THE FINAL TRIP TO SEE MY DAD

We took off on Tuesday to attend my father's funeral. My father died on Saturday following an eighteen-hole golf game, lunch (a ham sandwich followed by ice cream), and then when he was packing up cardboard to take to the dump, he exclaimed, "My back!"

He sat on the steps down to his basement, and my mother said, "Maybe you should lie down."

He said, "I don't think I can," and he crumpled. My mom called the ambulance, and he was still breathing when they came. Twice they lost his heart beat in the hospital, but couldn't find it a third time. I still don't quite understand what happened. Did someone say it was an embolism? Was it a heart attack? Is there a difference?

We arrived on Wednesday in Pinehurst after breaking down in Carlisle, PA just twenty miles south of Harrisburg. A company called Keller Bros. in Carlisle fixed the car for 289 dollars. The water pump had gotten dislodged, which tore out the serpentine belt. These items were restored, Vicky who talked to us for the company was very nice, and we drove another 9 hours to arrive in Pinehurst, NC, where my older brother's wife had rented three condos for my brothers and I to stay in.

My three brothers arrived, with their various families. My mother's sister had come, too. We tried to be stoic, but at any one time, someone was sobbing. My father was a really nice man. He didn't drink or smoke, he never raised his voice, and he was probably the nicest guy on earth. I was lucky to be his kid.

Warren Landis, who had been his golf partner for 42 years, led us to the viewing in his car. There was a photograph of my smiling father next to the strangely reduced individual in the casket. The only thing I could still recognize was his hands. I touched them. My brothers touched them. My mother touched them. All his various grandchildren touched them. His hands were cold. It was no longer my father, and yet it was.

Somehow, whatever is vital about a person disappears when they die. My older brother, who is in general a pronounced atheist, talked about heaven with us, and of his hopes for same. All of us stood around, weeping, but unable to leave my father there. At the same time, we were confused. Because clearly my father wasn't actually there. He was in heaven. Or he was with us. Or he was on a boat, on a great dark sea. Or he was down a hallway, trying to talk to me. Or he was waving hello. All these images occurred concurrently and in bewildering succession. I said the Lord's Prayer a thousand times during the week.

My kids kept hugging me, and my wife kept hugging me. This made the pain bearable. My wife kept everything functional. She kept feeding the kids, and took photographs, and somehow had put together a video of my father's life, but we didn't know when we would watch it.

We then went to the funeral service at a Lutheran church. We sang Amazing Grace, and read from Isaiah. I was a little discombulated, but decided to try to speak. The first to speak was Joe Oxendine, a beautiful friend of my dad's. He's now nearly 80 but is thin and works out every day, and is in terrific condition. He looked just like he did fifty years ago. I hadn't seen him since at least 40 years ago. Joe Oxendine and my dad shared an office at Temple University in the late 1960s. They were assistant professors in the Physical Education Department. Joe talked about how my dad never had a harsh word for anyone. Bill Cosby was their undergraduate student, and he was already lighting the hallways and cafes of Temple University with his ingenious humor which didn't depend on filth or meanness, (unlike much of the humor of the sixties, which took on the establishment, Cosby's humor was about family life, and had a lot of affection in it for mothers and fathers and uncles, even then).

Cosby was a uniter.

My sister-in-law Jen gave a beautiful talk about my dad. My younger brother Steven gave a nice talk. Warren Landis talked about my dad, and how he was an absent-minded professor, who didn't always remember where he was supposed to be on any given day, and who would collect worms to put in his garden, and then forget where he had placed them, and run over them.

No one talked during the service about a terrible day in my dad's life in the late 1960s when he was mugged and nearly killed. We nearly lost him over forty years ago.

My father was mugged by three men at the North Philadelphia train station in the late sixties. He had missed his train, and was correcting papers, alone on the train platform. A man put a butcher knife to his throat. My dad grabbed the blade and pushed it away from his throat. The man yanked the knife away -- tearing his hands in the process -- and demanded his wallet (12 dollars) and his watch. He refused. Another man got my dad in a headlock and choked him. The other two pulled his watch off his bleeding left hand. But my dad never said a harsh word against the men. He never talked about the incident. He just went on, and focused on the fact that a black doctor had helped him sew his hands back together. He always liked each person on their own terms. Over many years he had many surgeries and his hands always looked mangled, and still hurt, but he didn't complain. His hands looked unusual, and I always worried about them, so when I saw them at the viewing, I looked again at them one final time. I looked especially hard at his hands this time, because I had always wanted to look at them. There was so much history in those hands. His thumb and forefinger were intact on each hand, and this enabled him to continue to play badminton and golf.

Joe Oxendine didn't talk about all these things in his actual talk, but we talked about them after the service, because I had never gotten the full story from my dad. My dad wouldn't talk about anything unpleasant because he considered it a waste of time.

My dad didn't talk a lot in general and it was hard to get him to talk unless he was talking about sports scores, and his favorite teams. His teams were the Philadelphia Phillies, Eagles, and college teams were University of Northern Iowa and University of North Carolina. I don't understand why people talk about sports scores. What do they mean? My second-grader gets up every morning and watches ESPN at 6 am. As soon as I get up, he tells me all the sports scores. Kobe Bryant made 38 points, and his team won by 12. It seems there are some people who tune into different things, and my son is cut from the same cloth as my father. I AM interested in particularly beautiful plays, but these are rarely recounted by true sports fans. What seems of interest to them are the quantities, not the qualities. Perhaps it's because my father (and now my son) are terrific at math, while I struggle at it, and wonder often why it exists. Why does anybody want to know about quantities? I seem to only be interested in qualities. My dad had lovely qualities!

