Like a Story that Never Ends

No personal stuff, I told myself. Blogging that would be like reading diary entries through a bullhorn. Besides, who wants to hear about trips to the supermarket, etc?

But one car trip I made last week has managed to suck all the oxygen out of my lungs: I had to drive up to my dad’s hunting cabin to identify his body.

He had gone to bed satisfied. He’d spent the day in his favorite place in the world, setting up his turkey blind somewhere on the 40 mountain acres that cradled his one-bedroom “chalet.” (My mom had bothered to hang curtains inside and stock the place with dishes, prompting the undertaker who kept him for us to remark, “That was a woman’s hunting cabin. Real nice place.”)

And it was. It is. The other shoe has dropped. We all knew that Dad–a juvenile diabetic since grade school–was not going to live to be an old, old man. In fact, when my parents were engaged, a doctor counseled them to get cracking and have some kids ASAP if that was in the cards, so that he’d stand a chance of raising them and seeing them launched before his life was foreshortened by his disease.

Well, those hypothetical kids are long past the need for raising (on our good days) and he was able to share his mountainside, his river and the odd turkey sighting with his grandchildren. He beat expectations by a country mile, and kept going. A scientist who went corporate to support his desire to live in the woods , he knew the limitations of the human body in general–and his in particular.

“Why didn’t he just take up golf?” my mother would wail, wondering why a man saddled with a failing heart insisted on a solitary pursuit where success lay in the ability to hide in the woods. While things didn’t end quite the way she envisioned when her worries had her in a chokehold, my father’s final day was not too far afield from her darkest predictions.

But he was never afraid. He knew the risks, and instead of hand-wringing and taking it easy, decided to go run his life the way he wanted to. How many people can honestly make that claim?

Well done, Dad, even though I’ll miss you forever. You were improbably sweet and tender under your hard, crunchy shell. And improbably vigorous in the shadow of an “inborn error of metabolism,” as one of your old books called it.

And improbably patient with everyone you met, for someone who did not suffer fools gladly. Thanks to your remarkable self-restraint, for instance, I grew up believing that Saturday night’s back-to-back broadcasts of The Love Boat and Fantasy Island were the shining twin zeniths of television programming. All because you didn’t shoot the TV.

How did you resist the urge?

I wish I could ask you that, and so many other things.