Fifty years on

It was semester break, and I was home for the week. I would just as soon have been in Boston. I had an apartment off-campus. And a dog. There was no need for me to spend the week in Worcester. But there was.

Two months earlier, on my parents' twenty-fifth anniversary, my father had gone into the hospital for the final time. He had been suffering from progressive kidney disease since the spring of 1964, and it had been a long six-and-a-half years for our family. In and out of hospitals. One step forward, two steps back. When we were lucky, it was two steps forward and only one step back.

There would be months when he was fine. When we were fine. 

And then there'd be some setback. 

Dialysis was crude; transplants were rare.

In an out of hospitals. Sometimes in Worcester. Sometimes in Boston, where the experts were.

What was the treatment? What exactly did they do for my father? To my father?

I haven't a clue, and it's way too late to ask my mother.

He took the pills that they prescribed. He went on a salt-free diet. (If you grabbed the salt-free peanut butter by mistake: gag!) My mother was a great soup maker, but, let's face it, one of the keys to soup is salt. Suddenly, soup wasn't as tasty at our house. 

He was in pain a lot. Some nights, he would pace the narrow hallway of our small house, racked with pain, moaning. The next morning he would announce that he hadn't slept a wink. Who had?

Through most of it, thought, things were normal. But not the same normal. 

I was a freshman in high school when my father first became ill, so I was already checking out of the family.

During my high school years, did we still take family rides, something my father loved to do, and which were one of the hallmarks of our family life? My father drove us all over Worcester County, stopping at the Cherry Bowl or Verna's for ice cream. Stopping each fall at Brookfield "Happy Apple" Orchard for a couple of bushels of the Macs we all devoured. Stopping at the cemeteries - in Barre (where my father's father and his parents were buried), in Cherry Valley (where my grandmother's parents, and my sister Margaret, were). At Christmas, we rode through the city, in search of the neighborhoods with the best lights. In November 1963, he'd driven us through the somber and quiet streets of down city Worcester to get away from the awful news on television, passing the stores that all seemed to have portraits of JFK, draped in black bunting, in their windows. That ride, I remember. But did I still hop in the car on a summer evening for a family ride to the Cherry Bowl?

And here we were, January 1971, and my father was dying.

This time around, he was hospitalized in Boston. My mother moved in with my aunt and uncle in the Boston suburb of Newton. They took care of her, driving her into Tufts Medical Center each day so she could spend it at my father's side.

During the school week, my cousin Barbara - then a young mother with two preschoolers - would keep house in Worcester, moving in to take care of my younger sister Trish (11) and brother Rick (15). My brother Tom and I were away at school. My sister Kath, newly married, was teaching in Georgia where her husband was stationed.

On weekends, I'd spell Barbara who'd move back into her own home outside of Boston.

On Friday, my Uncle Charlie would pick me up in Boston and drive me to Worcester, chain smoking all the way, the windows of his Pontiac rolled up against the winter cold. He drove too slowl for the Mass Pike, so we moseyed out Route 9. On one trip, in Framingham, halfway to Worcester, I threw up all over myself. I spent the weekend mostly in bed, but managed to give Trish and Rick whatever the bug was I had.

And now I was in Worcester for the week. 

On Sunday, January 24th, I saw my father for the last time, driving into Boston with Trish and Rick. Knowing but not knowing this was it. 

I remember standing around my father's death bed. He was gray, shriveled, mostly out of it. I don't remember what anyone said. If anything. We got back in the car - The Green Hornet, our Galaxy 500 - and headed out the Mass Pike. We didn't talk much. The songs on the radio were Elton John's "Your Song," Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind," and James Taylor's "Fire and Rain." Always that winter. Always.

Back in Worcester, my roommate Joyce joined us, with our puppy Grimbald, to keep me company during the vigil.

On Sunday evening, Joyce and I took Trish to see Love Story, and we all wept our way through it. 

On Monday morning, I woke to find that Grimbald was sick. He'd puked all over the family room in neat little piles. 

Dogs are empaths. They know when things are off, and it stresses them out.

I think that Joyce and I had planned to spend the day skiing, nearby at Mt. Wachusett. But, after Trish and Rick were off the school, the call came from my mother.

While I headed out to pick Rick and Trish up at their schools, Joyce's boyfriend Tommy (now her husband) drove up from RI to pick Joyce and Grimbald up.

I didn't have to tell my brother Rick the news. The Xaverian brother who went to fetch him from his classroom did the honors. Not that he didn't know immediately, when the brother darkened the classroom door and gestured to him.

We drove back into Worcester to get Trish, Rick offering to go in and pick her up. To tell her.

We went in together. The principal ushered us to Trish's classroom, then went in to get her. Trish came out, crying, stricken. Followed by her teacher, a nun, who hissed at me, "How dare you come in here and interrupt this child's day." I mumbled something about my mother needing to see her children. I was thinking: fuck you.

