a candle

The results of Chick’s blood test taken this morning were not good. Her instinct and innate concern led her to know what the RE confirmed late today – our little embryos are not going to make it. All that joy and relief are channeled into quiet sorrow and grief. My heart is breaking for Chick.

And I am lighting this candle for the one I won’t get to know.

5 years

5 years ago this morning my incredible, brilliant, warm, magnetic father passed away. It was way too soon even though he was 84. Bad doctoring and a hospital whispered about for its infections cut his life short while he was still in the midst of doing so much.

A chemist, an international businessman, a member of the Executive Reserve (chosen to help run the country if/when DC was bombed out), a pilot, a teacher, a prolific author, a genuine Irish storyteller, beyond avid reader — who never forgot ANYTHING he read, which enabled him, after deep thinking, to collect all the puzzle pieces and share it back out in his teachings and writings and lectures so that everyone was rapt and enlightened, warm friend, problem solver on a national, state, local level, award winner for doing environmentally RIGHT things with a chemical plant, leader (chairman or president) of almost everything he became associated with who invariably gave credit and spotlight to others who made an effort, hot warrior/ cold warrior/ long view thinker.

That was just some of what people outside the family saw. He was an early Mensa, started high school at 10 and graduated at 14, earned every dime to put himself through university far from the snowy Northern “whippoorwill farm” he grew up on.

Inside the family he was the perfect balance with Snowy, a brilliant gal herself and used to being the center of attention, gracious, loving, sparring, deeply in love past the day that he died. He was an incredible father even though he traveled seemingly almost every day of his work life (Snowy was adept at making us always feel complete at the ‘unit level’ so we didn’t really feel he was absent). He was truly the hub that kept the family rolling along, although we all probably felt it was always Snowy as she ran the hive and did all the home things. When he left us, we’ve all just spun further away from each other.

As a grandfather, he was the best. Just ask Chick to whom he WAS her father figure. They spent long, long hours together as she grew up, sharing chess, opera, reading, and later on, a penchant for freedom-to-swear filled conversations that delighted them both. He had a protective arm around her her whole life, always being her rock and her listener, especially when I was not the best mother and needed to be vented about. He wrote her constantly throughout her university/conservatory years, slipping in a check that assured eating and living money, and even collected some of the letters in a book. He never, ever let her go, and they meant the world to each other.

He affected the other grandkids similarly, although their youth didn’t give them as much time to sit at his knee and absorb his high values, ethics, sassy humor, and hugely intelligent view of life.

I still feel as if he is in the next room or the one beyond that. It is so inconceivable he is gone and not here to guide us or righten our world. I know he and Snowy had made a pact that she was the one who would “go” first because, as she thundered at him, she didn’t know how to do the income tax returns. With some of the health issues she had a few years ago, they probably thought that was a possibility. I have figured out that if she had gone first he was considering following behind her.

Even with everything that was ‘wrong’ with him and had been for years, he battled through following treatments and protocol like the true scientist he was –keeping meticulous notes on what was going on. He was so dang curious about how things worked out.

But suddenly the bad doctoring led him to the abyss of the hospital undercurrent of infection, and there was nothing he could do against that. Even as he began to fall to the effects of the high fevers, he accessed millions of details of history to roam through. He spoke from varying wars in which he was leading armies into the battles he had studied and written about. As the infection was winning (although we weren’t told that was what was going on until the afternoon before his next morning death), he went further back in time with the battles.

Around Christmas Eve he was fighting in WWII. By 1/1, he was a commander in the Peloponnesian Wars and would not stand down to rest as much as we told him he could.
He was brilliant in his soliloquy of it all.

The last ‘present day’ directives he made to me were to make me promise NOT to pursue the doctor and the hospital for his situation. He didn’t want to be remembered for that. He also reminded me of my promise to care always for Snowy for him. “Trust me!” I vowed. He gave me one of his trademark raised eyebrow sideways glances and said, “I guess I have to. I don’t have any choice now!”

Snowy had moved into the nursing home with him to share his room the final week after the hospital moved him on. She was deep in the early stages of the Alzheimer’s, though it was not yet diagnosed. The same doctor had scoffed and said, “she’s just old,” before putting her on a number of competing and exacerbating Rx. This is the same doctor who told my father he was just old and needed to go on and die like others of his era. That always floored my father. He had agreed with me at last that when he fought through the current illness he would let me take both him and Snowy to the renowned clinic in Birmingham to start getting them good care. I didn’t get to do it for him, but I did for Snowy, which saved her.

I know Pop suspected and was fearful that Snowy had Alzheimer’s. The suggestion had been raised a couple of years earlier during her bad illness, and he had almost broken down. To them the image of Alzheimer’s was tied to stories of older friends of theirs in which the wife had gone wandering out in her nightgown and was found in the median of one of the main roads of town not knowing who she was, and similar tales, and this proud man, who had worked so hard to build his stellar reputation and whose wife was similarly esteemed, just could not stand the thought that all the years of good, of giving, of leading, of doing the right thing would be forgotten and become an anecdote of something unhelpable at the very end.

Thus I am glad that he didn’t have to deal with her diagnosis, but hopefully he would be peaceful and relieved and glad that Chick and I have worked so hard to take care of Snowy and preserve her life and dignity and buffer her from any seeming assaults on the memory people have of her in her prime. That is some of the unspoken part of the promise I made him about caring for his sweetheart.

After Pop’s death, he didn’t leave us. He made himself felt in so many ways. Chick even discovered him standing at and just behind Snowy’s shoulder in some pictures she took of Snowy awhile after his death. Even as an ‘angel’, he still had his tie on. And constantly he sent little signs when he sensed we needed to know he was there — with me he left me pennies in the most unexpected places and times, and always where there was NO penny a moment before. (My sibling began to notice this from time to time, too, after I had commented on it, and with Snowy he would sometimes leave larger coins.) For Chick he frequently sent dragonflies. It’s hard to explain this phenomenon, and I guess I really don’t need to, but the strength of the love we still felt surrounded by would just embrace us with an invisible squeeze. Sometimes it made all the difference in how we were able to soldier on without him — he was there with us.

Snowy will find him frequently in her dreams. He spends more time with her there and less dropping pennies, and I’m okay with that. She was the center of his life, his truest, deepest love, and nothing was more important to him than her. I ache to have something like that in my life, but am blessed for having seen it did exist in this world. She is less and less able to remember to share with us her dreams, but part of “our” prayer is always that they find each other in her dream.

He left Snowy a letter to be read after his death (which he started years earlier and which he routinely updated the information in with the passing of years, such practical things as the number for the Social Security office, copies of his military information so that he could have a flag-draped casket saving her the cost of putting flowers on it, all of the insurance information and who to call and the policy numbers, all the step-by-step directions of what to do, in order, that made things less overwhelming.

The first line of the letter, “I’ll be waiting for you.”

I believe it, and I still miss him every day. Somehow I feel he is still writing letters on our hearts.