The New Absence

 "The first day after a death, the new absence / Is always the same," Philip Larkin wrote. Today, I woke up to a house without dad in it. The caregivers were all gone. His hospital bed in the living room had been stripped of its linen. They wheeled his body out last night, after I had a final chance to say goodbye. 

Dad's last hours were very peaceful. After a final round of morphine, he just lay there quietly and comfortably for a few hours. We sat in the living room with him, listening to him breathe. Then, between 8 and 9 o'clock, he just stopped. We sat there, poised, listening for another breath that did not come. 

After it happened, I sat with his body until the undertakers came, stroking his arm. I didn't want to be parted from the body. No matter how much I know that dad was gone and couldn't feel anything anymore, it still felt unutterably wrong for him to be zipped up into a bag and hustled out of his home to some blank, faceless mortuary. 

In his poem Whale Nation, Heathcote Williams writes that a mother whale will carry her dead calf on her back for days after it dies—unwilling to accept the loss and be parted from its corpse. I now understand the sentiment. Part of me just wanted to curl up next to dad's corpse and not let go. 

Dad's final words—spoken a few days ago, before he slipped into unconsciousness—were "Hi Boon" (using his nickname for me since childhood). He said it with a smile. Indeed, as long as his face muscles were still doing anything at all, they were smiling. 

I wasn't lying when I wrote that dad's innate goodness was visible in him right up to the end. He was inspiring love in every last person he came into contact with. Even the caregivers from the private agency, who had seen him only in his last days, were as broken up about his death as we were. 

In his book about a friend's death from cancer, The Unfortunates, B.S. Johnson writes at one point that he just cannot believe it was only two years between the diagnosis and the demise. Could a person really go that fast? Could a perfectly healthy body just wither and "rot" like that, he asked, in only two years? 

Two years? Try four months. That's how long it has been since dad's diagnosis. Four months. He was a healthy, functional, perfectly rational and professionally capable person four months ago. His entire journey from diagnosis to death occurred just since January. 

Between the time I was admitted to the bar in October and they bothered to charge me the annual fee for my first year of legal practice, Dad went from being the walking, talking, reasoning person I know to a corpse. 

It feels like an instant. Like no time at all. Like none of that could have happened, because it was so sudden. 

At the same time, it feels like it was an eternity. Those six weeks of radiation. Those two stays in the hospital. The brain surgery. The sepsis. The ICU. The hospice team. The caregivers. The death bed in the living room. Was that all only in four months? Or was it a lifetime? 

"That night, that year," as G.M. Hopkins once wrote, "of now done darkness."

It was darkness; now done. It was agony; it was beauty. It was suffering, but simultaneously the only way I knew to honor what was happening to him, and all he had meant to me, all he had done for us. All I could think to tell him, every time he thanked us, was "I know you'd do the same for us." And it was true. 

"The debt one owes one's parents," B.S. Johnson wrote, "which I had thought one paid by having children oneself, I now see is more nearly paid by having to watch the [parent] die." 

I do feel that the ordeal of the last few months was in some way a partial and inadequate payment of a spiritual debt. The debt one owes for the gift of life, which cannot ever be repaid. But which one can go some distance toward remediating by accompanying the parent in death.

Just now, I got up to reflexively check my dad's medication chart, as I would do every few minutes or hours for days—just barely remembering that we don't need to fill it out anymore. That there will be no more medications; because there is no more dad. "Phantom dad syndrome," a friend of mine calls it. 

The "new absence," again. "I got up and [he] did not," wrote Larkin. 

The last entry on the medicine chart now reads: "Time of death: 8:43 PM." My sister had also texted it to us last night, so that we would have a note of it. I'd forgotten the context for that text, though, so I woke up this morning to just that eerie unexplained number on my phone: 8:43 PM. 

"[H]e will hear the stroke of eight / And not the stroke of nine;" A.E. Housman once wrote. And dad didn't. He was already gone. At 8:43 PM. On Memorial Day, of all days, in this year 2026. The mind just boggles. 

"Not how he died, not what he died of, even less why he died, are of concern, to me," B.S. Johnson wrote; "only the fact that he did die, he is dead, is important: the loss to me, to us."

The loss to me, to us. I got up and he did not. The new absence. Is always the same.