I could hear the evidence of his suffering in my mother and brother’s voices when I talked with them on the phone during his last week. Then, when I visited the funeral home and told my brother I was relieved to have seen Dad’s body because it didn’t look at all like him, my brother corrected me.
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The face above the long, thin body wrapped in a white sheet and prepared for cremation did look like my Dad did during his final days.
We all were thankful those days were blessedly few.
A father’s sweetness
So many other conversations with my mother during the past year of my Dad’s reclining health were much happier.
Dad didn’t suffer from dementia, but his awareness would come and go depending on the level of his steadily decreasing energy. What he retained from conversations with my brother and mother over those months when he mostly slept speaks to his essence.
Once forgetting that both his sons had surpassed 60 years, he awakened to tell my mom, “We’ve got to make sure those boys go to good schools.”
They had long since sent us to Wittenberg and paid the full freight.
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Another time, having overheard conversations about two great-grandchildren growing to the point that cribs might no longer accommodate them, he told my mother: “We’ve got to make sure we get beds for those babies.”
That kind of sweetness is one of the things that sometimes makes me feel that I was born in a dip in the road between my father and my son and worry about what I will be saying when my energy begins to ebb in old age.
Fathering style
The episode from which I most clearly recall my father’s fathering style is from my sophomore year of high school. I’ve described it here before and so will give you a brief version.
It involves me getting a call from him at my girlfriend’s house, reminding me to come home early because he was taking me to the hockey rink at 3:30 that morning for a pickup game. It also involves me ignoring his request, ignoring my girlfriend’s reminder of his request, and arriving home to have my father give me a new hockey helmet with a mouth guard to protect the teeth that had just recently been freed of the braces.
Although he said “I probably shouldn’t give you this,” he gave it to me, and, as he walked away, the disappointment that had been in his voice cut me to the bone.
Re-ordering of the world
In the shadow of my father’s passing, my mother has rekindled a long-time project: Putting family pictures into photo albums for my brother and me.
By the time the 1960s came, the photos and slides were taken in color. But like most children born in the early 1950s, our early days are recorded on incredibly sharp black-and-white snapshots that measure about four inches square and are framed by a glossy white border.
One of those pictures that has always been iconic to my brother and me shows him sitting behind me in front of the Christmas tree at my first Christmas in 1954.
Neither of us remembered ever seeing another photo taken that same day and filed next to it in the basket in which our mother has collected material for the albums.
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It shows my thin, handsome father standing in a hall in a robe in Herman Keefer Hospital in Detroit, where he was being treated for polio. I didn’t remember seeing it before and was surprised when she told me it had been taken that same Christmas.
It’s a little thing in the grand scheme of things. But it was still something of a jolt, nonetheless, because it was a re-ordering a world I had fixed in my mind about our family life in those days. Now, after Dad’s passing, it has to be re-ordered again.
Mercy and decency
I’m less of a tsk-tsker than I was in my earlier days. And now having been through the passing of my father-in-law, my especially beloved mother-in-law and my own father, I’m less likely to criticize people for conflicts that emerge after a loved one’s death.
The emotional stakes are high and the people involved are often fatigued from grief and travel — less than ideal circumstances for harmonious human interaction.
In its own way, the period after death can be like an election season in which every possible disagreement can flare into conflict. That’s often because each of us is clinging to our strongest sense of the person departed. When those senses conflict, conflict can result — with a jolt. And when it breaks out in a gathering of people who have been estranged from one another for years, the tinder is dry.
There is one major counter-force in this instance to keep things from going off the rails: The power of love and regard the survivors have for one another. That so often is connected with the power of love that’s the legacy of the person who has passed.
Those who have never had such conflicts should consider themselves fortunate. Any tsk-tsking we might be inclined to do in the direction of others who fall into heartbreaking conflicts should be silenced in the names of mercy and decency.
The ballast
In this space some years ago, I compared my father to a ship’s ballast — that weight that keeps it balanced so it can continue to float when the water is roiled. It’s a metaphor that grew out of one of the early loves of his life, working on Great Lakes freighters during his college years.
In the past two years, when I wanted to be with my Dad as he was, I’d ask him to tell me about the Great Lakes and his days on it. It always brought him back to full life, and we talked for a full half hour about it — a considerable time for him at that point — during the last conversation we had.
While it’s true Dad was a ballast and steadying influence — the kind of crucial steadying influence many families lack — he was more than that.
As a young man from Marquette, the Great Lakes ships opened his life up to a wider world. They allowed him to see over the horizon to a different life. They also allowed him a peak at how travel opens us up to new worlds.
Every time we returned to Marquette, he’d check the shipping news in the paper and go down to the docks to see the ships that were in port. And, when we were children, by bother and I were always amazed that he seemed to know all of Michigan’s highway names and routes to whatever place came up in conversation.
It was the reason he decided my brother and I should see Europe when I was 12 and my brother 15.
That didn’t help us on Christmas Eves when the family played our traditional games of the home version of Jeopardy. Although my brother and I would clean up in the trivia categories, Dad owned any category related to geography, down to correctly naming the third largest city in Canada.
Happy to be there
Last week, I was regretting not having a memory of my Dad holding me, which he did all the time in my childhood. It was a regret connected with the great pleasure I get from holding our grandson.
But while writing this, I remembered a moment of closeness. We’ll say I was 4 or 5, and our family was on one of its hundreds of marathon drives from the Detroit area, where we lived, to visit my grandparents in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
During the nine or 10 hours on the road, I would sometimes forego the fruit flavored Lifesavers I really liked and eat the peppermint ones I didn’t like just so I could be like my Dad.
In this memory, which comes from a time before seat belts, I am sitting in my Dad’s lap as we’re driving a 1960 Comet station wagon. We’re nearing Mackinaw City and the bridge that would take us to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Knowing that the connection between horses and horsepower was still unsettled in my young mind, while accelerating up a hill, Dad would call out to the engine like a wagon driver calling out to his horses. As I remember it, Napoleon was the lead horse.
As he called out to the horses, laughing, and I held on to the steering wheel with him, trying my best to enjoy a peppermint Lifesaver, I was happy just to be there — to be in his lap, along for the ride.
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