked in the room before me and said “guess who is here?” as he looked up and saw me he shouted through his fatigue the type of greeting he would normally give. I felt a cripling burst of love and pain. He was almost unrecognizable. One week.
I couldn’t control my tears, the pain in my heart fled through my whole body. “Why are you crying”, he asked. “I don’t like seeing you like this.” “Well, I don’t like being like this”. I knew it was true that he would rather be dead than living like this in a hospital room. But I was not ready to accept that the world could still exist without him.
In the months leading up to his death, he repeatedly warned me that his life was coming to an end. But like I said, the Papa factor. I was not going to listen to him or any doctor that told me that Joseph Patrick Killen couldn’t survive anything. There were days when the disease wore him thin and he’d tell me “I’m going down hill quick, Chris”. My grandfather and I were not shy to the hard conversations. There was rarely a topic that we would find uncomfortable to talk about and death was certainly not one of them. “I’m ready to pack it up.” he confided in me.
The year following my grandmother’s death was the hardest of his life. He had suffered from PTSD after World War II and the loss of a child, but the loss of his wife was a new type of suffering. He had told me the hardest days were the ones where he forgot. When the phone would ring and he could call out “Lova”, when he would see a friend in the town market and race home to tell her about it, when he would make dinner for 2 instead of 1. And that’s what I relate too most, forgetting that he’s gone.
I had gotten used to our new normal. I would feed him, hold his hand, and tell him I loved him and he would whisper “I love you more” back for as long as he was able. I made a playlist for him with songs that I knew he loved to sing. He would try to sing along. If he couldn’t find the strength, he would mouth the words. I put on Frank Sinatra “My Way” and he tried his best to sing along. “You can’t top that” he told me when trying to find a new song to sing.
There was one night where it was just he and I. I put on jeopardy and we watched together. I sat on the edge of the bed behind his chair and wrapped my arms around him. I was going to hug him for as long as there was still a man to hug. He whispered to me “are you comfortable?” It was a habit of his to always ask whenever I watched TV. At home, I would lay on the floor while he sat in his chair. He would get up, despite his weak body, and find a blanket to throw over me. In this cold hospital room hugging my best friend, I assured him that I was comfortable. He grabbed my hand and kissed it about 10 times and then he reached out for my face and kissed my cheek. “I love you more” he said through his weakness. It wasn’t possible.
January 15th; my mother’s birthday. He was waiting for my mother, Michelle, and I in the nursing home cafeteria. “Do you know what today is, Pop?” “Mom’s Birthday”, he could barely say the words. We sat with him for a while in conversation amongst ourselves when he sporadically shouted “I LOVE YOU ALL.” Clear and loud. He needed us to know.
When he lost his ability to speak, he used his hands. He would squeeze and kiss my hands often. I knew he was trying to say I love you more. I would like to say at this point I understood we were at the point of no return, but again the Papa factor. He was like a character out of a movie. He was so extraordinary that it feels criminal that the whole world doesn’t know he existed. I believed he would find a day of strength to come back to us, even if it was just for a goodbye.
Michelle, mom, and I were visiting one night. As I walked in, he was fidgeting with his watch. “You want to take it off?” He pointed to me. “You want me to have it?” He nodded yes in agreement, “you’re never on time” That was the last gift he ever gave me, the last joke he ever told, the last words he ever spoke.”
I am handling his death worse with each passing week. There are some days where i feel like skipping again and others where I feel like smashing my head against a wall to turn off my mind.
There is a void in my life now that’s unfillable. My best friend doesn’t exist anymore. When that thought crosses through my mind, it’s an instant panic attack. When I think of his body in the ground, I feel a wave of claustrophobia. There is an unbearable sadness when I get lost in my thoughts of all the things he’s going to miss. So I try to turn off my mind. I am doing my best, but I feel like I am drowning in grief while everyone else has made it safely back to shore. I don’t know how to heal. I just want my friend back.
