And two bad weeks
Thirteen years ago today my father suffered the stroke that would take him down two weeks later…
Day One
The world was spinning as it should; my father still stalked this glorious earth.
The roads were snow covered as I made the drive to see you and mom for the fifth time that January, but I wasn’t complaining. I loved going to see you.
We watched the birds from the kitchen window and shared each other‘s news. I filled the back porch with dry firewood while you and mom played double solitaire. Listening to you as I worked reminded me of the security I felt growing up, hearing the low murmur of your voices in the other room as I’d drift off to sleep.
When it was time to leave, you walked me to the door. You wore a chambray shirt that made those eyes peering beneath silver brows an even more startling blue. Buttoned over the shirt was the hand knit sweater that I now wear. After a hug, you held me at arms length, your strong hands on my shoulders, and gave me an electrifying smile.
“I want to get a picture of you,” I said, “you look so great today.” Pushing back gently, you growled with a grin, “You have plenty of pictures of me, go on now,” and ushered me out the door.
A family friend delivered your eulogy, and at one point he said, “Jack had an amazing 90 years, and two bad weeks at the end.” But of course that wasn’t entirely true.
Born to a Bohemian seamstress and an English bricklayer in Cleveland in 1920, you were not promised an easy life. You were only 3 when you and your 5 year old sister Doris contracted scarlet fever; she died, and you survived. Your mother often told you she wished you’d died instead of Doris. And yet you adored her.
Fond of Czech phrases uttered in anger, your mom called herself a gypsy, was superstitious, highly intelligent and artistically gifted. She married a man twice her age. Your father was born in England in 1870. He rode the rails back and forth across America at the turn of the century. An itinerant bricklayer, he met your mom in Chicago and swept her off her feet. They settled in Cleveland, where you were born.
Day Two
There’s a slight tilt in the axis.
I went ice skating with friends on South Lake that morning. There was a message on the answering machine when I got home.
Mom’s voice, choked in panic: “Your dad’s had a stroke. I called the neighbor and we’re following the ambulance. Please hurry!”
Later I learned you’d been playing a game at the kitchen table after lunch. Mom had won, and you got up to use the bathroom.
“I’ll win the next one when I get back,” you said over your shoulder.
In the next room, she heard a thud.
You’d grabbed the shower curtain, they told me later. You tried to help the paramedics when they arrived, but your left arm didn’t work as you struggled to get up.
We raced to the hospital in Kalamazoo. But when we saw you in the emergency room, you were looking pretty chipper, as you would say. You complained that your left arm felt like lead. We stayed until 3 in the morning, when mom sent us home. It took us three hours on icy roads to make the hour’s drive.
When you were a boy, you sold popcorn on a street corner to help at home. Drafted into the Army in World War II in your early twenties, you often said it was the worst thing, and the best thing, that could have happened to you.
You caught your first glimpse of the West when your train stopped in New Mexico on the way to basic training in California, and you fell in love. Never had you smelled such air; never seen such light. You vowed to go back someday.
Then there was the war - serving four years in Europe, doing and witnessing things that would give you night terrors the rest of your life, suffering hearing loss, frostbite and migraines. Much later, you were diagnosed with PTSD.
But after the war, you were able to attend college on the G.I. bill. It was there you met our mother, beautiful and smart. Your good looks and dark humor were magnetic. You married in 1948.
Mom worked at Willow Run Airport and you got your master's degree in geology at the University of Michigan. U of M ran a field camp at Camp Davis in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where you spent a summer and where Mom, too, felt the lure of the desert and the mountains. I can imagine how thrilled you both were when you landed a job as an exploration geologist in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona.
Nine months after you rented a cabin in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, I was born in Durango. You fathered three more children in the next eight years, and moved from Colorado to New Mexico.
Day Three
The wobble begins to stabilize.
After a few hours sleep, I drove back to see you in Kalamazoo, stopping to pick up Chris on the way. By evening, our siblings had arrived from Pennsylvania. Laura and I stayed the night with you. You seemed to be sleeping peacefully.
Your career with oil companies went from “well-sitting” to sitting in an office. But you were on the road a lot. You once missed an explosion and fire that would have cost your life if you hadn’t stopped in town to vote on the way out to the rig. Mom heard about the accident and spent many anxious hours waiting to hear if it was you who had perished. The geologist you were relieving was burned beyond recognition - and you suffered more survivor’s guilt.
Day Four
The line of rotation becomes slightly more symmetrical.
Your grandchildren, lights of your life, began arriving from across the country. You responded to their presence, although the power of speech seemed to be gone. Pointing in the air, making a circular motion with your right index finger, you appeared frustrated.
“Paper and pen!” my niece blurted. “He wants to write something!”
Sure enough, as you would say. We produced paper and pen.
We asked the question, “What day is it?”
The familiar handwriting, just a little shaky: “January 28, 2011.” The day of your stroke.
“Do you know where you are?”
“Bronson Hospital,” you wrote.
That was the hospital in Battle Creek, where you’d been before being transferred to Kalamazoo. You’d also been at Bronson for blood in your urine a month ago. Later we learned that you quit taking your blood thinners after that.
