Remembering my father (5): the day the music died
I have a great deal more I wish to write about my father’s life, but my last two days have obviously been quite eventful for me. I do plan on adding more of his story later, but as today is the twentieth anniversary of Dad’s death, I think it is fitting to say something about that, very briefly.
A few months after I left home in 1986, my parents purchased a home in Alix, a small town near Stettler, Alberta. (Abandoned prairie towns often had houses for sale for next to nothing; my parents paid $6,000 for this house; a house we had bought in Manitoba a few years earlier had been purchased for $3,500 at $100 a month with no interest.)
Shortly thereafter, Dad began experiencing strange symptoms, including sudden loss of strength in his right hand, to the degree that he began dropping things such as cups. He also had some stuff going on in his upper shoulder / collarbone area that I at first wondered was connected to a car accident we had been in a couple of years earlier. Soon he was losing his balance and falling to the floor.
As a bit of an aside, this amused our little dog to no end, as previously this meant it was play time for her. So she got excited and tried to play with him. How strange it must have been for him to be in such utter frustration with his new susceptibility to falling, while laughing at the dog.
He went to the local doctor, who was apparently a bit of a quack; instead of taking things seriously, he suggested Dad was faking illness in order to collect money from the government. (Which, for anyone who knew my Dad at all, was a ludicrous charge. He was anything but a fan of taxpayer-funded government largesse.)
By this time, I had moved to Grande Prairie (where my sister Ruth had preceded me some time before), and I believe it was en route to seeing my sister and me, Dad stopped to see an old doctor friend, Dennis Boettger from McLennan. Dr Boettger determined within a few minutes that Dad was suffering either from a brain tumour or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease).
Further developments revealed that the latter was the case. I don’t know what the timeline is now, but in the late 1980s, life expectancy of ALS victims was 2-5 years, although people rich enough to live in a bubble (such as Stephen Hawking, famous for his A Brief History of Time) could hold out much longer. The reason is that the disease destroys the functionality of motor muscles and the body becomes unable to fight off basic illnesses which we take for granted.
By then it was clear that Mom was in no position to look after my father; she was already into her sixties, and he was a heavy man (although only 5’5″, he was nearly 240 pounds at his peak, although that dwindled after he became ill), so she could not so much as lift him when he fell, especially as he became less able to offer assistance in the process. So in 1988, they moved to Grande Prairie and the family was together again so that I could provide primary care for him.
Dad deteriorated rapidly. For a while, he was able to use a walker, but even before the move was accomplished, his speech had started to slur. He had the foresight to instruct my Mom to put an antenna on a baseball cap, and have a sheet with both the alphabet and a list of common words so that he could point to it. (Thankfully, although he had lost the use of his hands, he retained control of his neck until his death.)
The most frustrating thing for him, however, was not the loss of an able body, but the loss of speech. For someone whose whole life revolved around talking, it was a terrible blow, and while limited communication was still possible, it was no replacement for real speech.
In March 1990, Dad contracted what appeared to be a mild cold. Within a day or two, we had to get him rushed to the hospital because the symptoms had become serious. At the hospital, not surprisingly, they put oxygen tubes in his nose. In his own non-verbal way, he pled with us to remove it. In retrospect, I think he knew it was the end, and the discomfort of the tube was simply not worth it.
In a matter of hours, he was gone: what had begun as an apparent cold or mild flu had become pneumonia in short order, and his body had no equipment with which to fight. He was 59 years old.
I was not there. Assuming he was going to be in the hospital for a few weeks and then return home, I went out to look at a newspaper to see if I could find temporary work. I received a phone call to return to the hospital and was stunned to be told he was gone. It still hurts, thinking I wasn’t there; and yet, I think it was how he wanted it, just Mom by his side….
On the morning after he died, an old friend called us up to see if he was healed, because the previous night she had a dream that he was well and walking again.
Yes, we said, he is healed.