24 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 18, 2019
My father and I had already done all the talking we were ever going to do.
PERSONAL HISTORY
THE FINAL FRONTIER
“Star Trek” guides a hospital vigil.
BY MICHAEL CHABON
ILLUSTRATION BY MICKEY DUZYJ
E
nsign Spock, a young half-Vulcan
science officer fresh out of Starfleet
Academy and newly posted to the En-
terprise, found himself alone in a tur-
bolift with the ship’s formidable first
officer, a human woman known as Num-
ber One. They were waiting for me to
rescue them from the silence that reigns
in all elevators, as universal as the vac-
uum of space.
I looked up from the screen of my
iPad to my father, lying unconscious,
amid tubes and wires, in his starship of
a bed, in the irresolute darkness of an
I.C.U. at 3 a.m. Ordinarily when my
father lay on his back his abdomen rose
up like the telescope dome of an ob-
servatory, but now there seemed to be
nothing between the bed rails at all, just
a blanket pulled as taut as a drum skin
and then, on the pillow, my father’s big,
silver-maned head. Scarecrow, after the
flying monkeys had finished with him.
His head was tilted upward and his jaw
hung slack. All the darkness in the room
seemed to pool in his open mouth.
Hey, Dad, I need a line, I said, break-
ing, if only in my head, the silence that
reigned between us. I’m writing dia-
logue for Mr. Spock.
I’d tried talking aloud to my father
a few times in the hours since he’d
lost consciousness, telling him all the
things that, I’d read, you were supposed
to tell a dying parent. There was never
any trace of a response. No twitch of
an eye or a cheek, no ghost of a ten-
der or rueful smile. I wanted to believe
that he’d heard me, heard that I loved
him, that I forgave him, that I was
thankful to him for having taught me
to love so many of the things I loved
most, “Star Trek” among them, but it
felt like throwing a wish and a penny
into a dry fountain. My father and I
had already done all the talking we
were ever going to do.
Can’t help you there, said my father,
a pediatrician, though long retired from
practice. Now, if you were writing dia-
logue for Doctor Spock ...
My father had slipped into uncon-
sciousness twelve hours earlier, about an
hour after we stopped the intravenous
adrenaline that had been keeping his
blood pressure up. Until then, he’d been
responsive, aware, irritable, funny, quer-
ulous, weak, confused, furious, loopy, but
recognizably himself. A studied, even
militant avoider of exercise all his life,
he had been seriously overweight for
most of the past forty years, diabetic for
a decade. His kidneys were failing. So
was his liver. The latest enemy was acute
hypotension, which when untreated
would drop him into the scary nether
regions of the mmHg scale. But the
norepinephrine drip that could magi-
cally restore my father to a close ap-
proximation of the man we remembered
was likely to put him into cardiac ar-
rest. His caregivers had gently and re-
gretfully begun to suggest that it might
be time to stop treating this particular
element among the complex of things
that were killing him. A heart attack
would be painful and frightening.
It was decided, not easily and not
without reservation, to let go of him,
and to let him go. It was agreed that,
when he went, he ought not to be alone.
My stepmother and two half brothers,
who had been caring for my father
without respite over the course of his
decline, were exhausted and depleted.
My brother and I, the sons of his first
marriage, had flown up from the Bay
Area to Portland, hoping not just to
spend time with our dad but to give
everyone else a break. So I took the
first night shift. Following the logic of
mercy, I was hoping that it might also
be the last.
Back in the turbolift, Number One
made the banal observation that people
were reluctant to talk in elevators. Ensign
Spock conceded her point, but I won-
dered if this would remain true in the
twenty-third century. Once the Eugenics
