He got out for good by (almost) dying.
My wife and I were getting ready for a Christmas party two years ago when my mother called to tell me that my father was in a coma. She explained the severity of the situation as I watched my wife slip on a black dress she had purchased for the occasion.
“He’d been complaining of a headache for several days,” my mother said. “The guards found him in his jail cell unconscious. The doctors say he had three brain hemorrhages caused by an aneurysm.”
My father had spent much of his adult life either homeless or incarcerated. His most recent arrest was for driving without a license, driving while intoxicated, possession of drug paraphernalia and resisting arrest. Noticeably absent from the list of charges was grand theft auto, meaning someone had lent him the car, which I found hard to believe.
My mother and father never married. This meant, as my mother explained, that I was his legal next of kin, responsible for making his medical decisions. This responsibility, already complex because of his lack of a living will, would prove to be even more fraught because he and I barely knew each other.
Three years earlier, after more than two decades of estrangement, I met him at a park near where he had set up camp in the woods behind a Salvation Army. We sat on a bench under the shade of a maple tree, and I studied the constellation of cuts and scabs covering his arms. He looked as if he had recently jumped from a train car and rolled down a gravel embankment.
I hung up, told everything to my wife, and then I sat in silence as she changed out of her black Christmas dress and packed our overnight bags. I thought: What if my father had still been living behind the Salvation Army instead of in jail? There would have been no one to find him.
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My wife and I drove three hours from our home in Nashville to a hospital in Birmingham, Ala., where we joined my mother and made our way to my father’s room in the neurological intensive care unit.
I was surprised to find the lights off and the room empty, except for a blanketed body in the bed and the sounds of a ventilator and beeping electrocardiogram. I half expected to walk in and see someone standing over his bed doing chest compressions.
An hour later, the doctor appeared and told us that after the jail medical staff had determined the severity of my father’s condition, all of the charges against him were dropped, and he was released to the hospital. “Otherwise,” he said, “they would have been required to post security guards outside of his room.”
The doctor then gently explained that my father’s condition was not going to improve. “At this point he’s just a body,” he said. “We will need you to decide what you’d like for us to do.”
After thinking about it, I told them to move him into palliative care. We were going to take him off the machines and let him go.
“You’re making the right decision,” my mother said. “I knew him well enough to know he wouldn’t want to be kept alive artificially.”
I asked for time alone with him and sat next to his bed examining his tattooed body. The cuts on his arms, which I had first noticed while sitting with him on that park bench that day by the Salvation Army, had long-since scarred into patches of milky-white skin disfiguring his tattoos. I pulled out my phone and played “Midnight Rider” by the Allman Brothers.
During one of our visits since reconnecting, my father had asked if he could clean my tires, saying, “I’m doing it for a few bucks these days at a gas station nearby.”
As we drove to the gas station, he played with the radio dial until he found a classic-rock station playing “Midnight Rider.” He turned it up and belted out the lyrics. “Well, I’ve got to run to keep from hiding,” he sang, then said, “That’s me, man. Got to run to keep from hiding.”
When we arrived, he got to work, sitting on his haunches and spraying so much cleaner onto my tires that even from a distance it stung my eyes. “I’m here most days detailing tires,” he said. “I could do this for the rest of my life. Just clean chrome. I don’t know why, but it would suit me.”
“Maybe it’s the immediate gratification,” I said. “They were dirty, but now they’re clean.”
My father had a long list of regrets. He blamed himself for his younger brother’s overdose. He used to verbally and physically abuse my mother. He had been jailed on and off his entire adult life on charges ranging from drug possession to assault and battery.
I watched him scrub my tires in the summer heat, his face beaded with sweat, and wondered if this felt to him like a sacrament, like penance. Dirty, but now clean.
I left the hospital late that night carrying everything he owned inside of two plastic bags. The first bag contained a bag of Cheetos, a small carton of chocolate milk, rumpled papers with scribbled thoughts that betrayed the mania of his bipolar disorder, a box of Cheez-Its, cookies and a Louis L’Amour paperback novel.
The second bag had one white undershirt, a pair of camouflage pants, tan construction boots and a copy of Tise Vahimagi’s “The Untouchables.”
After a few glasses of wine with my wife and mother, I fell into a deep sleep with my father’s belongings strewn across my childhood bedroom floor, and I woke early the next morning to a call from the hospital.
“Your dad is awake,” the person said. “We need you at the hospital as soon as possible.”
After hanging up, I felt numb. I had cried after learning about my father’s coma, and I had cried when I made the decision to let him go. Actually, what I did went well beyond crying; it was more like an exorcism of repressed emotions, my body shuddering. But the news of his recovery — practically a resurrection — rendered me emotionless. There was no sense of joy, no feeling of shock or relief, just a keen understanding of my own powerlessness.
My mother, wife and I rushed to the hospital, where the doctor met us in the hall just outside of my father’s room.
“We were transitioning him into palliative care when he opened his eyes,” he said. “We can’t explain it. It’s miraculous. You can go in and see him.”
The doctor was smiling at the good news, but I was frozen, expressionless, anesthetized by the incomprehensibility of this new state of affairs. I was finding it harder to walk into that room with him awake than I had when he had effectively been declared dead.
I had sat at his bedside, holding his limp hands in mine, and said goodbye. I had been rushed forward along the timeline of reconciliation, as often happens at deathbed vigils, but now, suddenly, he was fully alive, and the drama of the past 24 hours felt like some crude bait and switch. I sensed it was going to be more difficult to let him back into my life than it had been to let him go.
When we walked into the room, he looked at us and said, “Wow. Wow. Wow.”
His eyes stopped on my mother and he regarded her with awe, as if she were an angel or a Hollywood actress. Then his gaze fell on my wife, and he gargled out the word “beautiful” before smiling boyishly. Finally, he looked at me. My stomach was in knots. I felt young and afraid. Then he said, “I’m your dad.”
“Yes, you are,” I said.
“I’m your dad,” he said again.
“Yes, you are.”
He repeated this statement several times, and every time I answered the same. With each recitation, I felt the knots in my stomach loosening and falling away, as if we were reciting some kind of healing incantation.
“He’s not out of the woods yet,” the doctor said. “There’s a chance he’s going to need lifelong care.” He paused, then looked at me with a grin. “But he’s not going back to jail.”
Sean Bess is a writer in Nashville, Tenn.
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