Father's Death

Father’s Death marks the end of nearly two years in which pain had consumed the father’s life, but it is not narrated as a single moment of departure. It unfolds through worsening breathlessness, a hospital vigil shared by the parents, and Joachim’s intimate, unsettling encounter with the body afterward. The pressure-relief mattress first seems to preserve the father’s warmth; when Joachim turns it off, the room’s silence makes death feel newly final. His response is a mixture of tenderness, estrangement, and unexpected happiness at being released from the long clenched state of his life.

The Final Crisis

Three or four months after the father had awakened from a life-threatening struggle, breathing became increasingly difficult. Pain began to form again in his shoulders, joined by the fear of suffocation. He continued injecting enormous quantities of morphine; without it, he suffered withdrawal symptoms, while the drug itself threatened to suppress his breathing. Relief and danger were bound together: the medication that held pain at bay also risked making the next breath impossible.

The father had wanted to die at home. After another near-fatal attack of suffocation, however, he was taken to hospital. The narrator’s mother moved in with him there. The father’s desire for death and his body’s readiness to die repeatedly failed to coincide: at times he wanted to go, but his body held on; when it seemed his body might let go, he began fighting again. The account gives no neat resolution to this conflict. It shows the final weeks as practical, exhausting work, undertaken together by the parents rather than as an abstract confrontation with mortality.

A Vigil Shared by the Parents

The hospital stay brings the parents together in a way that had once seemed impossible to Joachim. The narrator’s mother remains at the father’s bedside, and the two endure the final weeks side by side. The scene is stripped of theory: their shared attention is expressed through presence and care amid the ordinary demands of dying. Their companionship does not remove the father’s symptoms or settle his ambivalence about death, but it gives the ordeal a shared human shape.

When Joachim reaches the hospital after his father has died, he meets a weeping nurse in the corridor, who embraces him. The narrator’s mother is sitting beside the bed; a candle is burning, and the father’s hands have been folded. Joachim is immediately troubled by the folded hands, even as the father’s battered, relaxed face looks profoundly relieved. The pain and fear that had marked him appear to have let go at last. That visible ease does not settle what has happened to the pain. Joachim keeps wondering where it could have gone: whether it vanished with his father or had somehow moved on, after feeding on the strength it had consumed.

The Body, the Bed, and the Silence

The narrator’s mother tells Joachim that the hospital staff will soon take the father away. Shocked, he asks the chief physician to delay them; the physician allows the body to remain for as long as Joachim wants. The narrator’s mother wants to return to her own bed, so Joachim stays alone with his father. He undresses and climbs into the hospital bed beside him, repeating a closeness from childhood. Even at twenty, he had crawled under his father’s covers so they could talk. He touches and kisses him, lifts his closed eyelids to look at his dull eyes, and strokes his arms and hairy stomach. The gestures place the dead father within the remembered intimacy of a living relationship without disguising that he is dead.

The bed holds a Dekubitusmatratze, designed to keep a patient from developing sores by continually shifting the body. Air flows into its chambers and escapes again. Lying close against his father, Joachim is dazed by the mattress’s motion and falls asleep. When he wakes, the body is still warm. Only then does he realize that the warmth comes from the electrical mattress, not from his father. He switches it off. Its steady hum, unnoticed until it stops, gives way to silence; the father grows cold and suddenly seems foreign. Death becomes, at that instant, not merely relief from pain but something unyielding and rejecting. Outside, daylight is coming.

Release and Aftermath

The father’s brother arrives from Berlin, and Joachim leaves him alone with the body while he goes for a walk. He feels liberated and almost impossibly happy. The image he uses for this change is a fist finally opening: for years, he had lived as though enclosed in a clenched hand, and now it relaxes. The happiness does not cancel the tenderness of the bedside scene or the horror of recognizing the mattress’s warmth for what it was. Instead, the account lets relief coexist with loss, without treating either as a betrayal of the other.

When the narrator’s mother returns, she is surprised, almost appalled, to find that the father is still in his bed. The family then leaves. The account extends beyond the death itself to show how the death is organized and publicly marked: after five full days of arrangements, there is a funeral followed by a requiem. The mourners are composed, unlike at the funeral of Joachim’s brother years earlier, when people wept aloud and supported one another. Joachim cannot remain through the requiem. The priest describes his father as a man of action, and Joachim leaves the church and drives home. That departure closes the account on a telling contrast: the father is given a public description, but Joachim cannot stay inside the ceremony that delivers it. The remembered death instead remains anchored in the hospital room—in the folded hands that troubled him, the warmth he mistook for his father’s, and the silence after the mattress stopped.