Mom and Dad - Molokai, HI 1965

^{*This is a repost from Father's Day last year. I couldn't think of a damned original thing to say this year. Maybe you missed it last time.*}

I guess my indifference at lunch that day was just denial.  I'd spent the morning chauffeuring my folks to the Salt Lake Clinic and after Dad had his exam, the Dr. called Mom in to chat.  She was visibly shaken when they emerged and on the drive to lunch she told me that the news had been bad; very bad.  The gist of it was that Dad’s heart had deteriorated faster than expected and the Dr. had said, in no uncertain terms, that his time was short.

The Dr. had ordered Dad to take two weeks off work and Dad seemed more concerned about the lost wages than the prospect of dying soon.  If I was in denial, I got plenty of help staying that way from Dad, who seemed more perturbed than afraid, as if dying was just such a big ol’ nuisance. 

Mom didn’t eat much and on the drive home she vented her anger about the Dr. and his lack of beside manner.  I couldn’t imagine what the Dr. had said to get my mild-mannered mother so riled.  That was the first of a lot of things over the next 8 days that either didn’t make sense or didn’t seem noteworthy at the time.  Maybe I’m just a slow study but it’s taken most of the 30 years since to comprehend the forest that I was too close to the trees to see. 

The weekend passed as usual.  The next day Dad and I wound down that hot early August Saturday by throwing lawn darts in the front yard, in the shadow of the Oquirrh Mountains.  Maybe we shot some pool in the basement before Dad retired to the back deck with some fresh fruit.  He liked to end his day sitting on the deck watching the sun sink into the West Desert and enjoying the cool breeze wafting down from the canyon to the east.  Sometimes Mom, or one of us kids, or a grandkid would join him.    

On Monday, the first day of his forced sabbatical, Dad was up at the usual time.  Instead of going to his comfy electronics job, he began tearing down the motor of his car.  I could have been more help to him and I should have been, but I really didn’t grasp what was going on.  I thought he just needed something to do since he couldn’t go to work.

I helped him when he asked for it, usually breaking bolts or nuts loose for him.  He clearly didn’t have the strength that he used to, but none of this registered much in my self-involved twenty-something brain.  At dinner, Mom was furious with him. 

“Am I the only one who understands what the Dr. told you?  You’re supposed to be resting.  He said you could die any day.”

“He said I have another year.” Dad replied. 

“He said you’d be lucky if you made it a year.  He said your heart could stop at any time and he doesn’t know when but he’ll be surprised if you’re still alive in a year.  I thought that man needed some lessons in bedside manner but maybe he was just trying to get it through your head.”  Mom looked at me as I shoveled more mashed potatoes on my plate.  “Neither one of you seems to be taking this very seriously.”

My usually calm mother had been agitated all weekend but that moment was the first real inkling I had as to just how serious my dad’s situation was.  I remember sitting across the kitchen table, like it happened yesterday, watching my dad carefully choose his words.

“Honey, you’re right.  I might drop over tomorrow or six months from tomorrow but I’m still here now.  I refuse to live in fear of dying.  When it happens, it happens and I can't do a darned thing to change that.”

That was vintage Dad.  He was as plain talking and as straight forward as they come.  No one ever had to wonder where they stood with Dad because he said what was on his mind.  He was what he was, never tried to be anything else and he didn’t give a fiddler’s fart what anyone else thought of him.

Under the category of things I know now that I didn’t know then, you can file the realization that he was not in denial.  That was vintage Dad too.  I can almost hear the wheels turning in his brain: I’m powerless over dying but what is within my power?  I can fix the car so she won’t have to deal with that.

The following weekend my folks went on a family reunion/camping trip in the Wasatch Mountains.  Mom said that Dad had a grand time singing around the campfire and enjoying the camaraderie.  She couldn’t remember when he last looked so happy. 

Late that night, as he lay next to my mother in my aunt and uncle's travel trailer, he took his last breath.

It seemed like forever after that awful phone call before my mother and her entourage arrived home from that camping trip.  By midday on that hot Sunday I was sitting on the sofa holding my mother while she cried, looking across the room at the tears streaming down my cousin’s face.   I had no tears of my own at the time.  I’m not sure why but those didn’t come until much later and they continue to come sometimes still.

Mom smelled like a camp fire and she kept repeating, “I don’t know what I’ll do, he’s always taken care of everything.  I don’t know what I’ll do without him.  I don’t know what I’ll do without him.”

When I came upstairs the next morning, Mom was seated in the living room looking much more composed. 

“Did you hear the Grandfather clock last night?” she asked me.

“Yeah, I heard it all night.”

“Your father loved that clock.  His mother brought it with them from Switzerland, his real mother, who died just after they got here.  It’s the only thing he had that belonged to her and he took very good care of it.  He was meticulous about winding it every day and making sure it was accurate.”

I smiled at the image of Dad checking his watch, which he synched daily with Greenwich Mean Time, and then making sure the grandfather clock was spot on.   He was obsessed with the accuracy of his watch, often telling us by how many seconds it was off.

“About six months ago it quit working.  He was intending to get it fixed as soon as we could afford to.  I lay in bed last night thinking that I just couldn’t go on without your father and then that clock struck midnight and it gonged every 15 minutes.  He was telling me that everything was going to be okay.”

It was.