FATHERHOOD | FAMILY | DEATH

My Father’s Death and The Craziness That Surrounded It

One family’s experience

June 11, 1992, my ringing phone woke me around 3:30 AM. I jumped out of bed and quickly answered it, fearing something was wrong.

My mother was on the other end of the line, frantic. “Oh my God, oh my God, I think Sidney is dead!”

While I came to my senses, she continued, “He hadn’t felt good when he went to bed. I think he’s dead. Oh, he’s so cold. I think he’s — ”

“ — I’ll be right up,” I said and hung up the phone. Quickly I pulled on a skirt and T-shirt and woke Natalie, my seven-year-old daughter who’d been tucked in bed beside me.

Not wanting to leave her alone, fearing she might wake and find the house empty and freak out, I took her with me across the road.

My mother unlocked the front door and let us in.

The house was already abuzz when I entered. Nellie, Mom’s female boarder, was in the kitchen along with my ten-year-old daughter, Kimberly. Her nine-year-old brother remained on the foldout sofa in the dining room where he and his sister had been spending the night.

I placed Natalie down beside her brother.

Wasting no time, I rushed into my parents’ downstairs bedroom off of the dining room. The overhead bedroom light was on. My seventy-three year old father was on his back, pale, his chest not moving. I knew he was dead. “We gotta call someone,” I turned and said to my mother.

“Who?” she asked. “Who do we call?”

I was thirty-three, I’d never dealt with death before, “The doctor, I guess. Get his number.”

My sixty-three year old mother ran and grabbed the phone book.

I looked up the family doctor’s number and phoned him. Then did as he’d instructed me and called an ambulance.

My mother turned on the kitchen light, unlocked the backdoor and we waited.

All of us stood in the kitchen with my dead father in the bedroom. Not one of us thought to go sit beside him to hold his hand, or say goodbye.

Once the paramedics arrived, we were not permitted to enter the bedroom or watch as they removed his body.

My mother and I remained in the dining room where she kept talking, almost like she was thinking out loud, “I think he was already dead. Already dead when I crawled into bed beside him and went to sleep. I think he was dead then. He was so cold. So cold. But he was often so cold. I didn’t think anything of it.” She kept repeating it over and over.

I didn’t ask. Did you think to check if he was breathing?

Not until my daughter Kimberly was an adult and I was writing this, did I ask her about what she remembered of that night.

She told me she’d been awakened by her grandmother and the boarder, Nellie, talking by the foldout sofa, where she and her brother were sleeping.

She overheard the adults trying to figure out how to tell if her grandfather was dead.

Nellie suggested they stick him with my mother’s diabetic lancing device to see if he bled.

But the ten-year-old got up, walked into the bedroom, remembered the first aid she’d learned in swim lessons and went over to her grandfather and checked for a pulse. Finding none, she told the adults her grandfather was dead. That’s when my mother phoned me from the phone on the wall, in the dining room, above the sofa where my children had been sleeping.

The night of my father’s death my mind raced with what needed to be done. All the plans for that day had instantly changed.

The previous evening before I’d gone to bed, I had spent hours labelling and packing my artwork to deliver to the Gallery Shop at The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. I noted that I’d have to call and cancel that appointment.

The one thing I hadn’t needed to do was figure out how to break the news to my children, since they were present and experiencing it all as it unfolded.

“Your sister,” my mother said, “you need to call Kathleen.”

“She’s at Maria’s. I’ll have to call her there.” I headed over to the phone.

After breaking the news to my sister, around 5 AM I drove to Maria’s house to pick her up. My sister was unable to drive since she had recently lost her license from a DUI. At that time, she spent a lot of time at our friend Maria’s place when her husband, Stu was away at sea and Kathleen’s son stayed with his father’s relatives.

I arrived back at our childhood home with my sister, one task accomplished.

The next task was to get my husband who was out at sea, home. Once the office opened at Deep Sea Trawlers, I called to get a message to the Endeavour, the scallop dragger my husband was on.

He wouldn’t arrive until the next morning at 5:00 AM, telling me how he had to get in a survival suit, be attached to a rope, and be lowered into the water so they could transfer him to another ship on its way into port.

My mother, sister and I and my children, along with the boarder lady, all sat at the kitchen table, stunned and shocked by the death.

Even though he’d been sick lately, experiencing lots of nausea, wearing compression stockings for his swollen legs, we had thought little of it. He was always complaining of feeling unwell, in one way or another. Usually, it was the back pain that had ended his working over twenty years earlier.

