A Dying Father's Final Gift

My father-in-law is dying.

A massive stroke left him vegetative six months ago, and my mother-in-law lacks the resolve to pull the plug—despite his explicit and repeated wishes otherwise and the pleading of their children.

Last week, he barely pulled through another health emergency.

The nurses administered Somchai, my father-in-law, a new blood thinning medicine that sent him into shock. His blood pressure plummeted, his breathing slowed, and he wavered between life and death in the ICU for a day.

My wife and I rushed the 1,000 km home as soon as we could—but by the time we arrived, he had already already made a miraculous turn around. Again.

Though his heart plodded along at 58 BPM and his lungs continued their involuntary labors, no one was home. The hand of his wife, the sound of his daughter’s wavering voice, the adjustment of his catheter, the wiping of his ass—none of it registered.

He was gone while his body endured.

The tragedy was not to be found in the ICU, watching him spasm, his toes curling inwards, his legs stiffening, and his daughters fighting back tears as his deluded wife celebrated the contortions as harbingers of recovery—reassuring everyone, including a nurse who white-knuckled not to roll her eyes—that any day now, the old Somchai would return and life would continue on as it had before.

Tragedy hit us on our way out.

The maternity ward sits at the end of the main walkway into the hospital’s heart. From this central point, all other sections can be accessed—including the ICU where her father lay. The design is metaphysically fitting. Birth is the nexus point for all other illnesses and the great rejuvenating force that persists in the face of so much decay and torment.

All things begin and return here.

As we walked past the ward, my wife described her father, a small man hardened by years of farm and surveying work, standing outside the delivery room with a Navy uniform for his newborn son, exalting in what would be the capstone of his life: a man to continue his line and usher in the martial glory he always longed for.

Only it wasn’t a son.

The doctor had misread the ultrasound, and out popped Somchai’s final daughter.

He stood there, his hands clinging the crisp, white uniform, and gazed into the emptiness.

That child, Daew, was their seventh, and, much to his disappointment, it was girls all the way down.

The family could not afford another attempt. They barely survived as it was. An eighth child, in a bid for a boy that the gods repeatedly denied him, risked a repeat of his own boyhood: being shoved off to a temple or a reluctant relative.

That scene unfolded to this man, at this spot, in this building 30 years ago. Now, that once expectant father of an admiral lays 30 meters away and is coughing phlegm out of his incubator tube.

Nestled onto my hip and nuzzled into my breast was our daughter, delivered just a few months prior and without a Navy uniform waiting in the wings.

Birth—death—birth in this tiny hospital in the Thai countryside. The entire circuit rendered visible as we walked to the parking lot.

This circuit, the inevitable march of death, the sapping away of life, the unraveling of that earnest father into a potato surviving off of IVs, catheters, scrub downs, and a cocktail of medicines is the tragedy.

No amount of prayers or pleas would bring him back.

Yet, he persisted. When we arrived home, I noticed my father-in-law’s features in my daughter’s face. The flat nose that flared out at the tip. The round of her jaw. Her serene, large eyes that rolled leisurely around the room.

Through her, he lives. His ancestors live. And we continue our struggle against decay, against death, against erasure in this world that afflicts us with strokes, maims us with an ailing heart, produces newborns without spinal cords, and throws all manner of obstacles our way to thwart any attempt at survival.

Within that struggle and triumph is the genesis of heroism in the face of tragedy.

To live and reproduce are among the most difficult acts for any living species. An oak tree will produce tens-of-millions of seeds over the course of its life. Of those, only a handful will germinate, pierce through the earth, and feel Helios’ refulgence saturating their stems. And of those, they’ll be lucky if one sapling sets down roots, spreads its branches, and survives long enough to produce its own seeds.

But mere survival is insufficient. It is the bare minimum, and Celtic pagans, devoted to excellence, beauty, nobility, and glory, the qualities which nature herself exalts and rewards, do not accept the bare minimum. We long for ascendance, the upward pressure of life, the movement towards increase.

My wife and her family reminisced over grilled chicken, papaya salad, and wine.

I was a fly-on-the-wall for these sessions, but here I caught the second and most essential act of life: increase.

My wife’s story—and that of the family in general—has been one of imperfect upward mobility.

Somchai started out about as low as a Thai boy could get. His parents were too poor to feed him, so they dumped him at a temple as soon as he could survive off of solid foods. He was one of many orphans handed over to the monks, who looked after them like they did their dogs: throwing them a few scraps of food and then leaving them to their own devices.

Somchai dropped out of school at 14 (the earliest legal age) and began working odd jobs. Harvesting rice. Shoring up irrigation ditches. Leading buffaloes out to pasture. Harvesting mushrooms come the rainy season.

He was never the smartest, but he was honest, diligent, and fuss-free. Our hero eventually caught the eye of a government fixer. The bureaucratic somebody offered him work as a surveyor. The pay was poor and the hours grueling, but it was steady work with a clear path upwards.

Thus began his plodding advancement up the ladder. His own integrity held him back. Then, as now, the bread-and-butter of government agents was to redraw lines to suit the needs of the wealthy & well-connected. A farmer who wanted another acre of land could slip a couple thousand dollars into an envelope nestled between blueprints and records, and a month later—much to the outrage of his neighbor—wake up with an extended plot thanks to the earlier “incompetence” of former surveyors.

The extremely low salary tacitly accounted for and encouraged this source of illicit income. Somchai never indulged in it, much to the chagrin and suspicion of his superiors. A clean man was a threat, and they worked hard to delay his promotions despite otherwise impeccable work.

Somchai would get the last laugh. During one of the corruption purges, many of his colleagues and former superiors were caught in the dragnet. Their careers were ended, their assets seized, and, for a portion of them, years lost to prison sentences. Somchai retired with a guilt-free conscience and a modest pension.

His tale is not one that will end up in the history books, but it is a testament to life surging forward and upwards, propelling him out of indigence and ignominy into the world of polite, middle-class society.

Some of his daughters would push the family into even higher strata. My wife and her sister have done much of the heavy lifting in this regard. From their childhood picking mangoes in a Thai village, they have become highly educated, ambitious, successful, and well connected in the upper echelons of Thai society—all while maintaining the humble, honest character of their father.

They are life in the ascendance. In their bearing, in the density of their bones, the confidence in their voice, the flashing whites of their eyes, they justify all that Somchai has fought for, all that he has endured, and all that he has built.

They, father, daughter, and grand daughter, are the answer to tragedy.

Ascendancy is unevenly distributed. One daughter struggles to make rent—although her charm will probably pull her through. Another collects coins outside of a bathroom.

Witnessing your father perish in slow-motion is a special form of torment that I wish upon no one, but the burden was made more bearable by my wife and her sister’s achievements—most critically, the birth of our daughter.

This is the purpose of life—stripped of all its abstractions and moralizations—the movement upwards, the enervation of limbs and intellect, the extension of will, the refinement and perfection of the biological form, the exultation of increase, the devotion to excellence, and the perpetuation of that existence across space and time.

We had—in our own modest way—done that, and as he involuntarily contorting in a hospital bed, his life draining away, ours rose upwards on the foundation he built all those years ago, on the foundation that lives in the marrow of my wife and our daughter, on the foundation that will be the wellspring of a thousand glories and honors for generations to come.

This life, our fortune, our virtues, the exalted happiness that greets us each morning, the ecstasy of dusk, the yearning to do great deeds and the great deeds done are his final gifts to us and our final gifts to him.

Gods willing, it will be ours to reap 40 years from now.

The preservation and extension of the fire in the dark.