My Father’s Body
My father died a month ago, and his remains have taken up residence in my office in California. They’re in a blue and gold urn the size of my thumb. Or rather, some of Dad’s ashes are in that urn, and some are in an identical urn at my sister’s house, and most are in a parental-size urn at my mother’s in Massachusetts. All eight kids were offered our own urns, but only Catherine and I wanted Dad’s remains. She says Dad is bi-coastal now.
The morning after the funeral, I was asleep in Dad’s rented hospital bed when Mom woke me. “Want to see something?”
I’d never heard that dewy tone in her voice, so I sprang up and followed her. On the bedroom windowsill, Dad’s urn glowed with sunrise. “Isn’t he radiant,” she said, “That’s how I saw him when I woke up.”
I dreamed about Dad nine days after he died. He strode past me: dark, pained, and aggressively silent. He marched out the kitchen door, headed straight for the deck railing, and dove off.
Suddenly he was swimming through something like a tiny waterfall. I raced down a trail after him. At the dock, I peered into the bottle-green water and saw a ghostly trace heel. I hauled him up and onto my lap.
He was radiant, youthful, beaming. “No more heart attacks,” he said.
“No more heart attacks,” I agreed. And he melted away like mist touched by sun.
My father was an unusually vital man whose uneasy relationship with his body defined much of his life. As a kid, he got into so many fights on the playground that his parents sent him out of the comfortable Lexington suburbs to a “strict” Catholic school in Boston, unwittingly handing him freedom and anonymity.
Tough street kids became my father’s new buddies. Dad learned to roll drunks. He used the nickels he found in their pockets to buy bathing suits at the Salvation Army and go swimming in the Four Point Channel, a busy polluted artery of the Charles River. When it was too cold to swim, he and his pals sat in subway stations and played cards. They sneaked into Fenway Park.
Dad’s new found freedom came at a cost. He lived in constant fear of being caught. When he fell from a roof, he made his pals carry him to the subway, and he told his parents he’d broken his leg falling down the station stairs. To Dad’s horror, his father promptly filed a lawsuit against the Massachusetts Transit Authority. (My grandfather, a poor German immigrant, had gone to dental school with money from a railroad accident settlement, so the pattern had been established.)
After the court date was set, Dad woke up nightly, bathed in sweat. Which was worse: to lie in court or admit his lies to his father? Sixty years later when my father described the dilemma, his voice still shook. His father was the only person he was ever afraid of, he said. Dad didn’t know how he’d been saved, but somehow the legal matter had dissolved. Nothing had ever come of it. I’m sure this miraculous rescue had something to do with my father’s later career as an attorney who constantly championed underdogs.
I asked Dad once what had been the happiest time in his life. He answered without hesitation: the summer between high school and the Marines. He played baseball all day, every day, and ate ice cream. Girls and booze weren’t even in the picture.
As I think about it now, I realize that that summer was probably his one time of freedom. The Marines were followed by marriage and eight children born in rapid succession. Another man with my father’s free-spirited nature might have resented his family or taken heavily to drink, but Dad did neither. He just played as much as he could.
One of the pleasures of my childhood was waking Dad up. Mom would send a gang of us upstairs. “Go get Daddy up.” This meant surreptitiously sneaking up the stairs and assembling outside the bedroom door. Once we were all together, we threw open the door and raced for the bed, like a small besieging army. Dad, of course, was waiting for us.
A mock battle ensued, with Dad grabbing whoever came first to hand and throwing him or her off the bed. The stinging fall didn’t slow us down, and we climbed back up as fast as we could. There were usually between four and six kids taking part, and the whole scene was a flying medley of tumbling children and flapping blankets.
The only rule was that we could not go beneath the covers. This was unspoken but completely adhered to. We yanked Dad’s hair, twisted his nose, pinched his ears, pounded on his chest, and, once his feet emerged in the fray, pulled his toes. Eventually there would be one or two of us standing at the foot of the bed, pulling on his feet, another couple of kids making assaults on his arms or face, and toddlers bouncing helpless with excitement, until finally my mother would shout from downstairs, and Dad would say, “OK kids. OK kids. You won. I’m getting up.” We’d run off, flushed with victory. Dad would make his way to the bathroom and begin the more adult, more constrained part of his day.
Dad played with the whole neighborhood. He was the universal pitcher for both sides in our sandlot games. When boys objected to having girls on their teams, my father’s eyes grew gleeful. “No girls. No game,” he said, rolling the baseball (which we owned) between his strong hands. My father was no feminist, but he did have five daughters.
He taught us games he’d learned from his street pals, including stickball, a cheap alternative to baseball, good for playing in traffic, with taped-up corks and broom handles. At the beach he introduced us to chicken fights, where we paired up as horse and rider teams and wrestled at the surf line, attempting to drag the others under water.
He liked playing with adults too; he was a skilled poker player who supplemented his meager earnings as a young lawyer with winnings from the local doctors. I have a letter to Dad from one of his poker buddies. “I’m still envious of your behavior playing poker–not so much your outrageous luck as your uncontrolled happiness and shameless laughter while raking in the pot.”
Sadly, somehow over the years it all changed. I don’t know why Dad lost his joy, but he was like a bright sky that slowly gathered clouds and finally poured rain. In my father’s later years, his exuberance was overlaid with bitterness and anger, and he was often willfully hurtful. Previously an idealist and civic leader, he spent his last decades railing against politicians, business people, union leaders, union members, religious figures, the media. And anyone else who offended him at a given moment. He unfairly berated some of his children, and in fact ceased speaking to them for periods of time. He nursed old grievances, some of which were imaginary, and cherished fantasies of revenge. He often drove my mother to tears and still required that she take care of him.
