I like to spend Father’s Day floating in and out of some quiet, peaceful conversations with my dad. I like to check in with him, ask him if he’s okay, let him know that I’m okay. I like to let him know he’s got three beautiful grandchildren who all know he’s their grandpa, even though two of them never got to meet him and one was just a toddler when he died. I like to let him know that my siblings are happy and well and that we keep his memory very much alive in our minds and hearts and conversations.
Mostly, though, I like to let him know that my mom’s okay. I think he would hate worrying about her growing old alone and I like to reassure him that we’re here, all of us, making sure that she ages in the full support of her family’s presence and love. No need to worry, I like to tell him, we’ve got it covered.
My dad died at age 60 after a long, courageous struggle with multiple sclerosis and diabetes. His life was not easy. In fact, it was exceedingly hard. But I like to remember that, mixed in with the tragedies, there were joys.
My dad grew up an only child, raised by a single parent – my Nana. His father deserted them when my dad was still a toddler and never contacted them again. My Nana was a schoolteacher and tried her best to provide for the two of them but often had to leave him in the care of relatives as she took teaching jobs wherever she could find them. This was the 1930s and work was not easy to come by. When my dad was a teenager they left North Carolina and moved to Virginia, where my Nana had married a rather rough and tough southern man named Kermit. Though the details are fuzzy I get the feeling Kermit was none too nice to my Nana and that my dad was witness to this.
My dad grew up around a lot of old-school southern racism and seems to have wanted out at the first available opportunity. He joined the army and spent several years stationed in Germany before returning to America and attending Virginia Tech and Georgetown on a GI bill. After finishing college he chose not to return to the old environs and instead set off to New York where he began a career in management consulting. There he met my mom and marriage and children soon followed. It seemed some long-needed domestic happiness might finally have found its way into my dad’s life but, sadly, trouble wasn’t far off.
From the time my dad was in his twenties he’d experienced some sporadic but disconcerting neurological problems. Double-vision, sudden episodes of temporary paralysis in his hands, unsteadiness on his feet. Every doctor he saw chalked it up to something different and no clear answers were available. Shortly after my parents were married he had a week long episode of near total blindness and the doctors thought he might have a brain tumor. This was pre-CT scan/ MRI days and diagnosing neurological problems was often a sophisticated guessing game at best.
As frightening as these episodes were they would each eventually resolve themselves enough for life to carry on in a mostly normal, healthy manner. My brother and I were born in somewhat rapid succession and my dad’s career blossomed. My parents had moved from New York to California and life was looking pretty good. Then, several days after my younger sister’s birth in 1965, my dad’s legs collapsed out from under him while playing golf with some buddies. He couldn’t get back up and was admitted to the hospital for a number of weeks while a plethora of tests were performed, some excruciatingly painful. Spinal taps of 1965 were nowhere near as refined as they are today.
I think so tenderly of the enormous fear my parents must have felt during this time. Still in their thirties, three young children -one a newborn-, a recently purchased first home, a career in full throttle and my dad’s body in seeming free fall. The news was, of course, not good. Multiple sclerosis is a disease of the central nervous system and affects each patient in a different way and with varying degrees of severity. It can range from fatigue and weakness to paralysis and blindness and everything in between. This great unknown must have hit them like a giant sledgehammer. My mom recently told me of a day when she’d gone grocery shopping, shortly after the diagnosis. She had a cart full of food, my infant sister perched in her carrier, and was headed to the check-out line. All of a sudden a crushing wave of fear and sadness came over her. She grabbed my sister, abandoned the cart, got herself safely to the car, and sat behind the wheel sobbing at last. Knowing my mom, it was probably one of the few times she allowed herself to break down. It catches at me even now to think of her having to live through that moment, distressed and alone.
The news never got much better for them. My dad continued to work for another ten years but his body was slowly crumbling. He did everything he could to make himself mobile – a cane, a walker, handicapped devices in the car- but eventually it was too much. He was becoming incontinent and urinated in his pants one day at work. His speech was beginning to slur and the fatigue was unrelenting. After a decade of non-stop battle, his body began to deteriorate quickly. By his late 40s he was in a wheelchair and had been let go from his job. My mom began a career with the MS Society and became our family’s breadwinner. My dad’s legs were now fully paralyzed and a crippling depression set in. The next decade was a long blur of hospitalizations, experimental treatments, home nurses, and physical decline. A broken hip, type 1-diabetes, bed sores, infections, bad drug interactions. My parents lives had gone haywire. The one blessing was that, when the end came, he was at home with my mom and sister at his side.
My dad has been gone for 20 years now. So much has happened since then, to all of us. He’d be so pleased to know he has a namesake grandson, Charlie, who looks very much like him. He’d be thrilled to know we’re all healthy and that mom is still kicking ass at 80. I’m not a religious person and have no particular beliefs about God or the great cosmic beyond. I do believe, however, that I will see my dad again. More importantly, I believe my mom will. And when she does there will be no wheelchairs or hospital beds or insulin shots or medical crises. Instead, she will find him gently moving in a light and ease that was lost to him here on earth. I hope that my dad truly is free now. Untangled. Unharnessed. Unencumbered.
My dad loved politics, bridge, Balzac, vermouth, German food and music, his green Firebird, the beach, golf, and boardgames. And those are just the things I remember. No doubt there is so much more. That is one of the sadnesses of losing someone before their time – all the things about them you will never have the chance to know.
You are loved so much, dad. Then. Now. And always. I am so very proud to be your daughter. Happy Father’s Day.
1 response so far ↓
Edith // June 20, 2009 at 4:40 pm |
Was there ever a more beautiful, a more loving tribute to a dad? I don’t think so. But you didn’t mention that only a few days before he died you had flown from Boston to be with him and had spent the night in a sleeping bag at the foot of his bed so you could be there if needed and could talk to him whenever he woke. In the past few days the president has talked a lot about the importance of a dad in a child’s life. I do think that for you three Dad’s presence was always and continues to be there.