THE NEWYORKER, MARCH 2, 2020 27
been taken from intensive care and put
in a regular hospital room.
By the time we arrived in Raleigh,
my father was back at Springmoor, the
assisted-living center he’d been in for the
past year. I walked into his room at five in
the afternoon and was unnerved by how
thin and frail he was. Asleep, he looked
long dead, like something unearthed from
a pharaoh’s tomb. The head of his bed had
been raised, so he was almost in a sitting
position, his open mouth a dark, seemingly
bottomless hole and his hands stretched
out before him. The television was on, as
always, but the sound was turned off.
“Are you looking for your sister?” an
aide asked. She directed us down the hall,
where a dozen people in wheelchairs sat
watching “The Andy Griffith Show.” Just
beyond them, in a grim, fluorescent-lit
room, Lisa and my sister-in-law, Kathy,
were talking to a hospice nurse they had
recently engaged. “What’s Mr. Sedaris’s
age?” the young woman asked, as Hugh
and I took seats.
“He’ll be ninety-six in a few weeks,”
Kathy said.
“Height?”
Lisa looked through her papers. “Five
feet six.”
Really? I thought. My father was never
super-tall, but I’d assumed he was at least
five-nine. Had he honestly shrunk that
much?
“Weight?”
More shuffling of papers.
“One-twenty,” Lisa answered.
“Well now he’s just showing off,” I said.
The hospice nurse needed to re-
cord my father’s blood pressure, so we
went back to his room, where Kathy
gently shook him awake. “Dad, were
you napping?”
When he came to, my father focussed
on Hugh. The tubes that had been put
down his throat in the hospital had left
him hoarse. Speaking was a challenge,
thus his “Hey!” was hard to make out.
“We just arrived from England,” Hugh
said.
My father responded enthusiastically,
and I wondered why I couldn’t go over
and kiss him, or at least say hello. Unless
you count his hitting me, we were never
terribly physical with each other, and I
wasn’t sure I could begin at this late date.
“I figured you’d rally as soon as I spent
a fortune on last-minute tickets,” I said,
knowing that if the situation were re-
versed he’d have stayed put, at least until
a discount could be worked out. All he’s
ever cared about is money, so it had hurt
me to learn, a few years earlier, that he’d
cut me out of his will. Had he talked it
over with me, had he said, for example,
that I seemed comfortable enough, it
might have been different. But I heard
about it secondhand. He’d wanted me to
find out after he died. It would be like a
scene in a movie, the wealthy man’s chil-
dren crowded into the lawyer’s office:
“And, to my son David, I leave nothing.”
When I confronted him about the
will, he said he’d consider leaving me a
modest sum, but only if I promised that
Hugh would touch none of the money.
Of course I said no.
“Actually, don’t worry,” I said, of the
plane tickets. “I’ll just pay for them with
part of my inheritance... oops.”
“Awww, come on now,” he moaned.
His voice was weak and soft, no louder
than rustling leaves.
“I’m going to turn him over and ex-
amine his backside for bedsores,” the hos-
pice nurse said. “So if any of y’all need
to turn away.. .”
I was in the far corner of the room,
beneath a painting my father had made
in the late sixties of a monk with a mus-
tache. Beside me was the guitar I was
given in the fifth grade. “What’s this
doing here?” I asked.
“Dad had it restrung a few months
ago and said he was going to learn how
to play,” Lisa told me. She pointed to a
keyboard wedged behind a plaster statue
of a joyful girl with her arms spread wide.
“The piano, too.”
“Now?” I asked. “He’s had all this time
but decided to wait until he was con-
nected to tubes?”
After the hospice nurse had finished,
my father’s dinner was brought in, all of
it puréed, like baby food. Even his water
was mixed with a thickener that gave it
the consistency of nectar.
“He has a bone that protrudes from
the back of his neck and causes food to
go down the wrong way,” Lisa explained.
“So he can’t have anything solid or liquid.”
As Kathy spooned the mush into my
father’s mouth, Hugh picked the can of
thickener up off the dinner tray, read the
ingredients, and announced that it was
just cornstarch.
“So how was your flight?” Lisa asked us.
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