“No, you’re at Borgess in Kalamazoo, Dad.”
Close. Very close.
Not even a massive stroke could completely dim your incredible intellect.
When I was little, we’d walk around the block at night, looking up at the stars in the clear New Mexico skies. They were rare times, spent with you. You hated your time away, too, and were becoming disillusioned with the oil business. Going back to school at 43, with a fellowship to the University of Texas at Austin, must have taken a lot of courage.
The Texas years were scary, thrilling, and full of change, good and bad. A few months after our move to Austin, Kennedy was assassinated, the day before he was scheduled to appear there. Walking home early from school that day, I caught you sitting in front of the tiny black and white TV set with tears on your cheeks. It was one of the very few times I ever saw you cry.
And then you survived the attack of the University of Texas Tower sniper, who killed and wounded many students and faculty just a month before we moved to Michigan. Your graduate school office was right next to the tower, with a view of the carnage on campus. It must have brought back horrific memories of the war.
Day Five
Wobble, tilt, steady, repeat.
A technician brought a machine into your room and somehow took pictures of your brain. My brother Chris and I looked at the screen and asked about all the colors.
“The red area on the right is where the damage was done,” the technician said. He looked very somber as he wheeled the cart away.
“It was almost all red,” my brother whispered. I glared at him.
You reached up with your good right hand and began rubbing the back of your head.
“Does it hurt?” I asked gently, expecting a nod.
“No,” you answered, very quietly but distinctly, “I’m trying to fix the problem.”
There were other offers after you earned your PhD, but you chose to teach at Michigan's Albion College, where a professor’s family could attend tuition-free. You led Albion’s field camp at Jackson Hole, where you and mom had gone as newlyweds. It was the first of many over the years - Durango, Jamestown, Jackson Hole. There were trips to quarries and gravel pits all over the country and Canada as well.
You traveled to Japan, the Bahamas, and Europe doing research and delivering papers you’d written.
With your talent for communication, you imparted your knowledge with skillful ease in the classroom but still felt most at home outdoors. Wearing blue jeans, turquoise belt buckle and bolo tie, survey transit and canteen slung over one shoulder, pick ax at the hip, you earned colorful nicknames from students, notably “Pecos” and “Cactus Jack.”
Day Six
Gravity defied.
I needed sleep. I went home and slept eleven hours, dreaming of you all night. Remember your 80th birthday cake? I had it made with a recent photograph of you in a hat, somehow transferred onto the frosting. It looked just like you. When I went to pick it up, I saw the greeting “Happy 60th Cactus Jack” written in blue icing.
“There’s been a mistake,” I told the lady. “My dad is 80, not 60.”
“Well,” she said, “we thought it must have been a typo on the order - there’s no way this man is 80. Do you want us to change the 6 to an 8?”
It took less than a heartbeat for me to reply, “No, leave it; he’ll love this story.” And you did.
We shared the rage against aging. You stayed lean and fit all your life, exercising mind and body daily. It amazes me that you built a retirement home at seventy and maintained twenty-two acres for twenty years after that.
Sometimes when I’m over there now, working outside, I’ll catch a glimpse of myself in the windows of the house, and I’m startled to see your reflection looking back at me.
Even at rest, your mind was at work. You read more than anyone I’ve ever known. After you retired, still in professor mode, you delivered lectures to anyone who’d listen, on everything from genomes and global warming to politics and plate tectonics.
In my initial grief, friends tried to comfort me, saying, “He was 90! What did you expect, that he’d live forever?”
Well, yes, I did. You wanted to live to at least a hundred. You had it in you. You had so much left to do. The unfinished manuscripts, the half-finished paintings. As interesting as your life had been, you wanted more.
But you quit taking the blood thinner, and you had a goddamned stroke.
You and mom had drawn up a trust and made a living will. You wanted no extraordinary means to keep yourselves alive. You discussed the options, weighed the consequences.
But the will to survive is a powerful force, and once you sign those papers, there’s no going back. They’re not allowed to ask if you’ve changed your mind, even if it looks as if you have.
Days Seven and Eight
Things go spinning out of control.
I went home for one night. One night. And while I was there, you took a bad turn. I jumped into the car and raced back to Kalamazoo as soon as I got the call. But it just got worse when I arrived.
You’d been raising your left leg a little and wiggling your toes when I left the day before. When they said you needed to pass a swallow test, you made an effort, excruciating to watch, but successful - your Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in your throat. They let you take small sips of water. I honestly thought you were going to survive, and it helped me sleep through the night.
But they seemed to have given up on you while I was gone - even Mom. There was a steady stream of specialists coming in and out, delivering grim opinions. I was angry with all of them. And that night, trying to sleep next to your bed while you thrashed around in it, wrapping yourself in sheets, then throwing them off your naked body, I was inexplicably angry with you, too.
Day Nine
All particles in the universe implode.
The talking heads agreed. You had failed the swallow test. They tried the thickened water and it didn’t work. You could aspirate it into your lungs, get pneumonia, and die, they said. Umm - hello?
