Being towards death

The card from the vet was the nicest saddest thing anyone had done for us — a fiction piece based on my experience of working as a junior doctor after the death of my father

Man dies constantly until the moment of his demise.

Martin Heidegger, Being and time

I

After my father died, my mother started joking that our dog was her carer. My sister and I had moved out of home and so she lived in a three‐bedroom terrace with two ageing pets. Her dog, George, was a 12‐year‐old pug. Three years ago, George had gone blind, and 2 years ago, he had developed a chronic sinus infection causing him to have snot permanently leaking out of his left nostril. Still, he coped. He trotted about the house with his head permanently tilted to the left. Quietly confident, he walked into walls, furniture, and cupboard doors, leaving a trail of snot stain wherever he went. Sometimes, Mum would come home and panic because she couldn’t find him. She would call out his name, but he was deaf too. Then she would call and text my sister and me, “Have you taken George? I can’t find him”. We had never taken him, because where would one take him? Usually, he was in the garden, stuck in a bush unable to find his way back to the house. Sometimes, he was stuck under a piece of furniture.

Mum’s other companion was our 18‐year‐old cat, Miffy. Miffy could see and hear but was almost certainly dementing. She used to watch television and sleep under the blanket with Dad. After he died, she began urinating and defecating all over my parents’ room. I looked it up on the internet and learned it was probably a grief reaction. Mum was forever cleaning floors and carpets and hunting around the house for occult stools. “Can you smell something?” she would say, and my sister and I would close our eyes and sniff around the living room. My sister was the expert at finding faeces. I specialised in urine detection. I also specialised in getting rid of the pungent scent of cat urine by dousing Mum’s floorboards in vinegar — something I had also learned from the internet.

A year after Dad died, George died. He had a good appetite until he died. Sometimes we took him out in a stroller because he was too weak to walk. Probably we did not take him out enough.

After Dad died, I saw death everywhere and started to break bad news compulsively. After all, I was a junior doctor, so this was part of my training. Every time George decided he didn’t want dinner, I would announce to the family that George was probably going to die so please brace yourselves. This is known as “firing a warning shot”. After a while, my warnings began to lose their effect. Then one day, he just died. Mum said he hadn’t eaten his breakfast. Then she had stayed with him, sat by him on the kitchen floor, patted him and chatted with him. She had to go in for a meeting and when she came home, he was dead.

I left work early because she was too distraught to take George to the vet. He was in the kitchen, in rigor mortis next to his water bowl. Miffy was trying to eat her dinner. I couldn’t tell if she understood the gravity of the situation. “Miffy,” I said, lifting him up, “do you understand that George has died?” I lifted his stiff body from under his arms and presented it to her, much like that scene in The Lion King. She ignored me. His corpse leaked urine in a small puddle on the floor. “It’s important that you have closure, Miffy. Miffy?” She ate some biscuits and went into the garden. Even though she was very skinny, she was always eating. Her stools were dark and reeked. She probably had a slow‐growing rectal cancer.

We took George to the vet in a cardboard box. We had to squash his face a little because he couldn’t quite fit now that he was all stiff. The secretary at the vet said that she was very sorry for our loss. A few weeks later, the vet sent us a card addressed primarily to my dad: “To Robin and family”. I said it was funny because Robin was dead and the vet was trying to be nice but was just rubbing salt in the wound. My sister said that it was the nicest saddest thing anyone had done for us.

II

I went back to work 5 days after Dad died. I didn’t know how else to pass the time. I was working as a junior doctor in the intensive care unit. When I saw a patient on high flow nasal prongs, or struggling to breathe, I had to walk away. I’d pretend I had forgotten something, or that I was fetching something from the printer. It was not noticeable, I think. There were many doctors.

Sometimes, at work, I thought about Dad, when he had lost all his weight and was floating in and out of a sepsis‐related delirium. They said he couldn’t eat because of aspiration risk. They put a feeding tube up his nose. I smuggled in his favourite ginger lollies from the Chinese grocery store. I told him not to tell anyone, but he could chew on them and then spit them out. I wanted him to taste something good before he died.

When I got home, I stalked the house for reminders of him. I collected anything with his handwriting and put it in a box. I found a kilo of frozen pork belly. He had written the date he had frozen it. I took the piece of paper and put it in my phone cover so that I could carry it with me wherever I went.

III

When Miffy stopped eating, we turned our home into a palliative care unit. We had multiple bowls of water and soft surfaces for her to lie on. She became weaker and could no longer go upstairs, but she slunk in and out of the kitchen and living room. She lay under the table in the garden and lapped water from a flower pot.

It took her 3 days to die. One morning, when she lay in a puddle of light on the living room floor, I set up a yoga mat and slept next to her. I woke up stiff and sore a few hours later. She had moved to the kitchen, so I went to bed.

Then, 2 days later, I came home and it had happened. She was lying in a doorway, half her body in the kitchen, half in the garden. I called upstairs, “She’s dead, Mum”. Mum told me to hide the body before she came downstairs. When I told her where Miffy was, Mum asked me if she should have just come down earlier. “Maybe she wanted to come inside but was too weak. Maybe she was waiting for me because she wanted to say goodbye.” I told Mum it was okay. I think she was not in pain. The week before she stopped eating, I had fed her exclusively with half‐microwaved chicken legs — her favourite.

When I handed her dead body to the vet, he said, “How’s everyone holding up?”

“Just to let you know, Dad has died.”

“Robin?” he was incredulous. “But he was so young? I’m so sorry.”

Two weeks later they sent another card. It was addressed only, “Dear Robin”.

IV

It was 2 years before I could go to the cemetery. It was twilight when we went, my mum, my sister and I. My dad had a good grave spot, in the shade of a sprawling eucalyptus. The sky was mauve, streaked with bright pink, and the air was thick with the hum of cicadas.

Mum had a bunch of wildflowers and a bottle of water. His grave was made of polished granite. There was a copper vase in the centre filled with dried out paper daisies. I sat at the foot of his grave. It was like being on the edge of a hospital bed.

Mum threw out the dead flowers and arranged the new ones in the vase. “Hi Hon,” she said, “Issy has come to see you! Isn’t that great?” She replaced the water and stood up. She was wearing a cotton dress, cut like a paper fan. She called it her Marilyn Monroe dress. There was a spare plot next to Dad’s grave, which she had bought for herself.

The sky cooled and started to spit rain. The vase blew over. She held her dress tightly at her hips to stop the wind blowing it up.