Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
For anyone who’s ever loved and slowly lost a parent, and for the music-lovers.
This personal essay is not so much about my dad, as it is about my experience of being with him in his dying. It’s not so much his story, as it is mine. And it’s not a eulogy.
It has taken me over 6 months to sit down and write this. Not just because of the pain it brings up, but because I’ve felt like I need to tell Dad’s whole story. To paint a full, beautiful, honest picture of my dad for you to see. Because I want that, I want him to be seen, remembered, known. We never had a memorial service for him — he didn’t want one. So, I don’t have stories from old friends, and old work colleagues, or a slide show of pictures from the full spectrum of his life to hold onto as a kind of nutshell of dad. But I’ll paint a little, because it’s impossible to paint it all, and then, perhaps selfishly, I’ll tell my story of loving him through his dying.
My father, Trevor Bryan Dale (a.k.a Dickie, Bot, Trev, Dad, Mkhulu, Grumpy) worked hard to send my brothers and me to good schools, and universities. He made sure we had more than he did. He provided for all of us, and he took this duty seriously. We went on holidays to Kruger and along the coast of KZN. He loved wildlife and birds and photography. And he delighted in the wonders of the universe — physics, astronomy, the making of a black hole; a real “Popular Mechanics” kind of guy. He loved plants — especially succulents and orchids — just like me (only things we could keep alive really) — and he tended to them and marvelled at the little fat leaves with pink edges, or the emergence of a new orchid flower. He was handy around the house and loved a bit of woodwork. His tools were all perfectly organised in the garage — his woodwork bench was probably the only thing he kept relatively neat (much to my mother’s dismay). He was generous and difficult. Intelligent and anti-social. And irreverent as all hell — something we delighted in in each other. A true Far Side fan. My brother, Marlon, once bought him the full collection of Far Side cartoons in two giant hard-cover chronicles. I’ll never forget the sight of him chuckling over those cartoons. Like most South African men, he loved his sport, especially rugby, and knew his way around a braai.
But perhaps more than anything, he loved music, especially rock. Jimi Hendrix was his ultimate, but Santana, Cream, Dire Straits, Led Zeppelin, Bread, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, The Traveling Wilburys and a thousand others were his religion. He got lost in the sound of an electric guitar like someone floating in water, eyes closed and away. In another world. Any chance he got he’d crank up the music and play air guitar in his study. He was for sure secretly proud when his daughter started bringing Gun’s ‘N Roses and Metallica tapes home and putting up posters of Slash’s mop of black hair hanging over a Les Paul — himself lost in his own generation of sound. I’m not sure he would have loved the sight of me headbanging to this music at parties though. And he certainly didn’t approve of my swearing; but he loved that I was rebellious in my teenage years, as he’d been his whole life. He was never one for rules or being told what to do. Perhaps his sweetest parental offering to me when I was young and constantly pushing boundaries was: “Do whatever you want, just don’t get caught”.
The last year was hard. I can only really see now how hard, as I look back on it. It’s no wonder I gave up so much of what I love — there was just no space. My love was directed at loving Dad through his final year and trying to be there for Mom, who bore the full brunt of everything. We didn’t know it was his final year, but we knew. He was in heart failure. After being in the ICU for a month in May 2022 with pneumonia, he was never the same. His eyes started to fade, the blue becoming greyer, everything more translucent, like Gran’s, before she died. His shoulders crumpled over, such that it seemed an effort to lift his head up from them to greet me at the door — which he always did — no matter how long it took him to get there, no matter the effort. With his heart in failure, his blood wasn’t circulating well through his body, and this meant having terribly swollen legs, which made it difficult and often painful to do everyday things — like greet your daughter at the door. He told me several times that year that he knew this was his last stretch. At first, I would try and re-direct him; “don’t say that, Dad, what about that mitral valve replacement…”. And then when I realised his surviving this was a virtual impossibility, I eventually relented, “I know, Dad, I know”.
When my brothers, Marlon and Jaycen were here over this time, both when he was in ICU with pneumonia, and for his final month in May this year, I could feel the weight lift. Through the big man-hugs they’d give me when I cried, and just because they were there, so I didn’t always have to be. Dad never had one day in the ICU without one of us there during the visiting hours. They say you only get two hours for visiting in ICU because they have so much to do to care for and medicate the patient, but partly I think it is also for the families because the doctors know that when someone is loved, those who love them will sometimes give up everything, including their own wellbeing, to be by their loved one’s bedside. Even when there is no response at all. So many people there were on machines, silent and unmoving, except for the slow rising and falling of a chest only rising and falling because of air being pushed in and out forcefully, and a metal stand full of plastic-packaged drugs on drips. But there we and others were, talking to someone who we didn’t know could hear us. Playing music, telling stories of our day, eking out any possible new thing that had happened to have something to talk about. Because they might just be able to hear.
The times Dad was awake during this month — because they’d reduced the morphine and other drugs to see if his body could cope without them — he’d be happy to see us, grateful, and laughing at our bad jokes, even though he had a tube down his throat. But he was also frustrated. He couldn’t communicate properly and at the best of times, my father was not a patient man. We tried alphabet cards and gave him his glasses and a pen and paper on a clipboard to write with, but we understood very little. Every now and then we’d guess right, and he’d throw his head back in relief, his eyes rolling upward as if to say, “About flipping time”.
I’d often give Dad a foot massage when he was awake, which he loved. It was gratifying to be able to provide some relief and connection in this white, beeping, tunnel of death. We saw several mortuaries arrive that month — they close the curtain completely around the bed, and around yours if you’re nearby, and then you know.
