the wicked witch is dead

A month or so ago, Marc took one of our granddaughters to see his father, her great grandfather. It was the first time Marc's father has met any of his great grandchildren. Jade is the only one who has ever really asked about her grandfather's father and then only recently. They know their great grandmother so she had asked to meet him.

It's really too late for any kind of acknowledgement since he is very old, very sick, and has dementia. He can't communicate even if he does understand what is happening. She saw only a pale shadow of the awful man he was. Which is just as well as far as I'm concerned. It's only in the last 6 months, now that his wife went home to Brasil to die among her family and he has come back here to die, moving in with his youngest son, that he has expressed a desire to see Marc.

The old bastard waited until the very end to regret disowning his first born 15 years ago. Ironic that the one who wants to know him was one of the reasons he turned his back on our family all those years ago and she wasn't even born yet.

Not that he had anything much to do with us before then, saving all his attention and hopes and pride for his two younger sons, barely knew his only grandchildren when he moved to Florida with his wife to retire, had basically emotionally abandoned his oldest son when he was about 12, would not give him an ounce of credit for all that we accomplished together attributing it all to me.

So you might wonder what caused Danny to officially disown us as opposed to just ignoring us as he had been. 

When our daughter was 19, she became the mother of a less than one day old newborn and moved in with her boyfriend. Six months later she was pregnant herself. The evening she came over to tell us, she also called all her grandparents to give them the happy news.

The next morning, the phone rang and it was Danny. This is terrible, he said. She's ruining her life, he said. She's happy about this, I said. I want you to tell that boy to convince her to have an abortion and get out of her life and I'll give him $5,000, he said. I'm not going to do that, it's not my decision to make and she's happy about this, I said.

When he couldn't get any satisfaction from me, he asked to speak to Marc. Marc laughed at him and told him no.

And that was the last time his father spoke to him. Or to any of us. 

Well, now the old bastard is dead. Died in his sleep Sunday morning, a week after Marc's last visit.

He deprived himself of so much.

roses are red...

I always think of my dad when I see roses. When I was growing up, alongside one section of our long curving driveway was a rose bed. My father planted and cared for those roses. He would bring home the old blood from the blood bank at the hospital and pour it on the ground around them and said that's what gave them their big sharp thorns. I don't know how true that was but they did thrive under his care. Later after he retired and my parents moved to the beach house he had a rose garden there too.

After he passed away and my mother went to live with my brother, my sister and her husband moved into the beach house and she took over the care of the roses. Eventually, we sold the beach house and they moved to Wharton, which is why I am here, but before she left, she dug up as many of Dad's roses as she could and transplanted them to her new garden.

My sister does well with roses too and I don't think she lost a single one. With her most recent move last summer though, from out in the country into the town proper after her husband died, she only dug up a few of the roses, leaving most of them for the new owners.

I've never been able to grow roses myself though I've tried a time or two. I think perhaps I didn't have enough sun at the city house or planted them too deep or just bought the wrong ones for our climate. All I know is they all died. So one of the big selling points about the country house when we were looking was all the roses planted about the property. Granted, they are all heritage roses, either pink or red, but they are established and hardy and bloom.

According to my father, roses should be cut back on Valentine's Day though my sister usually cuts hers back on February 1st because our winters have been so mild. If you wait till Valentine's Day, they are likely to already be putting up new growth and buds. And mine are.

I don't think I am going to cut them back this year, at least not yet. I probably should. I know they were stressed from last year's drought and the weather prognosticators are predicting another hot dry summer. Perhaps I'll do some pruning after this first flush of blooms.

father

May 16, 1996

The phone rang at 2 AM waking me up. It was my mother.

“Something terrible bad has happened to your father,” she said. “The paramedics are here working on him.”

“I’ll be right there,” I told her.

“They’re taking him to the hospital so come there,” she replied.

I hung up the phone and turned to face my husband who was now sitting up in bed.

“I think my dad just died.”

My parents lived on Galveston Island, about an hour’s drive away. My sister and brother both lived out of state so I was the only one close enough to get there quickly. We got dressed and headed down the highway in silence.

When we got to the hospital, I learned that my father, at 72, had, indeed, died. He had had a massive stoke which is exactly the way he had always said he wanted to go, quick and out like a light. My mother was in high form, not a tear shed, waiting for me in the waiting room. The nurse told me when I arrived that they had my father in a room if I wanted to go and be with him for awhile. I declined as had my mother which was why she was waiting in the waiting room. I’m sure the nurse thought I was a terrible person, not wanting to go spend time with the body of my father, but he would not have wanted me, us, to do that. You see, my father hated death and he did not want any of us remembering him dead, the way he remembered his own father.

My father was a pathologist and he spent his days looking at tissue to determine if it was diseased and doing autopsies. He had started out wanting to be a surgeon and until WWII, that was his goal. Unfortunately, he contracted tuberculosis in the army and he spent the rest of the war recovering. We had several strict house rules that stemmed from that time in the hospital. We never ate on paper plates because all his meals were served on paper plates and then they went in the incinerator. And we never had chicken because that was all he was served in the hospital. But I digress.

My father let himself be convinced by his colleagues and instructors that because of his tuberculosis, he would not have the physical stamina to be a surgeon. That’s how he became a pathologist, one of the great disappointments of his life. And that’s how he came to hate death. And by association, the color black.

Black was forbidden in our house. For my mother, myself, my siblings, black clothing was not allowed. Not outright forbidden, but it just wasn’t worth enduring the expression of disapproval that was sure to come. Black = death = work = bitterness.

He himself did not own any black clothing, well, except for his tuxedo which he always wore with a bright red cummerbund, tie and socks. I find it hard to believe, now, as an adult that he didn’t have at least some dark gray suits. He must have, but the ones I remember were the burnt orange, the canary yellow, the peacock blue (my favorite of his suits) and the emerald green. His leisure clothes would put any golfer to shame. He once bought me a pink and orange plaid pants suit (I kid you not) and I was expected to wear it, preferably in public.

My father, my parents, were very image driven and we kids had to measure up. And everything was measured by how it would make them look to the people in the social status they belonged to. And things that didn’t measure up were kept strictly secret. Our needs were second to their image.

Living with my father was not easy. He was very controlling.  He didn’t converse, he lectured, pontificated. There was a lot of emotional abuse.  We would all listen for the sound of the door, his foot steps when he came home from work to determine if it was safe to stay out or if we should scurry back to our rooms and shut our doors and look busy.  All of us left as soon as possible, my sister married young and our brother never returned after he left home for college.  My own escape took longer.

There were years when I was not in touch. Then he had a stroke and it changed his personality. He became completely withdrawn. It shattered his image of himself and it was 10 years or more before he began to emerge again and the man who emerged, now that he had lost everything...his profession, friends, financial security, eventually the house; all because it was more important to keep his stroke secret instead of getting medical help...was a kinder, gentler, humbled man.

Those years before he died, well, I didn’t see them a lot because they lived over an hour’s drive away on the west end of Galveston Island, but I mostly enjoyed being with my father when I was with him. He had changed a lot by then.

As it happened, about two weeks before my father stroked out, my parents had made one of their rare forays into town and they came by my house to visit a bit. When they got up to leave I gave my mother the cheek and told her goodbye. I hugged my father and without thought, said ‘I love you’. I can’t tell you how many years it had been since I expressed this sentiment to my father spontaneously. A lot. Most my life at that point probably. It was the last time I ever saw him, the last time I ever spoke to him, the last words I ever said to him.

*a note – As I seem to have given the impression to some of you that this just happened (and I appreciate all the condolences) my father actually died 14 years ago. Sunday was the anniversary of his death.