My Dad’s Last Christmas
By Damian Sebouhian
Rose sat down next to her husband of 50 years and gazed lovingly at all of us sitting around the festively decorated dining room table. George, my father, the long-retired professor who most everyone in the family referred to affectionately as G.G. (Grumpy George), raised his head from his stooped position and cleared his throat. Speaking had been challenging for G.G. during the past six months. His Alzheimer’s, diagnosed two years earlier, was getting progressively worse.
“I have something to say.”
Mom, who was passing around a bowl of her famous homemade rolls, lowered her head to Dad’s level.
“What was that, honey?”
Dad screwed up his face, obviously irritated. Clenching his fist around his fork, he hit the table. Everyone went silent.
“I have…” He paused, his gaze surveying the table.
“I have a speech.”
For three decades, during the Christmases we spent in Ohio with all of my Irish Catholic relatives, it was tradition for my father, a devout atheist, to share the pre-dinner Grace with my cousin, Father Jim Colopy. As an English professor who specialized in the American Romantic period featuring such luminaries as Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, Dad had a soft spot for transformation and saw the Winter Equinox as a reminder that with death comes the promise of rebirth, thus making it a day as holy as that of the titular Christmas holiday; he was never short of a secular quote to juxtapose against the bible verses recited by Father Jim.
This time around, in 2015, Dad’s speech was more abrupt, more disturbingly impactful.
“I don’t want to live anymore,” he said faintly. “This will be my last…” His mind went blank and he looked to Rose for help.
“What is this?”
Mom put a tender hand on his shoulder.
“It’s Christmas, sweetheart.”
But a Christmas like no other: That was the day my father announced that he would be committing suicide. Tradition was abruptly abandoned, and instead of opening presents and playing board games, we discussed, we argued, we wept, we celebrated, we argued some more. In the end, nothing we could say would change Dad’s faltering, yet resolute mind. He feared that, as the Alzheimer’s accelerated, the option to choose the circumstances of his death would be taken from him while we, his family, debated whether it should even be his choice to make.
My father was 83 when he passed, but it wasn’t by his own hand, at least not technically. Nor was it from lack of trying: On two separate occasions he emptied a bottle of Vicodin into his stomach, chasing them with a double shot of Jameson. Both times he passed out. Both times he woke up, dreadfully disappointed.
Although he didn’t believe in God and didn’t believe in the supernatural, he had my mother take him to see a psychic who informed him that he had the power to consciously die—all he needed to do was truly “let go.” After this, he did not attempt suicide again, and we began to assume that the dementia had removed the intention from his memory.
He died later that next summer, peacefully, in his sleep. The morning after his death, Mom discovered that that day had been circled on the calendar, and the scrawl within the box that she had at first taken as accidental was in fact the words “I die” written in my father’s deteriorated handwriting.
The man who’d taught the finest American literature discovered the power of his own pen, more powerful in this instance than two bottles of pharmaceutical narcotics, and marking his own, most holy, transformation.
This essay is the first in our series on the topic “Holidays?”
Damian Sebouhian is a college English instructor and freelance writer from Western New York. He is currently working on a memoir about his father, George (G.G.) Sebouhian.