My brothers held Dad’s hands, which broke my heart right open. My dad was a real man of his time; affectionate with me, but not his boys; they didn’t get many hugs; more handshakes. So, to see them holding his hand was a measure of just how close to death he was. That image will forever be a symbol etched in my heart of what it felt like to watch him slowly die and to be with not just my pain, but with everyone else’s. His, my brother’s, my mother’s.
The word “burden” has such negative connotations. People often use it to describe an unwanted weight, but it just means something that is carried with some difficulty. Love is a burden at times, all love. And the years of loving Dad through his slow dying were a burden. A weight. It wasn’t easy for Mom and me, for any of us. But it was a burden I am forever grateful to have been given. I was in the right place geographically, at the right time, to be there for Dad when he needed me. What a gift. I wouldn’t change a thing. Not one hospital visit, not one step out of the way of an ordinary full workday to do something to help, or just to show up to make him smile, and apologise to the nurses in case he’d been rude (he wasn’t the best patient). Half my job in fact — as I saw it — was to charm and express gratitude to the nurses for putting up with him — so they’d still be kind. Outside of the ICU, not all nurses understand how difficult it can be to be dying so I’d try to get on their good sides in the hopes that they’d transfer this kindness back to Dad — even when he was grumpy as hell (often).
I get a lot of my best and worst traits from my dad. Being moody and snappy is one of them. Like Dad, anger and lashing out is often my cover-up emotion, the coping mechanism to avoid feeling the deeper fears and hurts. So, I got him. But most people didn’t. Anger is, I think, one of the most misunderstood emotions. In feeling “attacked” by the angry person, people feel only the force of the attack, not the pain behind it.
During one of our early visits to the ICU, just after the “cardiac event” that put Dad there, I was scrambling for things to offer him in his coma-like state. I was scrolling through podcasts and making suggestions to Mom when at one point she said, “Don’t play him a podcast play him Santana”. And that was the beginning of the biggest blessing in this whole journey with Dad. I started a “Dad’s Hospital playlist” and started pulling in and playing all the songs we could think of that he’d enjoy. It was by no means a comprehensive list (impossible), and it was slightly slanted towards some of my favourites that we shared, for sure. I’d put my phone by his ear so as not to disturb the other patients (the ones who were awake), and let it roll. Later, when he woke, I’d close the curtain around his bed and play it as loud as I’d dare. No one ever told me to turn it down. In the ICU, other than the limited visiting hours and no flowers, a lot is accommodated. Because they know these could be your last days, hours, minutes together.
When all had been tried and failed to get Dad off the machines and meds, so his heart and lungs could function alone, we let him go. In whatever medical and spiritual way you must when you know there is nothing else that can be done. Jaycen had left for home in Joburg a day or two before, having said goodbye, and it so happened that on the same day the doctors told us they’d done all they could, Marlon was scheduled to leave back for the US, after being with us for over three weeks. Dad died while Marlon was hovering over the Atlantic, at 5:15am, Tuesday 30th May 2023. Life doesn’t stop around the dying. It can’t. I was in the parking lot with my partner, Paul, and our dogs — Paul had come back and forth from our base at Moms down the road to bring me tea and comfort in the night and I’d take 5–10 minutes here and there with them in the hospital parking lot. I’d tell Dad each time in his quiet, that I was going, and I’d be back soon. The rest of the time I slept on a mattress on the floor next to his bed, waking up every now and then to hold his hand, kiss his head and tell him I was there. I don’t know who I was there for more, him or me.
Before he died, when they’d taken him off the heart-lung machine one last time, and stopped the drugs keeping him alive, Paul and I were at his side, playing him songs like “Stairway to Heaven”, Led Zeplin, “Free Bird”, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and “Comfortably numb”, Pink Floyd. And he’d lift his arms at the start of each new song, or at a spectacular rise in the music to play air guitar, his face creasing ever so slightly in deep appreciation for the music. Until the morphine left his arms and face immobile, and he fell asleep. So, now I tell people that Dad died in a morphine-induced rock concert. Perhaps he felt like he was there on stage the day Jimi Hendrix played “Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock, standing behind that guitar, picking, strumming, and blowing electric sounds through giant speakers all around him. Perhaps he was floating above it all, being Jimi, the crowd, the sky and the music all at once. Perhaps he was just asleep. But for me, being able to play him that music, the music he loved, in his last moments of what we know to be consciousness, was the biggest expression of love the universe has ever gifted me.
To all the musicians out there, famous or not, just know that your discipline and play, your creativity — the dark and the light of it — is a point of connection for people that crosses all barriers of language, culture, religion, and even space and time. Dad didn’t believe he was on a “stairway to heaven” that night — he didn’t believe in heaven — but I believe the music was his heaven. Right here on earth.
Some thank-you’s
I can’t write this without thanking everyone who ever loved, appreciated or cared for Dad. The nurses and doctors in the ICU at Hillcrest Life, his long-time cardiologist Dave Gilmer and then Robin Dyer, and his physician Shambu Maharaj who helped give us a good few extra years with him; the friends and ex-work colleagues who sent him completely inappropriate jokes on WhatsApp that had him roaring with laughter at the kitchen counter; the friends who shaped his “misspent youth” — the notorious Sherwood Survivors; and our extended family and friends — especially Des & Shirls for being there to support Mom and me through it all. And Paul, his to-be son-in-law, who for the last 5 years, was Dad’s regular and very welcome, manly, dark-humoured respite in a world full of women (just two, but I think we were enough to make it feel like a room-full).
