The Strongest Man I Knew

It’s Christmas Eve in the ICU and they tell me my father is dying.   There is a small spray of pine branches in a glass vase my mom brought from home perched along the windowsill.  His childhood stocking with “Chuckie” sewn in yellow thread with felt appliques of trains and teddy bears is pinned up on the bulletin board.  Otherwise, you wouldn’t know it was Christmas.   It’s the one floor where they don’t pipe holiday music through the hallways or the Rock-a-Bye-Baby nursery rhyme over the intercom after a birth.  It’s the floor without clocks on the wall and with a conspicuous Kleenex box at every bedside. 

I glance around room #5423 and wonder if it will be that last space my dad will inhabit.  The sterile white walls, the tan checkered curtain ripped in several spots along the track – the last objects he will see.  The scent of bleach wipes and cafeteria meatloaf – the last he will smell.  The endless beeping of machines and the suctioning serenade of his oxygen mask - the sounds that will escort him to another realm. 

His body is tired.  Years of depression and mania and heart disease and Parkinson’s and now embolisms and pneumonia.  Decades of pills rounding out square plastic compartments:  red ones and oblong blue ones and tiny yellow ones and white ones so oversized they’d have to be quartered so he can swallow them.  He’s been leaving us a little bit at a time for fifteen years - his presence slowly dissipating like the air from a carbonated can.  After I graduated from college, his first bout of clinical depression reduced him to a life inhabited within the confines of the basement.  His bed became a 5-foot navy and burgundy sofa.   The two obscured glass block windows, his only indication if it was night or day.  As our worlds as his children opened up, his became more and more compressed.  As we moved out, started careers, got married, and had babies, he aged, atrophied and began to evaporate.   

It’s surreal really - for him to be dying in the same hospital he was born in.  Charles Raymond Dressel - ushered into the world on Sunday, September 11, 1949, a day that would fifty-two years later be marked with unprecedented tragedy.  My grandparents saved the hospital bill.  $49.00 for a week’s stay.  Five dollars a day for the mother and two for the baby.   Now, we are all sitting here waiting.  My mom, sister and brother, politely rotating chairs and giving each other futile hand pats. I can’t remember the last time all five of us were in one room. The nuclear family without the grandkids, without the spouses, without my 90-year-old grandmother.  Just us.  Watching him sleep.  Checking the green neon vitals on the monitor.  Each one of us, wrestling with our own regrets, sorrow, pity, and place in the world without a father or spouse. Coming to grips with the fact that an axis is shifting underneath us.  Coming to understand that a man’s life is ending at 66 and that his grandkids will scarcely remember him.  Time feels heavy, suspended like an old movie reel that might spin out at any point and turn the screen blank.

Growing up, my dad epitomized brute athletic strength.  He was Chicago’s high school senior athlete of the year and went on to play three sports at Princeton.  He was a heavyweight wrestler, a defensive end, and shot put thrower.  Soon after, he was the dad who did push-ups whenever we piled on his back in a giggling heap.  He could scale the climbing rope in our backyard in 10 seconds flat and he did chin-ups with us hanging like monkeys from his ankles.  He transformed the laundry room into a workout pit with weight plates the size of car wheels and I’d spy on him sometimes from behind the furnace.  I’d stare, half-terrified of the bulge in his eyes and the puffs of air that would escape his lips as he’d hoist the bar above his head and then back on the rack.  In the summer, he’d dive underwater in the pool and propel us up into the air with our feet balancing on his palms. “Standing on the hands” he called it and we perfected it to the point that he could eventually balance us on only one hand. Simply put, he was the strongest man I knew.

The day before we admitted him to the hospital three weeks ago, he stood on his own for the final time attempting to get from the couch to the toilet and fell against the bookshelf displaying our childhood trophies. Softball, wrestling, volleyball, basketball, baseball, football.   All brass-hued plastic badges of our athletic prowess as youngsters, a shrine of long-forgotten accolades.  I remember how proud my dad was of each of them.  The MVP orange and black Princeton football that was presented to him during a senior match against Colgate sat squarely in the middle of our figurines on pedestals.  And they all came crashing down around him.  Miniature bats and feet and balls snapped off.  Name plates came loose.  Dust danced in the air.  

Afterwards, I went to assess the damage and figured they should all just be tossed out.   I picked up the fragments of cheap plastic and turned them over in my hands.  They all meant something.  I couldn’t help but think of all the teams he coached, practices he instructed, stands he cheered from, and endless evenings he spent under our backyard lights, squatting on a bucket in full catcher’s gear, tracking my curve ball.  That was what my dad excelled at.  Sports.  And it’s what we did together.  Those trophies exemplify his prime.  His purpose.  His offering as a father.  His happiest memories.  And I realize as I stare at him, lying helpless as an infant, labored and listless, that they were also some of mine. 

The buzzing of machines and the ringing of a phone in the nursing station startles me back to the present.  I stare at his little pine tree.  Christmas Eve.  In my head, I hear him singing, “Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”  One of his favorite carols.  I wonder if in his dreams he can run again – catch a football, move, dodge, scale a rope, pin an opponent. I wonder if he can swing us around like dolls and do standing on the hands.  I wonder if in his dreams, he is a man again. I wonder if he might dream about teaching his grandchildren to hit off a tee, round the bases, and throw with their shoulders turned the way he did for me thirty years ago.  I hope he can see it.  Their smiles. Their first-hit-out-of-the-infield victories.  Their exhilaration.  Their trophies.  I hope it brings him some peace as he drifts in and out of consciousness in this somber room, #5423.   I can only hope that they will be the last thing he sees.  

**After rallying overnight, my dad was transferred out of the ICU into a different room on December 26th. He continues to have good days and bad days, but we are hopeful for forward progress.  The pine branches and his stocking came with him.