My father was a very clean man with a ruddy complexion that always glowed. He'd stand in the shower until the water ran cold, then emerge crimson. As weak as he was from the cancer, he insisted on taking a shower daily, and did so right up until his last week of life. He'd pad up the stairs and get the water running until steam filled the room. I'd help him out of his clothes and watch him lift his edema filled legs and feet up and over the edge of the tub. I'd stand outside the shower juggling his morphine pump with one hand and the shower curtain with the other - just praying he didn't fall.
The shower's steam blended the existing smells into a dank, musty mix: morphine, medical adhesive, the plastic shower curtain, the recently flushed toilet, acrid body odor, and the rubber feeding tube with its incessant leak. I had inherited my father's acute sense of smell - making it a mutual and unspoken appreciation for just how pungent this blend truly was. I know it pissed him off being the source of such malodor. I'm not sure if this was the actual "smell of death" they speak of or just death's overbearing cologne.
I'd help him wash his back, legs and feet; he'd wash his face and genitals. And like every shower he had ever taken his entire life, he'd stand there until the water ran cold.
* and excerpt from my cancer memoir CAR DEALER'S DAUGHTER
1 comment:
It must have been--I surely hope--so helpful for you to put all this down this way.
He was so very lucky to have you there.
And we are lucky too, in an entirely different, far less urgent way, to have you here.
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