For My Father…
An article I wrote as a tribute to my father …
Goodnight, Daddy
Through modern technology, the time of death can be pinpointed to the instant, but you don’t need wires and alarms to tell you when someone you love takes a final breath.
I arrived for the long wait just in time. My father was drifting into blackness — welcoming it, even — after a brave, painful struggle with cancer. He could hear me, I know, though barely. Pain and drugs now fogged his brain, which had been so keen and lucid only hours before. His eyes, too, were hazing, and I could hear the seconds ticking away like an iron clock in my head. Time, as daddy had lamented only three weeks before, was running as thin as the paper skin covering his illness-ravaged hand.
That hand … my toddler hand had sought it, squirmed out of its steely grip as a 5-year-old, dared not touch it as a too-modest teen. And now, at 41, I was again that 5-year-old standing before my daddy — but instead of squirming out of his no-longer-steely grip, I was afraid to let go, lest I never have the opportunity to hold that hand again. He was my daddy and I was his princess … and I had come to say goodbye … alongside my brothers, my sister and mother. We shared a communion in that twilight-shaded room where silence was king and tears quivered down cheeks as quietly and timidly as fearful subjects before the tyrant Death’s booming voice. But my father had not raised a coward; as afraid as I was to breach the silence I knew this would be my last chance to speak out what my heart was shouting. “I love you, daddy,” I said with a quaver in my voice. But I suspected he knew it. He blinked. “I’m proud of you, daddy,” I continued. It was what I would have wanted to hear, and, after all, everyone said I was just like him.
We had a connection, daddy and me — a connection I hadn’t always relished. Like an obsessed sculptor with his subject clay, he’d attempted to mold me in his image while the pieces stubbornly fell away. At first, he’d persisted in tacking back an arm here, a leg there, but the constant rebellion wearied him and he finally threw up his hands, all the while shaking his head over his perfect vision gone awry. So I worked and reworked the rebel clay, sometimes ecstatic with the results, sometimes horrified, and I settled on a fitting image — one that seemed entirely my own. But as time eroded my handiwork, melding my vision with that of the sculptor’s, I discovered that while the masterpiece bore its own unique features, the image hadn’t metamorphosed into something so very different from its beginnings.
Three weeks before, with tears in his eyes, a gaunt-faced withered man, my father had apologized for being so tough on me. I shushed him. I was what I was because of him — good and bad. I told him so. And I was proud.
More than anything, I was proud of the white-haired soldier lying now so still before me, whose hair grew in silky defiance to the chemo — thick and beautiful. He was brave, my daddy, and honorable and proud. He fought with true grit, never raising that white flag. He fought until the smoke cleared and the multitude of enemy cells at long last held him at rifle-point, bayonets aimed at his head … and lungs … and kidneys and liver.
It’s clear to me now that my father heard his own Taps playing long before the rest of us were ready to accept his fate … our fate. And still, as the merciless cancer attacked like ten thousand bloodthirsty bayonets, he raised his head against the onslaught … until my mother was strong enough — and brave enough — to give the final nod. And even in utter defeat he was proud. He didn’t spit in the face of the enemy — death — but stood, bloodied and battered, gave his name, rank and serial number, and with incredible dignity, extended his hand into a farewell salute that moistened every pair of eyes.
So I stayed by my father’s side as his mind faded to black and his body gave up his ghost, my heart wrenching as the monitors heralded his final moments with shrieks that frenzied my soul. And the turmoil of his final breaths left me utterly confused … selfless and selfish at once … wanting him to go, wanting him to stay … begging him to die, willing him to live.
In the end, I had no say at all.
I knew the instant he let go of my hand to reach for the hand of God and I gave him my blessing by whispering his favorite verse, The 23rd Psalm. It had been his mother’s favorite; now it was mine.
I’ve come to realize that mourning is never easy and never done. Every day I miss my father more. I believe where he lives there is no more suffering, no more pain. Somewhere, he’s standing in his beloved back yard … alongside the puppies we buried as a family … with the water trickling down from the fountain into the pond he built with his hands. And he’s wearing his favorite flannel shirt … and smiling at me.