Eulogy for My Father

Dad with Sean the golden retriever...sometime in the mid-'80s, I'm guessing.

Dad with Sean the golden retriever…sometime in the mid-’80s, I’m guessing.

As you know, my father was a journalist. In that role, he was a storyteller: he relayed information about lives and events that readers could use to make informed decisions about how to live their lives.

What occurs to me is that what we remember about my father were HIS stories — stories that serve as signposts illustrating a truly amazing, well-lived life.

There were anecdotes about growing up during the Great Depression — with which we would tease him about by saying, “we know, dad, they cut up your little red wagon for firewood when you were a boy” — that provided a background for the person he became.

And there were stories about growing up around Medford, stories he would bring to life for us when he’d show us around that area and point out how things had changed.

And of course, there were the stories from his time during World War II…stories that are all the more amazing to me for having been lived when he was just 20 years old. Pleasant stories such as:

  • Christmastime in 1944, and being so close to a German patrol that he could hear them singing Christmas carols, or…
  • Teasing a newly-arrived-at-the-front soldier by saying they used their bayonets regularly. After pausing for effect, Dad and his buddies showed the newbie how the bayonet was the best tool with which to open a can of food

And of course there were the not-so-pleasant stories such as describing the horrors of tree bursts in the Hurtgen Forest and the horrible weather conditions that winter and the horrors he’d seen.

But there were a lot of other stories — incredible stories, to my mind — that maybe some of you haven’t heard. I’d like to share a couple of them with you.

While a student at Dartmouth Dad met poet Robert Frost, who was in residency in Hanover at the time. Dad told Frost that he didn’t particularly care for poetry and when Frost asked why, Dad said it was because he didn’t like professors dictating what a poem meant. Frost asked for an example and Dad cited Frost’s poem “Birches.” Dad said he thought it a wonderful description of a joy he had enjoyed as a poor boy having fun in the woods, but the professor insisted it was about the poet’s latent desire to commit suicide. THAT got Frost’s hackles up and he gruffly told Dad, “Don’t tell me who that was or I’ll kill him.”

When we kids came along, Dad read us the poetry of Robert Frost.

Some of my favorite dad stories were ones he told about meeting Ernest Hemingway, his writerly idol, in Cuba in the 1950s. Dad was there on business and was introduced to Papa at the famous bar in Havana where Hemingway held court. Dad described a specific location where he’d fought in the war, an obscure spot that Hemingway also knew, and the two bonded. Dad ended up hanging out with Hemingway for the rest of his stay in Cuba.

Years later, Dad would pull a Hemingway volume off the shelf some evenings and read us passages from his work.

And then there was a story that prompted a nickname for my father used by several of the boys who played hockey for him:

While coaching the 78th Division hockey team in Germany after the war, Dad was told to show a visiting Russian man how the team trained and played. Dad said he had long discussions with the man, and diagrammed and demonstrated drills and plays the team. That Russian man turned out to be Anatoli Tarasov, the so-called “Father of Russian hockey” who created the Soviet Union’s dominant hockey culture of the second half of the 20th century. So my father at times would say that he could lay claim to being the founder of Russian hockey.

Some of my teammates and I took to calling Dad “The Founder.” It’s a name that stuck so well that one teammate Tim Caddo, who unfortunately couldn’t be here today, brought it up again in an email exchange this week.

There were many other stories Dad lived and told…to me, to my siblings, to you. I would ask that you remember those stories…and live and tell your own amazing stories.

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Untold Stories

Springsteen asked, “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true,” but what happens to a story that doesn’t get told? Surely it disappears, right? Evaporates like so much dew as the sun warms the morning. But the events of that story, the lessons, do they disappear too? And the person who lived the story, who dreamed it up and made it a reality, what happens to that person, after he or she has passed on, if the story doesn’t get told?

I ask all of these questions because one of the great regrets I will take to my grave is that I never got my mother’s stories down on paper. Mom, who lived an amazing, interesting life shaping a field that is the coin of the realm in modern-day America, had stories so riveting that award-winning authors and screenwriters offered to help her get them published. Mom always declined, saying that such privacies and privileges had been entrusted to her by her clients, by her place in her industry, and that she wouldn’t betray that trust. I picked up where those writers left off, telling her that just letting people know what it was like to have worked with these famous people on such high-profile movies would suffice, that she wouldn’t have to divulge any secrets and insider scoop.

