The day my father died it wasn’t a shock. It was a surprise, but it wasn’t a shock. I had been going to see him 3x/week before that and I knew how sick he was. I just didn’t know how sick he was until that point. When he died, I got the call at 4am, I was in another state, accessible, but still not near enough because he was in quarantine because of covid. I had had odd calls from him the days prior where he kept asking where his grilled cheese was and that “they” were having parties in the “backyard” of the hospital where he was in the isolation ward. For anyone with an elderly parent at the stage in their life when things only make sense to them, you know what I’m talking about. He called a lot of people near the end it seems. I got phone calls after he passed from a number of people telling me he called them and had a lot to tell them. Most of it was incoherent, all of it was heartbreaking.
The doctor who called me at 4am didn’t have any good bedside manner. She called me from outside the room where he was and said the following:
“Your father is dying. His blood pressure is very low. He’s unresponsive. He is very sick. Oh, he’s dead.”
That was how I learned my father had passed. Unemotional, unequivocal, and devoid of any empathy. She simply relayed the facts because she was just too busy to give a shit about him. I had some words for her but she didn’t really seem to care.
I left immediately to the hospital from a state away. I went to his house, collected his car, called one of his best friends who came almost immediately, and we went together to the hospital. He was cold. He was dead. They hadn’t bothered to close his mouth when I went to the ward where he was. I took a picture of him because it would be the second-to-last last time I’d see my father before he was cremated. I didn’t cry. He had been sick for a while and kept it to himself. He had prostate cancer that could have been treated but he was looking for a reason to make us all suffer for his grief that his wife, my mother, had left him years earlier. My parents had been together for 55 years. They met as children as in-laws and they were childhood sweethearts. My mother saved my father in so many ways that I could not even imagine another human being saving another person. If I live to be a thousand years old I could never find another human being who would ever save me as much as my mother saved my father. She nurtured him, she cared for him, she comforted him, she buoyed him, she made him whole in so many ways that I never saw them apart. I wish in my entire life I find a love like the one they had.
So many things about my father’s life astounded me. He told me so many stories about his upbringing and all of them seemed fantastical. All of them were true. He saved people he never met. He met people who saved him. I can only hope to be 1/25 of the man he was. He made a life in a place that wasn’t his and he brought up three boys who despised him in their own way for making them live a life that they didn’t choose in a place that never accepted them.
My father died and I heard from so many people. So many people contacted me and told me how amazing he was. How many lives he touched. How much good he did. I never met anyone with a grievance after he died. Everyone mourned that he was gone. Even months after he passed I had phone calls from people who called me saying they’d just heard he’d passed. All of them loved him.
Near the end, my father was very difficult. He knew what was coming and he was resentful that it hadn’t happened sooner. He missed my mother who’d been gone so many years before and yet, he never was angry at the world for giving him what he had. He was angry that the world made him stay in this one when he could have been with my mother.
I miss my father every day. There are days when I need to tell him something and he’s not here. I miss so many things about my father that could have been said that weren’t and yet, in the end, he left the way he wanted to leave.
