Mother's Day: Coming to Terms with Cruelty of Parkinsons

Mother’s Day at six: finger-painted pictures, cutout flowers and Elmer’s Glue. Clumsily fashioned ceramic turtle ashtrays, and cards with simple words filled with love and written in shaky block letters … all long since forgotten by the child, but cherished forever by Mommy, so proud of her young son.

As the child grew older, the homemade treasures became a Hallmark tradition: cards chosen with care, a special sentiment scrawled inside to personalize it, to make it different from the hundreds of other cards purchased for other moms. A necklace, a pair of earrings, a ceramic or pewter figure, sometimes a book … and always a brunch — time with Mom, perhaps the most treasured gift of all.

When did all that change? For me the change came in my 24th year, my mother’s 52nd. A weakness on one side of her body and a slight tremor; diagnosis: Parkinson’s disease. I’d heard of this disease, but knew little of it and its cruelty … human nature, I suppose, to ignore the unpleasant until it touches us personally. Parkinson’s had touched my mother. She would suffer from its effects, become weaker day by day even as she fought her battle, a battle she was destined to lose, one day at a time.

Yes, Parkinson’s had touched my mother, but it would touch me, too, and my dad and my sister as well. For the next 18 years we would all become intimately familiar with Parkinson’s and its relentless pursuit to steal from Mom her functionality as well as her dignity. Helpless, we could only watch. Innocent bystanders, we would see, firsthand, Parkinson’s handiwork. And in the process Dad would lose his wife, and my sister and I would lose our mom.

In the early stages its effects were barely noticeable and came and went. Mom had good days and bad days. All too quickly that changed: she would have bad days and worse days. She quickly learned that protein in her diet would worsen the tremors, and so she began eating less and less. She would lose the 10 pounds she always wanted to lose.

Through it all, Mom struggled to maintain a sense of normalcy to the madness. She drove a car for as long as she could. In time it would become an effort for her to get up from a chair and cross a room; at the very end she needed assistance getting from the bed and down the hall to the bathroom and back.

My visits to the house I grew up in revealed Mom engrossed in her daily routines: dusting, vacuuming, laundry … struggling to keep house in the same fashion she had while my sister and I were growing up. “Why,” I asked one day, not understanding, as she struggled mightily to iron a pillowcase, “why do you work so hard, Mom?” “It has to be done,” she answered patiently.

During the early stages of her condition it was good therapy; towards the end it seemed that she had become somewhat of an automaton, functioning solely on what she’d managed to convince her broken brain was necessary in order to maintain her normalcy.

In public she was most self-conscious of her condition. “I’m sorry,” she would say, apologizing for the extra few moments it took her to make up her mind over which item on the menu she wished to order, to get her wallet out of her purse, or for the difficulty she had in making herself heard as her speech became more and more slurred. “I have Parkinson’s.”

Once a month I would get a call asking if I wanted to split a pizza. Splitting a pizza with Mom meant that I’d call the order in and pick it up. Once home, she’d pay me for the pizza. How could I pass up an offer like that? She rarely ate more than one slice, because the protein would cause her to shake, but that pizza always managed to “hit the spot”.

As dad got older, I helped with much of the yard work, mowing the lawn in the summer, raking the leaves and cleaning the eaves in the fall, and shoveling the snow in the winter. I also painted the garage for the last time. But Mom was always out there too, offering what help she could, even if it was only to bring me a cold beer. In the spring, when most Michiganders welcome the warm weather after months of winter and thrill at the sight of new growth, Mom would panic. Springtime to her was the harbinger of autumn, when the leaves would drop, and who was going to rake up the leaves for her?

The 10 pounds had become 20.

Eventually her forays into public became less and less frequent. On her worse days she refused to put herself on display; on her bad days she needed to get out of the house. A prisoner of her own body, she would occasionally seek an escape from the prison that her own home had become.

