Be Brave Friday: My Dad

My dad getting kissed by Tala Dog a long time ago

I want to talk about my dad today. I hope you don’t mind.

Let me take you back. It was Thursday and spring and an oncologist whose last name is Snow had just told my father that he had a few weeks to live.

Sometimes poets use snow to signify death. As I wandered through the tiny patch of woods off the Glen Mary Road in Bar Harbor, I thought that this was appropriate in a bad way.

The doctor’s name is Snow. Snow. A lone crow alighted from one pine tree bough to another, leading me down the trail. There are superstitions about crows. One crow is meant to signify death.

“I already know,” I told the bird as he lifted his shiny wings, “but thanks.”

And about five hours away from me and the crow, Doctor Snow left my dad’s hospital room and my sister handed my dad the hospital phone so that I could say hi.

“Carriekins,” he said to me and his voice was cheerful somehow.

“Hey Dad! I love you!” This was the only thing I can think to say. I tried to make my voice cheerful, too, but it wasn’t strong like pine boughs and it couldn’t hold up the weight of me. I tried again and managed to sound chipper. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he said. “How is your day going?”

The first thing he asked, moments after he found out that he was about to die, was how my day was going. This was how my dad worked. He asked people questions. He wanted to know how they were doing, what they’d done, what they thought, why they thought it.

His favorite thing to say was “I don’t know enough about you. What can you tell me?”

And I never knew what to say. I never felt like I had anything to tell.

“My day kind of stinks, Dad,” I told him, stepping on a fallen pine cone. Crushing it will help to scatter its seed, but I still felt badly about it somehow. “I mean, it does stink because of what the doctor just said, but it’s good because I get to hear your voice and talk to you.”

It was the last time I had a real conversation with my dad. The next day they filled him with morphine and moved him to a hospice center. He couldn’t talk because of the drugs. That was Friday. On Saturday, he could only wheeze into the phone. I told him he sounded like Darth Vader and that I would be there Monday after a wedding I had to go to and after I drop my daughter, Em, off at college.

He died that night or really early Sunday morning right after the sunrise. He loved sunrises.

Doctor Snow had given him weeks. He lasted two days because of a fast moving, wildly spreading small cell cancer that had already officially claimed the area around one of his lungs.

Before we knew he had cancer he’d said, “You know I would go down on my knees and kiss the ground and praise God if I could breathe again. Isn’t that something? Isn’t that something you’d never expect to hear from me?”

And it was.

My dad was a hobbit kind of man. He believed in breakfast and laughing. He believed in second breakfast and laughing even more. He believed in dancing and smiling and telling stories and listening and a third breakfast that included cake. He believed in life and people. He was capable of looking straight into someone’s soul and getting right to the core of what made them special and because he had that gift, he forgave everyone everything. He forgave people all the time and he loved them just as much as he did no matter what they put him through.

And I think that’s brave.

I think it’s brave to live in the world and listen and dance, to mourn injustices and to sing out glories. I think it’s brave to forgive and act and look straight into souls.

I think it’s brave to be human.

And I think it’s something to aspire to.