Early in the morning on October 11 my father took his last breath before passing away peacefully with me, my mom and my brother right there with him. He had been at home in hospice after being hospitalized and diagnosed with acute leukemia just a few weeks prior.
For many years leading up to this moment I had been dreading a phone call from my mom about his health taking a bad turn. He had suffered a major heart attack in 2009 that he should not have survived, but for a friend and a minister who found him in the parking lot where he had collapsed. They administered CPR which kept him going until paramedics arrived a few minutes later, which saved his life. After a week in intensive care and a month of rehab, it was discovered that part of his brain died from the lack of oxygen in those crucial minutes, but we still had him with us. The result of that presented over the years as dementia, though I’m not certain the doctors ever officially labeled his condition as such. But from that moment forward he had a heart problems and breathing problems, and his short term memory was gone. Eventually we came to accept this “new normal,” and while gratitude for his continued presence in our lives was my prevailing attitude, I worried just under the surface about how long we would have him with us.
Life is nothing if not unpredictable, though, and while for thirteen years we were vigilant about the things that might overwhelm him, we never in a million years saw acute leukemia coming to take him in just a matter of weeks.
How to sum up a lifetime of memories with my father? It is impossible, so I will try for a few abiding themes that were there from day one until the day he died.
First of all, I was born as almost the spitting image of my dad. People would often comment (and kind of still do) that I was his mini-me. We had the same nose, the same mannerisms, the same ability to, no matter the context of any photo taken of us, have our eyes closed. (Unless we were totally unaware a picture was being taken.)
One thing I do not do that my dad did was whistle. Every day of his adult life he whistled. A lot. I’m not sure when it came into his repertoire but probably in the early 70’s, “If I Were a Rich Man,” from Fiddler on the Roof was a staple. Later in his life, so was “It Had To Be You.” I never had that whistling instinct, ever. I hum, though, so maybe that’s the same thing in a different form.
My dad was an absolute lover of animals. I learned to rescue spiders from inside the house from him, and I witnessed him stop the car on a busy road to relocate a caterpillar to safety when I was 19. We also had a houseful of pets from the day I was born. He loved dogs, cats, birds, and rodents like gerbils and hamsters all the same. He is the reason that whenever I see a dead squirrel or deer or any animal on the road that I send up a prayer for their little soul.
He was a Naval Academy graduate, and after 20 years in the Navy he went into middle management at General Electric, and he was laid off nine years into that world, denying him full investment, which would have come at ten years. This was in 1992. He decided to go back to school and become a chemistry major and get his masters in Chemistry and then another masters degree in Education. He was a high school chemistry teacher for the next decade before he retired in 2005. Through all of this he persisted and never faltered. Throughout his life he still loved the US Navy.
He had an integrity and honesty that was noticed by a lot of people. My mom’s mom, my Grandma, once said of him, “He is too good for this world. He is going to get hurt.” She was not wrong. He was just such a GOOD person, inside and out, and he was humble to a fault. To me, though, that kind of assessment of a human being is an excellent one. He was my dad, and I will love him forever. May he Rest In Peace.
