I have diaried about this before when my dad had stopped realizing who we were. He was still fairly okay. Now, he is not. I have to leave Atlanta to go down to Florida because my dad is dying. My brother from Maui and my sister from Chicago will also come down to Florida to join my sisters who live near my dad and who have been angels during the last few months and my sister from Atlanta, who, by virtue of the fact that she is retired, has gotten to spend a lot of time with him lately.
My sisters who live in Florida have been wonderful; one is a nurse who was the only person he would agree to let bathe him in these latter months. One has cooked and cleaned for him and my mom, who has had her own health issues. One has driven down from Atlanta (she is a retired teacher) and was the only one who could talk to him because she is the family historian. One, who retired from the Coast Guard, has the military thing in common and is a take-charge kinda person who would drive three hours north every week or so to take over the details that needed to be tended to.
I have done what I could, but I am not retired, and, to be honest, I cannot talk to my dad like some of my sisters can. I am much more a mama's girl. My mother and I have a bond that my sisters don't share with her.
But back to my dad. We grew up poor, though we didn't know it. My dad was raised in a small beach town in North Florida where he met my mom. His family lived in a rural area out on the marsh off Amelia Island, and his mother, my grandma, was a stalwart human being and one of the funniest people I will ever know. Our greatest treat as children was staying at her house, which we called "The Farm," even though she never really farmed anything. Even today, we call my parents' house "The Farm:" they live on 64 marsh-front acres that my dad's parents left them. The acreage to every side of them, which had been left to my dad's two brothers and one sister, has been sold.
It was a given that my parents' acreage would never be sold until my dad died. Now, we are looking at the inevitable. The land that we love so much, this marshfront land with its deer and its bobcats and its birds and its beautiful night sky and its marsh, where my siblings and I would spend countless hours having "sister time," which occasionally included my two brothers (one brother was killed in a ship accident in 1985) may now be sold off.
My mother wants to sell, but she wants to keep the 1 acre that their house sits on, because she loves it when we come there and cook for her and drink wine and listen to CDs of music she loves and then say, "Well, we're all going out to the backyard to watch the stars." We are all night-sky nuts.
Which brings me back to my father. My father was a 90s father in the 60s. He adored his children and enjoyed spending time with them. When we were young (I was the oldest of nine kids), he would come home from work, we would eat dinner and he would take us all in the station wagon (with the back part down so some of us could sit on it) to various areas around the Air Force Base we lived on -- Beach Park, the Mole Hole, etc. Every now and then, he would drive use to Jules Verne Park, where we would walk the pier and, then, on the way home, stop at a MiniMart to get 5 cent candy.
On rare occasions, he would drive us to a McDonalds, where he would buy burgers and milkshakes that we would take down to Gandy Bridge and eat, splitting them between all the kids.
Then he would drive us home, make sure we'd gotten our baths, and then put us to sleep. We had three bedrooms that all opened onto the same hall. So he would sit in the hall so we could all hear him and sing songs and read poetry until we were all asleep. I remember him singing Sweetheart of Sigma Chi, On the Road to Mandalay, and songs like Go Tell Aunt Rhodie, Lindy Lou and Sleep Kentucky Babe, which none of you probably know, but which are stuck in my mind and which I now sing to my niece.
I remember walking home from school in second grade when a car pulled up and someone leaned out and said, "The president has been shot." I didn't believe it, until I got home and my father's car was there, in the middle of the day. I walked into our house to find my dad with his arms wrapped around my mother who was sobbing. And I knew.
And then there was the time, when I was 14. He had bought a cheap telescope because he knew that men would be walking on the moon, and he wanted us to see it. He woke us up and made us come outside. He said, "Look at that moon. There are Americans on that moon right now."
My dad went to Viet Nam when he had a family of seven kids. The military being what it was, we couldn't stay on the Air Force Base that was our home. So we moved back to his home town in North Florida. My mom had to work. My dad sent us letters that made Viet Nam sound like paradise. He wrote about the birds he was seeing, and made us wish we were there. I never realized how hard my mom worked during those years, both to feed her large brood and to keep us from realizing how desperate my dad's situation could have been.
My dad taught me many things. He would always save baby birds He would always save baby birds that had fallen out of their nests; he went down to the bay after an oil spill to rescue a pelican; he showed me Orion and the night sky.
Toward the end, he became a right-wing Catholic. I don't why. We argued endlessly, until it became pointless because he no longer knew what he was arguing about. Now, I have to go down to my home and do a death watch. My father will be dead soon. I thought I would be okay with it because he has been in so much pain for so long.
But I'm not.