Lingis explains that “The face of the other is a surface upon which the axes and directions of his posture and the intentions of his movements are exposed to me” (Lingis 131). He explains that written upon the face of the other is their mortality. It is “[...]the place where the elemental addresses, appeals and requires, the involution in enjoyment which makes one’s own eyes luminous, one’s hands warm, one’s posture supportive, one’s voice voluble and spiritual, and one’s face ardent” (Lingis 132). When I reflect upon Lingis’ encounter with the last days of a loved one’s life, I think about my father.
I had been living in California for nearly ten years, having only returned home to visit once in that time span, and I’m sad to say, it was as a favor to a dear friend. I lived selfishly in California; it was, will forever be, home to me. Suddenly one evening, I received a phone call from my sister; my father was extremely ill and the doctors needed to amputate his right leg. How did I not know that he was ill? Over the phone, I ashamedly asked my father, “How are you doing?” Was that all I could come up with? I wanted to take it back as soon as it was uttered. He sensed my discomfort and replied with as much humor as he could muster, “Well, I guess I won’t need the shoes I came in with [silence]…” We drifted awkwardly in the silence, neither of us knowing how to remedy the situation. I realize now how extremely brave my father was then. He didn’t want to talk about his life, his health, his impending situation. We didn’t need to speak about those things in order to know (to feel) what was left unsaid. He wanted to know about me, who I was, who I would become.
A few days after the phone call my father had the operation. It didn’t go so well. My father was herded, like cattle, into a convalescence home after the surgery, and it was there that an infection spread throughout his body, compromising the other limb. It too, would have to be amputated. We were devastated. His good humor, and mine, could only carry him so far, so I quit my life and moved back to Florida to be with him.
When I arrived, he was in the intensive care unit. He looked liked like an inanimate marionette, with tubes outstretched from a limp body. The strings were slack. As I watched his gray body lay there I recalled the words of Dylan Thomas: “Do not go gentle into that good night, / Old age should burn and rave at close day; / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” The unconscious gray body that lay before me was not my father, he was only a shadow, a memory. “Though wise men at their end know dark is right,/ Because their words had forked no lightning they / Do not go gentle into that good night.” I sat next to his frail body, articulating emotions through hot tears. The attending nurse knew that words were insufficient, offering me sympathetic eyes and a warm comforting hand upon the shoulder.
I spent a month in the hospital waiting bedside. As my father’s life strings finally became more taut, I feared the reaction he would have to losing both limbs. The limbs that had throughout his life carried him across the world, connected him to the earth. How could I manipulate language to pacify his pain, to make him better accept his circumstance? Words seemed inadequate, inappropriate, so I was silent as he peered under the white linen to confront his personal nightmare. He looked away, tears welled in his eyes, in mine, and I saw, without utterance, his disappointment for the first time. I saw the vulnerability written on the surface. I saw his strength leave his body. He didn’t want to live. “Good men, the last way by, crying how bright / Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” He slipped out of consciousness once again.
The room was filled with the undulating sounds of a respirator. There were no suitable words, no vocabulary to draw from to make things better. “Wild men, who caught and sang the sun in flight, / And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way. / Do not go gentle into that good night.” I did the only thing I could do, I sat beside him and held his hand, as if the contact could somehow act as a conduit to carry the message of love and support. “Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight / Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Somehow he found within himself the strength to pull through and we left the hospital. We spent a year and a half together facing the world. An ugly world for those who are handicapped. He was not only physically dismembered, but also dismembered from society. It was not easy for him, the stares, the pity, the silences made things worse. He began to deteriorate before my eyes, weakened emotionally and physically. He did not want to continue to live so dependent, so vulnerable. “And you, my father, there on the sad height, / Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. / Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” He was no longer within my reach. He slipped further and further away from me with eyes glazed, terrified. On a Friday evening October 7, 2005, my father bravely closed his eyes, took a deep breath, exhaled and embraced the dying of the light.
I would like to think that I was there for my father in his last days of life, comforting and accompanying him as he faced mortality. But this accompaniment was, perhaps selfishly, more for me than him. I think back upon sitting bedside, holding his cold gray hand, and I realize, now, that it wasn’t so much me providing support as it was the other way around.
