Last Days

This last day of 2007 I’m spun back in time to my father’s last days. Don’t worry – I’ve got a cheery post stuffed in my back pocket for later. But right now I’m reading about people whose dads have died. Depressing stuff.

I hear you need at least a year to grieve, for me it’s been two months. Thinking the worst is over – I’m blindsided by little things. I don’t want to break down, but I can’t help it. Yesterday, I found my iPod shuffle in a coat pocket. The last person to listen to it was my dad. I had loaded it with gypsy music, his favorite.

The concept that his ear drums transmitted sound waves to a functioning brain just weeks ago baffles me. It’s like things don’t compute, I’ve got a system overload. My brain doesn’t know he’s gone and I have to keep telling it over and over that’s the case. I’m getting sick of it! I had some of my dad’s relatives over for a party before Christmas. I actually had the thought, “I wonder what Daddy will think of my Ron Paul sign.” I had to kindly explain to myself that he’s not coming to the party.

I drive past Beaumont Hospital on the way to work every day. This is where my father died. Thankfully most days I don’t notice it’s there – but when I do, I find the need to quickly gasp for air and hold it. This helps to keep me from crying. Glancing up at his room on the 8th floor, I remember looking out the window on visits to him. It was a pretty view. I would sit there, read books, pray the rosary, stumble through Serbo-Croatian conversations with his sister, wipe away his sweat, my tears, ask the nurses for updates.

Thomas H. Benton writes about his father’s death:

Sitting in silence, I had a lot of time to think. Prayers memorized in childhood surfaced into my consciousness, but, more often, I involuntarily recalled passages from beloved literary works like Hamlet:

"Do not forever with thy vailed lids seek for thy noble father in the dust. Thou know'st tis common; all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity."

The sitting and waiting was poetic like that. You start to float, fade, reminisce. You start to think of songs, poems, art, music. You imagine writing a novel, writing a screenplay. You start to think of all these things that escape you most days. These things distract you and bring you closer to the event at hand all at the same time. It’s like doing LSD. I’d be guessing.

Actor Steve Martin, in his essay “The Death of My Father”:

In his death, my father, Glenn Vernon Martin, did something he could not do in life. He brought our family together.

This observation strikes me. I’ve been sick with grief over my dad, but also about my perceived faults. Wishing I was easier to get along with during his illness, wishing I’d taken more time off work, wishing I’d have made all that money I’d hoped for since I was 10 so I could save my family and send them to the Croatian coastline to relax and dine on lamb and wine. Well, I didn’t save them.

And Steve Martin is right. The family, the support, it’s crazy. I thank God that my sister had the time to care for my dad. You love these people, you don’t talk for weeks, months, years, and then they are right there, loving you. Family is amazing. Friends are amazing. I’m not going to dissect this all here – let’s just say it was a mental and emotional carnival. Which brings me to Freud.

Sigmund Freud writes that a father's death was always "the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man's life."


Freud may have had some wacky ideas, but he also had some good one. I concur with what he says here because my experience of my father’s death so far proves his words are true.