Story of Dad - Part 1

This is the story of how my dad died. Or, rather, my experience of it. I feel the need to state the reason why I am writing about this and posting it. I feel like I've processed my grief. I've been to grieving groups, done writing exercises specifically geared towards processing grief, and spent enough time in reflection of it all to feel complete about the whole thing. Yet, when I think about doing anything creative I get stuck on this. My dad, my relationship with him, his getting sick, and his dying has somehow stopped up my creative flow. I feel a need to get it out of me and out there.

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So I'll begin.

I was thinking I could begin the story with...

Eric knocked on my bedroom door... It was our senior year in college, we lived with 3 other people in a Vegetarian Co-op we had called Figrund, a name derived from the digits of our phone number. I had painted a big sign that hung on the front porch that read, "Figrund Vegetarian Co-op." We had house meals every Wednesday, rotating who would be doing the cooking, and we'd each invite a guest to come to dinner. It was fun. He and another housemate lived downstairs, I and two other housemates live upstairs. It was a goofy house; though it had two kitchens, there wasn't much community space, so we ended up hanging out in Eric's room a lot. He had a big TV and good sound system. Plus, he was fun and often up til the late hours of the night.

There was an Undressed marathon going on at the time. Undressed was a TV show on MTV or some similar station. It really was a bad show, but we loved it. On any episode there were always three story lines going on, one taking place in high school, one in college, and one 20-somethings. The story would follow the characters until they got "undressed," the significance of which varied a bit depending on their age. We rationalized that it was an okay show to watch because there were gay couples, unattractive couples, etc. You know, they weren't all just attractive straight couples. The producers were trying to be open-minded, or probably just trying to avoid criticism.

It was late, probably one o'clock or so in the morning, maybe even a little later, and I had gone upstairs to my room. I don't recall what I was doing. Perhaps I was wasting time on my computer, perhaps I was getting ready for bed, or perhaps I was even watching QVC or more Undressed on my little TV with the purple spot in the corner. I do have the vague sensation though of being in my bed when Eric knocked on the door so I vote for watching television. I had never had a TV in my bedroom before, it was quite a novelty.

"Dude, your uncle is on the phone." Or maybe it was, "Dude, the phone is for you. It's your uncle."

But this would make for a story that wouldn't leave me feeling complete. So I'll back up.

Without referencing old emails and letters from my dad, the earliest memory I have of him being on chemotherapy was while I was away at military training in Maryland. It was in July or August, the summer of 2000. I recall speaking with him on the phone when I was on break, in the breakroom, at school. The breakroom had four walls of floor to ceiling windows, so that the instructors and drill sergeants could keep an eye on us privates and specialists without being in the room. There were rows and rows of benches suitable for perhaps sixty people to sit on closely together. But there weren't 60 people in there right then. There were just a couple of classes in there, so perhaps 15 or 20 people. More and more people were coming in though as it was the end of the day.

If I recall correctly, my dad was telling me about the vacation that he, my mom, and my siblings had taken. They had gone perhaps to Michigan, and he was telling me it had just been awful and they'd come back early. He was so tired. From the chemo. And it was scary because you know your immune system is down. So no fruits that you can't peel with your hands, because germs live on the skins. And even cutting off the skin would push the germs into the flesh of the fruit. He could still eat his daily banana. Dad was a daily banana eater. But he had been so tired from the chemo they came home early. It sounded like everyone had a rotten time.

I still don't think it was real for me though. Afterall, I was learning to fix guns while wearing uniform--totally out of touch with the reality of my homefront.

I went home very briefly after training, but I was already a day or two late to school so I would not have spent much time there. I have patches of memories of him being sick and having symptoms but I'm not sure when they are from. It must have been though in the few days between training and going back to school that he and I went for a run because it was warm out.

I thought I would make this a separate post, a separate story, but maybe it does fit here. My dad had always been a larger than life creature to me. He was strong and athletic, intelligent and astute. He seemed to know something about everything without being a know-it-all. There was a time when he could do no wrong in my eyes. That time lasted much longer for me than it probably does for most children.

I mentioned growing up on a lake. The swimming leg of the local triathlon was held on our lake. In the years my dad did triathlons, I would sit on the couch, or perhaps out on our pier, and watch him swim through binoculars. We had really large and heavy binoculars, I think they may be from my uncle from the Vietnam war. I could be wrong about that. I enjoyed watching my dad swim in the herd of thrashing arms. I knew his stroke well, I had no problem spotting him, because I had watched him swim back and forth across the lake. I always wanted to swim across the lake too, but I was afraid I may not make it. I was afraid of the seaweed that might rub on my belly while swimming, and afraid of letting my feet drop down past the termoclime if I had to pause while swimming.

I recall him coming back from runs with his friends. Three large sweaty male bodies stretching on our living room floor talking about the run and what they were about to eat. Dad would ask me if I wanted to run with him, and I always said no. I'm not sure of my age, but that had always been my response probably all through high school. I knew I wasn't fast and I'd feel insecure or something silly like that running with him at my pace, slowing him down.

