Faith in love: Memories of my father

Sept. 7, 2008

Two months ago, my oldest brother called me to say the doctors had finally figured out why the lining of my dad’s outer lung kept filling up with fluid.
He had mesothelioma, a cancer caused from exposure to asbestos. It was hard to detect because the hundreds of little tumors were no bigger than little tiny pencil points.
I found the diagnosis very strange since my father was a state trooper and didn’t work around asbestos. He did recall putting in a new furnace in the basement of our old house in Davison. He thought there might have been asbestos tucked around the vents, but he wasn’t sure. Or maybe it was the two years in his early 20s when he worked for a dairy. He thought the pipes might have been lined with the killer white stuff.
I am old enough to have seen death before. Some of my friends were young, some old. My grief was deep, but simple. I’d miss them very much. But the reason I am writing this is because I had problems this time around. My feelings were so… complicated.
My dad was a tall, formidable figure. A man’s man. He was a state trooper and an expert marksman. He spoke with such a deep voice, my friends feared him. He also hunted every year with my older brothers.
We must have had 50 guns and rifles in the house. He did a lot of different jobs for the state police over his 24-year career. He was a scuba diver and recovered bodies out of ice-cold rivers and lakes. He took black and white photos of grisly crime scenes (which I accidentally, on purpose, found when I was a kid). He worked undercover in the Flint race riots. He busted a serial bank robber in the Upper Peninsula and made him strip naked by his police cruiser so he wouldn’t escape. His last decade was spent arresting drug dealers.

EIGHT IS ENOUGH
He and my mom married young with hopes of having 12 children. They stopped at 8, but it was still something. Eight kids in 10 years. I never realized what that meant until I had three of my own.
He also had a bad drinking problem. They say alcoholism is a disease, and I believe it, but there was also a lot of stress in his life. Imagine a family of eight kids hitting the teen years all at the same time? Unbeknownst to me, his drinking ramped up when I was in the sixth grade, the cruelest year of any human life, especially if you are a girl with no fashion sense.
When I was around 15 years old, dad was called on to quell two different hostage situations, both involving armed men. He killed the men in both cases, saving the lives of the hostages (one was his sergeant). There was no media scrutiny, but I think he took it hard. On top of the job stress, he was smoking three and a half packs of cigarettes a day.
In his early 40s, he had a minor heart attack. The doctor ordered him to quit work, and he landed in his Lazy Boy.
I had no idea he was drinking. I interpreted his silence as his way of coping with his eight children who basically had only stupid things to say. My only conversation with him was about the Vietnam War. I was a protestor. He wanted to bomb the entire country and get it over with.
Sometimes he would break his silence and thunder out something like, “Enough!” and scare everyone. Then he’d lapse back into his stony silence. I remember when my brother Kevin walked behind his chair with his saxophone and honked, just to see if he was even alive. We stood in the stairway, wondering if we’d ever see Kevin again.

MOVING ON
At the time, I thought alcoholics were hoboes or soap opera stars who snuck cocktails in the afternoon. It never occurred to me that my own dad might be one. My cluelessness, owes in part, to my abilities of avoiding the house. I got a job at the local drugstore and joined every after-school club imaginable. I did my homework at the library. I obsessed over my terrible relationship with him. I felt so… bad. All the time.
And then when I was 16, I had an epiphany. I had to let the dad-loves-his-daughter-bonding thing go. It wasn’t happening, for whatever reason, and I needed to move on with my life. There would always be friends, and I needed to start opening up to the rest of the world.
The guilt was lifted and I was free as a bird. I walked with a lighter step. I felt something in my heart, which I detected as joy. I had successfully “detached.” I began saving money for college and, for the first time, I had hopes for a happy life—far away from my family. I went to my first party in the 11th grade. Things were looking up.
And they were looking up for my dad too. He stopped drinking during my freshman year of college, and talked again. He rapidly transformed into a human being of interest. He earned a bachelor’s and then a master’s degree in social work. He went on to help hundreds of people back to sobriety. He took up horseback riding and sailing and built a cabin on a Montana mountaintop. His 12-step program led him into a deep faith.

