No Heroic Measures

“In No Heroic Measures, Jessica Danger confronts the legacy of addiction and estrangement with unflinching honesty. What begins as the story of a daughter caring for the father who once caused her deep harm expands into a searching meditation on family myth, survival, and the complicated nature of forgiveness. This is a memoir written with courage and clarity, a testament to the endurance of love even in its most difficult forms.” — Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased and All the World Beside Me

“Jessica Danger’s No Heroic Measures is an unflinching look at what it costs to love—and lose—a parent to addiction. With brutal honesty, she writes into the murky space between love and obligation. No Heroic Measures reveals what so many keep buried: Sometimes we cannot help but love the people who hurt us most.”

– Shelby Hinte, author of Howling Women

“Jessica Danger excavates the most painful question a daughter can face: What do you owe the parent who devastated your childhood? No Heroic Measures is memoir-writing at its most fearless—a book that transforms family trauma into something luminous and essential.”

– Chelsea Bieker, author of Madwoman and Godshot

“Danger’s powers of recollection are sensitive and resolute, and hers is a page-turner of a story that seeks only to clarify and comfort, to illuminate the shadowy absurdities and successive ambushes of deep grief. No Heroic Measures is heroic in its own way, not unflinching as much as leaning all the way into the flinch; it is page after full-hearted page of bare-bones honesty and dogged, undying love.”

–Shawna Kay Rodenberg, Author of Kin

“I couldn’t stop reading NO HEROIC MEASURES once I started; it unfurled like a poem, a profound diary, and an answer to confounding questions—all at once. Topped off with pickled eggs, cigarette packs, a .44, a flannel shirt, the story insists on the truth, and delivers something even greater.”

– Jardine Libaire, author of White Fur, Here Kitty Kitty, and The Sober Lush

“This is not only a story for those whose parent-child relationships were shaped by alcoholism; it is for anyone who knows our days to love each other are numbered, and seeks to live those days well.”

–June Gervais, author of the novel Jobs for Girls with Artistic Flair

The paramedics let me ride in the ambulance in the seat up by my father’s head. It was a short trip, but he dozed on the way. The EMT monitored his blood pressure closely. I looked down at my hand. There was a fleck of scab on my wrist. I panicked, and then realized I was still wearing gloves. Sitting behind him, I couldn’t see where we were going. At the clinic, the medic held the ambulance door open for me before going back for my father. When my father was rolled out he said, “Honey! You’re here!” He had no idea it’d been me sitting behind him the entire ride.

Lake Shores Care Center. I was surprised at how clean it was. I knew he was going to hate it. The hospital had heavily medicated him for the transport and I was hoping this would work in my favor.
Room 31, bed A was his. The male EMT asked Dad if he needed anything before he left. My father said, “Yes, a scotch on the rocks.”
 

The gentleman, who thus far I had liked, said, “I hear that. I can’t wait to go home and have a few myself.” I wanted to reach up and punch him right in the face, to throw Dad’s worthless bags of useless belongings right at him. I wanted to scream, You idiot! Can’t you see what’s going on here? But this is what normal people do. They go home and have a drink. What they don’t do is go home and have thirty drinks, never bothering with a glass.

“This sucks,” my father said. “Oh man, this sucks.”

“Dad.”

“No, this sucks. It smells like old people.”

“That’s because it’s full of old people.”

“Don’t start with me. You! Of all people! Wouldn’t even listen to me about this one god damned thing.”

A short, brisk woman in an eggplant suit walked in, flicking on all the lights from the wall as she did. “Mr. Hanni! Bobby! Good evening!”

My father snarled at her, “Don’t call me Bobby. I ain’t your Bobby, lady.”

She didn’t even flinch. “No problem! Mr. Hanni, I am going to borrow your daughter for a little bit, okay? We have a lot of work to do!” She looked at me, clenching my arm like we were pals, and
grinned, lifting her eyebrows and smiling at me like we were just going to have the most fun ever.
Back at the nurse’s station, she waved her hands toward a tray of sandwiches. Peanut butter and jelly on white bread, cut into triangles and wrapped tightly in Saran Wrap. Thrown on top of one another, haphazardly, they looked disgusting. Everything was a shade of gray— the tray, the bread, the peanut butter a little too yellow.

“Oh. No, thank you.” I smiled, hoping to exude graciousness. She merely shrugged.
“Who is his power of attorney?”

Before today, no one had even asked me this question directly.

“Oh. I am.”

“Okay. We have some paperwork for you.” She waved again at a tiny little woman in a Hello Kitty smock. “This is Yumi and she will help get you started.”

Tiny Yumi asked me a thousand questions.

“Has he had a flu shot?”

“I don’t know.”

“Measles? Mumps?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know.”

Yumi was distressed. She looked at me, at the papers, back at me. She frowned.

I shrugged.

“Oh. Do you want a flu shot?”

“Do I want a flu shot? Oh no, no I’m good.” I tried to make myself appear as healthy as possible, as though there was no way anyone would ever look at me and think, Oh geez that lady needs a flu shot.

“No, for Mr. Robert. You want one for him?”

I shook my head. The question seemed ridiculous.

“What about if he has a heart attack?”

“No resuscitation.”

Yumi mouthed, “Oh.”

“Okay.” She handed me a pen covered in purple ribbon, with a massive silk flower on top. “Sign here, here, and here.”

I read it again and wanted to change my mind. I wanted to put that stupid purple pen down and say no. No, I cannot do this. No, I want my mother, please. No, you do it, anyone else do it. I wanted my dad back. I wanted to call a time-out and then a do-over.

I, Jessica Lynn Danger, daughter of Robert Scott Hanni, hereby request that no heroic measures will be taken to sustain life…

I signed it.

Three signatures later, we were done.

She looked at me with big brown watery eyes. “He is your father?”

“Yes. He is my father.”

She looked down.

It took me a moment to figure out what was happening. Yumi was crying. I looked around, wanting desperately for someone else to help her. Yumi looked down at my father’s file and shuffled all the papers around, stacking them together again and again.

She put her pen down and pinched the top of her nose. “I’m sorry. It’s just,” she waved her hands in front of her face like there was a bee in the room, “it’s just the hospice ones are really hard for me.”

And at that, I found myself doing the most hated thing. I rubbed her shoulder, I cocked my head to the side, and I said, “Ohhhhhhhh I knoooooooow.” I elongated my vowels. I openly used baby talk. I squinted my eyes and rubbed her back. 

I, Jessica Lynn Danger, daughter of Mr. Robert Scott Hanni, was comforting his hospice nurse.