Two Jobs

I was between lives that spring. The company I had co-founded had been acquired fifteen months earlier; I stayed through the integration, left, and took a few weeks off before starting work that would ask me to convene leaders around technology rather than build it. I was less than three hours into the new job when my phone lit up with a voicemail.

“Hey Chris, it’s your pops. We need to talk. I’m in the hospital at the VA right now. I just broke my hip.”

By nine that morning I had one new job. By noon I had two.

That was March. I am writing this in July, and I know the day and the hour my father will die. It is a week from today.

The job with the salary is not the one this essay is about. When a parent begins to die, the child takes on two jobs at once. The first has a description: doctors, phone calls, appointments, financials, the estate. The second has none. Closing the gap. Saying what went unsaid. Forgiving and being forgiven, or discovering you already had. Most of what I read treats these as separate work. They are not. You do them in the same afternoon, sometimes in the same phone call.

This is one son’s version. Your father is not my father. Your family’s wreckage and repair will look nothing like ours. Take what’s useful and leave the rest.

···

He tripped over his own foot. That is how it starts for a lot of men his age, and the doctors will tell you it is nobody’s fault, and they are right, and it will not feel that way. The ball of his hip had broken clean off the femur. Surgery the next day: traction, realignment, a pin to hold what was left together.

By the end of that first week I had reviewed his accounts and confirmed his documents. Everything was already in place at the VA. Power of attorney, healthcare proxy, advance directive, all of it established years earlier and sitting in one system. I did not appreciate what a gift that was until I started talking to other families in other hallways. So here is the only advice that cannot wait for the end of this essay: if your parent’s documents do not exist, stop reading and go get them done. Everything else I learned can wait. That cannot.

The hip did not heal. He worked at it. He was motivated, and the rehab staff liked him, because everybody likes him. But his bones had been thinning for years, and two months after the surgery the pin began backing out of bone that could no longer hold it. Metal scraping bone, every day, with a revision surgery on the table that would have consumed most of whatever time he had left in recovery. He declined it. He went home to his apartment in a wheelchair with a hip that would never be fixed, and from that day forward he lived with the daily possibility that it would fracture again beneath him.

The second verdict arrived while he was still in the hospital for the first. He had known the cancer might be back. The MRI was already scheduled before he fell; he got the scan from a hospital bed instead of an outpatient clinic. The squamous cell cancer had returned in his other lung, aggressive this time, and the follow-up tests found it in his bones.

Nobody asked him about chemotherapy. He told us before anyone could. He had watched his last wife go through chemo and die in pain he blamed on the treatment as much as the disease, and he was not going to do it. That refusal came before any prognosis, before any numbers, before anyone had framed a decision for him to make. Everything that happened afterward was a man carrying out a decision he had already made. I want that on the record, because of where this essay is going.

The doctors ordered one more test, looking for a genetic expression that might respond to a different immunotherapy. The results took months. They came back after he was already in palliative care. Negative. Six months to live. A year if he did chemo. He had answered that question from a hospital bed in March.

Palliative care began in June. Hospice within a week. You learn in the hallway that palliative and hospice are not the same door, and you learn something else that nobody says out loud: the speed at which your family moves through those doors is itself information. When the system stops talking about treatment and starts talking about comfort, the calendar has already told you what the doctors are working up to saying.

···

Somewhere in those same weeks, I sat at my kitchen table and prepared the instruments of after.

His funeral policy was a pre-need plan from his California years, assigned to a funeral home in Folsom and irrevocable, a word I learned the full weight of that month. I could not move it. Not as his son, not with trustee authority, not with any of the paper I had spent the spring assembling. Only he could sign the transfer to the funeral home in Denver. So he did. A man arranging the logistics of his own funeral, because the law trusts no one else with the job. He did not make it heavy. Neither did I.

There is a form in Colorado called the JDF 999. It lets a family settle a small estate without opening probate. I filled it out in June while my father was still alive. County: Denver. Affiant: me. Sole successor, one hundred percent. I completed every field except one and saved the file.

Date of death. Blank.

For most families that blank field is a question. In ours it became an appointment.

I know how cold this section reads. It is the opposite of cold. Competence is a form of love. Every form filed, every call made, every account reconciled is one less thing standing between you and the chair beside him. The paperwork buys the presence. That is the entire reason to do it well.

···

Within a week or two of entering hospice, my father enrolled in Colorado’s medical aid-in-dying program.

The law is deliberate by design. A terminal diagnosis confirmed by physicians. A prognosis measured in months. Repeated requests, mental capacity, and medication he must take himself, by his own hand, or not at all. The process is built to be slower than an impulse and faster than a decline, and having now walked through it beside him, I can tell you it asks the dying person to keep choosing, again and again, at every step.

He kept choosing.

Some people reading this will believe he made the wrong choice, or that the choice should not exist. I understand. I am not writing to change your mind about the law. I am writing to tell you what it looked like from inside the room: a man who had been told how his body would take him, choosing instead how he would go. The program did not shorten his life. The cancer did that. The program gave him back the one decision the disease had not taken.

His reasoning did not require translation. No regrets, he would say. I’ve lived a good life and I’m surrounded by my loved ones. I’d rather go out on my own terms than slowly degrade in excruciating pain. He said versions of this often enough that the family stopped bracing when the subject came up. He was not talking himself into anything. He was reporting a settled fact.