How silly of me, I now think.

When he was running ultramarathons, I just thought he was the coolest thing. My favorite running shirt of his? On the back it had two definitions, printed in the font and style of a dictionary entry. "Marathon: the first half of a race. Ultramarathon: a real race." Or something like that. I still have it. I want to make all of his running shirts into a quilt. I will eventually make the time for this.

There did come a time though when he asked if I wanted to go running and I said, "no, but I'll bike with you while you run." So that is what we did. He ran around the lake, and I biked at his side. We conversed about...well, anything imaginable. He knew something about everything and I was well on my way. :) Certainly, I found most anything he said interesting, larger than life though he was.

I recall driving home with my mom one time, and we saw Dad running. He wasn't far from home, but he looked terrible. We stopped and he got in. I think he had been doing a 20 mile run or something and, well, I guess that's what happens when you run that far. He hit that wall people talk about.

There were a few times when I was in college that we ran together. He wasn't running as regularly anymore, he had developed a problem with his ankle after a 50-mile run one day and a karate tournament the next, and so we were compatible runners. These were awesome times. He would watch me run and critique my form. I would tell him about aches and pains in my body and he would give me suggestions about how I needed to change how I was holding my body. He would be always giving me cues about how to run. After he died, whenever I'd run, I'd have his voice in my ear whispering, "drop your shoulders, relax your wrists, square your chest, let your legs turn under you..." I wonder if I wrote these down anywhere. I feel like I've come to do all these things so much now that I don't hear his voice anymore.

It might have been at that time between training and school, or maybe some weekend I went home, when we went for a run. But I did the running and he did the biking. He was too weak from the chemo to run. I recall some obnoxious boys of the junior high variety saying something about how we were moving really slow. How little people often know about what is actually going on. That is why you should always leave generous tips, even when you get crappy service. You never know what someone else is going through. You don't know who in their family just died, who was diagnosed, or who was the victim of some violence.

But the scary part, the sobering part, was not the boys. It was when we crossed some train tracks. Maybe you haven't been on a bike in a long time, so I'll explain this carefully. When crossing train tracks on a bike, it's important to cross them perpendicularly. If you hit them at too oblique of an angle, your wheel will get stuck in the groove and you'll fall. My dad knew this, of course, he'd done triathlons, and had ridden bikes for years and years. But there is a part of the route around the lake that involves going out on a busier street, and running and riding parallel to the traffic a bit. The train tracks intersect with this road on an angle. If you can imagine the scene, there are cars rushing by and train tracks that you are approaching at an angle. So somehow my dad tripped up the bike tires in the train tracks and fell. Not a big deal to anyone. Except anyone on chemo with the appropriately weakened immune system. He had skinned his hands. Again, not a big deal. Unless you were a person who couldn't eat fruit unless it had a peel.

He was a man who routinely broke bricks with his knifehand and had ran distances longer than I care to sit in a car. He had the most awesome nunchaku form, complete with sound effects and facial expressions. Though humble, he was show-off. Why did he run so far? "Because I can," he'd say.

But here, on a bike, on a route that had just a few years before been too short a distance to warrant getting sweaty over, I saw him humbled in a way that was difficult to digest. It took me a bit to understand the pained and worried expression on his face, the tenseness in his body. It was difficult for me to grasp that a scrap on the skin of his hand could be all the invitation a deadly bacteria would need.

If it hadn't become clear before then, it was clear in that moment. I felt nauseous. It was clear to me that my dad was sick. Very sick. This wasn't something far out there anymore, in the future, something I might have to deal with at some point. It wasn't pretend. It was reality. He was sick. And death at any time was a real possibility.
But it's challenging to go through life, living for the future, knowing there could be a very long future out there, while also realizing that at anytime, the last time I talked to him could be the last. And so still I tended to ignore that this was the reality of my life.

But sometimes it was hard to ignore. When I was home over winter break Dad had pneumonia. When he'd cough, I didn't know how I could handle it emotionally. He was a person who had never been sick. Occasionally, he'd have a cold, of course, and he'd stay home from work and sleep a lot. But he never took aspirin or ibuprofen or anything. He had always been robustly healthy and extremely fit. But now, the lymph nodes in his armpits had been collecting all the cancerous cells in his blood. They were overflowing into his lungs. Whenever he'd shift position, the fluid in his lungs would move and trigger a cough. This was in addition to the pneumonia. I was working on a 750 piece puzzle of with no borders, a repeating pattern of goldfish, and 5 extra pieces. I loved it, though I didn't finish it til I got back to college. But I would sit in the dining room working on this, grimacing as Dad would cough on the couch. He was trying to reach his doctor or nurse on the phone. He remarked that he hated how this, this illness, had become his hobby.

