The Last 90 Seconds
A fading father, a ticking clock, and one final snack for the road.
Today, on what would have been my father’s 101st birthday, I reshare this story about his final moments, my tardiness and navigating grief. First published in Midcentury Modern Magazine in 2018.
I. THE SANDWICH (AND A BEER) GENERATION
When I was a little boy, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I attended grade school on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh, where my father was a professor of linguistics. Because we spent our days in the same part of town, he would often drive me to school in the morning and pick me up afterward.
My father was someone who liked to know the terrain of the area where he lived. He liked to take a different route back to our house each day, always alternating, and he’d show me how they related to each other — and, by extension, how the neighborhoods of Pittsburgh and the little towns that circumscribed it related to each other as well. “You can’t just get where you’re going,” he would say. “You have to understand the landscape and how it fits together.”
My father also liked snacks.
These two guiding principles fit together quite nicely, for each route home tended to produce different snack alternatives for the two of us. “A snack for the road,” he’d call it.
Sometimes we’d stop at Taco Hut, one of my favorite places, where we’d get beef and bean burritos at a time when Mexican fast food was still, if not rare, at least not as ubiquitous as it would become in today’s heady era of Taco Bell and Chipotle.
Sometimes, when we were driving home through the East Liberty neighborhood, we’d pull into the huge, largely windowless blue building that housed a massive Sears Roebuck store. We’d walk into the east entrance and immediately be greeted by the glorious smells of a standalone nut kiosk, where freshly roasted nuts sat under pleasing yellow lamps, beckoning me to choose them. On a really good day, I’d get a small wax-paper bag of the deluxe mixed nuts, the kind with less than 50 percent peanuts.
But my favorite way station for snacks on the trip home from school was a convenience store that sat perched on a hill over the steel town of Millvale — the “Li’l General,” a tiny emporium of processed-food delights tucked into the corner of an apartment building.
The Li’l General was the place where I discovered that coveted, aggressively unnatural item that all American suburban kids eventually encounter: the Funyun. It was the place where I developed my abiding love for dill pickles, taco chips, beef jerky and the not-yet-iconic snack to top all snacks, the Slim Jim.
But the thing I remember most about the Li’l General was the time when microwaves came into wider use in the late 1970s, and a new item was added to their repertoire: the microwave burrito.
It was an item of dubious health benefits. I know that now and I kind of knew that then. But as with all the other snacks, we shared them, sitting outside the Li’l General in his 1976 Ford Pinto. “Not bad,” he’d say, this man who had traveled the world and eaten Thai, Afghan and Burmese food long before most Americans.
Like words and baseball and family history, the pursuit of snacks became a connecting thread in our relationship over the decades. In my 20s, I’d come home and we’d invariably go out to Burger King for Double Whoppers with cheese, another questionable indulgence but one that we enjoyed very much.
Later, when his dementia began to set in but he could still handle being out in the world, he would exhort me to come over so we could go out together for “a sandwich and a beer.” We did that right up until his early 90s. We even made it to Taco Bell a few times. I remember sitting in a green-and-purple Taco Bell booth with him as his Alzheimer’s was really kicking in. He leaned over and told me: “It was the strangest thing. I woke up this morning, and for a few minutes I wasn’t sure who I was.”
By July 2015, it had become clear that there were more snacks in the past than in the future. He was in hospice care in my parents’ assisted-living apartment and was barely coherent. I’d come over and find him mumbling about Russians and lost papers and faculty meetings he was missing. His teeth could no longer handle the snacks I’d occasionally bring him, to which he’d respond: “We used to like beef jerky … didn’t we?”
II. JUST ONE MORE BURRITO.
On the morning of July 12, 2015, after spending a few weeks at home with my fading father, I am set to fly from Pittsburgh to London for a few days of work at our company’s office there before heading back to Bangkok, our home at the time. Shortly after dawn, my iPhone rings. It is Michelle, the hospice nurse. His systems, she tells me, are beginning to shut down.
