It’s hard to believe how obtuse I can be. Despite all the tests and wills and health directives drawn up, you’d think I would get it.

But sometimes it just takes time, even when you’re looking a thing square in the face. It takes an odd little note to wake you up, something seemingly minor to scratch the itch you didn’t even know you had.

Mine was gout. Or, I should say, the lack of gout, since it turns out that Dad hasn’t got it.

Dad got a letter from the doctor that said despite all signs pointing to gout, he doesn’t have any uric acid in his blood work, making gout a MacGuffin in his cancer drama, a spectre that disappeared like smoke. So they don’t know why he’s hobbling about.

“Well, there it is, in the dark again. All part of the human condition, I suppose.” Dad is sanguine, but slightly disappointed. We both are. It would be nice for him to have something that seemed, if not treatable, then obvious and non-life-threatening. Now we’re left with a slightly nerve-wracking lack of understanding about something making Dad’s life just that much more of a pain in the ass.  At least we could take a stroll down the block or a hobble to the store, but since we’re unsure what the problem is, it makes it more tenuous. Gout was an easy compromise for me; the lack of knowing is not.

But if the lack of gout is a relatively minor issue, the fact that I realized Dad is mortally ill was more monumental.

I’ve been writing about it, chewing on it, reading wills and signing papers. He’s ill and I know it. But I don’t think I understood it until I realized that his weird foot thing could be a part of the larger picture, that somehow, with the subtraction of gout the other pieces fell into place just enough for me to get a deeper understanding of Dad’s situation.
And, while not confirming my suspicions, my Saturday night call to the on-call oncologist (say that ten times fast) did nothing to suspend them either. Edema is a characteristic symptom of advanced prostate cancer, sometimes from the treatment, sometimes from the cancer itself. So we know what it isn’t (gout) but we don’t know what it is (anything and everything else).

This is the sort of thing that makes me crazy and up to no good: going online and reviewing every single article that ever mentioned “edema” in the same airspace as “prostate cancer.” Searching high and low for answers that aren’t there because no-one knows, ever, how things will progress. In all these articles, though there were no answers for why Dad was gimped up, there were glimmers of a future I hadn’t quite absorbed yet: that Dad was probably going to die from prostate cancer, and that I was going to have to negotiate that with him.

So what to do? Go talk to Dad, of course. Which felt a little bizarre. How do you start this conversation?

“I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me, that you were going to need help at some point.” Help beyond me, I meant. “We need to talk about what you want to do, where you want to go.”

Dad said with characteristic gruffness, “I want you to drop me off in the woods so I can die.”

Since there’s little response I can give to an answer like that, I let it sit there.

“You asked.”

So I did. “Since I don’t want to be taken to jail for manslaughter, we need to talk about the other options,” I said.

“If we lived in a more enlightened culture, I would go into the woods.”

But perhaps he understood that I actually had to ask, that I finally realized, in my blindly and belatedly grasping way, that he was going to become needful at some point, because he answered without suggesting I drop him on Mount Hood and driving off.

“I don’t think it will matter at that point,” he said.

“What do you mean? It seems like nothing but that matters. It will be all there is.”

“I know that dying is essentially a state of diminishing horizons,” he said. “My world will get smaller and smaller until there’s very little left. I just don’t think it will matter where I am.”

Such pragmatism may be reassuring to Dad, but it can be a little tough sometimes. After this stark evaluation of end-of-life concerns, he began talking about his service in the Air Force, a time I know next to nothing about. And he talked about it with real fondness, not like he would ever join up again because God knows he’s no fan of military life, but with a respect for what it offered him at a time when he needed it.

“It got me 1300 miles away from my mother, that’s what it did!” he laughs. “It was great.”

But more than that it offered him sanctuary in the books he couldn’t get anywhere else: the base library would order him any book he asked for, no questions asked. It was here that he was exposed to some of his most influential authors as he flew his Air Force-Issue desk, and it must have given him the inspiration and confidence (and independence from his smothering mother) to go into a life of humanities, not exactly a fast track to success. But success is what he found anyway, amazingly enough.

“I know people don’t really believe me when I say that I’m fine after learning about the cancer,” he said. “But I really am. I’ve been really lucky! I’ve been healthy, I’ve gotten to create mischief in my life without getting fired, I have two great kids and I’ve really had a great time. I’m so fortunate that all my good health has been at the beginning. So I’m sick at the end,” he said. “I’ve had a great run.”

I had bought us lunch and we ate on the porch; now lunch was over and it was time to go. “At some point I’ll have to call hospice, you know,” I said.

“You mean ‘Our Ladies of the Immaculate Immolation’ or some other ridiculous group?” he asked.

“I’ll make very clear that God is not a part of your world-view,” I assured him.

“It’s enough that I’m made up of the same stuff as the universe,” he said. “I’ll just return to that.”

“I always wonder why that’s not enough for people. Isn’t it magical enough that we’re all here despite the long odds?”

Dad howled with laughter. “Talk about the truth of unintended consequences!” he gasped.  “Yes, it’s amazing we’re all here. Who could ever imagine?”

And that’s where we left the great hospice debate. He wants to be left in the wild, an old elephant wandering off from the herd, without the hullabaloo of intervention. No special accommodations, no extreme measures. If he could feed a nice bunch of cougars, he might agree to that. He didn’t mention vultures, though I don’t think he would be opposed.

I think it offends him that he’ll be fussed over in the end. People have been dying for hundreds of thousands of years before now, and he would rather do it like them, say, facing down the bitter cold of the mountains in winter, or the desert heat at the height of summer.

I didn’t mention that it could have gone a whole host of other ways–being at the wrong end of a gladiator, bubonic plague, plane crash, boiling oil over the parapet, random knifing in an alley. But I suppose that’s not the point.

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