As we finished the prayers, I looked out the window and saw the first snowflakes dancing from the sky. The front edge of the storm pushing in from Canada had arrived. That’s when we heard the angels sing. The voices came from far down the hall, growing louder as they neared us. A group of hospital volunteers
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was strolling the halls of this saddest of all wings, where battles are surrendered and life meets its inevitable end, pausing at each door to sing a Christmas carol.
Outside Dad’s room, they sang “Silent Night,” their soothing voices surrounding us like an embrace. I liked the idea of Dad drifting off to something so peaceful. “All is calm, all is bright . . .”
We thanked them; then Tim asked, “Do you know Ave Maria? Our father was very devoted to the Blessed Mother. It would mean a lot.” The lead caroler apologized; they had not rehearsed it. We thanked them again and turned back to Dad. The carolers must have reconsidered because from behind us came their voices once more, as warm and burnished as polished mahogany. As the first snowstorm of the winter swirled outside, dusting the world in white, they sang the song our father loved most. It was hard not to smile, and not to cry a little, too.
As the afternoon slipped away, the life-giving oxygen in my father’s bloodstream slipped away with it. The numbers on the monitor continued to fall. 64 . . . 57 . . . 45. At 40, Peg broke the silence to say, “They don’t get much lower than this.” His heart, however, beat steadily on, and his blood pressure remained strong. Even in unconsciousness, he continued to draw slow, even breaths. My father was defying the predictions of a quick death.
At 6 P.M., we made a group decision. Tim and Marijo would go home and tell Mom. It was something we all dreaded, but in the end she would prove herself once again the tough old bird, accepting the news stoically. I suspect she knew before any of us that her husband would not be coming home. Mike and I would stay behind and sit with Dad. Even though he was in a deep coma now, we would not risk him dying alone. For the next two hours, the two of us sat there mostly in silence, watching Dad breathe.
Finally I said, “Why don’t you go home and get some rest. I’ll call if anything changes.” I wanted to give my brother a break; he looked exhausted. But mostly I wanted to sit alone with my
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father for a little while longer. Mike agreed to my offer, but first I walked to the cafeteria, ordered a bowl of soup, and called Jenny to bring her and the children up to date.
After I was done eating, I returned to the room and sent Michael home. Standing beside the bed, I let my eyes travel from my father’s face to the snow outside. Now that there was no turning back, I no longer felt so helpless or inconsolable, nor did death seem so terrifying. Just the opposite. If anything, it felt peaceful. Peaceful and almost . . . beautiful. As natural a part of life’s rhythm as a baby’s first breath or a butterfly’s inaugural ascent from the cocoon. Standing there, I thought about spring’s glide into summer, and summer’s march to autumn, and the reliable promise of dawn in every setting sun. I thought about the old maple tree that fell in the yard and the young garden that flour-ished in its footprint. Mostly I thought about Dad and the exem-plary life he had led—and, for all our differences, the indelible mark he had left on me.
Michelle stuck her head in the door to say she was going home for the night. “I’m going to miss your dad,” she said.
“He thought the world of you,” I told her, and she hugged me.
Her replacement on the night shift was a young, extraordi-narily gentle man named James. He had black hair, brown skin, a white smile, and an almost beatific presence. “Is there anything I can bring you?” he asked.
“No,” I said, then reconsidered. “Actually, yes. Could I borrow a pen and a pad of paper?”
“Our father was many things,” I wrote as I sat on the bed beside him, my leg touching his. Then I began to list them: son, brother, husband, father, grandfather. Engineer, mathematician, war veteran, scout leader, volunteer. Stamp collector, gardener, sailor, classical music buff. Faithful Catholic. I looked up at him lying peacefully in the netherworld between life and death, and wrote,
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“Mostly he was a good guy. A good and sensitive and gentle man.”
Without intending to, I had begun to write the eulogy I would deliver at his funeral the next week.
I scribbled it all down on the pad, describing his itinerant childhood and the French teacher who helped him find his way to college and a future he had never dreamed possible. I mentioned his double deferment after Pearl Harbor and his decision to enlist anyway. I wrote how he returned from the war with four years of Sunday church collections in his pocket and how that serendipi-tously led him to my mother. I joked about his engineer’s sense of precision and his quirky affection for chopsticks.
I told the story of Dad’s Rube Goldberg invention for storing the Mary Ann during the winter, designing and building a series of braces and pulleys to haul it up into the rafters above where he parked his car. Just before the inaugural test of his boat-lifting invention, he looked over at me, his junior assistant and tool fetcher, and said brightly, “One decimal point off, Johnny boy, and there goes the Buick.” He knew he had the decimal point right, but he wanted me to know that even small, innocent mistakes can lead to major consequences.
I wrote until I was out of things to say, then I folded the pages and pushed them into my pocket. “Well, Dad,” I said, brushing my fingers through his white fringe of hair. “It’s been quite an adventure.” I let my fingers trace over his eyebrows and down the slope of his nose. “I’m going to miss you.”
At eleven o’clock, Tim returned with Elizabeth, and I retreated to the lounge down the hall with a blanket and pillow.
