It was right about now, shortly after 6 p.m. in a hospital in Kingston, Ontario. The weather was even a bit like today; late winter chill, clear day, snow still on the ground.
Dad had cancer. Who knows where it started, by the time it was diagnosed, he was a dead man. It was in his stomach, colon and bowel. There was no medical miracle waiting for him. It was a little over three months from diagnosis to death.
He did not go happily. The night he got the news, he was angry. He'd gone into an exploratory surgery to try to deal with a mass that had been detected on an ultrasound. He expected he would lose part of his stomach. Instead, the doctors saw cancer everywhere and just closed him up and then gave him the news.
By the time I was allowed to see him, he was propped up on his bed, in his hospital greens, disheveled and mildly disoriented from the general anaesthetic. He was on the phone with his mother in Victoria.
"No, mother, I am going to starve to death," I heard him snap as I came in.
I don't really remember much of that evening. He went home with his partner. I must have stayed over, I was living in Toronto at the time. So I guess I must have driven them back. I do remember him over the next few days, sitting in his Lazy Boy, staring out the window of his living room, saying little.
His last months were busy. He got married (again), this time to his high-school sweetheart. I was his best man. The ceremony took place against the backdrop of the biggest snowstorm in Victoria's history. I hardly saw him, marooned as I was at a cousin's place.
He got back to Kingston, re-wrote his will, began to get his finances in order, returned to work for a valedictory spin, made amends with some people.
Then a week before he died, he decided he wanted to live a little longer. He asked his oncologist for chemo. He hadn't had any treatment at all save palliatives: morphine, some stomach meds. The Wednesday before he died, he went in for a dose. I drove up from Brockville to say hi and he was in bed feeling pretty bad. We managed a few words, but I spent most of the time with my stepmother drinking tea and talking about the cat they'd bought.
That weekend, my girlfriend and I were supposed to fly to Cuba. I drove down again the day before we were supposed to fly, and he was out of it. I decided I couldn't go. I came down the next day, a Sunday, and we took him into the hospital, a two-car convoy to Hotel Dieu. We got him into the emergency triage. He nearly died there. I remember him thanking me for all my help, one of the last lucid moments I remember. We got him into a private room in the early evening and the doctors said he was stable.
That night I called my mother and told her to tell my brother and sister to get here asap.
I drove back up the next day; a Monday just like this, a sunny day just like this, a cool day just like this.
In the morning a man from the Palliative Care department came by to offer his services, later the oncologist paid a visit. He said something, vaguely along the lines of "well, that didn't work, did it?"
At one point I ducked into the bathroom and I heard Dad bark.
"Davy, bring that bag of cement over here!"
He knew I was there, but where "there" was was not a hospital room.
Around 5 p.m. he was laying on his side, looking out over Kingston harbour and out into Lake Ontario. He rolled over onto his back and said something.
"I'm going out to sea."
About 5:45 an orderly came in and took a look at dad.
"He needs to get cleaned up, he's looking pretty scruffy," he said.
He pulled out a razor and started shaving him. Dad could grow a decent beard between morning shave and dinner, so three days of growth was pretty impressive.
The orderly was expert. In a few minutes dad was tidied up. He was on his back, breathing shallowly. A nurse took his pulse.
"It's feathery, I can barely feel it," she said. Dad had a DNR, if his heart stopped, it was not going to be re-started.
A minute or two later, my stepmother slipped out. A minute or two after that, I looked over at my father and I could see he was gone.
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