Losing one or both of your
parents, unless you outright hated them for one reason or another, sucks. I was
23 years old when my father passed away. And here I am at 36 years old, soon to
have a child of my own, missing my Dad.
Born in September 1948, my
father grew up in Northeast Philadelphia in a
typical family home with my grandparents and his younger brother, my Uncle
Charlie. He was raised Catholic but through his childhood years lost his faith
in God. I remember asking him when I was a teenager what prompted the change.
Ever the source of reason and logic, his answer was simple: “I saw kids
afflicted with and dying of cancer. To me, no benevolent god could ever allow
that to occur.”
He excelled in school, in
some cases to the dismay of his teachers. He refused to carry textbooks or
notebooks to class – any class. Instead, he would arrive each period and unfold
a single sheet of paper (which he would use for all of his classes that day) on
which he took notes. Despite his aversion to books and other school-related
baggage, he did well and earned mostly A’s and B’s in all of his courses.
Having always been a
tinkerer of sorts throughout his formative years (building model cars, planes
and the like; constructing and wiring his own HO train platform; reconstructing
and repairing his 1949 Zenith radio), he began to show an interest in more
grown-up forms of transportation – primarily cars.
During his teens, he had
begun working at a service station. He understood cars. They made sense to him
and he was a natural at understanding what made them run, how they were taken
apart and – somewhat more importantly – how they were properly put back
together again.
During his senior year of
high school, my father inadvertently influenced his high school administration
to change one of their policies. At the beginning of the year, he discovered
that he could schedule his classes in such a way that the last period of each
school day would be a study hall. Instead of attending these study hall
periods, he would simply get in his car and drive home or head to work. At the end of the year,
he was called to the principal’s office and informed that he would have to make
up the time over the summer in order to get his diploma. “Are you seriously
going to make me come in over the summer for study hall? You’re kidding, right?”
The principal relented and instead changed the policy.
After high school, he
attended automotive technical school while keeping up shifts at the service
station. After graduation, my grandparents agreed to take out a loan so my
father could open his own service station. After a few years, he was doing well
enough that he repaid the loan and opened up a second service station.
He specialized in
Volkswagen repairs. According to my grandfather, my father could have a VW Beetle
motor removed, replaced and running again in about an hour. He also acquired a
number of cars: a 1939 Pontiac, a 1955 Chevy, a 1963 Cadillac Convertible and
many more. On the day I was born, my father drove my mother to the hospital
through a foot of snow in his tow truck.
I, of course, only knew
him after many of these mechanical escapades. But from the time I was a child,
I knew my father knew how to handle himself around tools. The man could pretty
much fix anything.
I remember one Sunday
afternoon when I was around 10 years old that my mother had gone out shopping.
My father was walking in our attic and slipped on a beam. My brother and I
heard a racket of sorts and looked up at our dining room ceiling to see his leg
dangling down through a newly made hole. My father had the ceiling patched,
repaired and was vacuuming up debris by the time my mother returned later that
afternoon.
During my late teens, my
father was diagnosed with malignant melanoma or, as normal people call it, skin
cancer. He had surgery to take care of it and was doing well – eventually going
from three-month check ups to six-month check ups and so on.
Years later, after I
returned home from my time in the military, my father went with me to help me
purchase my first car. I took him from lot to lot on endless Saturday mornings
looking for just the right car – no matter what the weather was.
When I got in driver’s
seat of the 1987 Chevrolet Caprice Classic I eventually bought, I turned the
key, but the car didn’t start. My father smiled and suggested that I pump the
gas once or twice as the car was most likely carbureted instead of fuel
injected (it was).
Later that year, my father
noticed that he just couldn’t shake a persistent cough. When he did go to get
things checked out, the doctors discovered that cancer had again come back to
his body. And this time around, it was spreading.
My father was quickly put
on a course of chemotherapy and radiation. He went from having a strong, robust
build to growing somewhat smaller and constantly weaker. Things really got bad
in April 1999. That was the first time he went for an extended stay at the
hospital.
As much as I hate to say
it, I really don’t remember much about the time when he was really sick with a
few limited exceptions. Two days before my father died, my mother called me
from her vigil at the hospital. She had obviously been crying.
“The hospital says the
only way your father can be brought home is if we have a ramp for his
wheelchair,” she said over the phone, through choked up tears. “I need you to
build something.”
Being the tinkerer that my
father was, there were ample supplies to work with. In the sweltering, July
summer heat, I cobbled together a very poor representation of what, if someone
looked at it from the correct angle, one could discern was some sort of ramp
over the steps leading to our front door. Sturdy? Yes. Up to code? Most
definitely not.
I called my father’s
hospital room to let my mother know that a ramp had been built. My father came
home the next day.
As the ambulance pulled
up, the EMTs surveyed my work. And then, being the type of kind, compassionate
people who should be EMTs, they promptly swept aside my makeshift ramp and
carried my father in his wheelchair up the small flight of steps to make it
into our home.
Unable to breathe very well
due to a tumor which had developed ever closer to his windpipe, my father slept
sitting up in a reclining chair in our living room. The night was rough for him
as he drifted in and out of consciousness, sometimes muttering random,
dreamlike responses to unasked questions.
Early the next afternoon,
the chaplain from the hospice arrived to administer last rites. My mother,
brother and I surrounded my father in his chair and placed our hands on him,
primarily because that’s what we felt like we should do at the time.
While my Dad wasn’t a
religious man, he took his last breath and peacefully died while the chaplain
was reciting The Lord’s Prayer. I’m not going to read too much into that. Why?
Because I am my father’s son.
My father was capable of
fixing many things during his nearly 51 years of life. Sadly, cancer was not to
be one of them.
On the day my father
passed away, I just happened to be wearing a Superman t-shirt. I only mention
this because that moment was perhaps the most helpless that I’ve ever felt in
my entire life.
Which brings us back to
today. While I could spend time cursing the cancer which took my father from me
and everyone else who populated his life, that would be doing a disservice to
my Dad and his memory. Cancer simply marked the end of his life, it didn’t
define the whole course of his existence. My task now is twofold: to use the
lessons my father gave me and to pass those down to my unborn son. Oh, and also
to never feel that helpless again (whether I’m wearing a Superman t-shirt or
not).
- Scott Kaminski
