When the Plate Glass Takes a Long Time to Fall

Lessons continually learned are reinforcement of values ignored.

I spent the week as the caregiver/companion to my dad while my mom took a much needed jaunt to Colorado with my sister.

I was worried coming into the week. His health had taken a turn days before the trip, he had a couple of surgeries to continue facilitating his three times a week dialysis, a few days of vomiting, and things were looking grim. On top of that he became rather stoic about his infirmity.

“Do me a favor? If your mom asks me how I’m doing, tell her I’m fine.”

“Are you fine?”

“No. Not fine. I don’t know what’s going on with me. But she needs to go on this trip and she won’t if she’s worried about me. Also, I want to make sure you have a copy of my DNR.”

“I know where it is. No worries.”

He also decided that he wanted me to sell his truck. This is not a small concession. Since I got here in September, he’s been fighting the idea that he’s beyond driving days but this week he let that go.

It felt like he was preparing to die this week. I justified my concerns to myself that maybe he just didn’t want mom to see him die or wanted the space to finally choose to give it all up and move on. I knew if anyone in my family was capable of diving into the pragmatics of death on the fly, focusing on the logistics of body removal and clean up, I was the one to do it. Compartmentalization is a superpower of mine although in these days of tearing down the trappings of any kind of masculine traits as toxic some might say this isn’t a superpower but a result of a desperate need for either religion or therapy (which, let’s be honest, are two sides of the same coin).

That was not the week we had or even close.

We established a routine of sorts out of the gate. I suggested I stay at the house for the week and he dismissed that outright. Perhaps he didn’t want to seem frail around me or simply wanted some serious quiet in his week but we concluded I’d swing by in the mornings to have coffee and checking in, go to work for a few hours (I mostly worked from home because his schedule, filled with dialysis drop offs and pickups, doctor’s visits, and the potential for getting a phone call that required an instant response made sitting in an office untenable), then head over and have dinner with him.

At first, he was in rough shape. I took him to the Texas Roadhouse for an early dinner and he barely made it from the car to the table and his hands shook as he meekly lifted his glass of Diet Coke to his mouth. He couldn’t really read the menu so I suggested a half slab of ribs and grilled shrimp. His eyes lit up. Two of his favorites. When I told him he could choose chili as one of his sides it was like I’d offered him a Christmas present. A week earlier, he couldn’t keep any food down but today he was gonna feast. We ate and he told me stories of old jobs he worked, places in Kansas that no longer existed, and the time Gene Hackman tried to get into a bar fight after a long day shooting 1969’s The Gypsy Moth (my dad was one of the stunt flyers for that film) that ended with the guy Hackman was baiting looking at him and shouting “If you wasn’t a movie star, I’d knock you on your ass!”

One day we went to get him a CT scan and on the way home found one of the very few Cajun restaurants in town. Dad loves Cajun food but mom can’t handle the spice so it was a real treat. He ordered everything and told me about his love for Louisiana and the many food festivals there. Sure, the hours after dialysis were still pretty rough but it was fun in between those moments. He seemed better in spirits than I’d seen him in a long time.

One question I’ve wanted to ask him this entire year but just can’t ask centers on his motivation to keep on keeping on. Dialysis is the closest thing I’ve seen in my life to medieval torture and rather than curing any sort of ill, it merely serves to keep him breathing one more day despite the slow degradation of his quality of life. Why? Why go through all of this pain, humiliation, and decline for just one day more filled with the same but less?

On Thursday morning, he and I sat on the back porch, he smoking his rolled cigarettes, me with my pipe, drinking coffee and jawing in the morning before the heat dome descended and made it impossible to sit outside without exclaiming “Fuck! It’s hot!” every six seconds. For two hours we got into it. We talked about how my former brother-in-law thought I was a real loser and that it frequently pissed my dad off. The interesting angle on that is that my dad doesn’t really understand my life’s path—the artist thing mystifies him as he grew up focused on making money to survive. A genuine ‘work will set you free’ type, my bouncing around from gig to gig, place to place doesn’t make sense to him but he loves me and accepts my weirdness.

