Father: The Final Installment

Everyone told me that when a man's father dies, everything changes. Well, everything OR nothing at all, it seems.

#42. Pre-fatherhood. And full of…dare we say…hope?

If you’re a sentimentalist you will find this very hard to read. By way of warning, this is warning enough. Because about a month ago I got a call.

“Our father’s had a massive heart attack.” The caller was one of my sisters. One of the ones he had disowned. Actually he disowned all of them, including me, but we’ll get to that later. One sister proved herself a bigger person and ignored his do-not-contact request, but the circumstances of us all being disowned were nothing, if not curious.

He and his wife had gone on vacation and found an incontinent dog with mange that they largely believed needed to be rescued. Which, apparently, they did. Then, on the occasion of another trip to another place asked one of my sisters, the one pregnant with twins, to dog-sit the aforementioned beast. She begged off.

My other sister, an intelligence officer who was almost never home, also declined.

“What do you want?” These are the first words he ever spoke to her when she called. When later asked when she had realized she had made a mistake she said, without laughing, “immediately.”

“You all are really fucking me over!” Then the phone went dead.

My pregnant sister’s husband, a sterling example of what a fine man is and does, called, in an attempt to talk some sense into him asking in not so many words, “are we really going to go out like this?”

I was not privy to the conversation but the answer seemed to be “yes” and outside of an occasional sighting at a donut shop, where his wife had forbidden him to eat and from which he fled when he spotted his daughter, my sister, and his grandkids, my niece and my nephew, he never spoke to them again. Which occasioned an email from my sister to me after some 20-odd years of silence with a subject heading that read: “You were right about our father.”

So the news that he had had a massive heart attack had me at not one of my finer moments.

“Hahahaha…oh…really?”

You see he had spoken to me last right before my 20th birthday when he had decided to disown me for taking off the Spring quarter at Stanford to put together a tour for Whipping Boy. The $85 a month he had sent me during my freshmen year, he had now been positing, was a grift on my part. A contention supported by his wife, and rapidly signed off on by him.

Speaking again weeks before I got married, he keened to the 33 year old me, “You didn’t even invite me to your graduation!”

“Why would I have done that?”

I leveled a look at him that itched for engagement. “Did you contribute much to me being able to do that? Outside of my actual brain? Anything at all?”

He waved his hands in a way that said “ok ok”…not quite a submission but more an attempt to make the most of the moment without yielding to TV dramatics. He was a professor himself, at the University of Maryland, College Park. So a sense of how much I had to pay for the privilege of getting a degree from Stanford was not lost on him.

In any case I invited him to my wedding, which he ended up declining to attend on account of me offending his wife by not putting her name on the invite. I put his name PLUS 1. He had told my sister what the casus belli was: “you bring luggage. You invite people.” This in response to my claim that he could bring whoever he wanted.

My soon-to-be-wife prior to all of this is the one who contacted him. She believed it would emotionally complete me if she could affect some sort of rapprochement.

“What do you want?”

These are the first words he ever spoke to her when she called. When later asked when she had realized she had made a mistake she said, without laughing, “immediately.”

You see, he was like me. Rigid, inflexible and while conceding to a chat with her, conceded very little else. But it got him to call me after almost a decade and a half. Though it was all for nought, it added some consonance to my claims that he had died for me in 1982.

This heart attack was different and very real though. My sister explained that post-heart attack he was in the hospital. Where was his wife, the love of his life, who he had sacrificed much and many for?

“No one knows.” Outside of this Columbo-esque twist (she was later found at home, a place she believed she’d be much more useful, caring for their dogs), there was not much to say. Well, that and a secondary report I had gotten that all he was doing these days was lying on the couch, seemingly attempting to usher in death. A revelation which also, amused me. Darkly.

…[She S]hrugged in the face of understanding that he had turned his back on three kids, six grandkids, one great-grandson, and eight siblings.

“Ridiculous.”

The hospital stay, as it does for people who are 86 did not favor him. He developed bed sores, a malady that kicks in when they leave you in bed unmoved and no family member shows to signal that they will get in trouble for having done so. His stomach was also leaking into his body cavity, an issue that I would guess arose from a badly inserted feeding tube.

He was in enough pain that sleeping was a terror and it was his moaning and groaning that made the love of his life request he sleep in another room as his sounds of suffering were keeping the dogs, and her, awake. My other disowned sister, heretofore known as “the witness” had suspected that his doting wife was also elder abusing him. Predictably when questioned by authorities he denied she was because, why start now?

