My father died thirty years ago. He faced his imminent death very well. I hope when my time comes, I can handle it as well as he did. In fact, he may have dealt with his death better than he did anything else in his life. For the year it took for him to die, knowing that he was terminally ill, he waited for death calmly and bravely. I was told he never said anything like “Why me?” He never once complained about pain—although he had pain—or expressed any fear of death. Perhaps he welcomed death because his life was very unhappy, a lot of it of his own doing. He had problems with alcohol and gambling. In fact, the last thing he did on this earth—just hours before he died—was to place a bet with his bookie, Charlie Numbers, over the phone from the hospital. He never had any money. Never owned a house or a car or had a good job despite his intelligence and good humor.
My father and I were estranged for a good part of my life after I reached age eight or nine. Before that, I thought he was a good dad and better than most fathers in our neighborhood. I didn’t see much of him, but when I did I remember the only thing I really didn’t like was his breath. I didn’t know what the smell was; I later discovered it was beer and whiskey and cigarettes, all of which contributed to his death. I also didn’t like it when he took me into Brady’s Bar and Grille on the corner of the street where we lived—I was four or five—and he sat me up on the bar. The bar was always wet with beer, and the wetness would seep through my short pants. I was afraid that people would see it and think I’d wet my pants. Even worse than the wet bar was the bathroom at Brady’s. The handwritten sign on the door read “Used Beer Department,” which says it all. It was a foul place. I can’t begin to describe the smell. I’ve been in a lot of really dirty bathrooms all over the world, but Brady’s was by far the worst.
As I grew older I became less tolerant of my father, cared less about him, ignored him whenever I could, and eventually became very angry at him. In my twenties I moved away to another city, and we rarely spoke or saw each other, sometimes for years. My children did not know their grandfather.
When I got the news that he had died, I felt nothing. I remember thinking that I should feel something. A couple of days later, looking down at his frail body in its coffin in a New York funeral home, I still felt nothing. For the next couple of hours on that first day of his wake, I walked up to the coffin with visitors, including the bookie, Charlie Numbers, who made it a point to tell me that my father’s last bet “ran out of the money.” I began to feel guilty about not feeling even the slightest bit of sadness. I started to wonder what was wrong with me that even standing in front of the body of the man who gave me life, I felt no emotion, no sadness for a wasted life, no relief that it was over . . . not a single tear.
When the funeral home was closing for the night—about nine o’clock—I walked up to the coffin for the traditional last look of the day, and I noticed for the first time that my father’s hands looked very small. They were folded across his waist, with Rosary beads entwined in his fingers. I had never seen him in that position in life and certainly never saw Rosary beads in his hands. His hands looked so small to me—almost half the size of mine—and I thought back to the time when his hands did not look small to me. In fact, they were nearly twice the size of mine. He took my small hand in his, when I was about five years old, as we crossed Liberty Avenue, a busy Brooklyn street, with two sets of trolley tracks, heavy trucks, passenger cars, and even horse-drawn carts. The year was probably 1939. I remembered that day and the feelings I had. I felt very safe holding my father’s hand. I didn’t have to look both ways as I was taught to. I had my hand in his, and I knew that he would do the looking for both of us.
I remembered another day, a couple of years later. I was about seven or eight and was getting washed and dressed to go to school. It was cold outside. And inside. We had to boil water in large pots on the gas stove. Three pots produced only about three inches of water in the bathtub. That morning, my father came into the bathroom as I was about to put the cold cloth to my face to wash my face and neck. Without saying a word, he took the facecloth from me and held it tightly in his hand for a minute, or maybe two, and then he switched the facecloth to his other hand and held it tightly. When he handed it back to me, it was warm. My father made his hands cold so I could put a warm cloth to my face. I had forgotten about those two incidents involving his hands until I looked down and saw them. Those two memories reminded me that there was a time when he cared about me more than he cared about the things that drove us apart.
Looking down at those hands and remembering those times, I felt very sad. I cried for the first time, as a son should do when his father dies.
