The last goodbye

June 1, 2005

The funny thing about Dad is that he was just out riding his bike in March while there was still plenty of snow on the ground, and even a month or so ago he was pedaling up to five miles at a time on the Leelanau Trail -- not bad for an 84-year-old with a bad hip.
I always worried when he forgot to buckle his helmet, offering a gentle reminder that it wouldn’t do him much good if he fell off and it wasn’t strapped on. And I worried that he’d fall out there on the trail -- those old bones don’t bounce the way they used to.
So it was quite a shock when Dad passed on yesterday. I thought he had a good 5-to-10 years left in him, but a combination of pneumonia, a staph infection and heart problems took their toll. One moment, he was sitting up in bed eating lunch and looking forward to getting out of the hospital, and the next moment he slipped away. Even the critical care staff was shocked -- he seemed so far along his way to recovery.
No one can imagine the shock you feel when it’s someone close in your own family who dies. We all hear of people dying in other families and offer our sympathy, but when it’s someone you’ve spent years with -- someone who is literally irreplaceable -- it turns your world upside down. When it’s a close family member, your world can never be the same again.
When we are young, the parents who are at the center of our lives gradually move offstage and we find to our great surprise that we have replaced them as the center and strength of the family, only to find ourselves moving towards the wings of the stage in our own turn in the progression of generations.
Joseph Edwin Downes was born in a farmhouse bed on Nov. 22, 1920. He grew up on a farm 25 miles from Grand Rapids at a time when those who worked the land barely had a toehold in the modern world.
Dad’s farm had no electricity when he was born -- no electric lights, stove or refrigerator. Coal heat. For refrigeration, he and his brothers and father cut ice from the lake down the hill and packed it in sawdust, selling the rest in town.
As a child, I remember seeing the metal windmill they had used to draw their water from a well and and I recall the old tumbled-down outhouse which served before indoor plumbing came along. The washboard was still a well-remembered tradition. The old chicken coop was still in full cry & cackle in those days, as was a terror of a boss rooster who scared the bejesus out of me on a couple of visits when I was three or four years old.
Dad tilled the fields with horses when he was young, finding nearly 100 arrowheads and spear points in the turning soil which he displayed all his life with great pride. He also pitched hay and milked cows by hand. And although he told me he was able to use his father’s Model-T to get to high school, I do believe he said there were times when he and his classmates would take a horse and sleigh in the winter when the roads snowed over.
He and his brothers hunted the local woods with Bob, the bob-tailed collie for whom I was named. He trapped hundreds of muskrat and mink out of the lake down the hill from the farm, and the pride of his life was inheriting the place, although not until he was nearly 80.
Our talks gave me a glimpse into how people enjoyed themselves decades ago: with weekly poker games, barn dances and church fairs. Getting around the law during Prohibition included the hazards of hard cider and moonshine. There were Grange Hall square dances with drinking out back, sometimes leading to fistfights. Then there were stories of hermits living out in the woods, the lumberjacks in our family, and the time someone stole a huge pile of beans during the Great Depression. My brother Mike and sister Sue loved the story of how Dad met my mother Ila at a square dance in Grand Rapids when a rack of coats fell on him and she offered to help pick them up.
You can’t replace stories like those. Stories, memories, things no one else will ever know or care about -- those are the gifts the unforgettable people in our lives leave us.
Last night I took a walk along Grand Traverse Bay and saw a jet‘s contrail far to the north flying high up into the blue sky beyond the billowing sunlit waves. The jet was lost from sight at the head of a brilliant white plume, bound for the other side of the world. It sure looked like my father, heading out for the wild blue yonder.