By: Christopher Staub
Edited by: Michael T Smith
A Warrior's final thirty minutes, and the son who stood beside him.
In the weeks before he died I had been in Florida with my dad, helping him through chemotherapy and radiation treatments for lung cancer. He had been doing well, all things considered, until the final week or so. He was scheduled for a total of 6 treatments with the option for a 7th one if needed.
The 5th chemo session started the way they all did on that Monday, manageable during the day, then the night came. With the COPD and also recovering from pneumonia the previous months on top of lung cancer meant breathing was already a fight before the chemo added its weight. We went through two medium sized oxygen tanks that night, plus the oxygen generator that was his regular oxygen supply. The breathing issues came in waves. Getting to the bathroom, even with the wheeled walker, was an event. Everything was an effort.
It was a very long night.
By around ten in the morning he had finally settled. Breathing calmer. The worst of it seemingly behind us. Then he said he needed to use the bathroom and wanted to try and make the trip. I said okay. I helped him up, following behind with the tubing trailing from both the tanks and the generator, the whole procession of it, his walker, my hands, everything trailing behind us. He made it, barely. After he was done he had to recover, so he sat down on the toilet, completely winded.
The stress of those weeks was unlike anything I had carried before. And whatever I was feeling, his was more. That went without saying.
So we just sat there. Him on the toilet, me close by. The oxygen machine humming in the background, the portable bottle punctuating the silence with each breath he pulled through it. A rhythm. Slow and labored, but a rhythm. Just the work of breathing. Letting the room settle around us.
He was embarrassed. I could feel his dignity slipping away from him, right there in front of me. I kept telling him to take his time, that it was all good, that it was only temporary. He kept saying he didn’t like me seeing him like this.
I told him it didn’t matter. That my dad is a veteran, a Vietnam helicopter pilot veteran, and in my eyes a warrior. A badass. That I still saw him the same way I always had. That nothing sitting in that bathroom changed any of that.
My dad had told me stories that made me look at him and think, holy shit, my dad did that? Flying missions in a UH-1 Huey. Shooting at the enemy and getting shot at. Saving lives and taking lives.
And then something shifted. I felt it before I understood it. He relaxed. Really relaxed. The kind of calm that had been missing all night.
Then I noticed the silence.
The bottle had stopped. No breath pulling through it. Just the hum of the machine and nothing else. Then I saw his body slump. Not a fall, he was still sitting, elbows on his knees, but the presence went out of him all at once.
I called his name. Louder than I meant to.
Nothing.
I shook him gently and crouched down to meet his face, which was turned toward the floor. When I looked up at him I saw his eyes had rolled back, whites showing, gone somewhere I couldn’t reach.
That’s when the panic started.
I yelled at him. Full voice, no filter. Some part of me thinking if I was loud enough I could pull him back. That the right word at the right volume could snap him out of wherever he had gone.
It couldn’t.
The panic hit me like a wall. I felt it register, acknowledged it, and somehow stayed focused anyway. Brain doing what brains do when the stakes are high enough. No time for panic. Move.
Then the second thought landed hard. My phone. Not in my pocket. Of all the moments in a life to not have that thing on me, it was this one.
God damn it.
Something clicked into place. The brain doing what it has to do when there is no other option. A list started running. Not conscious exactly, just suddenly there.
Get the phone. Now.
I ran around the corner, grabbed it, called 911.
“Hello, 911, what is your emergency?”
I flooded her. Everything I had, all at once. No filter, just data.
I gave her my name and my dad’s name, our address, and told her he was currently undergoing chemo and radiation, that he had COPD, and that he was on oxygen.
All of it in one breath. Some part of my brain had been keeping inventory the whole time without me knowing it. Name, address, medical history, current condition. The facts were just there, ready, waiting for someone to receive them.
She gathered what she needed. His age, his condition, where he was physically in the house. Then she told me what we were going to do. We were going to count his breaths. I was to watch for chest movement. She would tell me when to start and when to stop.
“Start.”
I watched. Silence on my end because there was nothing to report.
“Stop.”
“He didn’t breathe.”
“Let’s do it one more time.”
I watched again.
Nothing.
“Here is what I need you to do. Are you on a cell phone?”
I replied yes.
“Put me on speaker phone, put the phone down, and move him carefully to the floor. Nothing under his head. The paramedics are on their way.”
Then the words that made it all real, especially when she said the paramedics were on their way.
“You are going to have to perform chest compressions until they arrive.”
I moved him carefully to the floor. Nothing under his head.
