When we finish, he sits beside me and wipes the grease from his hands. "You know this wouldn't have happened if I'd been a better father." Tears roll down his face.
"And here, I've been thinking it was my fault." I offer him a Kleenex and keep one for myself.
---
A few years ago, I was in the passenger seat with my brand new husband as we negotiated a traffic circle we dubbed "Suicide Circle." We're having a light-hearted debate about the difference between mist and haze."You're the stubbornest woman I know," my loved one says to me with a mixture of pride and distress.
I turn my head to deliver my retort. In one of those rare moments of discovery, I realize it's my father's head that turns from the window, slowly, almost lazily; it's my father head that tilts on my shoulders and looks out of my eyes through my brows.
"Just limited to the women you know?" I hear Dad's smart aleck remark through my mouth. I laugh so hard my face is wet with tears. The expression on my husband's face reveals he is puzzling over which direction my mind has turned.
"I actually felt my Dad's expression on my face." I am able to feign a serious expression for a moment.
"Yeah, so what's new?" My husband confesses to seeing it a thousand times, delighting at the obvious connection between my father and me. My husband tells me he's been aware of the similarities from the first day he was in the same room as my father and me. "You don't mean to tell me you just realized?" he asks with true surprise.
---
Last week I went to see my father. My mother was angry with him."He's got a cold. He's such a baby when he's sick," she says as she purchases high protein drinks. The three of us are on our way to the University hospital to get him into a clinical trial. I'm there to flex my intellectual muscles regarding 'compassionate care' use of unapproved drugs.
The doctor explains that the disease will continue to progress at least eight more weeks. "Think hard about how you want to spend that time," she says.
Mom is ecstatic. He's accepted into the study. Everything will be all right if he just shakes this cold. She asks everyone to say the rosary. I promise I will and remember doing the same for her during the Bay of Pigs, understanding just enough to be terrified of nuclear fallout, but not enough to understand why Cuba would want to bomb America's pigs.
Dad is exhausted from the two-hour trip to and from the hospital. I scoop him out a small bowl of ice cream. Vanilla, even though we have his favorite, butter pecan with the chocolate topping right there waiting for him. Some things just don't look good to him anymore. He eats about a tablespoon.
"It's the strangest thing," he says. "I get full and I can't eat another bite."
"Yeah," I agree. "You've always been the kind of guy that could put down one more bite." I look at his big belly, one of the few leftovers of the Santa Claus look that remains on his shrunken frame. He searches my face waiting for an explanation. "Do you think your liver is crowding your stomach?" I offer.
"Yes. Yes I do." His sparkling blue eyes look deep into mine and cloud over to a dusty gray. There is dead silence in the room. He breaks it. "Did you know I learned to fly after I came home from the War?" Dad tells me of his flying lessons and his one and only solo flight. I have it all on tape for our book.
---
Only a few nights ago I lay awake counting all the things I'd miss about my father, all the changes that will happen in our family. The little things and the big things. I think about my mother and the half-empty bed that will be hers. The joyful whoop my father has forever made each morning, that will no longer jar me awake when I'm visiting; and how my own children hate that I sing in the morning. I sob uncontrollably. I feel like a small child about to lose one training wheel from her bicycle, trying to convince herself that one training wheel can give half the support. I try to accept God's will in all of this.---
The world, busy at work around me, is unconscious to the churning inside me. I am in a meeting this morning, strategy for Phase III clinical trials and approvable manufacturing changes. A simple question inside of me wants to be voiced: Did you know my Daddy's dying? I surprise myself at the naive, child-like question that comes out of nowhere to the front of my consciousness.---
This afternoon, I go to a dentist appointment; just a checkup. An elderly woman is escorted by a young man who could be her son, or possibly her grandson. They conquer the curb, then approach the building that houses many doctors' offices. A courier rushes by, in a hurry to deliver or pick-up from one of the offices, it's impossible to know. What holds my attention is the moments it takes the woman to regain her momentum and the pain in the young man's face as he helps steady her. I hold the door for them both. My eyes meet the young man's, but we do no speak. No words can contain what we both know is inevitable.---
On our nightly walk, I tell my darling how much I'll miss my father. I'm not sure exactly why. I don't ask my dad for advice. Sometimes he's a real pain in the neck. But I like being with him. There's so much I still don't know about him."I won't miss him at all." My husband surprises me with his apparent lack of sensitivity.
"Really?" I say.
"All I have to do is look at you, and I see your Dad," he says.
It occurs to me that I'm not only losing my Dad, I'm losing a touchstone.
