Something I Might Say

By Stephanie Austin and Peg Alford Pursell

Stephanie Austin had a complicated father and a complicated relationship with him. His death, after a short battle with lung cancer, forced her to reckon with his always-threatened and now permanent absence from her life. Then the health of her grandmother, with whom she had always been close, began to fail, and she faced another looming loss, i

• Language: English
• Publisher: WTAW Press
• Release date: Jul 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781733661966

Stephanie Austin

Stephanie Austin has enjoyed a varied career, working as an artist and an antiques trader, but also for the Devon Schools Library Service. When not writing she is actively involved in amateur theatre as a director and actor, and attempts to be a competent gardener and cook. She lives in Devon.

Book preview

SOMETHING I MIGHT SAY

October 2019

MY FATHER, ON HIS DEATHBED, asked if I had any regrets about our relationship. The cancer had taken most of his voice, so all he could do was whisper, Regrets? I tossed my head back and laughed. I said, Oh my God, Dad. I laughed again. I did not, and do not, have regrets. Well, I suppose I regret that I cannot put this scene in a story because it is a cliché. (Who tosses their head back anyway?) And I regret mailing the bitter letter I wrote to him before I attended his second wedding, when I was twenty-one.

His deathbed was a hospital bed. Thank you, hospice, for bringing the bed, the drugs, the nebulizer, the counselor, the medicated mouthwash for thrush.

A technicality: We were in the living room where the bed was set up because there was more space, and I was sitting on the hospital bed, his deathbed, and he was sitting in his walker, which had a warning label that read, DO NOT USE AS A SEAT. I towered over him, my dad, small and hollow, without hair or teeth. Once six four and 220 pounds, he was hunched over from the lung cancer eating up his chest cavity, his feet and ankles swollen with fluid buildup. Fluid is part of the body’s defense system. The body fights to the end. The body opts for hope.

The two of us were alone. The day caregiver was down the hall, maybe in the bathroom. The 24-hour caregiver group I’d hired was expensive, but hospice offered a volunteer for only a few hours and my father, who had little time left, could not be alone. I worked a full-time job an hour away. I also had a four-year-old, and my extended absences at home were noticed. In the beginning, I’d tried to bring my daughter with me to my dad’s, but small children require all the attention in the room. They get bored. The last visit, she couldn’t stop jumping back and forth over his oxygen tubing. I needed to put motherhood aside, however impossible, and focus on him.

My father wanted his patio doors open. It was October in the desert, finally cool enough in the mornings and evenings to allow this.

Years earlier, he stopped washing or trimming his hair, slicking it back with oil instead. It had grown long and scraggly and yellowed, and I was embarrassed both by and for him. After he began chemo, his hair had fallen out in patches. I’d bought him a lint roller to help catch the strands. I was not sorry to see that hair go.

Dad, I said, listen. You are you, and I am me, and we are who we are because of separate and shared circumstances. No regrets.

He nodded. I patted his hands, which were warm. The hospice literature told me the extremities may be cold. I read all the literature hospice brought: Give the gift of comfort and calm. Give them support, permission. Give them more than they gave you.

I always tell the dress story, a microcosm of my father’s transgressions: He took me shopping for my freshman-year high-school homecoming dance. I did not have a date. No one had asked me. I was going with friends. Boys did not like me. They thought I was weird, and I probably was weird. The problem was how much I liked boys, how much I needed their attention.

We lived in Lake Havasu, Arizona. Our town had a Walmart and a Kmart. The pretty girls had their parents drive them to Vegas or Phoenix to buy clothes. My dad took me to a strip mall in town where a shop sold off-brand girls’ clothing. I wanted a Jessica McClintock dress. Seventeen magazine advertised Jessica McClintock dresses, so I believed a Jessica McClintock dress was the key to boys and popularity. The shop did not sell Jessica McClintock dresses.

I tried on a blue cotton dress with pink flowers. This was the 1990s, when girls wore prints with big flowers on their dresses. I had a weight problem that wouldn’t go away for another two years and wore a size 12.

I came out of the dressing room, and my dad looked me over.

Maybe if you ate apples instead of cookies that dress would look better on you, he said.

New drinking game: Every time your dad destroys your self-esteem, take a shot. Every time someone laughs at the story of how your dad destroyed your self-esteem, take a shot. Every time the story falls flat, take a shot. Find the bad men and tell them the dress story. Listen to them say your dad sounds like an ass. Agree and laugh. Laugh and laugh and laugh. What a fucking asshole. Take a shot.

Join Team Mom. Dad is the reason they got divorced. Feel it in your body: Dad’s fault. Dad hurts everything he touches, including himself.

Everyone who entered my father’s house in Phoenix had to look at the wooden triangles he’d arranged and positioned at odd angles like an abstract painting on the wall outside his bedroom. He’d made them from pieces of an old chair; the vintage wood looked used. He would point to the shapes and ask what we could see.

Christ, I don’t know, Dad. Triangles? Your woodworking skills?

He’d shake his head. Look closer. My dad was into puzzles: not