My father passed away early Saturday morning.
He was 85, a Navy veteran, father of three, always neat and tidy and organized. Dad was born in the Toronto area of parents who came over from England. He joined the Navy at the end of the Second World War, spending his time after training on a picket ship in Halifax Harbour, guarding the anti-submarine nets. After the war, he moved to the area of Peterborough, Ontario, where his parents then lived. He met my mom when she was a singer in a jazz band in Peterborough in the early 1950s. Mom and her two sisters were singers, and the man who would become my uncle played clarinet in the band as well.
Dad’s family had a lot of police officers. His father was a Toronto police officer. His sister’s husband was a military policeman. His nephew was a Toronto police officer. His niece–who in her college graduation picture bears a startling resemblance to Doper Karen Lingel–married a Toronto police officer. Which made it especially interesting when Dad married my mother, who came from a family of political activists and artists. I sometimes wonder whether that was a factor in their breaking up when I was in high school.
Dad later married a redheaded Irish nurse, and they were like two peas in a pod. I think he was heartbroken when she died, because he kind of went hermit for 11 years, living in the same constrained pattern of habit in his little apartment in Oshawa, Ontario. Of course, that my sister and my mother and my mother’s sister died in the same period of time didn’t help. (It did a number on all of us.) Eventually we moved him up to the Bruce Peninsula, to be near his sister and my cousins. He moved into a beautiful new apartment built for handicapped access, and lived there for three years, until he fell and his sister found him on the floor after six hours. He went into the hospital, and didn’t come out until there was a space in a nursing home ready for him–though after he had recovered from his injuries, he was paying rent to the hospital as if it were a nursing home.
He lived quite happily in the nursing home for most of the past few years. The staff liked him and he was popular. But in the last few months, he started to have a few problems. He was weakening and getting thinner.
Last Monday, my sister called me, and Tuesday morning I headed to Owen Sound. Dad was far thinner than I’d ever seen him; he looked like a concentration-camp survivor. The next day they moved him from his regular room to a beautiful private room named Helen’s Room. They moved a comfy chair in so we could be there next to him. On Friday morning he was noticeably thinner even than Thursday. He wasn’t taking food and was taking just sips of water. Friday, he just looked kind of caved in. His skin was stretched over his cheekbones in a way that it had not been the day before. I was with him during the evening, and he held my hand. Then, when the helpers came in to bathe him and make him ready for bed, I went back to the hotel.
A few hours later, I was woken by a call from the nursing home. He had passed on at 1:22. I went there saw him shortly after he died, and he looked the same as he did when they were putting him to bed a few hours before, but so absolutely still. His head was fallen back on the pillow with his dentureless mouth gaping open. One eye was partly open. A whole universe of thoughts and emotions and memories… gone.
But his memories were kind of going for a long time beforehand. He’d lost much of his short-term memory a few years ago–he’d sit watching the Discovey Channel, and by the time its twelve-hour program cycle finished and started to repeat, it would be new to him. Yet at that time, he could still remember things that happened decades ago, like the time he and his sister went to England on a ship as kids in 1937 and the ship went through a storm and he was one of two people who didn’t get seasick.
I’d been making some of the arrangements and contacting relatives. I spoke with my mother’s sister in Peterborough who I hadn’t talked to for years, and we had this wonderful conversation – all about the bands she and my other aunt and my mom and my uncle were in when they were growing up, how it was to grow up surrounded by music and art and light, and how grateful I was for that… so that turned out a lot better than I could ever have imagined. She has a personality like a jewel, full of light and life, and I missed her terribly.
My sister is the executor of Dad’s will. (It’s not like there’s a fortune there or anything–I am so glad we don’t have that sort of fight.)
My sister and her husband arrived on Saturday afternoon. We went over to the nursing home and retrieved Dad’s stuff. We donated much of it to the nursing home–there’s evidently a demand for clothing there. And we sorted through Dad’s pictures and papers and retrieved what we needed to make the cremation arrangements. Paperwork, paperwork, paperwork. Dad’s company and public pensions have to be stopped, the Ministry of this and the Department of that informed, his health insurance card sent back to the Ministry of Health, his bank account changed over to an “estate account” over which the executor of the will has control, all sorts of things.
I think that Dad’s ashes are going to be buried with my stepmother’s, in Thornton Cemetery in Oshawa. My mother is buried in the same cemetery. The stone is already prepared. We don’t know when yet, probably in June on a beautiful summer day.