June 7 marks the two year anniversary of my father's death, a passing that proved more devastating to me than I'd ever expected it would be, but which - thanks to the gentle kindness of Time - has grown easier to bear.
My father was a turtleneck and blazer type of guy, and once quite the ladies man I am told. He was a handsome, sensitive music professor who hooked up with beautiful violists, opera singers and graduate students... until he fell, at last, for a hot actress straight out of Hollywood and committed to making a go of happily ever after at the age of 49.
I'm so thankful that he DID find that lasting happiness he'd hoped for with my mother, in a 34 year marriage that lasted until his death two years ago on June 7, 2009.
I happened to be hospitalized with pregnancy complications at the time of his passing, and was therefore connected to the family vigil at Dad's bedside solely by technology and the incredibly good heart of my elder brother who sent me many photos of our father during the final hours of his life... so that I could see the luminescent glow that infused his skin as he began to transition into a beautiful unknown.
My brother also did me the infinite kindness of holding his cell phone up to my father's ear, so that I could tell him for myself one last time just how much I loved him - how truly I had appreciated having him as my dad - and how grateful I was for our years together. I promised him that I would take great care of my mother, and that he (always the king of overprotection) did not have to worry about me either.
I told him how much I looked forward to seeing him again, and that he would be a part of me forever.
And that was it. My father was already unable to communicate and had mostly lost awareness of where he was, so there was no possible way for him to reply. I hung up the cell phone and sat in my hospital bed, tensely, waiting for that final call telling me that his end had truly come.
A few hours later, with an extremely dear friend visiting me in my hospital room, the call came through. "He's gone," my brother wept, and I wept too. I got off of the telephone and my friend and I bawled, me for the loss of my father and my friend out of true compassion and sympathy for our family tragedy.
That evening, alone at the hospital attached to a million wires and waiting for imminent surgery, I channeled my grief by writing down every unique thing I could remember about my father before the nurses could interrupt to check my vital signs again.
Two years later on the anniversary of his death, I will remember and honor my Dad by sharing some excerpts from what I wrote that day in my private journal.
"June 7, 2009
My father, Theodore ****** *******, passed away today at the age of 83. I will never see or speak with him again, yet somehow I feel closer to him than ever. I believe he will be watching protectively over my daughter's birth tomorrow, June 8, 2009.
Somehow though I am locked in this bed of wires and tubes, and he is gone, I know that we are both exactly where we need to be. My child will enter the world safely tomorrow, and he will make sure of it.
There are so many things I remember about Dad. His long thin fingers and bony feet - hands strong from playing the violin for seventy years or so. The way he loved his own mother's apple and custard pies. How he used to joke with her, "I'm going to chain you to the stove the whole time you're visiting so that I'll have an entire freezer full of pie before you go!"
My dad always wore old fashioned buttoned down shirts with his trousers pulled up around his waist like Cary Grant. His turtlenecks and bolo ties... what was with that flair for the southwest?
I remember the chin-up bar he had on our back patio and how he exercised all of the time when I was a little girl, always doing sit-ups and push-ups and going jogging along the ocean. He was in his mid-fifties when he was doing these things and still seemed so spry. The more I think about it, the more I am impressed by how fit he was at his age.
Dad loved to watch sports on TV with the sound off while he practiced his violin... he LOVED sports. Biggest sports fan I ever met... basketball, football, baseball, and most of all the Nebraska Corn Huskers. I remember thinking to myself that if I ever wanted to really communicate with Dad I would need to learn how to speak "football".
What an interesting, complex character. My father hated working with his hands, except to play music. He read voraciously - politics, satire, history, current events, sports columns, comic books. Loved Woody Allen films, Rodney Dangerfield and Art Buchwald. Took me and my Mom to see 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' when I was eleven and absolutely loved it.
He was the funny guy at the dinner party who set everyone off into peals of laughter; yet strangely, he was also the misanthrope who consistently called the cops on our next door neighbor's teenage son when he threw parties. (Funny how Dad could have an outstanding sense of humor AND be a total curmudgeon at once!)
Dad used to eat a huge bowl of cereal while watching Ted Koppel on Nightline every night before he went to bed. He was the king of Late-Night, getting his second wind around 10pm and usually not retiring for the evening before 1am. (This is where I get it from.) He spent much of that time thinking, and much of it chuckling over the things he read.
He was a pacifist and a dyed-in-the-wool Liberal, yet believed in the death penalty and kept a large wooden club-like thing next to his side of the bed, in case he ever needed to use it to defend our family at night. Guns were not allowed in the house but the club was. Go figure. My dad was not a coward in any way - he was a trained Naval officer who grew up in Nebraska farm country. He knew how to fight.
He loved Japanese sports cars and had incredible respect for the Japanese people, having visited the country numerous times in his professional career. He traveled as much as he could, and often considered the allure of moving overseas ~ to Adelaide or New Zealand, for example. In the end though, he was deeply attached to our beachside city and could never actually bring himself to leave it.
In the 34 years of my parents marriage, my father never wore a wedding ring. Yet, he was the most faithful man I ever heard of, before meeting my own husband. He was so incredibly kind to my mother and he loved her so much - with vast devotion and concern. I was lucky to be raised in a house with a love like that. My father ~ the man who liked to joke he'd "Never met a pretty lady that he didn't like" ~ told us constantly that he had married the prettiest one of them all and that nobody else could hold a candle to her.
But it wasn't just Mom. Dad adored his family. He cherished his parents, his brother and sister - and most of all, his kids. He talked about his boys (my brothers) who lived on the other side of the country incessantly as I was growing up and took such tremendous pride in them. He loved my mom's kids too and thought of them as his own... caring for them and their families, believing in them. He worried about all of us, probably more than was healthy for him.
Beyond my mother and his family, the greatest loves of my father's life were as follows: Ravel, Grieg, Prokofiev, Horowitz. Percy Granger. Joshua Bell. The Kronos Quartet... and Opera. All opera.
My father loved his life and clung to it ferociously - even as it slowly slipped through his clutching fingers. In his rare moments of lucidity during the final years, he wept over what was happening to him... and during the majority of time when he had no idea who we were or where he was, he took on such a sweetness. So much love. He would light up like Christmas just to see us walk into the room, even when he wasn't quite sure how he knew us. Somehow, despite the loss of names and diminished understanding of relationships, he knew that we were people that made him happy.
Dad I do not know how to say goodbye to you.
I hope you know... hope you knew... just how much you mean to me. I am so glad you lived long enough to meet your grandsons, and wish with all my heart that you could have met my daughter who will be born by c-section tomorrow. I promise that I will keep your memory alive for my children, and that they will know forever more that they are descended from a great and good man."
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