In recent years, Mom had begun to lighten up a bit. I bought Dragon Dictate transcription software and we created her profile on this laptop. The plan was we’d talk for an hour or two and after a few months I’d have a pile of notes and quotes that I could edit into the book many had hoped she’d one day write.

We did one brief session where she recounted her early days in Brooklyn and Malverne, New York, but then she put me off a few times and I didn’t press her. Months later, she warmed up a bit again and asked if we were going to resume talking but it never happened, not before she took her fall in October and the chance for us to ever talk again disappeared.

I find myself wracked with guilt over having let Mom take those stories with her. Many people have said I could talk to those my mother worked with and get a similar book, but it really wouldn’t be the same. Who can I ask about what it was like to walk down Park Avenue with Marilyn Monroe for a photographer? Countless other similar tales are now gone, and though there are photos to illustrate the events, the faces on the film are mute and they keep their secrets to themselves.

And now I find myself once again facing the similar loss of equally amazing stories. As has been chronicled in this space, my father and I are currently on the outs, not talking, not really getting along at all. We are, to stay with Springsteen quotes, “too much of the same kind,” it seems. But I’ve written before of my father’s World War II service and how I believe it affected everything in his life to this day. Of how he is still in the Ardennes, almost 70 years later. I’ve written that seeing what he’s gone through, what he’s missed out on, is too high a price for anyone or any country to pay. And make no mistake about it: he saw some serious shit at a way-too-young age not to have suffered.

The tales of those experiences, and those of others like my father, shouldn’t be lost to the mists of time. They should be enshrined so that hopefully we as a society can stop making the same mistake over and over and over again. And on a personal level, getting him to share those stories would hopefully give our family something we’re still seeking: an answer to the question, “why?,” that has pervaded the entirety of half a century.

My father also has some amazing stories to share that aren’t focused on war. There aren’t many people left of whom I can ask, “What was it like to drink with Hemingway in Cuba?,” but my father is one such person. I’ve heard the story many times, but to get it on paper would preserve the tale for my nieces and their children and on down the line.

Maybe, as it turns out, I never was a very good journalist, because I don’t know how to break through the wall to get to the great stories. I let Mom’s stories get away and I don’t know how to reach my father to save his stories. And that’s a shame. Because we as human beings think in language, in words, in stories. And we as societies live in the exchange of that language, of those words, of those stories. If our stories don’t get told and shared and passed down, do we really live?

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I’m Still Here

I’ve started this column/post a thousand times over the past four months. In my head, at least. Getting it down on this piece of electronic paper has proven a bit more challenging. But in the spirit of all the catch phrases and self-help gurus who’ll tell you/me to just write anything, badly, rather than not write, I’m going to spout off a bunch of brackish, murky thoughts for no other reason than to (hopefully) prime the pump for the clearer, tastier water lying deeper in the well.

So for this first gargle, let’s catch up a bit, shall we? In case you missed it, back in the fall of 2012 I was taking steps toward a dream of mine. In early October, I was in Annapolis, Maryland, checking out the U.S. Sailboat Show, looking at a few boats for sale in that area and working with a friend who has a business in the marine industry. With my mother’s blessing, I had given notice that October was my last month in my apartment in Newburyport and was planning on  chasing life once again. The primary plan was to head south toward turquoise waters on a boat of my own sometime around early November. If my search for the right, pretty-much-ready boat didn’t pan out, I was going to head somewhere, anywhere, in hopes of rekindling that fire that I had in 2011 that got me writing again. Something about adventuring always seems to get my creative juices flowing. Regardless of the specifics, my life was going to change.

And change it did. On Saturday, Oct. 6, I emerged from a seminar at the sailboat show to find a message waiting for me on my phone. I dialed my voice mail and heard my father’s shaky voice tell me to call him back, that it was an emergency. I found a quiet corner of the hotel, away from the seminar rooms, and called my father. He told me that sometime in the early hours of the morning, my mother had fallen down a flight of stairs at the inn where they were staying in Maine. My father said that she’d sustained a concussion and a broken arm, and that she’d been helicoptered to the Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston. I told him I was on my way and would start driving back immediately, that I’d be there around midnight.

Something didn’t feel right though, so I called the hospital back as I was driving out of Annapolis. I was connected to the doctor who said he was glad I had called as he didn’t think my father was thinking too clearly in light of what had happened and then proceeded to tell me what the real story was. Mom had sustained heavy brain trauma and had been revived once already. She was on life support but the prognosis was not good.

