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Posted on 12/18/2001 10:17:37 AM PST by LiveFree2000

A VIEW FROM HERE
by deb weiss
every tuesday

For My Father
December 18, 2001


Death came for my father quietly and mercifully, in the middle of the night. He was alone, and, we hope, asleep, when the sheer stubbornness that had sustained him for much too long finally gave way, liberating his fragile body and his cloudy mind from a life that no longer gave him any substantial joy. On my last visit with him, ten days before he died, he seemed unusually well. He spoke little, but he seemed to understand and remember, to connect in a way that he had not, with me, on other visits. He remembered the story of Uncle Bill and the bulldog, a story without a point that I loved to hear when I was very young, and his face lit up in the act of remembering, leaving a radiant impression of the man he had been before illness and great age had reduced him to a sad shrunken old man plucking at his bedsheets and peering through a permanent mist.

On earlier visits, in his rage and misery, a chaos of words would often pour forth elliptically from his once-agile mind. He spoke in dreams and metaphors, now and then manifesting a form of aphasia (the doctor believed he may have suffered a series of minor strokes that perhaps had affected the language centers of his brain) so that, for example, he would say "rainbow" when he meant to say "angry". His baffled expression would show that he knew he had chosen the wrong word: the problem was that he did not remember how to choose the right one.

This would be a tragedy for any man, but for a man like my father -- a scholar, brilliant, meticulous, precise -- it was a kind of torture.

Much as he hated the nursing home where he spent his final months, his periodic visits to the hospital were still worse. There is something in the physical reality of a hospital that can tip a frightened old person into a kind of dementia, and when he was there, poked and prodded, wakened at odd hours in a place where there was always too much light and too much noise, he would grow disoriented, imagining dark and eerie narratives.

I went once with his oldest and most beloved grandchild to visit him in the intensive care unit. There, with tubes and wires connecting him to the glossy apparatus of a modern death, he spoke querulously of children who had kept him awake all night, running up and down the stairs, he said, singing taunting songs and moving large boxes, thump, thump, thump, down the stairs.

There were no children, of course, no stairs, no boxes: only gleaming corridors where elevators sighed open and shut, and indifferent aides chatted noisily and cheerfully late into the night, oblivious to the comfort of the patients, and to their fear and trembling as well.

When he described these phantasms, his grandson -- then a man of nearly thirty -- wept silently, hastily wiping his tears away so that his granddad would not see them.

More than once, in the last week, I have thought of him as he was in his prime. In my heart's remembering, I see a portly, dignified man in an overcoat and an old-fashioned Homburg hat, walking up the street hand in hand with a very small boy who trotted along beside him, chatting happily with perfect confidence and trust.

Many years later, on one of our last outings together, I would watch as the two of them crossed the street -- that small, frail old man clutching the arm of the handsome young fellow beside him, and looking up at him with perfect confidence and trust. The circle was complete.

That was the moment that broke my heart. Death itself was not nearly so sad, when at last it came.

Although he was a man of great affection, it was not easy for him to be close to his children. It was different with his grandchildren, though, especially the oldest boy, who was his boon companion and partner in joyful crime for some three decades.

For this boy's sake, the old professor -- in his eighties, and already in failing health -- actually went to a rock concert, smiling benignly under the wild gyrations of the strobe lights, under a barrage of music amped up to the max.

His students, too, found him a warm friend and constant mentor, a man of great modesty and learning: never too dignified, mind you, to be a little silly. (Having grown up on a farm, he was grounded in the real world to an extent rare among the scholarly class: it must be confessed that he had a taste for bawdy jokes and limericks not always appropriate for very young ears.)

In a world in which it is by no means unheard of for distinguished professors to steal their students' work and pass it off as their own, my father would put his students' names on work he had helped them master, thus giving them a considerable leg up in the cut-throat world of Academe.

When my mother died five years ago, his own death began. She was the great love of his life, and when she was gone, nothing would ever be the same for him again. In his last months, in his room at the nursing home, he would watch one particular movie repeatedly on the VCR his son had given him.

The movie was 'Roman Holiday', and no-one could quite imagine why it so enthralled him that he would watch it again and again, sometimes three or four times in a single day.

I think I know why, though. It is, after all, a movie about lost love.

Now, and forever, they are together again.

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