Father’s Day and Memories of My Dad
By Donald Jones
“ If you want to see Dad, you better come now. I don’t think he will last a week,” my brother said. It was the call I had dreaded, but I knew had to come some day. Dad had fallen six weeks earlier and had broken all of his ribs on one side of his chest. He had blacked out in the bathroom and fallen across the toilet. I knew then that this event might mark the beginning of the end of his life. He had managed to live 91 years, and now his life was about to draw to a close. Two weeks after he got out of the hospital from the fall, I had called him to see how he was doing.
“Oh, I feel much better, “ he said in his normal don’t worry about me tone. “I guess it was not my time, but I’m ready to go,” he added.
Dad had fallen again. This time he broke his shoulder and was in the ICU. “I was afraid that was going to happen again,” I said to my brother. “Ok, I’ll leave tomorrow,“ I said, as I hung up the phone. It was a thirteen hour drive from Florida to Tennessee where my parents lived. I knew I could not just drop everything and run. There were some things I would need to take care of before I could go.
At 2 p.m. Thursday afternoon I left, and stopped only for gas. I arrived at 1 a.m. the next morning. As I pulled into the drive, I saw another car that looked strange to me, and the lights were on. A bad sign, I said to myself. Mom should be in bed at this hour unless something bad has happened. The door was unlocked, another bad sign I thought. I went in and found my; mother wiping her eyes and my uncle and aunt from Florida sitting in the living room with her.
My mother’s sister had told me they were going to come up and surprise them with a visit, but I knew this was not what they expected to find.
“They called from the hospital and said they did not think your Daddy would make it until morning. Ronnie and Tim have gone to the hospital,” my aunt said.“I did not think I could stand it, so I stayed here. He is in a coma so he won’t know who’s there anyway”, my mother said as she wiped away her tears.
Mom is feeble at 88 with a bad heart. Her decision was one I would have wanted her to make as well. I knew I had arrived too late to see Dad alive and that there was nothing to do now but wait here with my mother as my older and younger brother waited for the end in the waiting room of the hospital. Dad and I had said our goodbyes when we spoke a few weeks earlier on the phone, and there was nothing I felt I needed to say, because I had already told him I loved him.
An hour later my older brother came in. “The doctor said it may be eight hours before he lets go. So there was nothing to do but come home. We’ll go back later in the morning. I am going to lay down and get some rest”, he said. We exchanged greetings and he went to bed.
We all arrived at the hospital at about 11 a.m. and sat in the waiting room. It had been agreed on by all that he would be take off the respirator. He had already told the family that he did not want to be kept alive by machines if something like this happened. . The doctor had told us the only thing keeping him alive was the machine. When he was taken off the respirator, it was only a few minuets until he peacefully passed from this life.
Dad had lived 91 years and had he lived another three weeks he would have made it to 92. He always thought he would not make it to 82. Why 82? I will never know. His father died from a stroke at age 50. My dad had gone blind from Macular Degeneration five years earlier. He had nothing he could do. He could not read, drive or work in the garden. All he could do was listen to tapes that he received from the Institute for the Blind, listen to the news on TV and wash the dishes for Mom by hand. He had outlived his usefulness, or at least he thought so. He had seen most of his grandchildren before he went blind, and for that I am grateful.
As Fathers Day approaches, I cannot help but reflect on my dad. There will be no call to say ‘Happy Father’s Day’ nor will there be any of the family gathering at the house to wish him well. Now, I sense a feeling of slight regret, not for him, but for myself. I would never want Dad to come back like he was, because I know he wanted to go and was ready. Dad was a Christian. He had asked me to baptize him back in 1981 when I had come for a visit. For him to ask me to baptize him, I knew was difficult. In a very disinterested way, I acknowledged by a simple “Ok, be glad to.” Though I felt jubilant inside, I did not want to let on how it made me feel because it just might make him change his mind.
Dad was never one for outward displays of affection. It was only in the last twenty years I had gotten him to say I love you at the end of our phone conversations. Just before we would hang up, I would slip in a quick’ I love you guys’, and then wait, with at first, an embarrassing moment of silence which forced him to acknowledge what I had said. It was not that I did not know that he loved me, but I just wanted him to learn to say it and know it was ok to let his guard down. He would weakly say “I love you too', or sometimes he would say ‘same here.’ Dad came from an old fashioned family that did not express emotions openly. It trickled down to my generation also, and I wanted to break that old cycle. My older and younger brothers both had learned to say it, and we wanted our children to hear it from their parents.
When the phone call came from my brother to come and see Dad, I dreaded the moment For me it would end an era of my relationship with my father. At first I thought that I would be over come with grief, however to my surprise I found relief not for myself, but for him. As a Christian I knew he was in a far better place and we would see each other again. My greatest concern was for my aged mother who would now be alone.
My dad had lived a more then full life. He had been around the world several times while he served in the Navy. It is doubtful that he thought of our moving around from military base to military base in our youth as an education, but it was. Not many kids have been inside a Navy Destroyer, sat in a gun torrent of a ship, been inside a Submarine or onboard many military aircraft when they were only in their pre-teen years. We were also privileged to travel to other countries, experience different cultures and eat exotic foods as an everyday event. Our daily lives were an educational event within themselves.
There are many things I am grateful to my father for. When we were together a couple of years ago I made a determined effort to let him know how much I appreciated the things he had taught me as I grew up. He gave me a strong work ethic. One of the things I see today among many young people is a lack of the ability to work hard for a living. Everyone wants to have everything now without working their way up the ladder. Cutting wood for the stove, cleaning out fence rows in the garden, cutting the grass, hoeing the garden and finishing what we started, were ethics in the making for me. To always tell the truth, respect the elderly, stand at attention for the national anthem, to be proud of my country, respect the laws, be respectful in church, were all a part of what my dad expected of me. Yet, he never said any of it out loud. You just knew it by watching him live his life.
Was he imperfect? Yes, just like all the rest of us. He made his blunders and like all of us he learned to live with them and move on, and so will I. He died the last day of April 2007.