Back home, while we waited for my mother's arrival from Boston, I made the calls my mother had asked me to make.

To the army base in Georgia where my brother-in-law was stationed, the only way we had to get in touch with Kath, who was teaching in a remote rural school. To Chicago, where I called my Uncle Ted so he and my Aunt Mary could spread the word to Chicago. As my mother had instructed, I asked Teddy to tell my grandmother not to come. I can still hear his soft, gentle voice, "I don't think there's anything we can do to stop her, honey." He was right, of course. She came anyway, one more thing for my mother to contend with. (At least she stayed at a hotel. And I do know my mother was happy to have her Chicago siblings with her, if not my grandmother, who could be completely overwhelming and difficult.)

Later that day, I went to see my other grandmother. My father's mother. Nanny was shocked by my father's death, as my feckless Uncle Charlie had been assuring her all all along that my father was improving. ("He's sitting up in bed, Mother. He's reading about the Bruins in The Boston Globe.")

There was a steady stream of family and friends in and out of our house. Then the wake. The funeral. The terrible weather that didn't seem to keep anyone away from the wake or the funeral.  The wake: two afternoons, two evening. Then the funeral. They were all packed, in spite of a raging blizzardy storm.

A lot of people loved my father.

And why not?

My father was quite a guy. Funny, tough, brilliant, kind, imaginative, irreverent, generous, decent, honest. Yes, he had a hair-trigger temper, but his outbursts were brief, and he was way more bark than bite. He was a storyteller. And athlete. No respecter of arbitrary authority. Questioner of nuns and priests. 

Devoted beyond devotion to my mother. 

And he loved his kids. Obviously. Overtly. In almost every picture of him, he's looking at the person he's with, especially if that person was my mother or one of us.

I was hoping to find a picture I have, taken with a Polaroid, of me and my father. I'm about 10, sitting on the living room couch, my father's arm around me. I'm in PJs and a do-rag that covers the spoolies that in my hope vs. reason way I used each night to curl my straight as a ruler hair. Of course, I can't find that picture, so I'll rerun this blurry Christmas Eve pic...)

Anyway, even when he was bitching at us - mostly telling us we were lazy and spoiled because we didn't get down on our knees and scrub the kitchen floor, as he'd done every Saturday night for his mother when he was a kid; or something - we knew that he loved us. Each of us has a story of my father's jumping to our defense.

My favorite is my sister Kath's.

When she was a freshman in college, she wrote a story for the school's literary magazine that recounted an incident from grammar school. (The college Kath and I attended was run by the same order of nuns that had run our high school and grammar school.) The story was well-written, funny, maybe a little biting, mildly - amusingly - critical of some nitwit nun,  but nothing outrageous.

After the story was out, Kath received an anonymous letter from a nun, attacking her for her audacity in writing such a story. The nun clearly knew some details - that Kath was a scholarship girl (as I was) at our high school, and she told Kath that should be humbly grateful for all the nuns had done for her. Instead, Sister Saint Anonymous wrote, Kath was clearly a vile ingrate.

When my father learned about this letter, he hit the roof, threatening to pull us all out of Catholic school the next day. 

My mother calmed him down, and, although I found his response to this rancid nun exhilarating, I will say I was happy that she did. I was a junior in high school. I loved my school. I didn't want to get pulled out.

My story about my father coming to my rescue is less exciting.

A classmate had hurt my feelings, saying something modestly cruel to me after a misunderstanding. My father's response: "She isn't fit to shine your shoes."

I'm not sure whether that was true, but it made me feel better. 

When I was seven or eight, we were at a well-attended Labor Day cookout at the home of some friends. A slightly younger girl - Martha something-or-other - glommed onto me. As the party wore down, I overhead someone say to my father, "Martha sure likes Maureen." And I overheard my father's telling him, "Everybody loves Moe."

Not sure whether that's true either.

But he sure did, and knowing that has carried me through plenty of tough and doubting times during my life.

One time, when I was in college, coming home for the weekend, my father heard me coming in through the front door.

"Moe's here!" I can still hear the warmth, the joy in his voice as he told the rest of the family that I was back where I belonged. Where I as so valued, so cherished, so loved. 

Those words have carried me, too.

My father was just 58 when he died, more than a decade younger than I am now. He had wanted to make it until his baby, my sister Trish was 18. He didn't. Not by a long shot. She was 11 - the same age my father had been when his father died.

I'm not going to say that not a day goes by when I don't think of him. I'm quite sure plenty such days go by. 

But I think about my father all the time. And I miss him all the time.

If he'd lived, my sibs and I often laugh, he'd be dead already. But his mother lived to 97, and he had an aunt and an uncle who brushed up against 100. Coulda. Woulda. Shoulda.

Fifty years is a long time. Fifty years is the blink of an eye.

Fifty years on, I'm thinking of you, Al. Missing you. Loving you. 

Where does the time go?