I

t was I who made the appointment for my father to see a doctor, but it was
my mother who ultimately got him there—by ambulance, as it turned out. His
feet had ballooned and grown tender to the point that he finally admitted that
walking on them felt like walking on needles. When it was time to go, he
couldn’t stand on them at all. I was at work that day, but my mother described it
to me later—Dad being carried out of the house by burly paramedics, trying to
joke with them as they went.

He was taken directly to the hospital at the University of Chicago. What
followed was a string of lost days spent in the purgatory of blood draws, pulse
checks, untouched meal trays, and squads of doctors making rounds. All the
while, my father continued to swell. His face puffed up, his neck got thicker, his
voice grew weak. Cushing’s syndrome was the official diagnosis, possibly related
to his MS and possibly not. Either way, we were well past the point of any sort of
stopgap treatment. His endocrine system was now going fully haywire. A scan
showed that he had a growth in his throat that had become so enlarged he was
practically choking on it.

“I don’t know how I missed that,” my father said to the doctor, sounding
genuinely perplexed, as if he hadn’t felt a single symptom leading up to this point,
as if he hadn’t spent weeks and months, if not years, ignoring his pain.

We cycled through hospital visits to be with him—my mom, Craig, Janis,
and me. We came and went over days as the doctors blasted him with medicine,
as tubes were added and machines were hooked up. We tried to grasp what the
specialists were telling us but could make little sense of it. We rearranged my
dad’s pillows and talked uselessly about college basketball and the weather
outside, knowing that he was listening, though it exhausted him now to speak.
We were a family of planners, but now everything seemed unplanned. Slowly,
my father was sinking away from us, enveloped by some invisible sea. We called
him back with old memories, seeing how they put a little brightness in his eyes.
Remember the Deuce and a Quarter and how we used to roll around in that
giant backseat on our summer outings to the drive-in? Remember the boxing
gloves you gave us, and the swimming pool at Dukes Happy Holiday Resort?
What about how you used to build the props for Robbie’s Operetta Workshop?
What about dinners at Dandy’s house? Remember when Mom made us fried
shrimp on New Year’s Eve?

One  evening     I   stopped     by  and     found   my  father  alone,  my  mother  having