He entered hospice with a smile. I keep turning that sentence over and it keeps being true. He stayed in his own apartment, independent in his wheelchair, and near the end he rarely left the recliner. His world contracted room by room. The man inside it stayed whole.

He was surprisingly calm about the entire thing. The surprise was mine, and I have decided it belongs in this essay, because your surprise is data. Whatever I expected the dying season to look like, it was not my father at ease inside it, more settled than the healthy people around him.

···

The week it became clear where this was going, I got a therapist. Not for after. For during. The premise was that I would process the grief as it came instead of storing it up for the far side of the funeral, where it compounds.

There are words for this, and the words help. Grieving a person who is still alive, in every incremental loss along the way, is called anticipatory grief. What the therapist was watching for has a name too: complicated grief, the version that stays acute and disabling long after the loss instead of softening into something you can carry. And the research is blunt about the bridge between the two. Among the strongest predictors of grief that complicates is a relationship that was complicated. The more unfinished business, the harder the landing.

My father and I had decades of unfinished in ours. Estrangement, repair, distance, return. I have said goodbye to this man several times in my life, and some of those goodbyes were meant to be permanent. The therapist’s logic was preventive: close the gap while he is alive, feel each loss as it arrives, and the grief that follows will have less unfinished business to feed on.

I will not pretend I am feeling everything in real time. Some weeks I am in survival mode and I know it. The model is not that you process everything as it happens. The model is that someone holds the ledger with you, so the unprocessed part is scheduled instead of buried. Notes after, not during.

My therapist has said more than once that I am handling this well. Some days I believe it.

···

We have run out of practical things to talk about and organize. All that’s left is the time and the space between us, talking about the past, listening to him sing the old songs.

My father ran USO shows in Vietnam. He was an officer with a theatre degree, assigned to move entertainers safely around a war, and in December of 1969 the Bob Hope Christmas tour came through carrying Neil Armstrong, five months home from the moon. The story my father keeps returning to is not the show. It is Armstrong, who he says wept when he talked about looking back at the Earth. Not at the beauty of it. At the insanity of it. All that vastness, one small ball, and the people on it doing terrible things to each other, visible from far enough away to make an astronaut cry.

He has told me that story four times this season. The retellings are not decline. They are a life review running out loud, a man who staged entertainment for a war circling back to the one witness who saw the whole war from far enough away to weep at it. My job is to hear it fresh every time. I recommend the job.

Bob Hope gave him a cufflink on that tour. It sits in a box of mine now.

···

People assume the dying season is when the hard conversations happen. Ours happened years ago, over brunches and phone calls and the unglamorous work of showing up, which is why the season has asked so little repair of us. I said it to him directly this spring: I don’t think there’s a need for either of us to forgive. He agreed. If you wait for the deathbed to close the gap, you have waited too long. If you closed it early, the deathbed asks nothing of you, and you get to spend the time on better things.

What it asks instead is that you be sad together. Not sad about him, managed and private and composed in the hallway. Sad with him. This part of the trip is coming to an end, I told him one afternoon, after I-love-yous that needed nothing added, and we sat in it together, and it was one of the better afternoons of my life.

And then there is the tape.

When I was nine or ten, my father took me to one of those recording studios that malls used to have, and the two of us recorded “The Gambler.” My voice on that tape is young and small and meek next to his baritone, and even so you can tell we are having fun. He carries the opening and then hands the song to me with a lilt in his voice like a question, as if he is checking whether I know what I have been given. By the end of the duet two things have arrived that the tape caught and kept: pride in my father’s voice, and confidence in mine, getting bolder with every line.

The other day we played it. All of us, gathered around a recording made nearly fifty years ago, in tears, listening to a moment fixed in time on a tape that still exists somehow.

···

I should tell you what held me together, with the caveat that it will not be what holds you together.

I finished a book. I had left the startup with three quarters of a memoir written, and I completed it during the season of the broken hip and the diagnosis and the decline. I am not telling you to write a book. I am telling you the grief needs a place to go, and it will find one with or without your participation. Mine went into a manuscript. Yours might go into a garden, a long run, a garage full of half-restored furniture. Pick the place on purpose or the grief will pick it for you.

I kept my body moving. I swam and I lifted, and in the same season I gave up the fitness tracker, because I was already tracking one man’s vitals and did not need a device scoring mine. I knew exactly which of my habits in those months were unhealthy. I kept a running list and prosecuted none of it. There are seasons for optimization. This was not one. I swam, I lifted, I ate what I ate, I poured what I poured, and I let the ledger stay open until the season ended.

If you are entering this season, here is the distillation. Get the documents before the crisis. Get the therapist before the death. Learn what your authority actually covers, because trustee is not signatory and son is not proxy, and you want to find the edges before you are standing on them. Prepare the instruments of after while you are still living inside during; it feels like betrayal and it is the opposite. Learn the words: anticipatory grief, palliative, hospice, and in the states that have one, the aid-in-dying statute, because the vocabulary is a map of doors, and families who know the words get asked instead of told. Let the practical work be the container, because the real conversations arrive inside the errands. Hear the repeated story fresh every time; the repetition is the life review, and your only job is to witness it. Give the grief a place to go, on purpose. Keep the body moving. Drop the metrics.

The cufflink will still be in its box next week. The tape will still exist. The form on my laptop will finally have its last field filled, in a hand that is steadier than it has any right to be, because we did the work while there was time to do it.

These are the moments that remain. One more doctor’s visit. One more set of meds to pick up. One organized goodbye.