After an outburst, I often watched him in the recliner that had become his world, his head bowed, calcified hands wound round each other, thumbs twitching. Witnessing this was anguishing, perplexing, infuriating, and frightening. I often berated myself for the dumb helplessness that came over me as he stormed. The immense vitality that fueled his early life was still potent but completely frustrated. He was a force to be reckoned with, and I was unable to confront him. All I wanted to do was love him.
Two years before my father died, he fell and broke his neck in four places. This normally would have been fatal, but Dad’s whole spine had fused after 40 years of arthritis, so instead of snapping, his neck splintered, and the spinal cord remained intact, gallantly whole within a nest of bony shards.
The break set off nine months of surgeries, heart attacks, and movement between hospitals, rehab facilities, and a nursing home. Much of that time is a blur. I remember standing alone by his hospital bed, feeling that I was looking down at a corpse, and telling him it was alright to go, that he had fought long enough, that he could lay his body down. He apparently did not agree and fought his way back to consciousness and many more months of hospitalization.
I went back to see him many times during those months, every time packing a black outfit suitable for his funeral. After a fourth heart attack, when the doctors diagnosed him with congestive heart failure, he turned his bloodshot eyes to me, those large brown eyes now dazed beneath outlandishly bushy eyebrows, and told me all he wanted to do was go home. “OK Dad,” I said.
The next few months brought a galvanizing focus to our lives. We set Dad up in a rented hospital bed, and my brothers and sisters and their spouses and kids and I took turns staying with him around the clock. Never have I been so grateful for the size of my family. We slept in a lounge chair, previously used on the beach, and always remained within hand’s reach.
Hospice came, bringing a little box called Comfort Care. We explained to Dad that the drugs therein meant he wouldn’t have to suffer again. He took in the information without comment. He was accustomed to a very high level of pain, and his only new complaint was the need to urinate frequently. He also at times lost control of his bowels. Ironically, in a way, these months gave my father back to us. We touched him again.
He was most at ease when my brothers, men accustomed to physical work, were on duty. They handled him gently, as they had handled their own children, showing Dad a physical tenderness previously unthinkable. I will never forget the sight of my middle brother, a fisherman, carrying my dirtied father to the shower while casually continuing to debate the Red Sox game blasting from the television.
I wasn’t as strong or objective as my brothers. I couldn’t carry him. I stood behind him, arms around his waist, steadying him on his walker as he made his way to bed or the bathroom. Mornings, I’d half-carry, half-guide him into the shower stall, where he’d sink onto a white plastic stool, still wearing his skivvies. I’d test the water carefully, then hand him the shower nozzle on its long flexible line.
Standing behind him, I’d soap his back and ropy old arms. I’d stoop down, reach under the stool, and wash his feet, with their petrified toenails. I’d shampoo his white hair, still thick and beautifully wavy, the hair all his daughters envied. Once he was soaped up, I’d leave him and go sit on the bed a few feet distant, listening.
Dad stayed on the shower stool spraying himself like an elephant until the hot water ran out. Then Mom and I would go in together. She was recovering from a heart attack herself and had limited strength, but she’d bring a towel and clean underwear, and I’d stand behind him, lifting him. She’d slip off the skivvies, give him a quick wash, and together, we’d help him dress.
Six months after being discharged from the hospital, Dad graduated from hospice, still vertical as he liked to say. We shouldn’t have been surprised. My father beat death many times. After returning from the Korean War, he had his first heart attack in his thirties. He fought two separate bouts with cancer. He lived with insulin-dependent diabetes for twenty-five years. My brother-in-law once said if he had to face enemy fire in a foxhole, he would want my father with him, as my father was apparently impossible to kill.
Dad got another whole round of the seasons. Spring and the optimistic beginning of another Red Sox season. Summer on the deck, listening to beach sounds drifting up the street. Fall and a new crop of Macintosh apples for Mom’s pies. Winter and the red cardinals bright against the snowy feeder.
By and large, with a few lamentable exceptions, my father’s darkness did not return in its full intensity. I like to think that during his hospice period the unquestioned, unstinting, physical devotion of his tribe had somehow reached him, easing his aching heart.
Father Frank, a dear family friend and priest, made regular visits. Sometimes he’d come during the day with Communion, which Dad accepted stiffly, sticking his tongue out like a lizard tasting the air.
More often Frank would come in the evening for a scotch on the rocks. Dad would have a bourbon and water, and they’d sit together while Mom fixed supper, darting in from time to time to sip her old-fashioned.
One December morning Dad told my mother, “Barbara, we better start saying goodbye.” A few weeks later, he fell, broke his arm and returned to the nursing home. On January 21, at age seventy-nine, he died.
Paradoxically, just as my father’s hospice period gave him bodily back to us; his death restored the memory of his true character. Once the obituary was published, the phone began to ring, food and flowers began to arrive, and cards and emails poured in.
The house was filled with stories of my father’s generosity and exuberance. We heard from former clients, distant cousins, high school hockey players, clerks of the court, Marine Corps buddies, law school classmates, neighborhood kids, city officials, cops, fishermen, and multitudes of others who’d been down on their luck and had their fortunes restored in one way or another by Dad.
Not having to witness his years of dark decline, they remembered Dad in his fullness, his vigor, his rascally charm and generosity, his joyful and effective advocacy for all the underdogs. Their stories gave him back to us, rolling back the clouds, and we basked in the warmth.
Last week I took my father’s glasses to the Lions’ recycling bin. I like to think of some other man getting to wear those big aviator glasses. The fisherman knit sweater that I brought him from Ireland is hanging in my closet. And that blue and gold urn winks from my bookshelf. Some day I’ll take the ashes to the river and let them swim free.
