The Other Side of the River (Nonfiction)

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Dad never drank Dr. Pepper, but in his final days that was the only thing that tasted good. I’d hold a bendy straw to his lips and watch his eyes close in bliss when the carbonated syrup hit his tongue.

Pre-existing conditions—high blood pressure, diabetes, and a stroke—had rendered him uninsurable in Alaska, so he was forced to leave the home he’d built in the Matanuska Valley and move to Washington state for their annual period of open enrollment.

In Alaska, he had owned a riverboat. An avid fisherman, it was important to him to be close to freshwater. Dad bought the parcel of land just through the woods from his sister’s homestead on the Naches River, where the arid valley narrowed into a rocky canyon. It was a good spot for fly fishing.

He built a small home and workshop on the land, with arched doorways and rounded corners. There, he created gold nugget and fossilized ivory jewelry, carved soapstone, and took on the occasional construction job. He still tied flies and stood in his hip boots in the swift current. But, after a lifetime of hunting big game in the last frontier, he found comfort in feeding the birds and squirrels, even training two does to eat from his hand. Meanwhile, the tumor grew through the lining of his bladder.

He was allergic to morphine. The doctors couldn’t control the pain. Dad never complained; he didn’t want to hurt their feelings. We spent his last two weeks listening to an endless loop of Roy Rogers tunes as he slipped in and out of consciousness. At the time, spring had swelled the Naches, and the willows budded along the shore. Dad stared into the distance, muttering about cylindrical containers. He didn’t seem to know I was there. The hospice nurse said he was reliving his life, one of the stages of death. He had done so many things in his lifetime that the cylinders could have been just about anything.

He could only shuffle at this point, and to get him to the bathroom, I had to hold his arms and walk him. I reminded him that we used to dance the box step in just the same way, my small feet positioned carefully on his loafers, but he showed no sign of remembering.

The day before he died, we were doing our shuffle back from the bathroom when Dad suddenly squeezed my arms. I looked into his thin whiskered face to see his eyes clear and focused. “I’m so proud of you,” he said.

Through tears, I told him how much I would miss him. We embraced. I helped him back into the hospital bed and offered him a drink of Dr. Pepper, but he shook his head and lay back on the pillow. I massaged lavender scented lotion into his dry hands until his eyes closed.

Dad didn’t wake up again. In his last hours, he gradually lost control of his bodily functions. The nurse helped me strip off his wet pajamas. She looked away as I cleaned him, and then helped me pull on a diaper. His shallow breath rattled in and out until we turned him onto his side to change the sheets, and then abruptly stopped. I quickly rolled him back, and the jagged rhythm resumed. The nurse reached across his bed to put a hand on my shoulder. “It won’t be long now,” she said.

It was late, not much moon, but I could see the light on at my aunt’s place. I walked through the dark woods to tell her that it was time. She hugged me, then, choking back her tears, began making calls.

Before returning to Dad, I walked down the long hallway to use the bathroom. The room was quiet. As I washed my hands, I looked into the mirror at the dark circles under my eyes. I thought about Dad’s sunken face, how altered he was from the man I had known all my life. I stooped to splash cold water on my face, then dried it with the hand towel.

Suddenly, I heard a deep voice say my name. Loudly, clearly, as if he were standing right beside me. I turned to open the door, thinking someone was on the other side, but there was nobody there. From down the hall, I could hear my aunt’s soft moans and cries. Then, as if a window had been thrown open between the two worlds, I heard many voices in conversation. Some I didn’t recognize, but some I did—the heathery timbre of my grandmother’s laughter, my grandfather, great aunts and uncles, voices of departed family members I hadn’t heard since I was a little girl.

I ran down the hall and raced back through the woods, sure that Dad had already gone, but found him still breathing, the hospice nurse sitting quietly at his feet. I pushed my chair closer and rested my head on the mattress beside the feeble rise and fall of his chest, as the ethereal voices and laughter continued. They were sharing stories, catching up, as if they had been busy with their own lives and were now coming together in reunion. It was clear that they were waiting to greet Dad.

My aunt and cousins, the rest of the family filed in, followed by the priest. With Dad’s breath rattling in and out and Roy Rogers tunes playing in the background, the solemn young priest gave Dad his last rites. We formed a chain of love around his bed, watching and waiting, stroking the papyrus skin of his arms and hands, his hollowed-out face, and his thin white hair, marking these last moments with silent tears, while those voices I had come to think of as the ancestors laughed and chatted in the background like they were at a cocktail party.

The nurse said the hearing was the last to go. His sister leaned in close, “Happy trails, little brother.” The family took turns saying goodbye. His rasping breath continued weakly, and then the nurse said to me, “Let’s roll him onto his side so he’ll be more comfortable.” I looked up to meet her eyes. We both knew what would happen when we turned him onto his side, but she was right.

I kissed his forehead, and whispered, “I love you, Dad.” Then I held his shoulders as the nurse took his hips, and we rolled him onto his side.

Once again, Dad’s labored breath ceased. My aunt and cousins collapsed into each other. The nurse checked his pulse, looked at her watch and wrote down the time. I closed my eyes and listened to the voices rejoicing in reunion on the other side of the river.

After the coroners wheeled Dad’s body out, somebody switched the Roy Rogers CD to a Celtic soprano. Inside the empty room, you could hear the somber Irish airs, but when the family gathered in the kitchen and stood together holding hands, every one of us still heard “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Dad always had a sense of humor.

There’s no question that I was under extraordinary stress and suffering from sleep deprivation when I heard my name called in the bathroom. Whether the voices that followed were real or a trick of my mind, I couldn’t say. But for three days after my dad was gone, I heard them, their voices gradually becoming softer and more distant. On the third day, they went completely silent, as if someone had reached out and closed a window.

I thought of the hellfire and brimstone I’d learned about at Bible camp, and how Dad had brought me onto the back porch to watch the sunset, assuring me that a God who created such beauty could only be pure love. “Some church people like to think of themselves as a little bit above everyone else,” he said. “Despite what you heard at camp, there are many paths to salvation.”

In the early years after Dad’s death, there were many occasions when a room would inexplicably fill with the earthy aroma of his pipe tobacco, a reminder to our family that he wasn’t far. Still, it wasn’t the same as being able to pick up the phone and call him to tell him about my day or see what he was up to. The pain of missing him was a constant dull ache.

Sitting at the edge of a pond one night with my husband, I called out, “Dad, send me a sign.” My husband and I gasped when a shooting star suddenly trailed across the sky.

One night, Dad came to me in a dream. He was healthy and fit, showing me around a house he was building. He seemed happy, enthusiastically telling me about his plans for the house. It was high on a cliff, and I looked over the edge to see trout swimming in the eddy below.

I awoke the next morning with a sense of peace. I brought my tea to the patio in the garden, and as I sat there sipping jasmine tea and listening to the birds, my sister called. I answered quickly, eager to tell her about my dream, but she jumped in first.

“I dreamed about Dad last night,” she said.

Stunned, I asked, “Was he building a house?”

“Yes! On a cliff over a river!”

Like he had in my dream, Dad had shown my sister his plans for the house. He had been happy. We had both woken with a sense of peace and assurance that Dad was still close, still living a life of purpose. And that, though he may be on the other side of the river, he wasn’t so far away that he couldn’t reach us.

Carmel Mawle is a writer, photographer, artist, and managing editor of Panhandle Creek Press, an independent press based in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Carmel’s short stories, essays, and poetry have been published in Smokelong Quarterly, Vox Populi, Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts, Literary Mama, and others. Learn more at panhandlecreek.com.