I just finished making my husband a delicious love-filled Father’s Day breakfast. I toasted him with a cup of strong coffee for being such a wonderful dad to our children. In a few minutes, our daughters will be here to take their daddy on a daylong adventure. They are lucky. They have a really good father. And they know it.
But there is no way they can understand how relatively short their time will be with him. How precious each day is with their father. How one day – and it will seem sudden – this time will be in the past.
I am in the time of life where friends are losing their parents. My husband’s parents are both gone. It’s becoming more and more common to help friends mourn and grieve parents whose passing makes me more aware of how close I am coming to losing mine. In a sense, though, I have already lost my father. And that is what is making this Father’s Day so poignant for me.
My father was a man who was so good it makes my heart swell in my chest just to think of him. Using the word, was, to talk about him feels odd because he is still alive. But he is deep in his disease, Lewy Body Parkinson’s, a disease that causes a type of dementia that eats away at the brain, robbing him of his ability to string coherent thoughts together. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a real conversation with him. He is bedridden except when strong aids can lift him into his wheelchair for a change of position and location within the apartment my mother and he share in Washington DC. He can no longer do anything for himself. Anything. He is fed, cleaned, changed, shaved. Somehow, though, he is still in there, still fighting, still trying to put the pieces together. Not giving up. Choosing to live.
This brilliant man, a prominent New York Surgeon who could do the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, in ink, in under an hour is now unable to respond to simple questions. This man who loved good food, single malt scotch, golf and long walks in the fall, can no longer eat by himself, drink anything other than thickened juices and hasn’t walked for a year.
But today, when I called him to wish him a Happy Father’s Day, he said my name. He said, “I love you.” He said, “I’m waiting for you.” Living across the country makes moments like this excruciating. I want to jump on a plane and sit with him and hold his hand and stroke his brow. I want to rewind the clock and be with him as he was and appreciate every second of time we had together. I want to tell my children, “DON’T ASSUME THAT YOUR DAD WILL ALWAYS BE HERE BECAUSE HE WON’T!”
I want my Dad back.
When I was growing up, my father was something of an elusive celebrity in our house. We knew and loved him because of who he was, but to a great extent through my mother’s hard work at making sure we knew him and he knew us. Most days Dad left the house before any of us were awake and he came home when we were all in bed. My mother would occasionally wake us up and herd us downstairs to sit on Dad’s lap and spend a few sleepy moments with him before going back to bed. She would organize us to be ready for him when he could make it home for dinner with us. We would watch for his car turning into the driveway and greet him at the door with slippers, a cigar, a drink and the paper. While Mom cooked dinner for us all, we sat adoringly around Dad’s chair like a king’s subjects.
Dad’s intelligence and devotion to his career made closeness with him difficult. He was not a cold or distant father. Not at all. He had a demanding career and took his responsibility for supporting nine people seriously. But even when he was with us, it was hard to match his mind, to find a way to be truly, emotionally close to this man we had been conditioned to revere and whose approval became my sibling’s and my holy grail. As the girls began to date, the men we met had to meet certain standards, largely based on the model our father had set for us.
Now, in his diminished mental state, my father is, in an ironic twist, vulnerable and open and completely accessible to us. He depends on our answers, our input, our clarification of things that are confusing him. He depends on our presence, our attention and our love. This disease, which is robbing him of so much that he loved about life, is giving him to us in a way we’ve never had him before.
He gave us so much throughout his life, as he did so many people. He gave his patients and all who encountered him his beautiful, humble spirit. Dad’s file of thank you notes received throughout his career was sizeable. We joking called it the Living Saint file. He received notes from patients, many of whom he treated regardless of ability to pay. Thank you notes from people he had to tell were dying. Thank you notes from family members who appreciated his astonishingly tender care. He was embarrassed by the file but we insisted he keep it.
And now, in this final, selfless act, he is giving us, through his illness, access to him and a chance to prepare for the inevitability of his death. That day is coming soon and I will welcome it for your sake, Dad. But I will miss you even more than I already do. Thank you, Dad. Happy Father’s Day.
Irene Hopkins, a 20-year resident of Queen Anne, now lives on a sailboat in Ballard. Her column appears on the third Wednesday of the month.