Waitin' for da big one: my father's last years

My father had a stroke in August 1976 at the age of fifty-eight. It put him in the hospital for about a month and left him with the right side of his face partially paralyzed and drooping. "Why didn't you tell me about my face?" he asked as he looked at himself in the bedroom mirror for the first time in four weeks. "It's not that bad," I assured him, "it'll straighten out." It did eventually, but the stroke marked the beginning of declining health that persisted for the remaining sixteen years of his life.

Up to that point, my father had been an active, vital, six-foot-four, 285-pound bear of a man. He worked for the State of New York for forty years, first, in the public works department, later in the education department, and he was known to everyone as "Big Jack." Like many of his generation, he had returned from overseas to start a family with his war bride. He bought a lot outside Albany and contracted for a house that he finished building himself when the contractor went bankrupt.

In spite of his vitality, my father had health problems most of his life, having to do mainly with his legs. He had been hit by a piece of shrapnel during the war and spent several months in a military hospital in Italy. His injury brought him a Purple Heart and a limp that got more pronounced as the years went by, especially when he worked all day in our yard. But his real problem emerged in his thirties. He was diagnosed with diabetes, a disease that even then was relatively manageable. Every morning, my mother would use tongs to dip a hypodermic needle in boiling water. Then my father would use it to draw the insulin out of a refrigerated glass bottle, plunge it into the fleshy part of his upper arm, inject the insulin, pull the needle out fast, and wipe his arm with a cotton swab. It was a simple, two-minute routine but without it he would have had "a reaction," as my mother would somberly remind my sister and me.

I remember two reactions. The first, when I was in grade school, left him sprawling on the living room floor with my mother spoon-feeding him frozen orange juice. He went into the VA hospital, and I remember being hoisted up and talking to him as he wore a surgical mask. The second time was years later. He and I were shopping at Woolworth's when suddenly he grabbed a handful of Hershey bars, headed past the cash registers and right out the door, leaning heavily on my shoulder, using it as a moving hand rail. Once in the car, he stuffed the candy bars into his mouth, and then, after he came out of it, he turned and ordered me not to "go telling your mother." He didn't want her to worry, and he didn't want the dietary regime she might impose, one that would exclude peanuts, potato pancakes, and his nightly six-pack of beer.

With time, his medical problems multiplied and overtook him. At the end of my freshman year in high school, we moved out of our two-story house into a one-story ranch because, as my mother confided, "your father couldn't take the stairs." When I was in college in Pennsylvania, he and she would drive down to see me, but the trips took a greater toll on his legs, sometimes leaving him moaning in bed. Looking back, I think he already sensed he was living on borrowed time. Between my junior and senior years, my roommate Eddie came for a three-week stay of nonstop partying. I would go to work as a lifeguard in the morning, Eddie would join me at the pool in the afternoon, then we would go out for the night. But we would always stop home first to drink beers with my father. He let us know that he could "still keep up with you guys." But on the day he dropped Eddie off at the thruway to hitchhike home, my sister rushed up to me in the lifeguard chair and said, "We have to go to the hospital. Dad had a stroke."

It was only then that people at work told us he had been having blackouts for months. The doctors surmised they were "mini-strokes," and he never returned to work. His "forced retirement" was not the kind he had anticipated. There were no trips to Buffalo to visit his cousin, no drives across country in a Winnebago. His eyes grew steadily worse from the diabetes, and family and friends alike began commenting on what a dangerous driver he was. Eventually, he turned in his license.

Following his stroke, my father did not vigorously pursue the recovery regime the doctors and physical therapists had prescribed. As a consequence, his massive torso grew weak and flabby. An even bigger obstacle was his emotional state. At first he was weepy and sad, a common response among stroke patients; then he became angry and finally depressed. Throughout it all he was deathly afraid, not of another stroke but of the diabetes. He worried about diminished vision, loss of circulation in the hands and feet, infection, and eventual amputation. And he endured them all. By 1985, most of his right foot was gone and he was forced to use a wheelchair.

