Lifestyle
Gifts from My Father
“Even in this most extreme of living states, close to death, he maintained the tough, ironic Texas grit that marked his whole life.”
About eighteen months ago, my father learned he had a rare kidney disease that would progressively, inevitably so wreck the various organs of his body that one of them—heart, liver, lungs, brain, blood vessels, skin, the kidneys themselves—would fail, and he would die. Intellectually, he accepted the fact he was going to die. He did not rage against the dying of the light—rage is not his style—but neither did he offer to help reduce the wattage. He prepared for death in a way I found completely characteristic. He seemed to take some pleasure in the fact that only two other people in South Texas had his disease, and that the doctors had told him it was completely unrelated to the two packs of cigarettes he had smoked every day for 57 years. The powerful combination of drugs he took every morning made him feel, by his own account, like he had “just drunk a quart of cheap whiskey and was trying to drive uphill on a bad road in an overloaded Model T truck with no muffler.” Still, he kept on driving. By summer he had a little collection of adding-machine tapes indicating how much and how long the payments would be for the sale of his business, how much various men owed him, what the interest ought to be on his certificates of deposit, how much stock he had in the Tri-Country Farmer’s Co-Op, and how much it would be worth when he died.
All his life he had driven modest cars, lest he offend the farmers with whom he had worked. Now, he drove to San Antonio and paid cash for a fully equipped, top-of-the-line maroon Lincoln Continental. A few days later, when I rushed to his hospital bed to be present when he died, wondering what blessing he would bestow upon me, what his last words of advice or caution or love might be, he opened his eyes and said, each word slow, labored, and barely audible, “Did… you…see…my…car?”
I spent much of the next several weeks with him in that hospital room, thinking about what it means to have a parent die. I realized, as I had at the birth of my oldest child, that it was not the first time this had happened, which diminished its importance just a bit. But I also knew I was experiencing the universal, which ennobled the event immeasurably.
I thought about what it had meant to be his son. I don’t know whether our relationship was anything extraordinary or not. I remember wishing he would play with me more, much as I suppose my children wish I had played with them more. He always worked hard, but sometimes in the summer he took me on business trips and, after a day of sitting in a sweltering car of a cluttered, dusty office in a grain mill or a warehouse or a fertilizer plant, he would buy me a hot roast beef sandwich and take me to see a movie starring Francis the Talking Mule or Eddie Bracken or Leo Gorcey and the Bowery Boys. In the fall, we always managed to see several Southwest Conference football games, and at least twice he took me to the Sate Fair. He made me believe it was important to shake hands firmly, to remember names, and to look people in the eye when I talked to them. He tried to make me believe it was important to wear a hat and lace-up shoes. I knew he was smart and honest, and it pleased me that, when it came time to build a new high school or recruit a new doctor for the town, he was always one of the three or four men everybody knew would have to be in on it. Not everything I heard or knew about him was good, but the balance was clearly in that direction.
I was pretty sure he was proud of me, but learned not to expect him to say much about it. I was also pretty sure he thought it was something of a waste of talent for me to become a preacher or a teacher or a writer instead of going into a field with more substance to it—like the agriculture business. As recently as three years ago he suggested I come to Pearsall for a couple of months and learn about what he did, in case I ever had to take over. When I suggested he come to Houston for a couple of months and explain it to me, he was incredulous; after all, he had a regular job. On the other hand, when I overheard him talking about “that boy of mine that went to Harvard and teaches over at Rice,” or when I met someone whose only impression of me had come through him, I could tell he wasn’t entirely disappointed.
It was not a simple matter to fasten these strands of memory that trailed across my mind to this deteriorating figure in a hospital bed. The legs that had stepped off fields in a strong, measured stride were now white and hairless and thin, except for water-filled knees. The wrinkled feet were like balloons that had been inflated to capacity and allowed to go down. The swollen stomach summoned images of starving children. The organ that had propelled half of me into existence and that had first represented “man genitals” to me was now virtually useless even for its most basic task, unable to contain the involuntary flow. To compound the sense of strangeness, his charts and nametags listed his first name as “Lowell,” and the doctors and nurses called him that, even though an injury he had sustained as a teenage left him a nickname—“Peggie” (short for “peg leg”)—that was a permanent and natural as his slight limp and as unfeminine as his Stetsons.
As I looked at him for days, it became more difficult to remember how he had looked when he was well than to imagine how he would look when he was dead. Still, he was not dead, and even in this most extreme of living states, he maintained the tough, ironic Texas grit that marked his whole life. When the nurse asked if he could roll over to allow her to change his sheets, he said, “I can do anything once and several things twice.” When she complimented him on the good amount of urine he had voiced, he said it was nothing compared to what he could do on a heavy dose of diuretics. When she told him she was going to measure it and pack it in some ice, he said that was fine with him, but he thought they’d have a hard time selling it. Once, a nurse looked at him and declared him comatose. He registered not a flicker of protest for two hours, then said, in weak indignation, “Comatose!...I’ve…got…as…much…sense…as…I’ve…ever…had!
It should be no surprise that a man who claims to have lived just about every day of his life the way he wanted did not take well to life in a single bed. He despised his oxygen mask and sought constantly to pull it off; finally, he had to be restrained by cuffs tied to the side bars of the bed. It is not easy to tie one’s father to a bed, but I got better at it. Dozens, no, hundreds of times, he begged me to untie him. When he saw that begging would not help, he resorted to a technique he had practiced all his life: making a deal. “There’s a pocketknife in my trousers,” he said. “If you’ll get it and cut me loose, I’ll give you the knife.”
“I can’t do that,” I told him. “If I cut you loose, you’ll take off the ozygen mask and you’ll have a heart attack and die. I can’t do that.”
He thought about it, then looked at me and said, “It’s a seven-dollar-and-fifty-cent knife.”
Like Jacob with the angel, I wanted to wrestle with that old man’s soul and not let go until he promised me a blessing. But my determination to concentrate as closely as possible on that spark that refused to go out was consistently thwarted by a great cloud of witnesses. People I had not seen in years or, worse, had never seen came to pay their respects. My mother not only appreciated the company, but kept score. I suffered moderate ambivalence. My father was terminally exhausted and did not need or want visitors. One Saturday afternoon, when no fewer than twelve people crowded into the room, chattering and watching the ball game and using the telephone and nibbling on a cake roll filled with Cool Whip, I noticed he was trying to say something and moved to the edge of his bed. He forced out only two words, but they were apt: “Ringling Brothers.” At times like that—and there were others—I wanted everybody to clear out and leave us alone, but eventually I realized my possessiveness was inappropriate. I was there because about forty years and nine months earlier my number came up in the ultimate roulette game. Most of them had earned the right to be there, and the kind of love and respect they showed extended my understanding of family.
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