Episode Report Card Niki: D | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Unfinished Business
By Niki | Season 1 | Episode 17 | Aired on 03.05.2000
After the commercial break, we come back to Jake, Judy, and Lily with the doctor. The Mom is slightly behind them with her back to the group, looking into Phil's room. It comes out in their conversation that Phil is basically dead already and only the life support is keeping him going. The Mom's eyes shift to the doctor as he explains all this. The doctor leaves them to wrestle with the decision of whether to cut Phil's life support. They head into a meeting room where Lily, Judy, and Jake sit around the table while the Mom stands off on her own, looking out the window. Judy's having a lot of trouble with the thought of "killing" Phil, and Jake tries to convince her that it's not really killing him because he has no hope of recovering. Judy responds by attacking his right to be there, and Jake points out that Phil is still his father-in-law. "Not for long," Judy reminds him. Lily cuts in on them and silence falls over the room. Lily asks her mother if she's okay. The Mom is very much someplace else and, as if in a daze, says she's fine. She moves to leave the room, and Jake rushes to touch her elbow in a show of support as she opens the door.
Cut to Lily outside, near some loading zone, watching cars go by. Rick brings her a coffee and she asks him how he "handled this at fourteen." "Who says [he] handled it?" Lily admits that her biggest fear as a child was losing her father and she still hasn't outgrown it. Rick points out that since "losing a parent happens to everyone, it's supposed to be bearable, and it's not." He remembers walking around in a state of unreality after his father died and Lily says she keeps waiting for Phil to sit up in bed and say "Fooled ya!"
Cut to a close-up of tubes and machines. The camera pans down to Phil's face, which looks very still and gray. Lily sits at his bedside and sighs heavily.
Black-and-white Lily reminisces about the time she broke her leg skiing. She was seventeen, and it was her first realization that life can change in an instant.
Back at Phil's bedside, she tells him that "[he] was always so easy to talk to. And now--" her voice trails off. She tells him she got "that job, sort of" and laughs. Then she grows serious and says she has to make the hardest decision of her life, and it's about him. She tells him he never taught her how to handle anything on her own. She knows he just wanted what was best for her, but he shouldn't have sheltered her -- it didn't help her in the end.