Deep down, I’d been aware his death could happen at any time. He’d turned seventy-three in February — his last birthday. I regretted not acknowledging how sick he’d been. But he had complained so much I ignored it and avoided him.

He died alone.

Probably died while I was sitting at home typing up the information for my artwork. Busy in my own life. How had I not known someone so close to me was dying?

The evening had been so ordinary. Just another day.

I couldn’t recall the last time I saw him. Hadn’t known it’d be the last conversation. How many times had I gone into the house, my childhood home, and walked past him, and paid him no attention?

I regretted that I couldn’t go back and change things.

We wanted to know what caused his death.

My sister and I accompanied our mother to their family doctor’s office, and we were beyond shocked when he said, “He was in the late stage of congestive heart failure.”

None of us had known.

“I wanted him in the hospital,” the doctor said. “He refused to go. He knew he was dying.”

At that instant, I wanted to scream. He knew was dying! Knew, and chose not to tell his family! To not allow us to say our goodbyes, but to slip silently from this world? How could he? I was furious.

And then I was angry at myself for missing all the signs: the swollen ankles and legs, the compression stockings, the nausea and throwing up… but… I kept reassuring myself he was always feeling unwell. How was I to know it was more serious this time?

His lack of appetite had not been unusual. Nor was the laboured breathing from his many years of smoking and his previous lung surgery where surgeons had removed one third of his lung. He had angina for years. But never had there been any mention of heart failure.

I thought of the arguments my father and I had over the years. Sometimes physical altercations where I’d push or shove him away if he tried to grab a hold of me. Tried to go for my throat.

He’d fall to the ground, hold onto his back, or in later years his heart and he’d act like I had severely hurt him and my mother would quickly run to his side, step into his defense and blame me for everything.

In my mother’s eyes, he was always the victim and could do no wrong.

After the visit with the doctor, my mother, sister and I went home until the next appointment at the funeral home.

It hit me how quickly plans can change. Things I thought so important, all fell to the wayside.

At the funeral home, we viewed a variety of caskets. In another room, we sat down to finalize the arrangements. Kathleen and I were shocked to learn our parents’ financial details.

“You always said you and Dad had all your funeral arrangements taken care of,” I turned to face my mother and asked.

“No,” she said.

And I repeated what she’d once told me, “You said you sold that woodland you got in exchange for Roy’s board.”

“That’s all gone. We had to spend it.”

“Okay,” I said. “What do we do now? How do we pay for all this?”

My mother remained silent.

The funeral director offered suggestions and other options. We picked out a reasonably priced casket and decided to accept donations toward the funeral expenses, or donations to the cancer society. Though I wondered why it wasn’t for the Heart and Stroke Foundation.

“And a grave site?” I asked my mother. “Do you have a burial plot?”

“No, we don’t have a plot,” she said, and again I was hit with just how much our parents were unprepared for their deaths. “But we want to be in Newburne,” she said. “Where we’re from.” Newburne, a rural community near the centre of Lunenburg County, twenty miles from Mahone Bay.

At home, I made phone calls to purchase a double burial plot. Since the former older cemetery in Newburne had been filled. We ended up in the St. Matthew’s Lutheran Cemetery, the one the people of the community referred to as the new cemetery, on a corner of land by the paved Newburne Road and the gravel Veinotte Road.

My husband Mike and my cousin Troy, who’d grown up in our family, agreed to split the cost of a double headstone. Mike paid the full amount and my cousin was to pay us his half later, but Troy ended up never paying his share.

We purchased a double headstone so we’d have one less thing to deal with in the future. My mother’s name and year of birth were engraved on the granite stone, her date of her death the only thing left to add. I wondered if it made death more real for my mother? But these were subjects our family never discussed.

I cleaned out my father’s wallet. Took out the usual stuff: a small amount of money, his health card, driver’s license, etc. But I found no pictures of my sister or me. No photos of his wife. Instead, I found even more mystery.

Tucked in an inner section of his wallet, I found a 2 x 3-inch, off-white, stained with brown spots, accordion booklet. Some of the edges were held together with yellowed scotch tape. When I opened the booklet, it folded out into an array of black-and-white pictures. Based on the hairstyles and what little clothing they wore they looked like 1920s silent film stars.

The man and woman were posed in various sexual positions. One quite acrobatic — a standing sixty-nine pose.

The black-and-white porn images didn’t come as much of a shock. As children, my sister and I had found porn magazines under the mattress on our father’s side of the bed. Along with liquor bottles.