So how much of a surprise was it when my phone rang at 2:30 in the morning this last Tuesday? Not enough for me to wake up and take it when I saw that it was my sister who was calling. I guess I needed my sleep too. And I didn’t need to guess as to why she was calling.

In the morning I found out that he had died. Either that night or in the morning. My sister had called his sister, one of eight siblings he had also disowned. She works at the Department of Health and Human Services and after noting that no one had heard from him since even before his mother had died, sort of shrugged in the face of understanding that he had turned his back on three kids, six grandkids, one great-grandson, and eight siblings.

“Ridiculous.”

It even stymied fate, this badly comical failure of a massive order. In Chicago once on business I stepped into an elevator at one of Chi-town’s finer hotels. Head buried in my phone, when the elevator stopped I stepped to the side to let other riders exit. A couple exited and then stood, I could see their legs, facing the elevator. I reached out for the Close button without looking up and continued on to my meeting.

But the elevator pas de deux had me thinking. I had peeped that it was an interracial couple but what had I done to draw their notice? Then it hit me.

“Hey Gina,” I had called my sister from the lobby. “Where’s Stan now?”

“He’s somewhere in the Midwest visiting Carroll’s family.” And then all of the pieces fell into place. It was them and for whatever reason they entered and exited the elevator without comment.

My mother who had consistently spoken highly of him, though she divorced him, had had a revelation. After some family dynamic that had she and I not in contact for almost a decade, she called him. Her reunion with me and now blossomed family of three daughters, had twigged something in her. A revelation that had completed her in some way she wished to communicate to him. So after not having spoken to him since I was 14 she called.

“What do you want?” He was nothing if not consistent. She had tried to explain but he was having none of it.

I asked her when she realized she had made a mistake in calling. She sidestepped it and said, “I didn’t call him so much for me. Or you,” she said. “I called him for him.”

And now he was dead. “Well,” I told my sister. “Let me call my mom, as she’s the only person who, I imagine, would remotely give a shit.”

So I do. But my tone is…off, though befitting the reality of my deal with him. It sounds like I’m talking/gossiping about a stranger though.

“Hey…Stan is dead.” I had stopped calling him Dad, or even father, years earlier. I continued on about how true love is ageless and evergreen and asking you to sleep on the couch since your pain was keeping it awake. A fact that amused me and as I laughed through the recounting of the story I notice the quiet.

“Mom…?”

And she loses it. Through the deep sobs I hear her say “it’s so sad.” I pause since the variance between her feelings and mine are wide enough to bear being examined. She begs off of the phone and I leave her to it.

But per my morning routine I pull up to jiu jitsu and walk in and announce with a smile: “Hey! Guess what?!?! My father is dead! Finally!”

Now jiu jitsu is the home of the most ribald exchanges, as is to be expected when you’re routinely putting your testicles on another man’s ears for recreational purposes. But the room dies and I’m being looked at like I killed it.

“Bro…” The speaker’s brow is knit in concern. “That’s not funny.”

Wrong, I say. It’s not only funny, and ridiculous, it’s the perfect end to an imperfect story and if you’re expecting some sort of after-school special ending out of me, forget about it. They are not convinced or mollified.

So I think about posting it online just so I can say, “keep your condolences. I don’t need them now, or ever, in this case.” But I let my kids know, my other sisters who were not his daughters, my mother’s second husband, my stepfather, wife, ex-wife, a few close friends, none of whom is likely to try and jog me into Hallmark land.

“Ever read Hemingway’s shortest (and saddest) story ever written?”My mother’s second husband from the time I was five to when they got divorced when I was 18, has been a lifelong father figure and, at the very least, the only father figure I am in contact with. He’s referencing the story that begins with “For sale: baby shoes…” and ends with “never worn.”

“Well right there you just wrote the second shortest story ever written,” he said in response to my notification text that read…

“Stan died last night/this morning. Alone and in pain, apparently. Carroll was in another room. Taking care of the dogs.”

You could almost feel him sigh through his closing comment.

“An unintentional classic.”

Yeah man…you better believe it.

And, as of now his obituary page, typically provided by the surviving spouse, remains blank with a notation that reads instead, “No matching records were found.”

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Portions of this have appeared in the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon? Or the Bookshop.Org dealie, here…