Then a thought cut through clean and clear. The front door. It was locked. I ran to it, unlocked it, and swung it open. No hesitation. The logic was simple and immediate. When they arrived I was not going to be the reason they lost a single second standing on a porch waiting. No fumbling with a lock, no shouting across the house. Door open, path clear, nothing in the way.
Then I ran back.
The adrenaline was real. But so was the clarity. I was on point in a way that surprised even me. You never know how you’ll respond when it’s real, when it’s life or death, when it’s your father on the floor. I found out that day.
Holy fuck!
That’s what my brain said. Exactly that, nothing more articulate than that. And at the same time, underneath it, something else. A calm that had no business being there. Not the absence of panic, the panic was absolutely present, but something running parallel to it. Holding the wheel steady while the rest of me was screaming. I was terrified and completely in control at the same time.
I didn’t know a person could be both those things at once until that bathroom.
The details get fuzzy here but the instructions were clear enough in the moment. Palm of my hand flat on his chest, between his nipples. Other hand over that. Press down about two inches. She gave me the count.
I race motorcycles. Tell myself I know something about risk, about facing the edge. But that’s a different kind of danger. That’s chosen, controlled, yours alone. This was nothing like that. This was real. This was my father, a man, a human being, a living thing, and he needed someone to save his life. There was no one else in that house. No one else to help in the moment. Just me.
1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4.
And I started.
I was not prepared for what happened next.
First compression down, two inches, and I felt it. His chest gave way under my hands. The sound and the sensation of it registered before my brain caught up with what it meant. Somewhere in the back of my mind, underneath everything else, a voice said: this is expected. This is normal. Do not stop.
I did not stop.
I may have said it out loud, to the woman on the phone, to the room, to nobody.
“I think I just broke his breastbone.”
And then I kept going.
She had to slow me down a few times. I was pushing too hard, too fast. The compressions running ahead of the count. The weight of it was building. Not just physical, though that was real too, but the whole thing pressing down on me at once. Everything I was holding together starting to cost something.
She was a professional. Calm, steady, exactly what that moment needed. And it was helping more than I had words for right then.
I heard myself ask it before I decided to.
“Where are the paramedics?!?”
She didn’t miss a beat.
“They’re on their way and they are close. You are doing awesome.”
Four words that shouldn’t have meant as much as they did. But in that bathroom, on that floor, with my hands on my father’s chest, they were everything.
So I kept going.
1, 2, 3, 4.
Then I heard them. Sirens, close and getting closer fast. I didn’t stop compressions. The sound of boots and gear coming through the front door I had unlocked for exactly this moment. Then a voice.
“Hello?”
I screamed.
“Back here! Back here!”
And kept going. 1, 2, 3, 4.
The bathroom wraps around a corner from the front door. They would have been searching. So I just kept yelling, kept the compressions going, let my voice be the signal. Follow the sound. Keep moving. I’m here. He’s here.
And then they were in the bathroom doorway.
As they came around the corner I didn’t ask. I told them.
“Let me know when to stop and get out of the way.”
Seconds later.
“Now. Move.”
I moved.
They had a board and a compression device, mechanical, built for exactly this. One medic was already applying sensors to his chest. The EKG machine came to life.
Flat line.
They muttered to each other in that quiet shorthand that people develop when they work around death long enough. Then one of them looked up at me.
“Does your dad have a DNR?”
The question landed like a physical blow. Everything stopped for a half second, the room, my hands, my own breathing. I stammered.
“I don’t know, ummm. Yes. Yes he does.”
The word was barely out of my mouth before I understood what I had just done.
Yes meant stop. Yes meant step back. Yes meant let him go. Yes meant that everything I had done in that bathroom for the last however long, the compressions, the count, the broken breastbone, the yelling, the unlocked door, all of it had just reached its end.
I hadn’t decided anything. He had. Years ago, on some form, in some drawer, he had already made this call. And now I was the one saying it out loud, the one whose mouth the word came out of, even though it was never mine to give.
Not because I failed.
Because he had already decided.
After I answered him, the paramedic looked at me.
“I’m sorry. Your dad is gone.”
“FUCK!!”
I don’t know why. It came out before anything else, before grief, before thought, before anything recognizable as a human response. Just that word, raw and reflexive, launched into a bathroom in Spring Hill Florida at the moment my father left.
It wasn’t senseless. It was the only honest thing left to say.
Then it hit me. All of it. Everything I had been holding together for the last however long came apart at once. I cried. Not quietly. The heavy breathing came first, like my body was finally remembering it had been running a dead sprint and hadn’t stopped to breathe once.
The adrenaline had been doing the breathing for me.
Now it was gone.
And so was he.
Warrior down.