Spending money would become one of her few pleasures. It would make her happy to bring home a new plant or a knick-knack for the house or a new sweater for herself. Unfortunately it was a quick fix — spending merely propagated more spending. Yet for all the pleasure it gave Mom, Dad, ever the more practical one and ignorant of the why behind her spending, grew more and more frustrated. A new pair of slacks was never a single trip to the mall. Mom’s condition prevented her from trying on the outfits she bought until she got home. Often it would be much later that she would find she had brought home the wrong size, or that it was the wrong color to go with the blouse or sweater she had purchased a week before. The woman who once was able to unerringly pick out a picture for the dining room without a piece of wallpaper and a carpet swatch to match it to now became indecisive about which kitchen trash bags she wanted to purchase.

Despite the many clocks she purchased over the years, perhaps as a reminder that the sands of time were dwindling for her when so much living remained, a 20-minute trip to the mall to exchange an outfit would end up a two-hour ordeal, with stops at the fragrance counter as well as the handbag and linen departments. Too late I realized the shopping meant little to Mom; it was the getting out that brought her the most pleasure.

Towards the end the Parkinson’s began to affect her speech. She would have difficulty supporting her voice and would speak in little more than a whisper. About that same time Dad’s hearing began to deteriorate. The timing would’ve been amusing had the potential for disaster not been so real. One day Mom fell while in the garage and struck her head on the driveway. Unable to call out for help, she lay in a puddle of her own blood for 30 minutes before it occurred to my dad to go looking for her. Vanity aside, Dad finally agreed to get a hearing aid.

Mom began to lose her balance more and more frequently. She would come to a stop, nearly in mid-stride, her muscles locked in a sort of rigor mortis. She would stand for minutes at a time, unable to move or to call out, until Dad would find her and coax her into motion again and assist her to a chair, or she would just topple over. It’s a wonder she never broke anything, or worse, that she never fell down the basement stairs.

Each Christmas she would make the arduous journey into the basement several times to bring up her decorations, despite the fact she and Dad rarely entertained family anymore. Yet she managed to do all of her own Christmas shopping, right up until the very end. Always a gift for me; always something I needed. Each card she ever bought for me spoke to me: somewhere inside this frail and failing body was a six-year-old boy’s mommy.

Three years before she passed away, I had a minor surgery to repair a hernia. I would be off work for several weeks and unable to drive for at least a week. Mom sent Dad to the hospital to pick me up and bring me home — their home not mine. I live alone, and she insisted I stay with them for the weekend so they could care for me. Not wanting to be a burden, it felt odd having her fuss over me, after all, she was the invalid; but it was comforting, too, being home. Having Mom take care of me.

On Monday Dad took me to my place, and every day for a week thereafter they’d come by together to take me to lunch. Of course I thanked them for all they did for me, but it wasn’t until Mom was gone that I realized what taking care of me had meant to her. Although she never said it, perhaps she didn’t understand it, but I had given her life a purpose again, if only for a few days. Someone needed her. Her son needed her. I’m glad now that I let her take care of me.

The 20 pounds had become 30.

Mom fought extreme depression, courtesy of her affliction. It was rare that I saw her lose her temper, rarer still that I saw her question the reason behind her disease. “Why me?” she pleaded on a rare occasion. And I could only shake my head. She would lash out from time to time, at Dad most often because he was there most often. She tried Dad’s patience; I know she did because she tried mine, too, as surely as she must have tried my sister’s.

Helpless to do little else but watch, I became angry with myself for my inability to do anything but watch. She needed assistance with nearly every aspect of her life now. Where once she needed someone to cut her food for her, she now needed someone to feed her. Someone came into the house two or three times a week to bathe her. And she began to panic: so much work needed to be done around the house and who was going to do it all?

Yes, I was angry at my inability to do anything about my mother’s condition save take care of her, and so I became angry, too, at what she had become — what the Parkinson’s had made of her. I have few regrets where Mom was concerned, but one of them is that I raised my voice to her, more than once. I hope she understood that it was never her that I was angry with.
***
December 1996: Dad is diagnosed with cancer. While he recovers from a colostomy, I spend the next few weeks going home — the home I grew up in — after work to fix them dinner, make sure Mom has her meds, do a few odd chores, and get Mom ready for bed. I spend the night on the sofa. Mom urinates frequently now, and she cannot make it through the night without going to the bathroom. I sleep fitfully, waiting for her to call my name to help her to the bathroom, two, three, sometimes four times throughout the night. In the morning I help her from bed and dress her for the day, fix a quick breakfast and coffee, and then go off to work, only to come back in nine or ten hours to repeat the custom.

