Memories of My Father
As Father’s Day approaches, I naturally started thinking about my dad. I always called him Dad. Never Father (too stuffy), Daddy (he wasn’t cuddly enough for that to fit), or Papa (never even a consideration). All my siblings had been calling him Dad long before I came along, so calling him anything else never occurred to me.
He passed away in 1986, just short of his 70th birthday from complications of surgery for a bleeding ulcer. He suffered from dementia for the last 20 years of his life, so we really lost him long before his body shut down.
I don’t remember much about my dad prior to him having a stroke when I was four years old. That stroke left him blind, paralyzed on one side, and with a constant blinding headache.
When Dad was sightless, I used to try to stay out of his way when he was walking through the house. My efforts to do so, however, only put me directly in his path. He was attempting to go past me based on where he last heard me. Me scrambling “out of his way” only put me exactly where he was walking based on my last known location every time. Because of his partial paralysis, bumping into me knocked him down more times than not. Finally, after what seemed like the fiftieth collision, Mom made a rule that I had to sit on the couch every time Dad was on the move through the house.
Although his sight came back slowly over the year following his stroke, Dad still had headaches for the rest of his life and never regained full feeling in one leg.
I have foggy memories of him giving me horsey rides and of having tickle fights prior to his stroke. There is a blurry picture of me running away from him after having stolen his hat and of him grinning in the background. He must have been a fun dad before the stroke. We still saw occasional flashes of his old sense of humor in his sly – and somewhat crooked – smile. Although his laugh was often silent, it shook his whole body.
He loved watching sports, playing board games, and picking gooseberries. Buckets and buckets of gooseberries – sometimes picking long after dark by aiming the tractor’s headlights at the bushes. He’d also spend hours sitting on the ground on our lawn, searching for four-leaf clovers. A good day of hunting often resulted in 10 or more four-leaf clovers. I dried and pressed some of his finds, along with the two or three I’d find in the few minutes I was patient enough as a grade-schooler to sit down beside him to look for the elusive clovers. My collection of clovers contains nearly 500 specimens.
He clearly loved his children and grandchildren, at least until the dementia made him forget who they were. Even then, watching his grandchildren, or any child, playing made his day. He also obviously loved my mother, despite not knowing who she was for the last few years of his life. He was more kind to her than he was to anyone else he encountered, and heeded her soft-spoken guidance in his daily activities right up to the end.
I don’t know if I can classify my feelings for Dad as actually missing him, since he was not fully himself for most of my life. I think I can define my feelings more as missing the father he was very early in my life and sadness that I didn’t get to enjoy more time with that version of him.
For those of you who still have your fathers in your life, grab as much time with them as you can and try to enjoy every minute. You never know how much time you’ll have to do so.