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When you are traveling across the country tonight to see your aging father for the last time, you wrestle with conflicting feelings.
Happy to be going home for the first time in 2 1/2 years, but my mission is draped with a sense of permanent parting.
The bubble of joy over reuniting with a pretty passionate family — we are not always on a first-name basis with peace — is punctured because everything Pop and I do will be stamped “Final.”
At 93 years old, wracked with pneumonia, caused and complicated by diabetes, and kidney failure, he is presumed to be dying.
Even over the telephone wires this morning, Pop’s daily weakening was unmaskable.
Just as Long as He Talks
His voice was typically strong. Still has a lilt in it, of course, because he is Irish. Briefly, he sounded as vital, once more, as did when he was 50, the days when my trips home meant long, long drives, wending along slanted country roads that had not been touched since the previous century, the 19th.
No matter where we drove in a 50-mile radius, he knew who lived and worked in certain buildings, and a familiar story was attached to most of them.
At 30 miles an hour, just the two of us were on these sunny, serene jaunts through neighborhoods where he has invested his whole life.
Generally unflappable, he would lean back in the passenger seat, flash a huge grin that never diminished, reflect invariably on trying to carve out a living during the Great Depression and then switching to how fortunate we are in the present.
Proud to be Alive
Glancing over, Pop looked as if he just had been elected king of the world.
Never freeway types, we always took the scenic routes, past weathered but still workable farmlands and frequently ramshackle, long-unpainted buildings.
Pop never could go more than 10 minutes on our back-country drives without remarking, “Dad sure would have loved this.” Grandpa was in his middle 80s when he died in 1953. A former teacher driven for cover by the KKK in the 1920s, he was a man of the 19th century. Never owned a car and seldom rode in one. He was not even exposed to electricity on a daily basis until the last eight years of his life.
Another permanent facet of Pop’s personality was to speak to everyone within sound of his considerable voice.
When we would drive through the countryside, often we would pass within several feet of farmers working or relaxing in their front yards. Pop never could resist the opportunity to lean nearer the window and call out, “H’llo.”
In recent years, our daily conversations have dwelt more on nostalgia for two reasons: the longer memory is last to go, and besides he does not remember who visited today.
“What day is this now?”
This morning, Pop periodically had to stop and cough. Such a thundering shudder erupted that I didn’t think he could summon the strength to resume our conversation.
I am thrilled to be able to look Pop in his twinkling eyes once more.
I have a great deal I want to say to him before the lights are extinguished, but my thinking apparatus becomes jumbled because my mind races ahead to a few days from now when, perhaps, he will be gone.
My sisters, who check in daily, say Pop tenaciously is clinging to what remains.
Here Is the Beef
The favorite hamburgers of his life — and this is a man who has eaten hamburgers most days of most years — is 22 miles from his nursing home. When I promised to deliver them tomorrow or Friday, he protested. He said he would ride along with me, as he has for many years.
That is not likely to happen, but he has surprised his nurses numerous times during various hospitalizations in the last 40 years.