You needed a stomach tube to survive. But you had signed the living will. You were not allowed to have a tube. We were not allowed to ask if you wanted a tube. You were in your right mind when you signed the papers. You were not in your right mind now, they said. You were ninety years old, and you’d had a stroke.
Nobody looked at the picture I placed on your bedside, the one of you when you were thirty, the man you still were inside this old body of yours, this body that had failed you. You were done. Game over. Finis. They decided to send you home.
I went ahead in my car. You and mom followed later in the ambulance, and we were ready when you arrived. We moved the hospital bed we’d ordered into the kitchen, where you could watch the birds at the picture window. It was too bright for you, though. We gave you sunglasses. We joked about how cool you looked.
I made fresh coffee and tried to let you drink it through a straw, my finger holding one end shut to deliver it in small sips. You managed a small smile, and I knew you appreciated the effort. You loved your coffee. On trips back and forth across the country over the years, we’d groan when a coffee shop appeared off the highway.
Days Ten and Eleven
Comfortably numb.
The next few days were a blur. Hospice workers taught me to deliver powerful sedatives and pain relievers under your tongue at frequent intervals. With these meds, they said, death would come quickly and painlessly. Starvation doesn’t hurt, they said.
But you were doing this motion with your good arm. Drawing hand to mouth, over and over, as if holding a fork or a spoon. It was absolutely heartbreaking to watch, knowing how much you loved to eat.
On day ten we moved you into the living room, where the light was dimmer. You weren’t opening your eyes anymore. That afternoon, the door blew open, and your eyes opened wide. I saw the first slight smile I’d seen in days.
“Was it your sister Doris?” I asked. “Do you think she’ll come for you?”
The smile turned to a smirk, which was more like you. War made you an atheist, but you turned to agnostic in your later years, saying you were smart enough to know you didn’t know everything.
Days Twelve and Thirteen
The earth’s orbit ceases and hangs in space for a moment.
The next night, your temper flared. As weak as you had become the past few days, you found strength somewhere. You lashed out in almost primal anger. I don’t know if it was directed at us, if you had a memory of the war, or if it was the drugs, but you were “fit to be tied,” as you would say. It took all our might to hold you down. Your face was twisted in a dreadful grimace, guttural sounds coming from your throat. It crossed my mind that you were trying to attack Death itself. It was terrifying.
You used to lose your temper once in a while, and like many dads of your generation, occasionally took your exasperation out on us physically. Releasing the buckle and whipping the leather strap from the loops of your pants in one fluid, singular motion, even while driving down a highway at 55 miles per hour, you’d flail the air with your belt, and God help us if we didn’t duck. If it hadn’t been so scary, it would have been beautiful to watch. I once caught the end of a lashing meant for Chris, though, and you stopped in mid air, pulled over, and took me in your arms.
Day Fourteen
The planets align somehow, and peace is restored.
The next day, the visiting nurse came, bathed you and washed your hair. Your face relaxed under her gentle touch. I made lunch while you slept peacefully in clean pajamas.
We urged Mom to sleep in her own bed that night. She was exhausted from the previous one, when you “fit the battle of Jericho.” Everyone went to bed early. I stretched out on the sofa next to your bed.
Every night both at home and in the hospital, lights had been left on all night. But that night, I turned them off, lit a candle, and put your favorite Puccini opera on the stereo. Whispering in your ear, I said you’d had a massive stroke that would have killed most men in an instant, that it had been your choice, your decision not to prolong life in such an event. I asked you not to be angry with us. I told you we would care for Mom.
I described the waxing snow moon, full in another week, dancing with the clouds outside the window. Your breath quickened. Lying next to you, I held your good hand, and we finally drifted off to sleep.
I sat up an hour later, shortly after midnight.
The music had stopped, the candle had gone out, and your magnificent heart had ceased to beat. I put my head on your chest and wept.
In a little while, I woke your sons and your wife of sixty-two years. She kissed your warm face and said her goodbyes. We sat with you all night.
You didn’t want a funeral, but there were so many people who wanted to pay their respects. I hope you forgave us for the memorial service we had at the college chapel. They said it was unusual for a 90 year old to have over a hundred people at the service. The veterans were there with a flag for mom and a salute to you. We asked them not to fire their guns. We knew how you were about loud noises.
“Jack had ninety good years,” our friend said, “and two bad weeks.”
When we picked up your ashes, I held the box in my lap as I drove the long way home. You loved going for rides. It was cold but brilliantly sunny. As we rounded the corner driving up to the house, a lone great blue heron flew slowly up the frozen river, unusual for February.
Thanks in large part to you, I lead an excellent life. But no matter how long it might be, no matter what I might experience or accomplish, I’ll keep going back to that last day when you were still truly alive with us, talking and listening, eating and drinking, relaxing and loving us all so much that it still brings me to tears, remembering.
Day One, when the world was spinning as it should, and my father still stalked this glorious earth.
Marsi, this is the kind of storytelling you used to post on facebook that I always admired. Having been through a long decline with my dad, I understand some of the delicate details. I really am glad to be reading this.
A glorious tribute to your fabulous father, your family, and you. Brought tears. Hugs my dear friend.