“He’s actively dying now,” she says. I should come over. I should probably hurry. He has a few hours left at most.
We had offered him a goodbye of sorts the previous afternoon, all of us. Awash in end-stage dementia, my father nonetheless somehow managed to recognize both of his visiting grandsons that day, and I got the chance to hold his hand as I told him that I was leaving for London and that I loved him. He wasn’t really eating solid foods at that point, and the last thing I fed him before I left was a slushie from 7-Eleven. I will later see that as foreshadowing.
This day has, of course, been coming for seven years — and, you could argue, for my entire life. I was born when my parents were 45 and 43, and I spent most of my childhood acutely aware of how much older they were than other kids’ mothers and fathers. I now realize that I also spent a lot of my psychological energy preparing to lose them. By the time I finished college in the early 1990s, each time I said goodbye to them I’d take a lingering look as I pulled out of the driveway and rolled away, convinced this would be the final time I’d see one of them alive.
But they lived, you know? They kept on living. They left their house of 42 years for an independent living community in 2007, and they kept living. They survived my father’s near-fatal congestive heart failure the following year, and they kept living. They went to plays at the Pittsburgh Public Theater until they could no longer follow the stories and were whispering loudly during the performances. They didn’t want to let go of things like that, things that connected them with the world.
When my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, they still kept on living. They did what good academics always do — they began to research memory, and how it is preserved, and how it fades. They learned that blueberries contained something called flavonoids, which retarded memory decay, and suddenly there were fresh blueberries around every corner — blueberries at the kitchen table, blueberries on the living room couch, blueberries while watching the 11:00 news. So. Many. Blueberries. Not quite the kind of snacks my father and I had typically pursued.
They both kept on living until this particular morning in 2015, when Michelle the hospice nurse calls me and tells me that the time, finally, is about to be up.
I hurry to rearrange my flights, email my bosses, grab a shower and get into the car. I suspect I may not have a chance to eat for many hours, and my adrenaline is pumping and I haven’t eaten since dinnertime the previous night. I decide to make a quick stop at the 7-Eleven along the way for — appropriately — a quick microwave burrito.
The refrigerator-case special at this 7-Eleven — and, who am I kidding, at every 7-Eleven in the country, I’m sure — is a 14-ounce behemoth about the size of my forearm called “The Bomb” — a microwave burrito stuffed with spicy beans, beef and cheese. He’d approve, I thought. A snack for the road, one final time.
(Only later, upon poking around online, would I learn that “The Bomb” was 860 calories, 30 grams of protein and 40 grams of fat. In retrospect, perhaps he might not have approved.)
I pay for the burrito with great dispatch and thrust it into the shiny chrome microwave, standing there and watching the 90 required nuclear seconds tick away digitally. Upon the first beep, I yank open the metal door, making a mental note of its pleasing, industrial strength “click” as I drag The Bomb from its irradiated temporary home. It is piping hot — hotter than you would expect for 90 seconds of microwaving. I play hot-potato catch with it as I grab napkins to protect my hands.
As I stride toward the automatic doors, someone comes at me diagonally from the southwest part of the store. “Do you have a few minutes to answer a quick survey?” the cheerful young man with the clipboard says, amiably blocking my path. I slide my feet like a basketball player evading a pick and move outside, clambering into my Jeep and peeling out of the parking lot.
As I drive the last seven minutes to assisted living, I have the good fortune on this sunny Sunday morning to find myself behind a leisure driver — a minivan that is going about 17 mph in a 35-mph zone. It is a two-lane road, busy with church traffic, so I have no choice but to tailgate gently, holding the wheel with one hand while wolfing down The Bomb with the other.
Finally I arrive. I run in the double doors, pass a couple people on walkers, hop over the large black dog that resides on the place’s staircase and see the second-floor hallway ahead of me. My parents’ apartment is down this hallway, past apartments with nameplates out front that feature names like Alma, Rita, Irma and my personal favorite, Agnes DeKay, which my precocious 8-year-old son has pointed out might not be such a great name for someone in an end-of-life-type situation.