One time over winter break he and I took the train into the city together. This reminded me of the summer after my senior year in high school when I had the job of cleaning pay phones. My cousin and I drove an Ameritech car around, parking in loading zones, hunting the free Snapple giveaway vans, and scrubbing outdoor payphones in preparation for the 1996 Democratic Convention. That summer, I would take the train into the city every morning wth my father. A couple times a week, when we left home with time to spare, we would stop at the local bakery and pick up a donut or sweet roll. This was when I learned to drink my coffee black. There is no reason to sugar it if you were eating it with something sweet. Dad's favorite was apricot or apple sweet rolls, his one unhealthy habit. I say sweet roll because that is what he called them, I'm not sure if that is their official name. I'm referring to those individual-sized coffee cake-like things. I already knew his favorites because the bakery was a few doors down from the karate dojo. He would give my sister and me money after Saturday morning karate classes and she and I'd go get smiley faced cookies, or a donut, and a sweet roll for him. Some of my happiest memories of him and my sister are Saturday morning karate classes.

On that winter trip on the train though, I don't recall if we had stopped for sweet rolls or not. We had parked the car in the adjacent lot and walked to the train. Except we didn’t just walk to the train. I walked. Dad lagged behind. I had to wait for my Dad. There were a few reasons for this in addition to the usual fatigue that would accompany having chemotherapy. One was the fluid and pneumonia that occupied his lungs didn’t allow him to take full breaths of air. This was again challenging for me. He had had the largest lung capacity of anyone I knew. You think I’m exaggerating for the sake of the story? Nope. At rest, he took an average of 2- 2 ½ breaths a minute. This was the result found in some exercise physiology test he had taken. My mom will still remark that she’d look over at him sometimes when he’d be sleeping and wonder if he was breathing or not because he’d breath so slowly.

Another reason was that, and I think it was a side effect of the chemo, his red blood cell count was low. Mom would give him shots of something to boost this, but it was low. And so he had less hemoglobin in his blood to bind with useful oxygen. Oxygen needed for such things as walking.When we were aboard the train, after a few stops a man got on who knew my dad. I think he may have been a lawyer that he used to work with. My dad didn’t have a high opinion of most lawyers. And I didn’t have a high opinion of this guy.

Dad, to me, looked obviously sick. He was pale, washed out looking. It was difficult, if not impossible for him to smile. He was so tired he was having trouble staying awake on the train. And this guy wouldn’t shut up. He had sat down behind us and was leaning forward against the back of our seats. He kept trying to engage Dad in conversation, expecting Dad to turn around. Dad had retired about two years before, and this guy wanted to know what he’d been up to, why he was going into the city. “Oh, you’re sick? You’re on your way to the doctor? Oh, that’s too bad, I’m sorry to hear that…” And then he’d go on talking. You know that feeling when you are super tired and want to fall asleep, but you’re sitting up and you can’t because someone is demanding your attention, and you can’t leave because there is no place to go? And that feeling becomes physically painful? That is the feeling I got from my dad. I felt so bad and so angry at this insensitive brute behind me. I think I may have said something to make him stop talking, it sounds like something I would have done.

I recall the last Late Night Conversation, also over winter break of my senior year in college,I had with dad. The thought and flittered across my mind, should I record this? There are a limited number of conversations I’m going to have with him. But he would not have appreciated me pointing out his mortality, and so I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t record it. This is why I always want to say to parents, stop recording your kids! Your kids, when they are grown up, will be less interested in seeing themselves blow out their 3 year old birthday candles, and more interested in hearing what you thought about the world. So turn the camcorder around and show them who you are. Because you’ll forget to tell them, or you won’t be around, or time will blur it so much they’ll forget what they know when it is most important for them to remember.

The last conversation I recall having with Dad was over the phone when I was back at school, this would have been Spring Semester my senior year. He had had a good day the day prior, which meant he had enough energy to leave the house. He and Mom (I think) had gone to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I hadn't seen it yet. I didn't see it until after he died. But I do recall what he said about it. Overall, he enjoyed it, but he didn't like how dark it was, you couldn't see all the choreography as well as he would have liked. Also, he thought that the fantasy element and special effects used in the movie detracted from our appreciation of just who incredible some martial artists are in real life.

I'm now distracted by the memory of one of my favorite martial art stories he would retell. I sit here trying to recapture enough of it in my mind to tell it and I'm not sure that I have... Hmm. I will have to work on gathering up the details from the recesses of my mind, all the details have not come to mind yet.

Anne, do you recall the one? There is a gathering of martial art masters of a variety of traditions. The protagonist is at about a blue belt level and is perhaps a practioner of karate. Perhaps he was checking out all the other masters and traditions, trying to figure out if he was in the right one, the best one. He observed an older Tai Chi master drinking tea or something during the day when everyone else was doing some "martial arts" and perhaps thought something deprecating about him.

That night he was awakened from his sleep by a loud, "boom, boom, boom, boom..." The whole building was shaking. He went downstairs to see what was causing this loud noise. And there was the little old Tai Chi master, repeatedly punching the center beam of the house (I don't know why he'd do this), shaking the whole house. The protagonist then decided that Tai Chi was the best martial art and that he should change traditions. But I do believe that the Tai Chi master advised him, essentially, that all roads lead to Rome, and to stay on the path he was on. But I forget the details.