He was a stoic, like my mother, but they are both interested in beauty, even if they never talk about it. My dad gardened, and liked it when the flowers came up. He liked pretty golf courses. He liked my mom, who was a beauty queen in northern Iowa in the forties. They were from small towns in Iowa, where stoicism is the norm. But there was a hidden kindness, too, and the unspoken in aesthetics. My dad played beautiful holes in golf. My mother is a dancer, and likes to choreograph. And beauty for them is closely allied to ethics. Driving me to first grade on the first day my dad said to be sure I was nice to the kids who felt left out and to be sure to talk with them.

That was the only direct advice that I think he ever gave me. It has held me through my entire life. It's good advice because it gives you an active role, and makes you less self-conscious.

He told me he thought talking just got you in trouble, so he rarely indulged in it. After years of pestering him to tell me a story about his childhood, he told me that when he was little (his own dad had died when he was 2), his older brother and sister put robins' eggs behind his butt, and when he woke up, they would tell him that he had laid them. One day his mom found out about this, and gave his older brothers and sisters extra yard work.

When I was in 12th grade, I was trying to force an exercise machine to move. It had a handle and you had to pull the rope. It was stuck, so I was yanking at it. My dad said, "Never force things."

That became another imperative.

I thought my father would live another ten years, but he had gotten sick: very sick. He got dehydrated after a college reunion party in Iowa a few years ago, and became incoherent for about a day or two. We almost lost him then. He's had many kidney stones. He had adult onset diabetes. He wasn't able to enjoy all the food he wanted. Last Saturday during his golf game, his friend Warren Landis told us that he complained that he had pains in his right arm. How intense were the pains? It's hard to know. Warren thought it was the left arm that made for heart attacks. I had never heard about arm pains and heart attacks or how one was a symptom for the other. Why are there so many things I don't know? I have constant pains in my arms, and now have had a very heavy heart for the last week. Does it mean I'm having a heart attack? How do you know? We all feel guilty that we didn't do something, or know something. I feel guilty I didn't talk with my father more often. But it was hard to get my father to talk, and he talked in quantities, a foreign language to me. My father wasn't one to make a fuss. After he had passed, blood tests revealed his heart attack had been in progress for at least six hours. Sometimes heart attacks have no symptoms at all. We just don't know. Warren Landis wept with us at the viewing, and later stayed with us at the church service until the very end. I was so grateful to him. Had my dad gone to the hospital instead of continuing his golf match, he would probably still be with us, but perhaps he was saved from some other, worse fate. Did God help him by giving my Dad a wonderful last day? He played golf with his very best friend (he had many many fine friends, but he was particularly fond of Warren), had lunch with his wife of 56 years, and then passed away peacefully and quickly. You never know how long people are going to be with you, and every minute is a kind of miracle, and against all probability. What are we even doing in this universe? Why do colors such as brown exist (my five-year old son asked me this last night in the car home). Why can't you lift yourself up off the ground (he also asked). It's amazing that we can ask questions. We are the animal that asks questions.

My father was a math and sports professor. He did analytical movement studies of optimal golf swings using a computer model in the 1960s. In the classroom he would kneel next to each student when providing help.

I've wept on an hourly basis for a week. I've never cried like this. Even as a baby, I was a stoic. I cried more this week than I cried in the rest of my whole life together. I saw my dad in older men in gas stations along the I-81 corridor, and wept. I wept when we passed a van that looked like his. Every time I see a golf ball, or see the Rockford Files, I weep. I weep over the grass and the bumblebees and the rivers and bridges because everything reminds me of him. Somebody mentioned August, which is my dad's birth month, and I wept. My brothers also wept, but their cries were probably triggered by different memories. I joked that if only our dad had been a terrible alcoholic who beat us and was a serial killer, we wouldn't miss him so much. They laughed. But my aunt corrected me. She said that everyone weeps at their father's death. I had to concede this point, but I wonder if it is true. Isn't the pain we feel proportionate to the love we felt? My dad was a fact of life since I was born, just as the sun is a fact of life. Perhaps everyone has such facts of life but my dad was qualitatively superior other dads. I can't imagine that anyone else can go through this much pain and still live.

After Thursday, the family had another day together. We went to a park and my older brother played with the kids. I talked with my two younger brothers. At night Steven's daughter Bridget played violin (Haydn), which was soothing. I didn't want her to stop, because it distracted me, and gave me a sense that life had a past and could continue, too. We watched my wife's video, which had a very emotional song by Luther Van Dross in the background called Dances with my Father. We all wept, and my older brother hugged my wife, Riikka. My baby Sofia crawled into my brother's lap, and liked it there.

Without my dad, I feel disoriented, and yet: he does still orient me and orient us. Maybe this will bring us all closer together. My dad was from a generation in which service to others, work ethic, the notion of the good, were still intact. The sixties tore those things down as a bunch of cornball lies and tried to substitute a government that would do everything for us, as families were torn apart, and each person was out for themselves, and the government was there to bail out the increasingly non-functional who had turned to drugs or crime as a lifestyle. Now as you drive down the freeways you see ADULT BOOKSHOP, on every horizon. But an older America still exists where family love and family commitment have priority over solipsistic lusts. It's in all the good people who came to my dad's funeral and told me he would be missed, and who vowed to support my mom, and it's in the Lutheran pastors who gave the funeral address, it's in my mom herself, who's weeping, but still strong, and to a large extent, it's even in me. I had been pulled into the Beat ethos as a kid, and thought they were right about many things, but now I wonder if they were right about anything. The notion of a nation that was ready to sacrifice to higher values, instead of to merely personal pleasures, is what has kept the nation from being merely a bunch of self-absorbed wastrels.

I was and am and will always be his Son. He was and is and will always be my Sun!