Book 3 Chapter 10 The Day My Father Died

The Day My Father Died

My father died early one morning in the spring of 2006. Once I received the word of his passing, I called into work to tell my boss that I would be out for a few days. After driving over to my parents’ house, I sat with my mother and sister in the kitchen as we waited for the ambulance to take away the body. Every once in a while, I peered in the living room to look at my father who lay on the couch. The thought occurred to me that it isn’t like the movies where the deceased’s face looks peaceful, almost like the dead person had fallen asleep. No, it was nothing like that at all. My father’s crystal blue eyes were crossed because there was no conscious muscles there to keep them in place. They rolled around when ambulance driver picked him up to put him into the body bag.


The three of us waited in the doorway and watched as the technician certified that Dad was dead and then two men loaded the body onto the gurney and wheeled him out the front door. Mom cried quietly. She said, to no one in particular, “my father would not be proud of me right now. He would have told me to keep a stiff upper lip.”

Dad’s health had been declining for years so his death wasn’t unexpected. When I was a freshman in college, my father had his first major stroke. He recovered nicely and suffered no visible damage but his doctors told him that it was time to slow down. It was probable that he had several small strokes before and after the major one but they didn’t register with Dad or his doctors. Ten years later, Dad retired from the company that he helped to build up for three decades. He never talked about it but, after he died, I went through my father’s personal papers and I found a sheet with his unique handwriting on it. There were two labored paragraphs where Dad tried to write about being conflicted about retirement, but the words wouldn’t come. He wasn't used to expressing himself in emotional terms and shoved the paper in the back of a drawer for me to find twenty years later.

After his career ended and his health slowly deteriorating, my father began to lose interest in almost everything. Even the simple act of going out to eat became a chore for him. An example of this is when he went to his favorite restaurant and the waiter asked Dad if he wanted any change from the fifty-dollar bill that he used to pay the check. This question irritated my father, who didn’t like that the waiter assumed that he earned a fifteen-dollar tip, and he tersely asked to be given all of his change. The waiter became testy and, with an attitude that no owner would have agreed with, he asked my father not to sit in his section any more. In his younger days, my father would have given the waiter a tongue-lashing for his impudence, but now he meekly accepted the rebuke. He never went back to his favorite restaurant, and eventually stopped going out to eat altogether. In fact, he rarely left the house and asked my mother to go to a drive through restaurant to bring home sausage and biscuits.

When he first retired, my parents took many vacations to Europe together, but that was just to give my father something to do. He enjoyed planning the trips more than actually going on them. It became an undertaking that was too much for him because of the hardships of travelling, having to find a place to shelter the dogs, and the disruption of his routine. As time went by, and his health declined, Dad didn’t want to do anything at all, so my parents stopped taking trips. Since they no longer went on vacations or out to eat, Dad’s only distractions were reading the paper and watching television. When asked how things were going my father always answered "Peace and quiet."

Because he rarely left the house, my father stopped taking caring about the way that he looked. While he still had a career, he wouldn’t leave until his hair was in place, his suit was cleaned and pressed, and his shoes were shined. After a few years into retirement, he rarely wore anything but a t-shirt and shorts around the house and he stopped caring about how his hair looked. The highlight of his day, and what occupied his mind, was taking “a big poop.”

When he was about fifteen years into retirement, Dad’s gait was so unstable that he began using a walker. He had to lean over it to keep his balance and, when he looked up from that cramped position, the emotion that registered on his face was one of fear. In order to see where he was going while using the walker, my father had to crane his neck upward. It was an awkward posture and he was afraid of losing his balance and falling down. Once he was seated and comfortable, he looked like his old self; but the simple act of moving from room to room became a trial.

At the end of life, having switched from the walker to a wheelchair, Dad resigned himself to his fate. He had given up. After he lost his health, he also lost his social life and, since he could no longer enjoy his hobbies, my father spent most of his time sleeping on the couch; the same couch on which he would die. It wasn’t just that he wouldn’t leave the house, he never left the den. A hospice nurse visited him to give him a sponge bath since he couldn’t manage to take a shower by himself. If he needed to relieve himself then he had a bottle to urinate in and a toilet chair set up in the middle of the family room, which was available for him to take "a big poop" in if he needed to.

After he died, it took a couple of hours for the ambulance to arrive to take away Dad’s body. I remember thinking that I regretted that I never had the chance to sit down and have a heart to heart discussion with my father before he died. I would have liked to ask him if he was ever happy and if he took any joy in raising a family or building a career. Later, as I looked through an old album, I saw a picture of my father sitting next to his first-born son, who must have been just five or six years old at the time. At that moment, he was happy, taking pride in his eldest boy and was clearly full of hope for the young family that he had created. The old pictures give me a clue as to what was truly in my father’s heart and I like what I see in the albums.