Dad passed away October 27, 2018, a mere 3 months and 4 days after Barbara passed away. Those were two of the most important people in my life that I lost in a very short time and it was a double gut punch. The year 2018 was a rough one for me and the entire family. However we all can mourn the loss of these two people with sadness but also with the knowledge that they are where they knew they would be when they died. They are in a place beyond description, both leaving the pain and suffering that they endured behind and are praising their God constantly. Both of them set an example for all of us and we should take heed to the example they set. I have already written about Barbara and what she meant to me both in life as well as in death. Now I attempt to write about my father and the man that he was.
I have written several pieces on dad over the span of this blog. I have written about him almost if not a little more than I have my grandfather. I haven't bothered to go back and count how many I wrote of each one but the volume of writing I have done reflects how important these two men were to me. But this one is about dad. It is a tribute and a memorial to the man that helped raise me under very serious health conditions for sixty-two years. And right at the top, I want it made clear that even though dad did face problems that sometimes effected his mood, he did the absolute best that he could and he did it well. His life and my grandfather's life are almost parallel to each other except for the health issue that dad carried with him through two thirds of his life.
My dad had a brain aneurysm when I was about four or five years old. He was in his early thirties. I talked to my Uncle Jack about the day it happened and it went something like this. Dad and Jack were at a baseball game. Now dad had some rules about attending a baseball game of which I have written before. The main rule we are dealing with is the rule that states that you do not leave a ball game until the last out of the last inning. Major rule. Jack told me that around the fourth or fifth inning dad began to complain of a headache. It quickly worsened and dad began to slump a little in the old wooden seats of Municipal Stadium. Then around the sixth inning, dad told Jack that he had to leave, the headache was getting worse. At this point my uncle knew that something was terribly wrong. Dad leaving before the end of a game was simply unheard of. So the two of them left the game early (I honestly think it was the one and only time dad ever left a game early) and headed home.
Facts get a little fuzzy for me here because I do have a vague memory of that day and am not sure what really went on. Sometime after dad got home from the game and the next morning, a blood vessel in his brain burst and rendered him unconscious, basically in a coma. I remember mom calling my uncle on the phone and it seemed like Jacks little white Beetle was in front of the house before she hung up.. They rushed dad to the hospital in an ambulance to the emergency room where I assume a team made up of many doctors and nurses worked to save his life. They were able to stabilize him and admitted him to the intensive care unit. However he was still in a coma. My mother was told by the doctor that dad had maybe a 5% chance of making it through this tragedy. It was a daunting thought for her as she began to prepare for what could be a life without dad. She had four young children and did not have a job. And so the praying began.
A quick word about praying for healing. I believe that God does hear every one of our prayers and that He answers them. All of them. Barbara had so many people praying for her as she lay in a coma for a week after her surgery. I do believe that God answered those prayers even though it wasn't the answer we wanted. God answered our prayers by taking Barbara home. I think God had His reasons for that and looking back I can see some of those reasons and I am not angry with God, but I am thankful that if it was time for her to leave this earth, she found a place safe in God's arms. The answer to the prayers for Dad was a different one though. God willed that it was not time yet for dad to join Him and slowly dad came out of the coma and began to heal. It would be a long and rough healing process though taking many years before he would be free from the terrible pain inflicted on him.
The aneurysm had left dad with the process of dealing with the most horrific headaches on almost a daily basis. The pain would be so bad at times that he would need to go to the local clinic to get a shot that would knock him out so he could get some sleep through the pain and get up the next morning and go to work. I am not sure if the pain ever really left him during those many years or he adjusted to it so that when the pain wasn't as bad as it could be, he would manage to function as if there was not any pain. That is the theory I hold to. I believe he was in constant pain for decades but when the pain lessened somewhat, he took advantage and took care of the family as best he could. This is the definition of a strong, loving, great man in my eyes. After oh so many years, the blood vessel that had been clamped off and was the cause of the headaches eventually rerouted itself around the clip and once the connection was completed, the pain started to dissipate. He still had headaches now and then but not to the point of not being able to sleep or function on a daily basis. I believe God healed that in a way only God could and dad became a little more able to tolerate noises and people than he had for most of his life. It was a blessing. A blessing that took a long time to realize but it did come.
