When Your Father Is Dying

There is a consequence of divorce that is often overlooked.  It

leaves the pages of the family photo album incomplete. My dad

and I sought to remedy that in the early fall of 2008.

We began at the kitchen table over a cup of coffee. Dad was

fiddling with his coffee stirrer and undecided about the pink or

the blue packet of sweetener. His lucidity was fairly strong for a

man of eighty-seven years. It may have ebbed and flowed at

times, but even then it was more akin to the ripples of a small

lake than the ocean tides.

I studied his face. A time would arrive too soon, I realized,

when I would no longer be able to see it, Dad’s ruddy freckled

complexion, his nose so much like Ben’s, and whiskers, sandpaper

like. These were my favorites of Dad’s facial features. Always

clean-shaven to the eye but abrasive to the skin, I never once saw

my dad in moustache or beard. Shuttering at the oneness of what

we, my dad and I, were about to begin together, I felt a chill run

up my spine. This was it, my one free throw. I took

aim.    

"Dad, are you ready to begin?” certain I had begun our last

conversation. It was the season of our reckonings, each of us

in need of something from the other. I needed a dad with whom I

could share a lifetime of memories. Dad, a son to whom

he could impart his legacy. It was as if each walked toward the

other, narrowing the gap between us, as we drew closer to the

middle.

My children called him “Poppy”. I hadn’t ever called him by any

name other than “Dad”-except for on one occasion. When about

thirteen or so, I made the mistake of addressing Dad as “father”.

So completely out of character was his reaction-I had never

before seen him so angry-when he unceremoniously informed

me of his preference to be called “Dad”. He’s always been slow to

anger, a man not given over to outbursts. Perhaps, he thought

“father” cold and distant, a reminder of what he might have

preferred to forget. We had together missed so much of life. He

knew all too well how much more lay ahead. Be that as it may,

Dad remained “avi mori”, my father, my teacher. There had been

none other.

At what was then only the start of my collegiate arrogance, I had

become –already by the tender age of eighteen-“smarter” than

my father. His response was simply not to respond to what he

knew to be my temporal period of egocentricity. It wasn’t until I

became a parent for the first time at twenty-five that I realized

how little of life I understood. Dad called it my “first taste of

wisdom” when a man freely admits how little he understands

rather than foolishly believing in how much he does.”

Things do invariably work themselves out. And now, as my

father’s fifty-five year old son, I’m learning to see him in a new

light.  Meriting the years of a zakein, an elderly man on whose head

wisdom has settled like a crown, he recognizes the subtlety of 

life’s many shades of gray. Enthusiastic about forging our last link

together, Dad enjoyed his time with me and I with him. Did it

make up for all of life we had missed? No, but it did make us

happier at a time in his life when sadness and surrender to

inevitability may otherwise have overwhelmed us.