REMEMBERING DAD
I Didn’t Get To Say Goodbye
And now I’m fatherless again
My dad passed away in 1994 when I was 34 years old. He wasn’t my natural father but he was my dad in every sense of the word.
He was never very healthy, suffering with severe asthma and emphysema that forced him out of the Canadian Navy before his fortieth birthday.
To add insult to injury, the medication he had taken for years to control his breathing troubles had caused numerous other health issues including extreme osteoporosis. When he left the navy, he was told that he likely didn’t have a lot of years left. But he managed to beat the odds and lived to age 65.
It was a devastating shock when he died. He’d recently recovered from a bad case of the flu that had laid him up for months. His doctors wanted to do a scope of his lungs to determine if there had been any scarring from his bout with the flu. The next day he died from a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in his lung.
I was halfway across the country, working that day but I lived just a block away from work so I was able to come home for dinner. That day I was even more excited because my best friend was at my place waiting for me, coming for a long-awaited visit from Los Angeles. I was looking forward to getting some time off to spend with her.
As we were cooking dinner my phone rang. Call display said it was my brother Keith. He didn’t call me very often so it was a big surprise and I just let loose with a volley of pleasantries and questions without even saying hello.
“Keith, how are you? What a nice surprise to hear from you. What are you doing calling me and how did you know I would be home from work?”
There was silence on the end of the line. He had his hand covering the mouthpiece so I knew he was talking to someone else in the room.
He came back on the line and the first words out of his mouth were, “You don’t know do you?”
Of course I said, “Know what?” He hummed and hawed for a few moments and then just spit out, “Dad died.”
I paused, not sure how to react.
So I said “Keith that isn’t funny. Why would you say something like that?” As if he, or anyone, would joke about death. In a quivering voice he said “because it’s true.” In that moment I felt my world collapse. My mind started racing but I couldn’t hold onto any one thought. When I opened my mouth, I wasn’t sure what was going to come out. “How?” “When? “What happened?”
He told me that dad had woken up early in the morning with a bad stomach ache. Early in the morning my mom awoke to find him in excruciating pain. He said he was going to go into the bathroom, as my mom waited to find out what was wrong. Suddenly she heard a loud crash. She called out to him but there was no response. She had to force her way in the door because he was partially blocking it with his body.
When she reached him, she knew that something was horribly wrong. She grabbed the phone and called 911. As the operator spoke to her she realized that he wasn’t breathing and he was dying.
In fact, he was already dead.
My mom beat herself up, saying through her tears that she had never learned how to do CPR. But the doctor told her it wouldn’t have mattered at that point anyway. There was no reviving someone who had died from an embolism, even if it had happened in the hospital.
Neighbors on the street were all looking out their windows to see what all the commotion was about with an ambulance in front of our home. But everyone knew what must have happened.
The hardest part of his death was the fact that none of us were able to say goodbye. At the time, I thought that was the worst way to lose someone. You couldn’t have closure until you said that final goodbye.
That’s what I believed until my mom was diagnosed with Lewy Body Disease and began a gradual decline with dementia. It was far worse to watch someone that I love suffer with the horrific diagnosis (originally thought to be Alzheimer’s Disease) and then her deterioration over the next couple of years.
It was better that dad had died suddenly. He probably didn’t know what hit him. He didn’t linger, suffering until the end.
Because of the suddenness of his death, my mom decided to have an open casket at the funeral. Even though he wasn’t Catholic, my mom was raised in the Catholic Church where open casket viewings were the norm. She thought it would give us all a chance to say goodbye, which we did. But it didn’t ease the pain like I expected.
I wanted to be able to tell him how much he meant to me, that I was glad he wanted to be my dad. But I think he knew.
During my last visit home, before I was leaving, he took me aside and told me how proud he was of me and the man I had become. It was overwhelming and I didn’t know how to respond except to say thank you. We hugged and I went back to gathering my things to leave. If only I had known it would be our last moment together.
I had always wanted a dad and when I got one, I truly believed that I got the best one. And now he was telling me that he was actually proud of me. We always said “I love you” to each other at the end of all of our phone conversations.
I finally realized we had said the things that needed to be said. He knew how important he was to me. And I knew how important I was to him.
We may not have shared a bloodline but he raised me like I was one of his own kids. I couldn’t have asked for a better father.
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