Michelle Martin

Going Home

Sunday, February 26, 2012

The last thing I remember saying to my father- in-law was, “It’s good to be home.”

He said, yes, yes it was, and he was glad to be there.

That brief exchange happened a few weeks ago, shortly after he returned to the house in a home hospice program. He was suffering from cancer that started in his lungs but had spread to several other organs, and the doctors had told my husband and his sister that there was nothing else they could do to stop it.

My father-in-law, known to the whole family as Papa, made his wishes clear to everyone who saw him in the hospital: He wanted to come home.

So about a week after he went into the hospital the last time, he came home. He arrived sitting up in an ambulance; when I came home after picking the kids up at school, he was sitting in his chair in the living room with his children and with the hospice nurses who would help us care for him.

Later that day, he got up from his chair and walked to his bed.

My children — Caroline, just about to turn 14; Frank, 11; and Teresa, just turned 2 — got to see him that afternoon, too, greeting him as they usually did when they came home. But the living room was crowded, and we didn’t stay with him long.

We knew he was dying; he was in hospice, after all. But on that sunny afternoon, it looked as though we would have him with us for some weeks yet. He was taking in the scene, talking with everyone, in some ways still acting as the host at his own party. The nurses spoke of the possibility of getting him out for some fresh air as the weather warmed up.

Some of the fears that my husband and I had, about the difficulty of caring for him properly, even with the help of the hospice people and the rest of the family, receded a bit in the joy of the moment.

Those fears began to return in the dark hours, when my husband sat up with him as he talked through the earliest hours of the morning, apparently confused by the pain medication, finally soothed to sleep as my husband sang to him.

I looked in on him in the morning, as a home caregiver fed him breakfast. Then Teresa and I went to run some errands. An hour or so later, before we returned home, my husband called me to tell me that his father had passed.

He was finally home.

In some ways, it came too soon for us. We’d made plans for our pastor to come over and anoint him that afternoon; instead, he came and we prayed the rosary by the bed after he died. Frank, who feared his Papa would die in the hospital, wanted another chance to talk to him and got it, but he still didn’t know that it was the last time when he said, “I love you,” or maybe it was “Goodbye.”

Caroline stayed quiet as the family went about the business of planning a funeral, and Teresa kept asking, as we walked through his apartment downstairs from ours, for Papa.

She’s stopped asking for Papa so much now, but she knows he’s still around. At night, when we say her prayers before bed, and I say, “God bless Mommy and Daddy,” she interrupts with, “and Papa!”

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