I hear her voice call out and roll off the sofa and into motion. I pad down the hall on bare feet and pull the covers off her and help her to a sitting position. After a moment, I assist her to her feet and guide her to the bathroom. Once she is seated, I ask if she needs any meds. She has taken to calling them by color and tells me in a whisper, “Two blues and a yellow.” At this stage of her illness she takes them when she needs them, which is not always as prescribed. Who am I to argue with my mother? I go to the kitchen, wash my hands and get her meds and some water. Back in the bathroom I place the meds in her mouth and hold the straw to her lips so that she can suck some water. She swallows and I am amazed at the effort it takes for her to do so. A moment later she looks up at me with her beautiful blue eyes and destroys my last hope. Until that moment I had always hoped that whatever the Parkinson’s was doing to her brain synapses to cause the tremors, the rigidity in her muscles, her loss of balance and all the rest of the horrible symptoms of this dreaded disease … I had always hoped that it would have the decency to cloud her thinking, too. That a lucid, thinking, aware brain would not be trapped inside this fragile, malfunctioning body.

“You always wash your hands before bringing me my meds,” she tells me, matter of fact. “Your father doesn’t.”

I have been struck a blow; I nearly double over but manage to overcome the urge.

I get her back into bed. I pull the blanket up to her chin and gently arrange it around her tiny frame. I’m suddenly struck by our sudden role reversals. A six-year-old boy is tucking his mommy into bed. Has it really been so long ago that she was doing this for me? I ask myself, hastily brushing aside a tear and hoping that Mom has not seen it, that she will only see me rubbing sleep from my eye.

She looks up at me, her eyes seemingly seeing into me, and whispers, “I’m sorry to be so much trouble.”

I manage a smile and wonder if she sees her own dimples in my smile. I lean down and kiss her forehead and whisper, “You’re no trouble at all, Mom.”

A few moments later, back on the sofa, I cry myself back to sleep.

A few weeks pass and I find I am wearing myself out with this schedule. I had only suspected how difficult it was for my dad to care for Mom all these years, and suspecting is a far cry from experiencing it firsthand. She needs more care than I can give, and needs it most during the day, during the hours I am away. She is active during the day, and should she fall, my father will be unable to get her to her feet. I suggest that she consider having someone come to the house during the day to sit with her, or consider staying at a care facility for a few weeks while Dad completes his recovery from surgery, although by then he will have begun his Chemo and radiation therapy. Her eyes tear up and she shakes her head. I suggest that she deserves and needs better care than I can give her. She gulps and says, “Nobody wants me.” Crushed, I give up my argument, and never again breach the subject.

Another week passes and she complains of abdominal discomfort. It worsens the next day. She is taken to the hospital where she is diagnosed with a urinary tract infection. Admitted on Friday, she can be treated over the weekend and be home on Monday. On Sunday a blockage is discovered in her lower intestine. Because of her condition, the doctors advise against surgery. It will only serve to traumatize her and prolong the inevitable by a few days. The inevitable. For 18 years we awaited the inevitable. Now it was here.

Mom had made it known long before that she did not wish to be tortured into being kept alive. The next day we move her to Hospice, where they will monitor very closely her discomfort and administer morphine whenever she needs it.

The 30 pounds has become 40 — she now weighs but 90 pounds: a skeleton sheathed in a thin veil of skin.

I visit her every day during my lunch and every night after work. On Wednesday evening I walk in and tell her how much I wish I could split a pizza with her, but that Lona’s won’t deliver this far. Her face lights up with a smile I take with me forever. Later that evening I manage to spoon some tapioca pudding — another favorite of hers — into her mouth. I ask her if it tastes good. She nods and manages to say, “It’s delicious.” A few minutes later she slips into a coma, one from which she will never come out.

On Sunday evening, just after 9, my dad, exhausted by his vigil, asks me to take him home. I remind him to say goodnight to Mom. When he finishes, I lean down to kiss her and whisper into her ear that I love her, and that I’m proud of her. I tell her that it’s okay, that everything is going to be fine, and that I will always carry her with me. And then I ask her to let go. “Your time has come, Mother. There is nothing left here for you to do. Go and rest. You deserve it.”

