Patience

My dad was an exceedingly patient man. He wasn't a, "Let's go, c'mon, hurry hurry hurry!" kind of father. He was not the kind of person to yell at a waiter or store clerk, giving them the benefit of the doubt most of the time. Faced on occasion with transfusions lasting eight hours, he read the paper, met his neighbors in the suite, listened to his i-Pod... exercised his patience.

I guess he built up a bank of patience over his lifetime that was paid back to him in his last days. Unfortunately I am not as placid and patient -as a father or as a man- as he was, but during the last week of my dad's life, I received a crash course in patience and in grace from a series of nurses, most of whom made me feel like he was their lone patient. It was something that even in my grief I recognized as extraordinary. I also met a couple of hospice volunteers I can never forget. One in particular had lost her husband too young in the same hospital only a year earlier, and she came to the hospice floor a few days a week just to comfort those of us who were now watching our loved ones fade away. She brought me water and coffee, offered to chat, and was generally very kind. I asked how she was able to come back again and again, and she said it helped her turn her husband's death into something positive.

A lot of people who lose loved ones run races, raise money, become involved in the cause of fighting the disease that took away their family member. This is extremely admirable, but I'm working on something else, too. The first, best, positive thing I can draw from my father's death is to become more patient, especially with my kids. Kids spill things, they cause you to be late (and don't share your urgency about it), they sometimes have tantrums. Sometimes I get frustrated and have a tantrum of my own, and sometimes, when I am my better self, I think of the way those nurses and volunteers treated my dad and my family, and I reset. Kids deserve patient adults.

Patience with the sick, with children, with any vulnerable person, might be the most admirable virtue of all.

The Background Photo

This is the picture that is in the background. Some of my warmest memories from childhood were when I would be somewhere with my dad and his dad. They exuded pride, and I could drink that in all day. I am glad my oldest son got to have that experience on this day a couple of years ago. Have a great weekend.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

When you lose someone you love to a terminal illness, it's hard not to look back at the choices you made and wonder if anything could have been different. With cancer, there are so many options and variables that inevitably there will be roads not taken. I have taken solace in knowing (hoping, really) that my mother, sister, and I made the best decisions we could for my dad at the end of his life with the information available.

What I struggle with is all the information that has since become available. Within a month after dad died, there was this excellent New Yorker article about the benefits of hospice, which made me wonder whether we could have improved his quality of life, if not extended his time, if we had made that move sooner. Then there was this news, about an experimental drug for the kind of cancer my dad had. Before the obvious beginning of the end, I had been in the process of getting him into a compassionate use study to get that drug right at his home hospital. Should I have kicked down the door sooner?

I try not to torture myself, because that won't bring him back. And the truth is, he had stage four lung cancer, and he lived a good life despite it for a very long time. But lung cancer is the top cause of cancer death for a reason. So the way forward has to be to focus on what was good about his life, rather than what was painful about the end.

New research may help you if you are ever in a position to need it, but I can't let it color the way I feel about those last few weeks. If nothing else, I am glad I was there just to be with him during his last days.

Radio Free Dad

My dad was an audiophile. Not a small-time one, either. His life was sound and the machines that could bring it to the ear. As a teen he ran his own car stereo repair business, and a little later on he semi-successfully mounted a turntable, then a reel-to-reel tape deck on the front seat of his car. Not only did he appreciate radios, record players, and stereo components, he was like a world-class surgeon with them. One of his closest friends from the last twenty years of his life said he was not a tinkerer, but a master tinkerer.

His tinkering and his love of audio exploded into an amazing collection of radios. He found them at yard sales, thrift shops, on eBay, everywhere. Whatever their condition, he would patiently and lovingly bring them into working order and make them presentable. Then onto the floor-to-ceiling shelves in the family room they would go. His grandchildren and other young family members were given novelty radios as gifts when they would visit. We had a cleaning lady when I was a kid who was fooled by a Heinz Ketchup bottle radio and tore the top off of it. Among the possessions he left behind were easily a couple hundred radios just in the pipeline, waiting for him to restore them.

But for all the radios he owned, he never had a Catalin radio. As he explained to me once, Catalin isn't the brand or manufacturer, it's the type of hard plastic used to make the radio. Most of the radios made with it were done in art deco designs. He looked at them like they were Picassos. He had some hard plastic art deco radios in his collection, but he knew they weren't Catalin.

So why didn't he just buy one? For one thing, a cheap one can run $1000. And because just buying one from another collector didn't seem sporting I guess. He needed to unearth one.

You're Cut Off

Yesterday I was driving home, and one block from my house I saw a lost golden retriever. It was 18 degrees out. I stopped and called the dog over, made friends. Her name was Skylar, and she had a bandage around her neck that was wider than her collar. She seemed very friendly, and did the thing most goldens I've met have done, which was to insinuate her head right under my hand and kind of use it to pet herself.

As cold as it was, I really wanted to make sure I got her home. I thought of the sickening feeling I'd experienced once or twice, of not knowing where my own dog was. Her collar had a phone number, but no address. I dialed, and ran into a dead end. "The number you dialed has been disconnected..." I checked the number and tried again with the same result. Crap.

I walked a little way up the block, knocked on a couple of doors, and got absolutely nowhere. Nobody home, don't know the dog, etc. After a few minutes Skylar took off faster than I could follow her, into one backyard, then another, then another. She was gone. Irretrievably gone. I couldn't help her, could no longer communicate with her. I was cut off.

I don't need to draw you a fucking picture. I miss my dad at every moment. There turns out to be room for that emotion alongside nearly every other thing that occupies me. But more than the pain and feeling of loss, I wasn't prepared for the feeling of just being cut off. My entire relationship with my dad is frozen in time now. It can never become anything more than what it was. No more just telling him things he'd find funny, or comiserating about this or that political issue, or sending him pictures of his grandchildren, who called him Papa. No more.

So much has happened in my life since he died seven months ago, just as I assume a lot has happened in yours. Decisions made, milestones reached, pictures taken, occasions celebrated, etc. And I can't tell my dad about any of it. Not even about the dog I tried, but failed, to help yesterday. That really did happen, and I can only hope Skylar was soon safe at home. As bad as it feels to be cut off, I bet it's much worse for dogs.