Now comes the tough part to write. It is rough because I can look back on the time I was growing up through my preteen and teenage years and on into time after I had married and left the house and I am not proud of myself and my actions in relating with dad. I am not going to speak for my siblings, I am sure they had different experiences with dad than I did. I was a stubborn and independent child and teenager. I eventually outgrew that after I had a son of my own but for almost half of the time I had with dad I messed it up. Because of dad constantly dealing with pain, he was not as patient as a normal person would be. He would get frustrated easily. I feel like I did everything I could to test those few weak spots that my dad did have. I look back and can see all of the many things dad tried to do for the whole family. He tried his best to have a normal family life. He would take us on day trips like to Fort Osage. He would take us to baseball games of course, but I also remember he took us to a soccer game when Kansas City had the Spurs as a home team. He took us to hockey games. He put up a basketball goal over the garage and put up with all three windows in the garage and one of the living room windows being busted out by a basketball that came from my fingertips and he replaced the windows without complaint. He went to most of our little league baseball games and my band concerts. I even remember one time that he took off from work early so he could come to Smith-Hale Junior High School and watch me play a basketball game. He did absolutely everything he could to give us as normal of a family life as possible and he did it well. But as I was growing up, I could not see all of this.
Now I am not saying dad was perfect, he was just a man after all and I certainly wasn't perfect, I was far far from perfect. We butted heads quite a bit. It got ugly at times. It got a little violent at times. I can look back at those times now though and clearly see that it was my stubbornness and rebellion and independence that trigger the vast majority of the conflicts. I am not proud of that fact. The thing is dad and I had so many things in common. We both loved music. I got a lot of my taste in music from listening to dad's old albums. Hank, Jim Reeves, Eddie Arnold and Jimmy Dean were great singers who sang wonderful songs and I still to this day listen to a lot of those artists that dad loved. He taught me about the great players that I watched growing up. The Orioles, the Twins, the Redsox were all held up as legendary teams ... and oh yeah, those stinking Yankees as well. For some reason though, neither of us connected to each other on all those things we had in common. We spent more time butting heads then enjoying what we had in common.
What started to turn my thinking around was when I went to work at Rycom Instruments, where dad worked. When I first started working there, it was after school picking up trash and sweeping floors but it was also a chance to observe my father at his absolute best. He was so intelligent. He was a sheet metal worker and along with grandpa one of the two greatest sheet metal workers I have ever seen. He did not us a calculator but did all the math on the blue prints so he could see how he got the final figures. The things is, most of the days I saw him working he was in the grasp of those terrible headaches. I would see him wince in pain, rub his forehead and continue to work a full eight hours. I may be wrong, it may just be my perception but I honestly do not ever remember a day that dad took off sick. He practiced, and I learned, that you give eight hours work for eight hours pay. And that was a full eight hours without any halfway working but a full hard eight hours of focused hard work. That was when my respect for him started to turn and to grow as I realized how long he had been doing this day after day. It had been decades. And he never complained. Oh he would complain about some of his co-workers but never complained about his job or what he had to go through. It was this work ethic of my dad's that formed my own work ethic that I carry with me today. It was probably the greatest gift a father could give a son.
Well, dad worked until retirement. He made the adjustment fairly well as he began to learn how to help mom clean house and do dishes. He was determined to make life as easy as he could for mom and I think he was pretty good at it. Then he began to age and it began to catch up with him.
He suffered from a hernia. He had a couple of heart attacks. But it was after retirement that the biggest challenge he would face since his aneurysm happened. Dementia was starting to settle into that sharp mind of his. It didn't start off drastically, just little things for the first several years. Forgetting things, redoing things that he had already done, just little things like that. The first time I really noticed that something was happening was when he was in the hospital for something that I can't remember what it was.