The hallway seems endless, like one of those constantly receding corridors in a low-budget horror film. I realize I am clutching the burrito wrapper in my hand, crumpled, still slightly soft from the 90 seconds of microwaving that probably degraded the plastic just enough to ensure I ingested some toxins alongside the fat and salt and cholesterol. I hurry in the door of the apartment and go straight back to the bedroom.
My mother is sitting by my father’s bed and holding his hand. His eyes are closed. His mouth is open. He is not breathing. The hospice nurse is sitting in the corner. “He’s gone,” she says. Then she looks at me and says the six words that I now think about every time I heat and consume a convenience-store burrito: “He died about 90 seconds ago.”
I walk over to my dad. I touch his forehead. It is warm, a bit sweaty. I realize that this is the final time I will feel warmth in him. There will be no more snacks, no more trips to the Li’l General (which by this point is long consigned to childhood’s dustbin), no more sandwiches and beers.
I lean down and lay my head on his chest. From deep within him, I hear a rattle. But he does not move, does not breathe. I have waited for decades for this moment, imagined it in countless ways. And yet it is so different from them all. Fresh, uncharted territory. A virgin forest of experience, both well lit and utterly dark. I keep expecting him to cough, to gasp for air once more, to mumble. But nothing. Silence and yellowing skin, a waxen pallor setting in.
How is it possible that I missed saying goodbye by 90 seconds? How did my appetite, once again, get me in trouble and get in the way? I am excoriating myself inside. I could have said goodbye. I could have held his other hand as he died. I could have been there.
But as my wife and young sons — no strangers to microwave burritos themselves — arrive to sit with my father’s body and say their goodbyes, I start to think about it a little bit more. And it all starts to make sense. The 90-second burrito, the guy with the clipboard, the slow Sunday driver, the whole thing.
Maybe he felt he could let go. Maybe he had some sense of finality after we said goodbye the previous afternoon. But more than that, I think, my father — who, despite his cheerful informality, always had a tremendous sense of decorum — might have wanted to die alone. Even my mother was in the other room when he breathed his last, and she only made it in moments after he died. I can completely believe that he took that opportunity to take that final step unaccompanied.
Dying is a personal and intimate act, and it leaves much behind. When I moved into my father’s study after he moved out to the first retirement community — the euphemistically monikered “independent living facility” — I found a box in the closet. It said, “Unsorted but Significant.” And in the story of my father’s final hours, one more microwave burrito by his son proved to be the most unsorted but significant thing of all.
III. MATTERS OF GRAVE CONCERN.
I still eat microwave burritos at 7-Eleven and elsewhere, though less often than I used to. I know they’re not particularly good for me. The words “The Bomb” should probably have the word “fat” sandwiched between them. Sometimes, though, I’ll buy one at the same 7-Eleven, which I also pass on the way to the cemetery to visit my father’s grave.
I’ll sit there, sometimes in the sun, sometimes in the snow, gnawing on a piece of convenience-store fast food that happens to be a totem of something lasting. Sometimes I’ll have conversations with my father, and wonder what he might say about the way I’m living and the forces that buffet my life. Sometimes I’ll bring my boys, who have watched since they were tiny as my wife and I helped care for my parents. Sometimes I’ll even bring along a drink — a posthumous sandwich and a beer, if you will.
I still heat up the burrito in the same 7-Eleven microwave. I still stand there, watching it irradiate in the big metal box and thinking of almost 50 years of snacks I shared with my father. It still takes 90 seconds before the burrito is ready.
But this time, I’m in no hurry. Now … now we have all the time in the world.
This is so powerful. I hope everyone who reads it raises a glass to your dad tonight. And I hope people who are navigating their own mourning discover this essay and find comfort and wisdom in it.