I damn near drove off the freeway as the doctor ran through the situation step by step. I was hyperventilating and couldn’t breathe. I was crying uncontrollably and couldn’t see. I focused on taking deep breaths as the phone call concluded and was able to see signs for the Baltimore airport. A quick exit, I parked, grabbed a few things threw them in my bike-messenger-style computer bag and entered the terminal. I found an AirTran flight that went direct to Portland, Maine, in an hour and a half and booked a ticket. I then called my sister and brother out west and told them what the doctor had told me, and that they needed to get on planes ASAP.

I got to the hospital in Lewiston around 6pm. I proceeded to stay up all night by my mother’s hospital bed, but it had been clear to me from the moment I walked in that she was already gone. My siblings arrived around lunchtime the next day and we made the decision to stop life support. That’s one thing about our family: as disparate as our attitudes about pretty much everything are, we are unanimous in our belief that essence precedes existence. Mom passed away very shortly thereafter on the seventh of October.

There was a whirlwind of activity in the week following my mother’s passing, what with a wake and a funeral and getting the process started to deal with her estate. I chronicled some of what was going through my head at the time in the previous two posts in this blog. In those posts, I made it clear that I was not going to repeat the mistakes my family had made in 1985 when my brother died. I was going to get the help and support I needed to avoid drifting off into some abyss, and I was going to do so in an open and honest manner here on TerraStomper. Obviously, since this is my first writing since the eulogy I posted back in October, that didn’t happen.

What did happen was that I left Newburyport all right: I moved three miles east, back to the family home on Plum Island. I was there three weeks later, instead of in London as I had planned after Mom’s passing, because hurricane Sandy was bearing down on the East Coast and I didn’t want to leave my father alone to deal with the inevitable mess she left in her wake (and also because I was hoping to get some great surfing in).

With apologies to those in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, Sandy turned out to be a big dud here in Massachusetts. But that Monday evening, the 29th, I was waiting for my father to join me at the dinner table when I heard him cry out. I was sitting in the chair my mother always sat in at the table and turned to see him falling backwards in slow motion. I jumped up and caught him before he hit the floor and laid him down slowly. After he rested a bit, we tried to have him roll one way. Too painful. We tried the other way. Too painful. He tried to sit up. Way too painful. At that point, I pulled the chute and called 9-1-1.

Fortunately, with all the hype surrounding Sandy, there was an ambulance stationed on Plum Island in case of evacuation. The EMTs reached the house in no time and immediately determined that dad had broken his hip. Whoosh! They whisked him off to the hospital and I followed in the car. Again, thanks to Sandy, everyone was bundled up in their homes so the hospital was empty and dad was settled into a room in relatively short order.

The next morning, the orthopedic surgeon — who lives just down the street from us on Plum Island and who has worked on a ton of friends — arranged to perform surgery in the early afternoon. Dr. Steve worked his magic and dad’s hip was repaired with a couple of pins: one running the length of his femur and another pinning that whole arrangement in place in his hip. A couple of small incisions were all that showed anything had been done at all.

Except that dad suffered complications. His blood pressure was very low and the anticoagulants that he’d been taking for years as a result of his irregular heartbeat (for which he’d had a defib/pacemaker installed in his chest in August) prevented the wound from clotting and his leg filled with blood. Infection followed, as did an inability to swallow and keep food or liquids down — the result of dad’s intubation during surgery. For two weeks, my father lay on his back at Anna Jaques Hospital in Newburyport, and in that two weeks, what strength he had evaporated.

Dad then spent six weeks in a pair of rehabilitation facilities, improving in fits and starts on the long, slow road to recovery. (The completely and totally fucked-up health-care system in this country will be the subject of a separate, later post.) But through it all, his spirit was slowly waning. The soul-crushing nature of nursing homes was taking its toll. So on Christmas Eve, a good two weeks-plus early I would guess, I brought my father home to Plum Island. He made it home for the holidays, and though the house was pretty empty it definitely provided my father with a pick-me-up. He’s been home for five weeks now, slowly improving, since then and his spirit has made the long journey back.

And that’s where we are at this point. Obviously, there’s a lot more to it than just this quick recap. Suffice it to say: these have been the longest, most arduous four months of my life, without question. And therein, I hope, lies some of the growth I had hoped to capture along the way. That I couldn’t find the strength to do so as it all was happening is a testament to the exhaustion I’ve been wrestling with. With this gargle, as I called it, I’m taking the first step back, finally.

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