REPAIRED RELATIONSHIPS
I liked him much better, but he still vexed me. He wasn’t much of a grandpa to the kids, mainly because he lived 2,000 miles away. And I guess I didn’t exactly have my kids send him Valentine’s Day cards either. Over the years, he repaired his relationships with all the other siblings, but I always felt a little on the edge looking in. He warmed up a little, but declined my invitation a few years ago when I offered to fly him into Michigan to meet my third child—his last and 25th grandchild. I was hurt, but persisted and later flew out to Montana where my son, by then a toddler, promptly climbed on his lap and planted a kiss on his cheek. Dad was charmed.
So what do you do with all these decades of feelings, especially when they don’t seem quite… appropriate?
When the cancer was diagnosed, all eight siblings agreed to take turns staying with my mom and dad to serve as chauffeurs and cooks. Six weeks ago, I went to their trailer in a little trailer park outside of steamy Phoenix. After I arrived, I enthusiastically waited on them hand and foot. I bought him the newest James Bond book and lots of milk shakes.
One night, I apologized to my dad for being such a difficult child. (Oh I didn’t mention that?)
And my dad was amazingly nice. We talked and joked and it was wonderful. Yet neither of us could ignore the fact that he loved Fox News as much as I liked the John Stewart Show. Mom and dad prayed before every meal, something I usually skip. And there were the times when he’d have “break-through pain”—when the Oxycotin wasn’t doing the job. He’d grimace and lapse into silence. I knew exactly why he was grouchy, but that’s when my childhood pain came roaring back.

A CONVERSATION
One night, we had an uncomfortable conversation—a conversation about politics and religion—a talk that I’d rather not have with a dying man.
It began with Mom telling me I wouldn’t get into heaven with my “good works” and I should get my faith act together. I sort of spewed some bitter words about how organized religion was being used to subvert politics and justify this stupid war—everything Jesus stood against.
Then my mom said she’d pray for me and dad walked out of the room.
My mom and I later agreed that our love wasn’t based on political issues. She said they were proud of me. And I told her that as much as I’d like dad to like me, I couldn’t change who I was.
The next morning, everything was back to normal. I made coffee for my dad, really weak, the way he likes it, we chatted over the headlines of Fox News, and I took their dog, Sam, for a walk around the trailer park. Sam took a dump in the middle of a cactus with foot-long thorns.
I marveled how he did that without getting his bottom spiked. We laughed about it when I got back.
When it came time to leave, my dad thanked me, and he sounded like he was really, really grateful.
When I got back home, I talked to dad on the phone at least every other day, and he was gentle and kind and…. loving. He seemed to have let our political and religious differences go by the wayside.
I’ve wrestled with all these emotions over the past two months, and it hasn’t been pretty. I’ve talked to other people about their dads and I realize my dad wasn’t that much different than most of the other men who grew up in the Depression era—that silent, tough guy type who adored John Wayne and 007 movies.
A friend of mine suggested that this was the time that I ask my dad questions that still linger in my mind. Tough questions about why we never seemed to click.
I didn’t do that, because, well probably, because I was too afraid. But the answer came anyway. I realized his love was always there, but I had to be willing to believe in it. He may not have necessarily liked me, but he did love me. And it sure has hurt to see him slowly die.
Two weeks ago, I flew back to Phoenix to be with him, and my seven siblings, because he had gone into hospice care. I walked into the room where he was staying and found him in bed, laboring to breathe. He sometimes stared at a vanishing point in the room that none of the rest of us could see. He was dying with a furious sense of purpose, and I was overwhelmed by how brave he was. He always had been a brave man, I thought. During his last few hours, when he could no longer talk, I gently squeezed his hand and told him once more, “I love you dad.” He nodded, “Yes.”