“Oh, I’ve been called far worse by better people,” I respond and he laughs a big hearty laugh I haven’t heard in the year I’ve been here.

I tell him about finally finishing the casino book and the fondness I have of those people and that place despite the ludicrous ending that was my third divorce. I mention a guy in the book, whom I knew, who basically died of a broken heart.

“Well, there’s this guy I see every week at dialysis. He was on the same schedule as me and then I noticed he started missing his days. He’d come in twice and skip the third. Then he only came once a week. He was looking bad. I asked one of the nurses about him and she said that’s how it goes with most of their patients. At some point people just lose the will to go through all of that every day. They lose their want to see the next day. they stop coming and then they stop living.”

“Do you ever feel that way?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s hard. Sometimes I think about saying enough of this. I see if I can do today what I was able to do yesterday. It’s less and less every week but if I can do something, I do. And then I go back.”

I want to ask him why but instead tell him about Ana Flores.

She was 37 years old. On October 8, 1999, she was walking down Wabash Avenue in Chicago holding the hand of her three-year old daughter, Viridiana. She was a full-time mother; her husband, Tony, was a baggage handler for United Airlines. It was a Friday afternoon, just after lunch.  It was a slightly cloudy day with occassional light showers throughout.

Twenty-nine stories above her, on the west side of CNA Plaza's South Tower, a piece of plate glass casually slipped from its mooring and fell to the ground. The CNA building had had incidents of glass both cracking and falling from the building but, to date, no one had been hurt so the $3.5 million rehab on the windows had consistently been put off. Like a heavy feather, the plate glass gracefully sliced through air for 7.6 seconds before gently decapitating Flores where she stood.

She was killed instantly.

I saw it that afternoon on CLTV. Like everyone else who saw it on television, I was horrified. Unlike everyone else, however, I was also deeply curious. What truly made an impact on me that day was not the unfairness of life or the teetering lack of safety we all tightrope walk upon daily, but Ana Flores's last second of life.

“What was she thinking?” was the question that plagued me that afternoon. Most people see their death coming—even if only for a moment. It is that moment that the myth of “seeing your life flash before your eyes” gets its resonance. Whether it is at the wheel of a car crashing or old age softly pushing out the final breath, we mostly get to see the final instance of life extinguished. Not Ana Flores. Her death was silent and unseen and snuffed her flame out in a microsecond.

What was she thinking about during that 7.6 seconds? If she was anything like most of us—and odds are that she was—she was likely thinking about the flotsam and jetsam of every day living. Bills to pay. A petty squabble with her husband about something stupid. Self doubt in the form body insecurity or an inability to motivate herself to achieve something on her list of things to do. If she was anything like most of us—and odds are that she was—she was likely thinking about bullshit. Inconsequential crap.

“What will you be thinking about when it comes?” I ask my dad.

He sits quietly, thinking. “Getting old and not being who I was or being able to do the things I used to be able to do. Hoping I can sleep. Good food. Your mother.”

“Not all bad, then.”

“No. Not all bad.”

It occurs to me when I’m relating this that if the plate glass came for me in this time in my life the things that have been occupying my mind are not the things I’d want to be thinking about in my final moment. If it came for me my last thoughts would be still lingering on the hurt and amazement at the divorce from a woman I thought was a soul mate but turned out to be a sociopath, thoughts about the weight I gained in post-divorce ennui, the bizarre and uncharacteristic lack of passion I have for tomorrow, and bitching about the small town I’m currently residing in.

Lessons continually learned are reinforcement of values ignored.

I should be thinking about the love of my family, the joys of making podcasts with three of my best friends, the sheer opportunity I have to spend time with my father, the improbable luck I have to constantly manage to land on my feet (with lots of help, of course). I should be more grateful so when that glass descends I’m thinking about those things rather than my inconsequential crap.

I am grateful for this time with my dad. As much as it was a break for my mom, an opportunity for her to escape for a week, play with my sister, and get some perspective on her life, it has been a gift to hang out with him, hear his stories, have meals with him, and know that if either of us gave up the mortal coil tomorrow, we could say that the last days were good. Or at least not all bad.