In Memoriam

It was on random morning in January, 2004, that I woke up preoccupied with my father’s eulogy. What would I say about him? What would I miss? The fact that my father was still alive was of little consequence to my inner dialogue, which fretted over how to sum up a man who in some ways I hardly knew and yet was of profound importance to me.

It wasn’t until I was fully awake, having responded to the babies’ morning cries, fed them, changed, them, gotten them dressed, that I began to absorb the moroseness of waking up thinking about my father’s death. I couldn’t recognize it then as a premonition. I was ignorant, and blissfully so.

Sure, I knew he’d fallen off the wagon. I knew his drinking had been growing steadily worse, but the man had been an alcoholic for years, then sober for most of my life. He’d only started drinking again a couple years earlier and, while I was irritated by his return to the bottle, I wasn’t as worried as I suppose maybe I should have been.

I called him on his birthday – Feb. 24 – to offer to bring the babies out to see him. I wanted to have dinner. He said he was sick, sorry, not this year. I was disappointed, but didn’t think much of it.

Then, near the middle of March, I came home one day and saw St. Francis Medical Center on my caller ID. No message. The only reason I’d ever heard of St. Francis was that my father had been there once a couple of years earlier when he’d had what he was calling pneumonia (I wouldn’t find out until much later that he had actually fallen while drunk and punctured his lung). Something was wrong.

I called my mother. Despite their divorce twenty-some years ago, she usually had a handle on what was happening with him. “Is daddy in the hospital?” I asked. She didn’t know anything. This reassured me for the split second before she suggested that maybe I should call the hospital back to find out.

I called. He was there. The nurse said, simply, “He is doing better.” Better than what? She suggested that I try to speak to his wife about what had happened.

I called his wife. She was shocked that I had found out. I went to the hospital. He was in Intensive Care and was not himself. “Please,” his wife begged when she arrived, “don’t be mad at me. He didn’t want me to call anyone.” But who was to know what he wanted? He was only occasionally conscious, and when he spoke, it was often to ask where the train was headed.

I asked the doctor what he was on, why was he so out of it? “He’s not on anything,” the doctor said to me, a mix of confusion and pity on his face. “That’s how he is now.” He went on to explain that once his liver could no longer process the alcohol, it had begun to poison his brain. Soon his organs would begin shutting down one by one. This is it, I thought. It’s over.

All that was left to do was abide by his wishes for no heroic measures and to spend as much time by his side as I could. In one of his more lucid moments, I came out and asked him, “Daddy, did you call me? From here?” He told me yes. How he had dialed the phone, let alone remembered my phone number, will always be a mystery.

The days blurred together. He wouldn’t eat. We moved him to hospice care. I brought the babies, just nine months old, to see their grandfather one last time. I yelled in his face to wake him up, desperate for him to know that they were there, desperate for him to be there, if only for a second.

On March 18, 2004, around two in the morning, he took his last breath. I like to think he waited until St. Patrick’s Day had passed so as not to tarnish one of our favorite holidays.

And so, every St. Patty’s Day I raise a toast to an incredibly smart and selfish man. The man I miss more in death than I ever did in mere absence. The irony of toasting him with the very thing that killed him is not lost on me. He would approve.