I Still Dream of My Father
I was at a cocktail party. Someone asked me what my father wanted to drink. I was surprised by the question and that I didn’t know the answer. Why hadn’t I seen him drink recently? Had he stopped when he got older? He used to like gin and tonics, maybe an occasional beer, champagne at New Years. Then I woke up. I’d been dreaming. My father didn’t get older; he died 30 years ago at age 68, the age I’ll be at my next birthday.
**
My father grew up poor on a sharecropping farm in Delaware. He did well in school and was the first in his family to go to college, earning a degree in industrial engineering. He wanted a more prosperous life than he had growing up and worked steadily as an engineer and manufacturers’ sales representative. At age 50 he started a successful business and rose to an upper-middle-class life. He provided for his family. He funded college educations for my two sisters and me, and for me to get a PhD in biomedical science. He bought a summer home on Cape Cod and a luxury car. When it came time to retire, he moved to North Carolina and built a large home on a golf course. He had made it.
My father’s financial success gave my family opportunities, and providing money was a comfortable way for him to relate to us. Emotional relationships were more challenging. He was a gregarious but anxious man. He chatted easily with strangers. He enjoyed happy hour banter with his friends, laughing a bit too enthusiastically at his own jokes. He smoked heavily throughout his life and persistently jiggled the change in his pockets.
My father liked problems that were readily solved. He worked on cars and repaired broken appliances, straightforward tasks for an engineer. I was not mechanically inclined and had emotional needs that he struggled to understand or meet. In my early teens, when the blast of hormones and developing sexuality triggered guilt and anxiety, he was challenged to communicate with me about my emotions. His response when I went to him was “don’t worry about it” and to leave the room awkwardly. Issues that couldn’t be solved with money were an enigma for him. When we were adults, my sister and I had a fight over something silly; both of us ended up in tears. When I stormed outside, my father followed me with his checkbook and asked if I needed money. I was incredulous — did he really believe this had anything to do with money? But it was the only way he knew how to respond — putting the situation into a context he could understand. He was uncomfortable with feelings and unable to talk about them, at least with me. His role was providing. Money.
**
The cause of my father’s death was cholangiocarcinoma, cancer of the bile duct. In the late fall of 1988, two years after he retired, he had the warning symptoms: significant weight loss, blood in his stool, and ultimately, his skin turned a pale yellow characteristic of jaundice. Not confident with the medical care in North Carolina, he traveled to Boston to consult a specialist.
As the medical process unfolded over the holidays, my parents stayed in a rented house adjacent to my sister’s, just south of Boston. One night when the family was gathered at my sister’s house, the region was struck by an ice storm, the driveway connecting the two houses frozen slick and treacherous. We strung a rope between the two homes, naively thinking it would provide something for my father and mother to hold onto as they inched from one house to the other in the wind and cold. My brother-in-law accompanied them to help, but he was barely able to remain upright any better than they were. My father looked frail and helpless. The rest of us watched from inside. We all felt helpless.
The Boston physician first did a percutaneous biopsy — sticking a needle through the skin into the liver to sample the liver cells and whatever else might be lurking. The procedure yielded no clues and a subsequent CT scan showed only a vague shadow near the pancreas. Surgery was the next option; the operation took place on January 9. The clinical language of the surgical report can be summarized as “oh shit.” They found that a malignant tumor of the bile duct had spread throughout his upper abdomen and GI system. They took out what they could, closed him back up, and told us he had at most a year to live.
The family convened at the hospital on a sunny but frigid Massachusetts day. We were stunned. My father had just retired; it wasn’t supposed to go this way. After the surgery he was in an anesthesia-induced delirium, talking about losing control of his car while driving down a hill. It was not clear if he knew or understood what they had found. None of us had the nerve to tell him. Instead, we called the surgeon and asked him to talk to my father. My mother, sister, and I waited outside in the hall. I knew I should be in that room, but I was back to watching, removed, as he inched along the icy rope.
He returned to North Carolina and did a palliative course of radiation and chemotherapy to give him a little more time. He slept a lot. He had a brief upturn that summer where he was able to get out and enjoy some of his normal activities, but he deteriorated quickly in the fall. He and I talked about the disease only once during a visit I made in late September. He asked me what cancer was, and I gave him the basics of uncontrolled cell division and metastasis, like a lecture I might give. He considered the information silently.
During my visit, we had a warm and sunny day in North Carolina, although it was cooling quickly in fall afternoon. After playing a few holes of golf, my father and I sat in the cart near the clubhouse. He turned to me and said, “Thank you. I really enjoyed that.” The scene was immortalized in a photo my mother took. I had one leg dangling outside the cart and I sat looking at that foot. It was an awkward moment. We had so much to say and no language to say it. It was the last conversation my father and I had before the pain medications robbed him of coherency.
His last days were numbing. My sisters and I joined my mother in North Carolina and waited. We brought in 24-hour hospice care when we could no longer take care of his needs ourselves. He was unconscious, the morphine barely staying ahead of his pain. He died the morning of December 12, 1989. Although we each spent time sitting at his bedside during the prior few days, the only person in the room with him at the end was a hospice aide. According to the aide, my father’s eyes opened wide in the sunny morning and then shut again for the last time.
The funeral service was held in a small local church. Extended family and friends filled the pews. Immediate family sat up front and my mother held my hand. The minister offered generic platitudes about my father, but nobody who really knew my father spoke. Thirty years later, my sisters and I still regret not giving a eulogy.
**
One of the opportunities my father gave me was to learn to sail. He bought a small sailboat we kept on Cape Cod. Curiously, and he never said as much, he didn’t like to sail — he had never learned to swim and was afraid of the water. The only time I remember sailing together he kept the sails trimmed so loosely that we barely moved. But he liked seeing the boat on its mooring and puttering around on it, fixing all the things that constantly need fixing on a boat. I eventually learned to sail from a neighbor who took me out on Buzzard’s Bay late one hot summer afternoon, with a strong sea breeze blowing in and the tide rushing out. I have a vivid mental image of tacking out with the rail in the water and waves crashing over the bow.
A few years after my father’s death I had another dream. I was sailing alone on the bay, cruising slowly behind Toby’s Island, when I found a white sand beach I’d never seen before. My father was there on the beach by himself, like Robinson Crusoe, repairing a boat that had run up on the sand. He looked like he had been there a while, with long graying brown hair tied in a ponytail. He carried himself with a quiet ease and confidence I never saw in his lifetime. He looked up and acknowledged me, but we did not speak. He gave no indication of distress. I sailed on.