On Mother’s side of the bed were four New Testaments and two Bibles. I couldn’t understand why she needed so many. Why she kept them in such an unusual place? She always told us the Bible kept evil away. I wondered what evil could be in her bed.

My hands felt dirty holding open the accordion pornographic booklet.

But then it got even weirder when I found two 2.5 x 3.5-inch professional black-and-white photos of two girls no one in my family knew. The photos looked to be from the early 1960s.

I thought about every new wallet he had over the years. Had he moved these pictures from his old wallet to his new one? How many years had he kept these photos with him? And the biggest question of all, why?

What did these girls mean to our father?

And why since he knew he was dying did he not get rid of these pictures?

How could he leave us with so many unanswered questions?

I felt guilty for feeling a huge relief.

My father no longer being alive was like a breath of fresh air.

I could breathe easier. I no longer needed to hold my breath when walking in my childhood home. No longer needed to tiptoe around him, fearing I’d say or do something to upset him. To trigger his anger, his rage. My life had been spent trying to please my parents. My relationship with them, not so much one of love, but of duty.

The next morning at ten o’clock, I attended the scheduled meeting with the Moorings Art Gallery staff in Mahone Bay, along with the other eight artists involved in the planning of the show for the summer of 1993. A group show of fibre artists, “The Gathering of Nine”. It felt good doing something not funeral related.

At home, it felt good doing mundane, routine tasks. Laundry. Cleaning floors. Preparing meals.

My mother insisted on a church funeral. Though my father had not stepped inside a church in years. Still, she insisted it would be what he wanted. She chose the St. John’s Lutheran church in Mahone Bay. Scheduled a two o’clock service for Saturday June 13.

The regular minister was on vacation. The service would be given by a man none of us had ever met before. A complete stranger would talk about my father’s life.

The grandchildren attended the funeral. Before the service began, before the casket was closed, they viewed their grandfather’s body, saying their final goodbyes. They placed roses and other trinkets in the casket.

When I touched my father’s chest, he felt like a stuffed straw man, so unreal.

My two oldest children understood death more than their little sister. They had often tagged along outside as their grandfather tinkered with things. He helped them pump up their bicycle tires, oil the chain on their bikes. With Mike gone to sea, my father had been their main male companion.

During the service, I laughed at the ridiculousness of it all. My husband nudged me and gave me a look. He leaned over and whispered in my ear not to laugh. I whispered back, “This whole thing is a joke. It’s crazy. He has no idea who my father was.”

And then I realized, neither did I. Who was this man we were burying? We had lived in the same house throughout my childhood. Sat at the same table. Ate meal after meal together. Slept under the same roof. But what did we really know about one another? We were a family of strangers.

It was not a large funeral. A few neighbours, relatives, and a couple people from the Monday night “Adult Children of Alcoholics Group” I attended in Bridgewater, along with two of my closest artist friends came.

The three cousins who grew up in our family, Troy, Margaret and Jamie were there.

Troy with his wife and two daughters. Margaret by herself. The man she lived with not joining her. Jamie showed up with his new girlfriend, half his age. He’d since left the relationship with his other young girlfriend, who he had a child with.

Only our immediate family met back at the house. A gathering so unlike that in the movies.

On the way home we’d stopped and picked up KFC for supper. No one had delivered food for our family. We were on our own.

When leaving the grave site, Jamie had asked to take Troy’s youngest daughter with him and his girlfriend on the drive back to our house. Though hesitant, Troy agreed, despite the history they had between them of Jamie claiming the child was his and not his brothers.

Back at the house, we ate. Sat around and talked.

It had been many years since we’d all been together as a family.

Hours went by. Jamie was more than late. Troy became more and more concerned. “He’s probably kidnapped her,” he said. “Probably still believes she’s his daughter.”

“Maybe the car broke down,” I suggested. “Or he might’ve gotten lost on the back roads. Mike used to get us lost all the time when coming from the drive-in.”

My mother said, “Maybe he took the long way. Showing her around Newburne.”

“I don’t trust him,” Troy said. “I can’t believe he’d pull this stunt.”

We waited and waited until it was almost dark, wondering if we should call the cops.

Then finally Jamie pulled into the driveway, saying he’d had a flat tire and all kinds of other excuses, but none of us believed him.

The tension mounted and the rest of the evening became a blur. Except for a man who had once boarded with my parents. He arrived and pulled our mother aside and spoke to her alone.

After he left, she told us that he said if she needed a man around the house, he’d be happy to come live with her.

I shook my head. It was just more craziness on top of craziness that summed up my family.

But it was over. My father was in the ground. I had no idea what would come next. I just knew life would never be the same.