Dad

One of my dad’s favorite movies was Lawrence of Arabia, which won Best Picture in 1963. I always loved watching the Academy Awards with him. He was a movie buff and could rattle off the actors’ names in the In Memoriam segment faster than the producers could identify them on the screen.  As I was composing my thoughts last night, I hid in my home office and lit a candle.  I was reminded of his favorite line in that movie when Peter O’Toole extinguishes the match between his thumb and finger.

“Of course it hurts,” O’Toole says. “The trick is not minding that it hurts.” I smiled thinking of all the times he had impressed us with that maneuver when we were growing up. He was the strongest man I knew. 

After my dad passed away yesterday, our family sat around him, sorting through all the memories that encompassed who he was. The good stuff: before the depression, mania, electric shock therapy, and heart failure. The times before overflowing pill boxes and the embarrassment he felt while eating in front of others because the Parkinson’s made his hands shake.  

We recalled the many hours Amy and I spent pitching to him in our driveway - him suited up in full catcher’s gear and perched on a painter’s bucket.  We remembered the time he literally leapt from the stands in jubilation when Blake qualified for state at a high school wrestling meet.  We were reminded of that family trip we took to Mexico - how he and Tony Navilio belted out country western songs while riding these scrawny, geriatric horses down the beach.  And we thought of him, marching proudly in the Princeton alumni parade, sporting that ostentatious, striped orange jacket. We can see him so clearly, lacing up his beat-up running shoes that he’d tape together out of frugality or piling his plate with peeled shrimp at an all-you-can-eat-buffet, determined the restaurant would lose money on him.

I thought about how strong his back was.  How large and looming it was to me as a child.  I envisioned him scaling the rope in our backyard and lifting us up in the swimming pool with his arms outstretched.

I used to love to sniff the collar of his flannel shirt when he came home from the hardware store at 6 o’clock every night.  He’d give me a hug and I’d breathe it in.  It was really just wood dust, plastic hoses and peat moss, but to me it was dad.   Years later, when I found myself homesick while studying abroad in Australia, I’d frequent an old local hardware store down the street from my house.  I’d wander the aisles, sometimes finding something small to buy.  I was on the other side of the planet, but the smell was the same.  It instantly transported me home.

Amy asked my mom when she thought dad had been the happiest. She told us it was probably when we were growing up.  When he was coaching us or driving us to practice or watching proudly from the sidelines.  He was our most devoted fan. 

My dad drew a short straw in the twilight of his life.  Chicago’s 1967 Athlete of the Year wouldn’t ultimately get to be the grandpa who’d teach his granddaughters how to hit off a tee or model how to perform the perfect half nelson to his grandsons.  Yet, they loved him as ‘grandpa’ without judgment, accepting that even the strong can become frail.

Two years ago he was in the ICU on Christmas Eve and the staff told us that he would likely not make through the night. We reflected on how he had been slowly leaving for us for a while – how the quality of his life had been dissipating like the air from a carbonated can.

Yesterday as he took his final breaths, my mom gave him permission to go…to be free of affliction, free of suffering, free of the physical demands that had become too much for his body. He was unconscious, but it was as if he heard her and listened.   

We were all with him through the afternoon after he passed. We sat around my dad in the dim, our own continued vigil in room 14 - One of us occasionally pulling back the curtain to enter the glare and commotion of the hospital to make a call outside, to make preparations.  At one point, we paused to listen to a woman in an adjacent room singing a hymn. With us going in and out, he was still a part of it all.  A part of our family unit.  It took us a few hours to feel ready to leave him.  And as I stood there, the sheer finality of the moment seized me–it would be the last time we would all be alone together.

It’s heartbreaking the things that make you laugh in the most bewildering circumstances. As we were planning the funeral gathering, we contemplated the idea of buying some flowers to beautify the space. We quickly discounted the idea, knowing that my dad would have hated spending the money on arrangements.  I said, “Actually what dad probably would have approved of, is a bouquet of dandelions.” Being a hardware man who sold weed killer, he always teased that they were his favorite flower.

I will think of him in the summer when I see those yellow faces persevering in the most unlikely of places - Darting up through the sidewalk cracks and skirting chain-link fences.  I may even encourage my girls to blow on them when they turn to seed, scattering them to the wind.  Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes. They are the strongest flowers I know.

Dad, I want to say that it hurts. I’m trying not to mind that it hurts, but it’s not just a simple match.  A much grander light was extinguished…and it hurts.