It would be wrong to characterize these years as ones of total darkness. He saw the birth of his grandson, and although he was unable to attend my ordination, he and my mother visited me in Phoenix the following year. He still got around town with the help of his friends, and many people came to see him. Still, his surroundings shrank. Most days he would move from bed to kitchen to his reclining chair in the living room. Eventually he slept there at night. During my visits home, we'd reminisce and he'd bring me up to date on his illness, that alien within. He would philosophize about being ready to go, and reprise a Redd Foxx line: "I's waitin' for da big one."

The big one came in December 1987. I got the news as I was about to celebrate morning Mass. I was at his bedside that night, watching the monitors and listening to the ventilator pump. He had had a massive coronary. When he came to, a day later, he gestured that he wanted the ventilator out and the heart drugs discontinued. After talking it over and swallowing hard, we agreed. Over the course of twelve hours, he would be weaned off the drugs.

That afternoon, his hospital room was the scene of a procession of family and friends coming to say goodbye. One old friend, a former parole officer, left muttering, "I can't believe this is it." Eventually my mother and sister said good night. I stayed, ready to call them when the time came. My father and I talked a long time that night. He was more peaceful than I had seen him in years. As he faded in and out, my eyes went back and forth between him and the monitors. At one point, he coughed and the monitors spiked. "I lost my breath," he whispered. Later tonight, I thought, you'll lose it and won't get it back.

As he slept, I read the psalms and eventually fell asleep myself. The next morning the doctor told us my father would probably die that day. The morning after, the doctor said the same thing. But the following morning, the attending physician admitted that there had been a misdiagnosis. "Looks like his heart is stronger than we thought," he said.

My father died four and a half years later--his worst years by far. He and my mother made it to their fiftieth wedding anniversary, but medically speaking, it was all downhill. In May 1992, he was back in the VA hospital, this time with a multi-system shutdown. A few days later, as he was being transferred to bed, his body gave out. My sister called me, this time to tell me he had died.

Throughout my father's long decline, we--family, friends, doctors, nurses--would urge him to "be patient." My father was anything but. He didn't do as the doctors told him, didn't listen to my mother and the rest of us, ate and drank what he wanted. On good days, he was pleasant and fun to be with, although there was always a note of sarcasm. On poor days, he was self-pitying and bitter. He was an impatient patient.

Oftentimes, I tried indirectly to impart to my father something of the Christian vision of suffering: how Christ is with us every step along the way, how we should strive to unite ourselves with Christ on the cross, how this can help us be patient. I wanted him to know the comfort and consolation of Christ's redemptive love. But at one point or another my father would usually say, "Words are cheap."

Looking back, I can see that he was right. I was speaking to him from a place within the ordinary circumstances of life. He was listening to me from a very different place, where one encounters what the Greeks called "The Furies." People who are sick over many years, whose lives are consumed by the suffering signified in the cross, often find it difficult to see anything but the cross. This is a reality that would try anyone's patience, and we can only know how we will confront that reality when we know it firsthand. Until that time, there remains a part of ourselves that we simply cannot know.

Yet the cross signifies a further reality, one that has to do with more than suffering, for it involves and evokes God's mercy. The fruit of Christ's Passion comes to us in the flesh, through the works of mercy: my mother helping my father through the long ordeal of getting to the bathroom; my sister sitting with him for hours; we and our friends finally burying him. Works of mercy that my father brought to many others too, which were surely on our minds as we laid him to rest in a cemetery only a hundred yards from the baseball diamond where, sixty years before, he played as a kid. What I thought of that morning in May was the many times my father had brought me to that same ball field when I was a kid, and patiently taught me how to catch, throw, and hit. It was a glimpse of the patience by which all of us, after wavering throughout our lives between patience and mortal impatience, are brought home to the presence of God.

Michael J. Baxter, CSC, teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.

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