The next thing I knew Elizabeth was shaking me. “Come quick,”
she said. “Daddy’s eyes open.”
When I got to the room, his eyes were indeed open, but they were vacant. His heart rate was dropping and his breathing, which had been slow and steady all night, now came in short gasps separated by eternally long silences. Tim and I squeezed his arms and talked to him even though we knew he could not hear. He
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exhaled one final deep breath, and Tim and I both looked at the monitor. The green line made one last bump and then traveled flat across the screen. James the nurse must have been watching the same line from his station down the hall because he appeared behind us and said in the gentlest voice, “He’s gone.” A few minutes later, a doctor I had never seen before arrived and listened with a stethoscope. Time of death: 1:16 A.M., Thursday, December 23, 2004.
We walked out of the hospital and into an undisturbed snowscape that managed to make even grimy Pontiac—the city where my father was born and where, eighty-nine years and two weeks later, he had died—appear impossibly beautiful. Three inches of virgin snow covered everything, glistening in the streetlights.
There were not even any tire tracks. Somehow it felt perfect, as if the heavens had conspired to wrap my father and all that he had touched in a shroud of purity and goodness and grace.
In Dad’s Buick, I pulled out onto Woodward Avenue and led the way through the still-falling snow, Tim and Elizabeth following behind. I took it slow, peering through the beating wiper blades to follow the road beneath its unmarred white blanket. It was 3 A.M. when I slid beneath a comforter on the couch in the basement and fell into a deep and dream-filled sleep.
Chapter 36
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Iawoke before dawn and tiptoed into the kitchen, closing the door behind me so as not to disturb the others. I made coffee and called the airline to try to change my flight, which was scheduled to leave in a few hours. It was hard to believe that I had been so bullishly confident Dad would be fine while I skipped out for a few days. The last eighteen hours did not quite seem real, and I paused to remind myself I had not simply
dreamed them. Now here I was, holding on the line, hoping to get some kind of bereavement consideration. I wanted to push the flight back one day, flying home on Christmas Eve. When the customer service agent finally came on, I explained my circumstances. “My father died five hours ago,” I said. “I need to help plan his funeral today.” She told me she was sorry for my loss but she couldn’t rebook my flight without charging a penalty. The Christmas Eve flights were running nine hundred dollars a ticket. Supply and demand. I felt what little spirit that was left in me drain away.
Then she said: “What city are you flying out of again?”
“Detroit,” I said.
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“You’re in luck,” she told me. “That airport has declared a ground snow emergency, which means we don’t expect people to make it there. I can rebook you tomorrow at the same price, no penalty.”
My heart leaped, and only then did I realize how badly I missed Jenny and the kids and needed to get back to them. I looked out the window at the uninterrupted snowscape emerging in the gray light and had to smile. I did not believe in miracles, not in the literal way my parents did, but I couldn’t resist the idea that my father had performed his first. I snickered at the thought that his very first order of business upon arriving at heaven’s gate was to dial in a snowstorm so John could change his flight without a penalty and get home to his family for Christmas. My famously frugal father would have just hated to see a perfectly good airline ticket go to waste.
When Mom awoke, she asked, “Did Dad die?”
“Yes, Mom,” I said, wrapping my arms around her. “About one-fifteen this morning.”
“Oh,” she said.
After breakfast, Marijo and I went into his closet and picked out a gray suit, light blue shirt, and striped tie. From the box I had made him, I pulled out his General Motors forty-year service pin with the tiny diamond and attached it to the lapel of the jacket. Marijo retrieved his grandfather’s rosary, which we agreed belonged in his hands. Then with Michael we drove to the funeral home, picked out a casket that we thought fit his personality—
modest but of solid hardwood—and planned the service.
Later that afternoon, we sat with Mom and paged through old photo albums for a slide show that would run at his viewing.
It was therapeutic for all of us, and Mom enjoyed looking through the snapshots of their life together. I feared they might make her sad, a reminder of all that had been and was now gone, but her eyes brightened and she launched into her chestnuts. “Oh, there’s Irene O’Brien. Did I tell you about the time we fell into the river?”
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She had, many times, but we sat and listened intently as if it were the first telling. Then we reached the photos of us as kids and teenagers, and we managed to laugh at our bad haircuts and cringe-worthy fashion statements from the sixties and seventies.
We picked out a representative selection, starting with a photo of Dad as a toddler, then as a young boy, teen, college student, navy lieutenant, bachelor, newlywed, new father, retiree. It ended with a photo of him walking Elizabeth down the aisle at Our Lady of Refuge that summer. We marveled at how handsome he looked in his twenty-fifth-anniversary GM portrait, the young executive with the pinnacle of his career still ahead of him. And at how beautiful Mom was in her early twenties with her lustrous hair parted on the side and swept back behind one ear. As we sorted through a lifetime of memories, the passage of time was palpable. My parents’ chapter was all but closed now, collapsing into the dust of memory.