My sister stays with Mom.

At just after 10, a few minutes after I get home, the phone rings. It’s my sister. My world has suddenly become a much colder place in which to live.

She passed very easily; no death rattle. Her breathing, which had been irregular for three days, simply stopped. Even had she the will to continue living, the Parkinson’s had left her too weak to do anything but succumb. In this she was blessed. After 18 years fighting a losing battle, she deserved an easy death.
***
And now as I sit writing these words so many years later, trying to find some meaning for her suffering in a world where little of anything that happens to any of us in this brief moment we call life — for good, bad or indifference — has so little to do with meaning, or deserving, I’m nearly compelled to throw in my towel. But I cannot. I will not.

Perhaps the meaning is in the writing of these simple words, although this has been no simple task. Perhaps the meaning is in the impact of what she was and what she became and how she faced her adversity. Perhaps it is in the memory of a young boy and the pride a young mother took in hearing her son utter his first word, in taking his first step, in doing well with his studies, in leaving the nest and alternately pleasing and displeasing her, as all children must surely do. But in every card I ever received for holiday or birthday, she spoke of her love and of how proud she was of her son. Perhaps the meaning of her suffering comes in the full circle of life: that I now bear she who bore me — her memory as well as all that she gave to me and sacrificed for me.

To me, Mother’s Day is now everyday, as there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think of my dear mother — she who bears the sweetest name, and adds a luster to the same; long life to her, for there’s no other who takes the place of my dear mother.

Why do I write these words? The answer begins to come into focus, becomes crystal clear: I write these words because it is a task that must be tended to … a task from which I will not back away, nor will I stop until I have finished writing the last …

Graves Duty

This originally appeared in the fall 2005 issue of River Walk Journal.

“I’ve learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you'll miss them when they’re gone from your life.” — Maya Angelou

I visit my dad twice a year. On this particular early May morning the sky is cloudless, the air crisp; the grass is bejeweled with dew. Leaning against the side of my truck, I clip the end of an Onyx Vintage ‘97 and light it, taking a long, satisfying drag. I let the smoke warm the back of my palate, and a moment later I exhaust it with a long sigh. I discovered the pleasure of cigar smoking two years too late. I’ve convinced myself that this custom is something my dad and I could’ve enjoyed together.

I don’t need to come here, to Fort Custer National Cemetery, to visit Dad. Most people forgo visiting their loved ones in the cemetery two years after relegating them to their final resting place. My dad has been gone from me for a little more than seven years, but coming here a couple times a year somehow just feels right. I also suspect we have unfinished business between us.

I envision us sharing a smoke on a Saturday afternoon over a couple of glasses of bourbon or scotch as we listen to Ernie Harwell call a Tigers game. We had our differences, Dad and I, but whatever they were we could always put them aside for a couple of hours for the enjoyment of a baseball game.

One of my fondest memories is sitting alongside my dad, behind first base at Tiger Stadium. The year is 1968, it’s September and the Bengals are destined to go on to win the World Series the following month. Denny McLain would win 31 games that season, but it would be Mickey Lolich who would win the Series MVP award.

Earlier that summer, Dad had come home one evening after work and slipped into my hand a brown piece of paper haphazardly torn from a grocery bag. I turned it over and saw some markings. Puzzled, I looked closer. I turned the scrap 90 degrees, then 90 more: the first set of markings soon turned into a word, a moment later the word became a name. When I recognized the first name I didn’t have to puzzle over the second — “Bill Freehan!” I exclaimed, overjoyed. It was that famous Freehan trot I always emulated after drawing a walk and making my way down to first base during our neighborhood baseball games. “I ran into him in a grocery store this afternoon,” Dad told me, matter of fact. I was thrilled, not only by the treasure, but because Dad chose to give it to me instead of keeping it for himself — I was touched by his selflessness. Today I’m ashamed to admit that I can’t recall what became of that scrap of, to me, priceless grocery bag.