In Kansas City they like to torture the Royals fans. They do this by showing a ball game live and after you watch them lose that game, they have a half hour post game show followed by?? yup, a half hour PRE-GAME show that would be followed by rebroadcasting the devastation once again. You not only got to see the Royals blow a game once, but just to make sure you get the full effect of another loss, they show it a second time. Well, I was spending the night with dad at the hospital one night and since the Royals were playing, we watched it. Dad tried to never miss a Royals game. During the game dad would comment on each play and each player, he enjoyed it so much. Of course the Royals lost the game and after it was over we watched a little of the post game then started to talk ignoring the television. Suddenly, dad looked up at the television and the Royals were playing a SECOND game!! And so we watched it. It was at this time that I first noticed that something was slipping. Dad began making the same remarks that he had during the same game four hours earlier. He watch the full game as though it was the first time he had seen it. The dementia would not really worsen for awhile or at least get worse very slowly but the process had begun.
Over the next few years dad's dementia continued to worsen and my moms eyesight weakened quite a bit. It was time to pay back to them what they had sacrificed for us. And so with help from my sister Karen and my niece Tara, both who went above and beyond the call of duty, we took care of mom and dad. It was also during this time that Barbara's health began to falter tremendously. Without Tara and Karen I would have been beside myself. I had to spend more time taking care of Barb and less taking care of mom and dad, although I tried to stop and check in on them everyday after work. So, just a shout out to Karen and Tara. THANK YOU BOTH SO VERY MUCH!
After awhile dad's knees began to give out on him and before long he had to use a walker to get around, even in the house. Adding taking care of Barbara to the care taking of mom and dad was piling up and becoming a little too much. Elaine discussed with mom and dad the idea of moving to Alabama where she could take care of mom and dad and I could concentrate on Barbara. It had a lot of benefits. It would give mom and dad a social life once again was a big one. Meals would be provided and a hospital was right across the street. And so in October of 2016, mom and dad moved to a small apartment in Camden, Alabama and I began to focus on Barbara.
Dad's dementia continued to worsen. It wasn't too long before it became apparent that with mom's eye sight as bad as it was and dad's dementia problems getting worse, it was getting to the point where both of them needed more help than living in the small apartment provided.
They kept dad in the assisted living facility for a short amount of time to evaluate him before moving him to the dementia facility. It was the first time in their marriage, other than dad's military time, that mom and dad were separated. We began studying dementia and the effects it has on people who suffer with it. We studied and listened to how the disease progresses and the how people with the disease make their way through the steps. Dementia is not pretty in the latter stages. It seemed like dad was heading towards another frustrating part of his life that the an aneurysm would bring him to. Our prayers for dad began to change. We did not him to leave us, but we didn't want to watch dad go through the suffering that progressive dementia would take him.
I was going to go to Alabama to visit dad once more before winter set in, knowing that by springtime his dementia probably would be to the point of him not knowing who I was. I was going to leave on Wednesday, October 31. However on the afternoon of October 27, my sister Karen showed up at the house to give me the news. Dad had passed away. I left for Alabama the next morning.
Once again God had answered prayers. It wasn't what we wanted necessarily, but it was God's plan, God's schedule to take dad home. I miss him. I loved him. But just as God had plans for Barbara, he had plans for dad. Dad would not have to endure the frustration and the misery that dementia would bring upon him. He had died quickly and easily as his heart suddenly just stopped. No real pain. No lingering around waiting to die. God took dad home in a most merciful way. As with Barbara, it was not only merciful to dad, but it was a show of mercy for all of us that we did not have to watch dad suffer.
Dad was buried in Blue Springs, Missouri. We had two memorial services for him. One in Camden Alabama where he had made friends with a lot of people and a lot of his family was there. The other was held in Blue Springs, Missouri for all the friends and family in the midwest. Both services were closed out with the attendees singing "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" in unison as a special tribute to dad and his love of baseball.
Dad is at peace with God along with so many people that he knew and influenced over the years, including Barbara. I am thankful in knowing that dad will not suffer from the horrors of dementia. That he will no longer have those headaches. That his knees will bow before God without pain and stiffness.
Our God is loving and merciful and gives us the gift of grace. If I learned anything during the year 2018, it was that. I already knew it, I believed it, but now I have a concrete belief in his love, grace and mercy. He has shown that to dad, to Barbara, and to me. I thank Him for that.
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| The last photo of just my dad and myself together |