Dad had wanted me to spend Christmas with my own family, and the next day that is what I did, flying home to Pennsylvania in time for Christmas Eve dinner. He had been right; it was where I belonged, and it never felt so good to be back. The day after Christmas, just as the sun was peeking over the white pines, Jenny and I packed the kids, the dog, and our best clothes into the minivan and left on the same ten-hour drive Tim and I had made not quite two weeks earlier.
Six priests and a bishop concelebrated the funeral Mass, with Father Vin giving the homily, portraying Dad in saintly terms that surely would have embarrassed him. Mom sat stoically in the front row, weeping only once. Tim read two passages from the Bible, Marijo announced a list of intentions, and Michael gave a brief history of Dad’s life. Then it was my turn and I stood on the altar and gave the eulogy I had written in the hospital room. As I spoke, I looked out and saw the faces from my childhood. Old neighbors and classmates and long-forgotten acquaintances. Rock was there, and Sack, and Tommy’s mother, Mrs. Cullen, herself
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a widow of just two months. Afterward, she told me Tommy sent his best from Arizona.
There was another group at the funeral I had not known about. A group of men, most of them about my age, who belonged to a men’s prayer group my father had started. Once a month they got together for prayer and fellowship. Thirty of them had shown up in matching dark suits to serve as pallbearers, and it was instantly obvious my father had meant a great deal to them.
The sight of them lined up two abreast to escort my father’s casket down the center aisle to the altar was moving. For me, it was also painful, for in them I saw the son he surely wished I could have been—the kind who embraced and shared his rever-ence and devotion. As one by one they filed past me in the receiving line, shaking my hand and telling me how much they admired my father and what a spiritual inspiration he had been to them, I could not help feeling my failings. With each of them, he enjoyed the relationship he could only dream of with me, one that did not need to be censored or sanitized or danced around. One he could embrace openly without fear of a son’s squirming rejection.
Long ago, he had stopped sharing that part of himself with me, and I had been grateful that he had. We had both come to realize that religion, that grand unifying force that should have been the healing, binding balm that cemented our family, was the single most painful strain on it. When I looked at these men of certitude and shared belief, I could not help seeing the adult son my father had finally, after years of struggle, conceded I would never be.
After the funeral, and the lunch hosted by the women’s altar society, and the drive to Ann Arbor to lower my father’s casket into the earth beside the grave of his long-departed infant daughter, Tim and I decided to fire up the snowblower. Our longtime neighbor, Les Schoonover, had shown up unannounced the morning of Dad’s death to plow out the driveway, one of countless small acts
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of kindness that touched us as a family and made me realize the greatest comfort to the grieving comes not from words but from actions. But more snow was threatening, and from his hospital bed Dad had urged us to start up the snowblower and make sure it was ready for the coming winter.
In the garage, we checked the oil, topped off the gasoline, and set the choke. Michael would be taking over Dad’s snowblowing duties now, but he was perhaps the least mechanical person on the planet, and Tim and I knew we needed to show him how to run it. When it came time to start it, we were stumped. Somewhere was an electric ignition button, but it eluded us. We searched and searched and finally paused to scratch our heads.
“Hold on,” I blurted out. “Let me go ask—” I stopped short, catching myself. We stood looking at each other, our breath vaporizing in the cold air.
“Dad,” Tim said, finishing the sentence for me. “That was my first thought, too. Ask Dad.”
“He’s really gone,” I said. “It’s just now sinking in.”
Tim and I had both lived independently for years, but always in the back of our minds we had known our father was there if we needed him. For a loan or career advice or handyman tips or life guidance or a place to move back to if all else failed. No longer.
The paternal safety net was officially and permanently cut away.
It was our turn now.
“Come on,” Tim said, “we can figur
e this out.” And we eventually did, locating the button in a hiding place beneath the carburetor. The snowblower roared to life, ready for another season.
Chapter 37
o
The months passed. Winter’s snows surrendered to
spring’s trumpet call. The forsythia bloomed with ex-
ceptional vigor that year, followed by the cherry trees and azaleas and redbuds. Our backyard hens hatched out a clutch of chicks, and the wild rabbits emerged from the woods with their babies to stage nightly raids on the vegetable garden.
The Canada geese again flew north in V-formation. Like I knew it would, life marched on.
Three days after my father’s death, as we prepared to bury him, a human tragedy of unimaginable proportions struck halfway around the world. A tsunami off the coast of Sumatra sent a giant wall of water cascading across the Indian Ocean at the speed of a jet plane, claiming an estimated 150,000 lives and dis-placing millions. And yet my siblings and I barely registered it at the time. Enmeshed in our own grief and personal loss, we somehow did not even notice this indiscriminate extinction of human life. Now, months later, it offered a valuable contrast to our own experience. People die every minute of every day; sometimes they
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die in vast numbers without warning, sometimes in horrific and terrifying ways, sometimes decades before their time. My father had lived a long and healthy life. He had remained vital and physically strong until the final few months, and mentally sharp until the end. As deaths go, his was a gentle and peaceful one, surrounded by his children. He had had time to put his affairs in order without too much time to linger, and he left this world believing it was just the warm-up act, that the true journey, the real reward, still awaited him. Not such a bad way to exit a full and worthy life.