The Yankees were in town for a weekend series, it was late in the game with the Tigers comfortably ahead and McLain was on the mound. Mantle stepped up to the plate. Beyond the twilight of his career, he was in that crepuscular place reserved for athletes who have overstayed their welcome in a game in which, at some point, experience no longer counts. He’d lost his timing, along with much of his grace, and he routinely swung wildly and missed pitches that, a few years earlier, he would have sent into orbit. McLain looked in to Freehan for the sign; he shook off the first, as well as the second. Then he leaned back, stepped off the rubber, and held up the ball for Mantle to see, asking Mickey where he’d like the pitch. The crowd, which had grown complacent with the home team’s lead, sensed something was up. Mantle gamely swung his bat — arcing gracefully through his wheelhouse — to indicate where McLain should leave the ball for him. McLain nodded, went into his windup… and blooped the ball right where Mickey wanted it… Mickey returned the favor by launching the pitch into the right field bleachers. The crowd erupted. Mantle had certainly hit longer and more important homeruns, but the crowd perhaps had seen the writing on the wall, although they may not yet have read the text: this was Mantle’s final appearance at Tiger Stadium, and the homerun counted as the next to last round-tripper in his if not long but illustrious career. Mantle retired from baseball the following spring.

Beside me, Dad snorted his disgust. To him McLain committed the ultimate sin in baseball, or in any sport: allowing the opposition to score. Perhaps he recalled all too well the Black Sox scandal from the early part of the previous century in which eight Chicago White Sox players, Shoeless Joe Jackson among them, were found guilty of conspiring to throw the 1917 World Series. Although he was only a year old at the time it happened, the story reverberated throughout the baseball fraternity for decades. Years later, after Mantle died the result of a bad liver, I realized Dad knew more about Mantle’s off the field behavior and drinking habits than I did when I was 11, and that that perhaps played a part in his reaction that long ago afternoon.

I push myself away from the side of my truck and slowly make my way up the small knoll toward my dad’s marker. I’m thinking about that day at Tiger Stadium, the images undimmed by the passage of 35 years, and I regret not having relived the experience with Dad that final year of his life. In retrospect I think I feared that, had I asked him if he recalled what was for me such a memorable experience, he might say “No.”

I feel emptiness and a pain in my chest. I suspect the pain comes from not having more such fond memories, and wishing I had fewer memories of a childhood in which Dad often seemed a ghost, except as a disciplinarian.

I was six or seven years old when I took a spill from a bike that didn’t belong to me. It was too big for me and I was riding too fast and lost control. I landed hard, the bike on top of me, and promptly burst into tears. Dad, who’d watched the entire proceeding from a lounge chair on our porch, crossed the street in no great hurry. Perhaps he already knew what hadn’t yet occurred to me: that I was crying more from having given myself a good scare than from being hurt, although I’d banged my ankle pretty hard. He carried me back across the street and, once he’d determined I suffered no real damage, scolded me for being on a bike that I hadn’t yet grown into and for being so reckless. The lesson I came away with was to avoid risk.

I kneel at the slab of marble that marks my dad’s existence and brush away a few dried grass clippings:

James C Guest
SSgt US Marine Corps
World War II
Oct 29, 1918 — Feb 10, 1998

Dad served in the Pacific arena and saw action on Okinawa, where some of the bloodiest fighting of the war took place. Dad had been retired from the Marines several years before he met and married my mother — “I was smitten,” Dad related to me once shortly after Mom passed away. “She was the first woman I’d ever met who not only knew but had read …” I curse myself for not being able to recall the name of the author he mentioned: another element of his life has passed from existence forever.

Growing up I knew little of his wartime experiences. In youth we believe that little of what happened before we got here is of much importance. Still I learned, the hard way, that Dad was not an ex-Marine or a former Marine. He was a retired Marine. I learned that the Marines were a far more elite group of this country’s armed forces than was the Army.

Dad kept in touch with a select few of his comrades, most of whom to me were merely names he mentioned from time to time, save one — Sgt. Major Bean. Bean I met several times before he passed away the result of having acquired the HIV virus from tainted blood he’d been given during heart bypass surgery. I was 18 the last time I saw Bean. I had already reached my adult height but still skinny; Bean looked at me approvingly before looking over to my dad and exclaiming, “God, Jim, he’s a good-looking kid. We’ll make a Marine out of him, eh?” He promptly looked back at me and asked, “Do you like to kill?” I managed to stammer that the only things I’d ever killed were mosquitoes and that while I couldn’t say with any degree of certitude I enjoyed it, I enjoyed a certain gratification in succeeding with my first strike initiatives.

