It had been a tough couple of days, with an ER visit on Friday and his foot bleeding thing getting worse. It had been a tough couple of months at the end of a tough year. So I called him up because I had a free minute and was thinking of him and wanted to tell him so. That, and the Super Bowl was kicking off in a few hours, and the man loved football.
I walked around the apartment and he absentmindedly watched TV as we chatted about this and that: the visit my brother and his girlfriend and Katharine and I had made to the National Arboretum the day before; Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes; my job and how some of our work was about making transportation easier for people with disabilities. I had never really explained that before. He listened. I noticed.
At some point, I realized just how loud the TV was. He tended to watch at max volume, and I was having a hard time hearing both his voice and my thoughts.
I asked him to turn it down.
“Sure,” he said, taking a second to figure out the remote.
I thanked him.
“All you had to do was ask.”
His voice was warm and soft. It was gentle.
I stopped.
What had just happened was not always possible. In the past, I might have demanded the question more than ask it, and he might have raised his voice in reply, and we both might have been swept away into bickering, old hurt between us and inside of us igniting with the slightest friction.
But it was so simple this time, and come to think of it, it had been happening this way more often lately. Somewhere along the line, we had learned that moments together were worthy of a lot more.
I took it in for a second, and then I told him:
“We’ve come a very long way, Dad. I’m proud of us.”
“Good,” he said. There was a satisfied smile in his voice, like something had been put to rest.
“You should be.”
I told him I hoped he was, too.
“I am.”
Dad clung extra tightly during that final year. His organs were shutting down and the writing was on the wall, but he remained resolute in turning away from death. He stayed on this plane through what even his doctor of 25 years could only call sheer willpower. For him to make his final exit, there was something he would need to stop holding onto.
Before we hung up, Katharine walked into the room, done with whatever she’d been up to in the bedroom. I put her on speaker, and he told us that he loved us both. We went to the grocery store and watched the game that night, but I fell asleep before texting to ask what he thought.
The next day, he let go.
Three years of life have unfolded since Dad passed. There’s plenty I know he’d have wanted to be here to see, like how Spartacus swam in the Pacific Ocean and came to live with us in Virginia, and they’re bringing Tom Brady back as an announcer next season, and he has a grandaughter whose smile looks like his father’s. But that’s not what time held for him.
I didn’t initially set out to do it this way, but I’ve now written a little three-part series about the phone calls that, for me, shaped the time of his crossing over. I published the first two years ago, and the other last year.
Such a poignant, insightful, and real piece.
Absolutely lovely writing.. keep it up.. (may sound cheesy, but this was a piece of writing that touches the soul. rare and beautiful.)