OldTroubador's blog post - Good Bye Dad

I want to open up by apologizing if I have seemed distracted or even needy lately. For the last couple of weeks, I have had a lot on my mind. You see, I celebrated my birthday on the road a couple of weeks ago. I don’t generally advertise my birthdays; to me, they are just another workday – it’s just that the desserts are better on that day. But this was going to be a special one. It was my 50th, I was supposed to be off the road, and Mom and Dad were supposed to come down from Pennsylvania to help celebrate it with me. That didn’t happen. Dad has congestive heart failure and has been fighting with it for at least six years. He also wears a pacemaker. Since the first of the year, he has been in and out of the hospital about eight times for complications with all this. He was just too weak to make the trip. In fact, for the three and a half days that I was home, he spent about twelve hours at his house; the rest of the time he was hospitalized again. And Mom seems to be headed into her own little world somewhere, much like her mom did twenty years prior. My sister is bearing the brunt of all this as she lives close by; I drive my truck and have been fiddling while Rome burns down around me. But my sister and I have both come to the conclusion that Mom and Dad will probably never leave Pennsylvania again.
Everything I am, I owe to my Dad. He gave me my work ethic. He gave the gift of laughter and of story telling. Dad taught me that learning does not end when school is over, that that is when the lessons really begin. He gave me a sense of self and told me to never hang my head to anyone. Dad taught me to be polite and about respect for others. He taught me about personal responsibility. He taught me to fish and to swim and to just sit back and enjoy the great outdoors. Some of his lessons were taught with a kind lecture. Others, as you can imagine, were written on the palm of his hand and applied to one of the fleshier parts of my body. We have spent 50 years working, laughing, and crying together. Fifty years of telling jokes and stories of people and places we knew. This is a man who strides through my life larger than life.
Dad is now teaching me how to fight. There are times when it seems like every new day is another one posted to the win column. And he keeps chalking them up. He loses a few here and there. He told me the other day that his best day this week is not as good as his best day last week. And he does get knocked to the mat every so often. But he bounces back and keeps on plugging along. But I have to wonder how long he can, or will, fight. It has to be so tiring. And he has to know also that he cannot leave his retinue of doctors behind. But every day, he gets up and goes after it again – volunteer work, choir and chorus groups, administrative boards, wherever he needs to be. And for one reason – because he promised these people that he would be there, so he makes sure that he is.
So, if I seem lost, if I seem like I am somewhere else, I am. I am inside my heart, replaying 50 years of great memories and hoping and praying that I get another 50 years worth. The late Lewis Grizzard once wrote about going out with some friends and getting “crying about my Daddy drunk”. I now know what he means by that. I worry like hell about him now, and wonder how empty my life will be when his time comes. I laugh at all the cutting up and shenanigans we did. I go back to all our vacations and revisit all the places and people we knew. I spend hours in the rowboat or canoe drowning dead bait with him. And I still lose all the fights we ever had. I live our life together again.
When I grow up, I want to be half the man he is.

The fight ended Friday afternoon. He fought tenaciously to the end but his desire to be with his lovely wife, my Mom, was stronger than his body. I am broken, shattered, as is my sister. Dad walked large through our lives and his memory will continue to do so.

Dad: 14 Oct 1933 - 9 Mar 2018