Dad never talked to me about joining the service. He never explained to me what I might be missing by forgoing a tour of duty during peacetime — the camaraderie, the male bonding. Years later, when I asked him why he never advised me, he merely said he thought I should live my own life and make my own decisions. I realized much later that I couldn’t have made an informed decision without the information he had withheld from me. I was angry but kept my disappointment to myself.

I recall standing next to Dad at the foot of the Marine Corps Memorial in Washington D.C. during one of the many Marine Corps reunions he attended. It was the summer of 1966. Earlier in the day, on a bus ride to the Marine Corps base in Quantico to attend an artillery demonstration, Dad introduced me to General Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, the most decorated Marine in history. I heard the reverence in Dad’s voice as he introduced me to this small and wiry man who, to me, seemed ancient. The best part of his life was obviously behind him, but he seemed an important personage to my dad, so I tried to hold him in some higher esteem.

That evening, at the foot of the memorial, as I looked at the names of battles during which Marines lost their lives etched into the pedestal, many which I couldn’t pronounce, I heard my dad hiccough. I looked up at him and saw tears coursing down his cheeks. It was the first time I’d ever seen my dad cry. It would be many years before I understood the why behind the tears.

I asked my dad twice — once when I was a kid and again during the last year of his life, when I was 43 — to share with me some of his overseas experiences. The second time I’d hoped to come away with a greater understanding of why he was the way he was, and that perhaps, in sharing, he might experience a sort of healing. Each time I asked him, he refused. Whatever he did on Okinawa, whatever he saw, whatever he endured, he took with him when he died.

I learned more about the Marine that was my dad, after his death, from an older cousin who recalls Grandma reading a letter that her Uncle Jim had written on the back of a dead Marine, and that for years he couldn’t stand the sight of ketchup on the kitchen table. My cousin relates her favorite uncle’s homecoming: “He was tall and looked so handsome in his uniform. He dropped his duffel bag on the landing and I squealed, ‘Uncle Jim, tell me some stories about the war!’ He looked at me and his smile disappeared and he told me very sternly that I was never to ask him about the war.”

Dad related to me, a few months before his death, a different, very abridged account of his homecoming: “I always felt cheated,” he said holding back his emotion, “because the family had moved while I was overseas and I never felt the satisfaction of coming home.”

Dad’s footlocker now serves as a coffee table in my house. Inside it are many treasures he left me, some which I’d never seen while he was alive. A black and white photograph depicting Dad as a young, handsome Marine in his dress blues sits next to the flag I was presented after his death. I display in my living room the saber he took from a Japanese soldier he left no longer in need of it, along with some photographs of John Wayne and Robert Ryan on location during filming of Flying Leathernecks. Dad sheepishly tells the story of his celebrity encounter: “They were rehearsing for a scene and the question came up whether the correct term was ‘graves duty’ or ‘grave duty.’” Graves duty meant retrieving the remains of dead Marines after a fire fight. “Wayne looks at me and says, ‘What about it, Sergeant, is it grave or graves?’ I told him, ‘graves.’” Of course when I tell the story I embellish it and impersonate my dad impersonating the Duke, and I end the tale by saying “And that’s how my dad became an unofficial advisor to John Wayne on the set of Flying Leathernecks.”

On March 14, 1997, I stopped by the house to pick up Dad. Four months previously he had been diagnosed with colon cancer, had since had a colostomy and begun chemo and radiation therapy. But that morning I was driving him to a memorial service for my mother, his wife of 43 years. Mom had died three weeks previously.

Dad’s eyes were red and he confessed to me how much he missed her, and how much he’d be willing to bargain for the chance to help her down the hall and to the bathroom just one more time. And then he burst into tears. Somewhere I found the wisdom to put my arms around him, noticing how narrow his shoulders had become, and held him until his grief was spent. He suddenly cursed himself for his weakness. I surprised myself further with additional wisdom, assuring him that his tears were in no way a sign of weakness, that they were a normal and healthy response to grief. He looked at me, and somehow we each understood that the student had, for that moment at least, become the teacher. The hug was something I gave often over the next 11 months, knowing how difficult it was for him to initiate it, and getting as much in return as I’m certain Dad received.

