I Miss the Old Man

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