Friday, May 31, 2013

The Week of Dad's Death: May 30, 1996: Kellogg Friends

The call from Mom came either in the very last days of April or right at the beginning of May.

Mom and Dad had just learned that Dad had inoperable liver cancer and the doctor said he had a month to live.

Dad's health had been lousy for the last year and a half, but none of us knew he would be dying this soon.

When I got off the phone, I sat with the fact that Dad was terminally ill and I knew that I had to drop everything in Eugene, get some help to take care of things, talk to my boss, and get to Kellogg as soon as I could.

My only option at Lane Community College was to take a leave without pay.  I would make that work, no matter what.  It so happened that I was teaching an overload in the spring of 1996.  I must have had four research writing courses and a course in Shakespeare.  It would take two or three instructors to cover my schedule, an unhappy prospect for my boss.

But, I didn't let the difficulty I was causing him deter me. On May 10th, I headed for Kellogg.  My classes got covered, the cats and my gardens would be tended to, I figured out my income, and if anything went wrong, it would be peanuts compared to what I needed to do for Mom and Dad and the rest of my family.

Walking in the front door of our family home early in the evening of May 10th unsettled me a bit.  I'd been told Dad has lost weight. Indeed.  He was gaunt.  His hair was a shock of white.  His ears stuck out funny from his head, thanks to his gaunt face, in a way I'd never seen before.

We hugged.  Neither of us said anything.  Dad broke the silence:  "Your Ducks did great this year, huh?"

Dad and I had watched the Ducks on television back in January get creamed in the Cotton Bowl.

"Yeah.  They had a good year."

At this point, Dad wasn't yet in the intense pain that would come soon.  He could get around and joke around.

He had one wish:  a trip as soon as possible to the Prichard Tavern for a cheeseburger and Heidelberg beer and good company. 

We made that trip early in the week.  Leo and his wife and Donnie and Rosie and Carol's family and Christy and Mom all went up. 

Dad had aged about ten years, looking far older than his sixty-five years, but he gave us all one last good look at what he loved most in life:  an honest bar, some cold beer, a good burger, and, most of all, being surrounded by friends and family.  Leo and Donnie and Dad all went to Kellogg High School together.  Their stories and memories went way back.  Dad had been off of beer for quite a while, but having been given such a short time to live, having a last cold one or two was perfect.

What made the deepest impression on me over the next nearly three weeks had to be the friends of our family, but most of all, friends of Dad's who filed in and out of the house to see him and comfort him and my mom.

I had fallen into a lousy trap when I was younger.  I had gone off to school in Spokane, taught college in Spokane, and had gone off to graduate school at the University of Oregon.

I lived in the world of ideas, in a college and a university,  and I had fallen into the misconception that I lived where truth could be found and I wondered, when I was younger, how those who didn't read great works of literature, especially Shakespeare, could really know about basic human experiences like love and friendship and death without being educated in them, the way I was being schooled, once again, especially by Shakespeare.

This naive perspective of mine began to be demolished, in a really good way, in the summer of 1992, when I came home for my 20th high school reunion.  Before that weekend, I don't remember ever feeling such immediate and deep love, the love I felt that reunion weekend,  for so many people all in one place -- and it wasn't the love I was learning from my studies.

It was the love that grew out of shared lives, shared stories, admiration for what good people we were; it was love that grew out of dancing, laughing, eating, telling more stories, flicking each other some shit.

During that weekend in August of 1992, I felt like I'd found my foundation again.  I'd recovered what was real in my life.

It not only happened with my friends.  It happened with my father.  While we played golf, while we sat our on the back deck reading the newspaper over coffee, when friends of mine came by the house to see me and my dad, old affection I hadn't felt since I was a teenager, welled up and I knew Kellogg was my true home.

As Dad died, these feelings intensified, especially as friend after friend after friend filed into the house to see Dad and to offer comfort to Mom.

I began to realize that all those days Dad worked at the Zinc Plant, all those afternoons and evenings he spent uptown or at the Sunshine Inn drinking and watching ball games, all those rounds of golf, trips out finding berries to bring home, all those visits to Rose Lake, through all of it, he had formed deep friendships and bonds of affection with countless people in and and around Kellogg.

Now I really knew I was home and was overwhelmed by how the friendships between my dad and others that I'd once had the arrogance to underestimate, were deep, full of love and respect. They were friendships I didn't have to long for because I was beginning to understand that I had them with my Kellogg friends, too, even as we lived in different places.

By Thursday, May 30, 1996, it was hard to see Dad.  He was bed-ridden.  He couldn't talk.  He could hear what people said, when he was awake, and he could make slight gestures in response.

Even though it was hard, the visitors continued to come.

I experienced in an immediate way what I had learned through Shakespeare in a secondary way: dying reveals character, not only of the one facing death, but of the friends of the one who is dying.

Not Shakespeare or any other writer could have helped me experience the beauty of this truth more admirably or more vividly than my dad, my family, and my friends did in those few weeks leading to Dad's death. 

(I've written four other pieces about the week Dad died, hereherehere, here.)

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