Seven months later, just a few weeks before Dad checked into hospice, I stopped by the house to take him to dinner. Dad was lonely without Mom and detested eating alone, and so this was a custom we repeated several times a week: I picked him up after work and took him to his favorite greasy spoon diner where everyone knew his name and where he seemed to take great pride in introducing everyone to “my son.” He of course insisted on picking up the tab for “intruding” on my time. On this particular evening I turned to lock the door while Dad took a cautious first step down from the porch and toward the car. He suddenly lost his balance and took a spill onto the concrete, hitting his knee hard. I bounded down the steps, knelt beside him and, after making certain he hadn’t seriously hurt himself, helped him to his feet. He attempted to hide the fear in his eyes by muttering something about his knee buckling. I drew a breath, prepared to scold him for not waiting for me, for taking an unnecessary risk, but some distant memory — the memory of a father scolding his young son for taking an unnecessary risk by riding a bike that was too big for him — stayed my mild rebuke.

Once Dad checked into hospice, I watched him slip the rest of the way away from me. One afternoon, while I was sitting at his bedside, his eyes suddenly flashed open, he cast a furtive look at me and exclaimed, his voice laden with paranoia, “ Who are you?” I winced inwardly, but placed my hand on his to reassure him. “It’s okay, Dad, it’s me, Joe. Your son.” The tension immediately left his face, and while I saw no recognition in his eyes, the smile that spread across his mouth assured me in return that he trusted my words. The smile lingered but a moment, before he drifted off again, but I was convinced that in that moment I also glimpsed no small measure of pride.

Two weeks later, at Dad’s memorial service, I spoke a few words; afterward family and friends told me that they were good words, spoken with eloquence. I thanked them because that was the polite thing to do, but I thought, then and even now, that they weren’t nearly enough. That a man’s life can be summed up in but a few hundred words seems, somehow, amoral.

Since Dad died I’ve returned to Washington D.C. to stand at the base of the Memorial I first saw in 1966, and I’ve read With the Old Breed, considered by many historians to be the finest account of World War II combat in the trenches ever written by an enlisted man. The author, Eugene B. Sledge, or Sledgehammer as his buddies called him, in his account of the fighting on Pelilieu and Okinawa told me all I needed to know about my dad’s service to this country, including what “graves duty” often really entailed — picking up corpses that have been sitting in the sweltering South Pacific sun for several days only to have the weight of the body cause it to separate from the arms — and I now understand a little better why he was the way he was.

So now these twice yearly sojourns to visit Dad at his gravesite, the closest I can come to his realm without stepping over to the other side. I wonder if he is aware of my presence, if he can hear my silent musings, my audible ruminations, or if he even cares that I visit. I often wonder if the reason I visit is because I’ve taken it upon myself to care enough for both of us.

I take a long drag on my Onyx Vintage wondering how it could’ve burned down so quickly. I want to forgive my father for so much, but in order to forgive him I must elevate myself into a position of judge, and that’s something I find I just can’t do. So instead I decide that I must accept that I am who I am, in part, as a result of this man about whom I know so little. I need to consign him to a less prominent place in my life, perhaps in some favorite corner to which I can come from time to time if only to dust off the cobwebs. I resolve to stop staring at my past looking for answers, or to assign blame, and to start living my life today. Wanting to believe that I have within me the power to change and the courage to risk, to become the man I want to become, I resolve to reach out for my dreams, even if they should exceed my grasp, for, as Robert Browning wrote, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp. Or what’s a heaven for?”

My cigar has gone out, and something in my eyes blurs my vision; I blink away the moisture and lay my hand on the cold marble into which my dad’s partial obituary is chiseled. In time that will be all that remains of him: a name, a rank, a war and two dates, not so unlike those around him in this honored place.

A moment later, I stand and make my way back down the knoll, the white markers across the way bearing witness to my departure, the silence a stark contrast to a battlefield I can only imagine.

— JCG/May 2005