Goodbye

This is, more or less, what I said at my Dad's funeral yesterday:

It doesn't really feel like it at the moment, but I know that I am really, really lucky.  I don't have a single bad memory about my dad, unless you count the times that I had to tell him goodbye or all the time that I spent missing him.  I remember things like him reading to me, teaching me how to ride a two-wheeler in Grandmommie's driveway on Christmas day, him carrying me out of the hospital after I had surgery when I was little, and him being at all my soccer games, cheering for me. 

Here is a story that I think says so much about my father and the kind of person he was: In the late 70s he had an apartment in Garland and Jay and I stayed with him every single weekend.  The apartment was so little - just one bedroom, one bathroom, a kitchen, a little living room, and a teeny dining area with a sliding door that opened up onto a little patio.  Jay and I slept on a black and white fold-out houndstooth sofa with foam cushions.  Remember that, Jay?  One day we were a little stir crazy, and so dad opened the sliding glass door, and opened the window in his bedroom, which was low to the ground and also looked out on the patio.  He took out the window screen and told us that we could run in circles from his bedroom, through the window, onto the porch, into the dining area, through the hall, and then back to his bedroom.  And so we did- we ran and ran and ran, laughing the whole time.  When I was older and had kids, he told me that I needed to be sure that I always lived in a house that had circles for the kids to run in.  So I do, and always will, even when I'm a grandmother and great-grandmother.    

My dad planned to be there when I was born, which was a newish thing in 1970.  He went to the childbirth classes and came to the hospital with lollipops and a paper bag for my mom, in case her mouth was dry or she hyperventilated.  He wanted to see me be born, but the doctor on call that night said no.  My grandmother, Margaret, told me that when she got to the hospital while my mom was still in labor, she found him completely dejected, sitting in the hallway on a chair, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands, holding the paper bag.  She said it was the saddest thing she'd ever seen in her whole life.  "Poor Stanley!" she said.

I tried to be there for my dad when he died.  When Jeani called me the Saturday before last and told me that things were looking bad for him, I booked a redeye out of San Francisco the next night and got to Houston at 8 in the morning on Monday.  I grabbed a cab at the airport and was in his room before 9.  He slept for almost the whole day, except for the time when the nurse stopped his sedation so he could wake up and tell me hello.  He was back on a ventilator and couldn't speak, so he took a pen and wrote on his notepad, "I am so tired," and "I'm so glad you came."  Jeani read him a wonderful letter that Jay had emailed her. 

I wanted to sleep in his ICU room that night, but I'd been awake the whole night before, flying, and the nurses encouraged me and Jeani both to go home and rest.  The next day was supposed to be big; they were going to remove the chest tube that had gone in a few days before to give him relief from his collapsed lung.  Before we left, I was sitting in a chair at the foot of his bed and looking at him sleeping there.  He was sitting up partway because of the ventilator and his head was turned to his left.  I wanted to climb in the bed next to him and put my arms around his shoulders so that his head could rest on my shoulder, but we could hardly even give him a hug with all the wires from his IV and ventilator, his chest tube and heart monitor.  When we left I gave his hand a squeeze, rested my hand on his shoulder, kissed his cheek, and told him that I loved him, that I'd see him early in the morning when Jay got there from Portland.

At 12:01 on Tuesday morning I finally got into bed and tried to sleep. It was June 21^st, the summer solstice, a date that dad always appreciated and sometimes even made sangria on.  It was the longest day of the year, and what would turn out to be the longest day of my life.  At 1:24 Jeani woke me up, saying, "Jeni, it's time.  We need to get to the hospital."  We got dressed and drove over, only to find that he'd died at 1:27.

A lot of small and large details had to be attended to, and so Jeani and I did that and then planned to sleep before driving to Sherman.  We never did rest, but we got on the road a little before 2pm and made our way through rain and forest fires up to Sherman where my dad grew up.  We got to grandma's house after dinnertime, and we hugged her and cried with her and I couldn't hardly look around because every single thing I saw held all these memories.  After an evening spent visiting around the table, Jeani and I went to bed just before midnight in my dad's old bedroom, the one he grew up in.  There was a thunderstorm, and as we went to sleep the windows lit up with lightening and I counted one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, all the way up to twenty before the thunder came and I pictured my dad as a little blonde-haired boy doing the exact same thing in the exact same place. 

It's funny, sometimes, the things that make you think of people.  Last summer, when I went to Houston for a weekend, my dad and I were cooking supper together and he said, "You know, I read something really interesting and once I thought about it, it made perfect sense: When you crack an egg, instead of cracking the shell on the side of a bowl or the pan, you should just hold it longways and strike it flat against the counter top.  It makes a cleaner break and you're less likely to get eggshell in your eggs."  Then he briefly explained the physics to me of why that was.  I break a lot of eggs.  A lot.  See those four kids there?  They love eggs and banana bread and cupcakes and frittata.  Ever since my dad taught me that, every single time I have cracked an egg I've thought of him.  And now maybe you will, too.

My dad taught me so many, many things, and the most important of them were things he taught me by example.  He taught me to be considerate, to give people the benefit of the doubt, to not be judgmental, and to be patient.  He taught me that honesty is best, even when it's the more difficult choice, and he taught me to treat everyone with respect.

In March when I found out that he'd been diagnosed with kidney cancer, I spent many days feeling like I was underwater and in a dream.  Jay and I booked a trip to visit him, together, at the end of April, and I couldn't wait to go see him.  On April 1st dad was hospitalized and Jay immediately got on a plane to be with him, even though he had just become a papa for the second time to sweet little Oliver who was born nearly two months early.  I arrived the next day.  Dad couldn't talk, because he was on a ventilator, but he wrote notes.  Lots and lots of notes.  One of my favorite stories from that time was when a young male nurse came in to check on him.  He'd been napping and the nurse woke him up.  Dad asked for his pen and paper and he wrote, "You aren't nearly as cute as my sister."  We all looked at him, wondering what on earth he meant by that.  He continued, "She was bringing me an ice cold beer, but then you came and woke me up!"  Another time, when his friend Richard was visiting, he asked Jeani to tell the story of their very eventful first date, and he used a pen and paper to add his details to the story.  Even without his voice, my dad was a wonderful storyteller.

I was there the first time he had his ventilator removed and he could speak again.  He told me that he'd had a great life.  He told me that he'd been blessed with an amazing family, that he absolutely loved his career, and that he was honored and humbled by the outpouring of love sent his way when he became ill.  He told me that he was lucky, and that even if he didn't live much longer, it was okay, because he'd had the best life he could have ever hoped for.