Spawn

Few phenomena are as mesmerizing as a spawning salmon holding steady in a stream. Fire maybe—the liquid undulations of flames in air. But unlike combustion, that chemical conversation between heat and fuel, salmon’s communion with water is animate, intimate.

I’d heard some splashing, thrashing noises earlier in the day and finally crept down close to the creek just as the larger male coho—candy apple red with a visibly jutting toothy underbite—moved on upstream. The remaining female held mostly still over a smoothed over sand and gravel-bed in the otherwise cobbled creek-bottom. The only way to hold still in a moving body of water is to dance with it. Slow-body wave, slight shimmy, slide, and then a sharp tail-pump to move forward. She turned on her side for a moment, flashing pink, then back upright, nose into the current. If it wasn’t for her white tail she’d have appeared more ripple than fish, a riverine shadow.

Her tail was white because she was dying. She was dying because it was her time—she’d spawned. Buried fertilized eggs in the streambed, her work done. Her body—now more fit for saltwater ocean than freshwater stream—was already disintegrating: battered, pock-marked and scaleless in patches. But she made it, hundreds of miles and through countless barriers. She survived all the toxic chemicals downstream and downriver through town and city to the sea, then back again. She avoided being eaten by all the other fish/birds/mammals/diseases that would love a fish dinner. Journey complete, she needed do nothing more than float, flow, dance her final watch over her offspring until she died. She was coming apart, and yet, she was beautiful. It was an honor to watch.

Days later, I watched my father die. He was dying because cancer was eating his esophagus, his lungs, his stomach, his kidneys, his lymph nodes, and more until his body was disintegrating. In three weeks he’d gone from an active, joyful, astute 79 year-old with no health complaints but heartburn to a shrunken, listless, confused old man, gasping and moaning. He was supposed to live into his nineties like his father did, we thought, to slowly give out and fade away peacefully, long into the future. He didn’t make it.

It all happened so fast that we struggled to keep up with the ever-worsening news from the few doctors he saw, as my sister, who lived nearby, struggled to keep up with the needs of his quickly failing body: from assisted ambulatory to walker to wheelchair to hospital bed almost faster than she could arrange for the equipment. My father too, seemed briefly optimistic, then dazed, worsening to bewildered, and then, while still lucid, what appeared to be a resigned calm which may have been denial but to me, knowing him, felt more like wise acceptance. Just, holding steady in the stream, because there was nothing else to do but float. In one of the last coherent phone conversations we had, I asked him how he was. He said, “Better than some; worse than others.”

By the time I was able to fly out to Montana to be with my sister at his side he didn’t wake up again, had fallen into that restless final sleep/delirium the hospice nurses called terminal restlessness. Sometimes snoring—as he always had—sometimes choking, wheezing, wailing. His hands, diminished to twisted claws, scratched at his chest, struck out and away, grasping for something or someone we couldn’t understand. His breathing succumbed to gurgling, as fluid filled his lungs. As if he longed to return to the watery womb where he began. But, like ocean-acclimatized salmon returning to the freshwater of their natal stream, their bodies have changed too much to live in those conditions again. To return is to die. Always.

He slowed. He calmed. He gurgled, and he stopped.

I’m lucky, people tell me, to have been by his side when he died.

Am I?

I suppose I am glad I was there for him, in case he knew and if that was some sort of comfort to him. He knew, people tell me, and it mattered. It helped. Perhaps.

But, aside from that unknowable factor, am I glad to have watched him die?

I know this is the part where I’m supposed to find some beauty in witnessing that transition, in watching his dance with death. I haven’t. It wasn’t beautiful; it was horrific. And now, always, lurking among all the happy memories of my witty, ebullient, feisty father is that shriveled little man already smelling of rot.

The point, I guess, is that my salmon analogy doesn’t fit as I wish it would. This isn’t about my Zenlike voyeurism in getting to watch an animal’s final moments on earth. Not about standing on the creek bank and watching a life peacefully fade away from the comfort and safety of my separateness. My experience of my father’s death was intimate, chaotic, and traumatic.

No matter how close we were, or weren’t, through our lives, no matter the changeable psychology of our relationship—that man, my father, made me. My body formed, in part, from his. He allowed my birth, so the least I could do was to witness his death. To listen to him gasp and moan, to hold his clawed and grasping hand. To read aloud, sitting on the rug by his hospital bed, tales of his ancestral homeland. To hold a cold washcloth on his feverish forehead. And, once he’d passed, to dress his shrunken and diapered body in a favorite outfit for the cremation. Those memories hold no beauty, and I don’t feel lucky for having them. What I did and do feel is simply the responsibility and helplessness of a daughter, his spawn. Dancing with this visceral, indelible memory of where I came from, whom I came from, and where, one day, I may end up, as I make my own way upstream.

Heather Durham is the author of Going Feral and Wolf Tree; “Spawn” will appear in her third collection, Sylvan Crone, due out in 2025 from Homebound Publications. Heather holds degrees in psychology, ecology, and creative nonfiction, and lives on traditional lands of Coast Salish tribes in Washington. Learn more: heatherdurhamauthor.com.