Dad is in his wheelchair. His good leg is propped up on a support attached to his chair. His stump, where the other leg was amputated just below the knee, is extended beside it. It is 2001 and Dad has been battling diabetes for almost forty years. As warriors go, he’s a tough cookie. But diabetes is sneaky, patient, steady. Unlike Dad’s other adversaries—racist army sergeants, stonewalling politicians, a back-talking eldest son—diabetes can’t be outfoxed, out-boxed, or enlightened. It just keeps coming at you, gaining, sucking up the small blood vessels first, the ones that feed the extremities—toes, feet, fingertips, eyes—then it spreads, slowly, implacably, infections choking the life out of your ankles, then higher, deeper.
But Dad’s still fighting. His weapon of choice these days is surrounding himself with the things, the people, he cherishes. Right now he’s in the living room listening to Count Basie, inhaling the funky bass lines and sassy piano riffs like it’s his oxygen, his morphine. The Basie beat takes me back to my childhood, memories of laughing hysterically as Joe Williams wailed about his lover being as welcoming as leftover mashed potatoes and Dad cracking up when I’d sing the song back, picking up Joe Williams’ phrasing flawlessly, only two octaves higher. Music, Dad’s kind of music, always put him in a boisterous mood. Dad’s still listening to the same half-dozen records he listened to then. But instead of clapping his hands and swaying along to the feel-good rhythm, he sits very still between the stereo speakers.
There’s something that I’ve been meaning to ask Dad. I’ve been putting it off. But I can’t much longer. I’m not sure how many more chances I’ll have to speak frankly with him. Much as I think I’ve come to understand my father, some of his past behaviour still confuses and hurts me. I don’t always want to carry this anger, this sadness inside. David’s almost a teenager, alternating between rebelling and reaching out for me more than ever. I suspect that my moodiness, my there-but-not-there presence when I flit through the house lost in my lyrics, is as wounding to him as Dad’s overbearing presence once was for me. So I smile at Dad and take the plunge.
“I’m curious about something, Dad.”
“What’s that, son?”
He’s looking up at me. Glad I’ve come to visit, but wary.
“Why were you always on my back when I was a kid? Why did you always tell me to be aware of my limitations? What made you so sure I was ‘never gonna be a Bruce Cockburn,’ to quote you?”
“I never said that.”
“Yes, you did.”
Mom yells from the kitchen, “Cut it out, you two,” her voice caught between a plea and a threat.
Dad waits for a signature Basie piano riff to fade before speaking. “Before you’d turned sixteen, you were already talking about dropping out of school and taking to the streets with your guitar. I was protecting you from yourself. The world’s a cruel place. It was my job to prepare you for the world. Even if I was a little mean sometimes.” Dad hesitates here, knowing he’s made a major concession. “You always had food to eat, a roof over your head, shoes on your feet. It’s not like you weren’t looked after.”
Ahhh, there’s the old warrior talking, I think, oddly reassured by Dad’s vehemence. If he truly thought he was putting me down for my own good, then there was a chance that his criticisms had come from a place I hadn’t recognized: love. Dad, fidgeting with a lever on his wheelchair, peers up at me. The emotion is rising in me so fast that I can’t talk. I’m fifteen again, using every ounce of self-control to hold myself together.
Seeing me struggling, Dad turns reflective: “I underestimated you, son. The kinds of things that you accomplished in your musical career …” His eyes aren’t as sharp as they once were, but I’m sure he can see the tears in my eyes. Lowering his voice to a murmur, he says, “That just didn’t happen to kids I knew when I was growing up.”
I underestimated you, son. I realize that is all I’ve ever wanted Dad to say.
Josie, one of Dad’s round-the-clock health care workers, treads gently into the living room, presenting Dad with a fresh glass of water. She tenderly guides a straw into Dad’s mouth, holding it in place until he’s finished drinking. Once Josie mops the tiny specks of dribble from Dad’s chin, she pads back into the kitchen to tell Mom that Dad’s blood pressure is dropping again—”I can tell by touching his skin, it’s too cold.” Mom, unfazed, reminds Josie to start preparing Dad for dialysis. One more expensive consequence of suffering through advanced diabetes, I think, as Josie, moving with some urgency now, heads to the family room to turn on the machine.
Dad, unconcerned by all this activity, has nodded off, his head hanging forward, his snoring coming and going in spurts and stutters. I sit and watch him for a few minutes, knowing that if I stir even slightly, he’ll open his eyes and ask where I’m going. Unlike me, Dad has always been blessed with the ability to fall asleep anywhere, anytime, often in mid-sentence. But these days his sleep is like a shallow, grey shell—every few minutes he’ll let loose with a fearsomely loud snore that startles him awake. Then he’ll look around accusingly, gulping in air, for the source of this rude, intrusive noise.
As I take a chance and get up quietly from my chair, I realize how difficult it must have been for Dad to concede that he may have made some mistakes with me. I hadn’t meant to turn my afternoon visit with him, a guy reeling from infection to infection, who’d recently lost half of his right leg, into an inquisition. As I creep out the front door undetected, I’m haunted by the kind of guilt one feels after provoking a competition with a hugely disadvantaged opponent.
On the drive home, I blasted the radio, compulsively punching up stations, trying to find some song that would galvanize me the way “Satisfaction” or “A Hard Day’s Night” did back in my childhood. In today’s world we’re bombarded with pop-idol reality shows. We’re besieged by ever-younger singers, known only by their first names, whose greatest talents often seem to be their frightening determination, their killer abs and their illusory kid-next-door accessibility. If the prevailing propaganda in sixties America was that anyone could be president, today’s dream has changed to something more realistic. These days, anyone can be a pop star. But when I was a kid, telling your parents you wanted to be a pop singer was about as comforting as telling them you wanted to join the circus and get shot out of a cannon. How could I not have seen it from Dad’s perspective? According to all he’d experienced, there was no precedent of success for a moony-eyed, mixed-race, suburban kid bent on throwing away his education to risk it all on his musical fantasies. Dad must have thought I was mad. And I suppose I was. But I was also lucky.
I’m a hypocrite. Not long after Dad and I had our talk, David and I were on a flight to New York during Christmas break. He insisted that I watch a film of him rapping one of his songs in my recording studio. He held the dime-sized screen of his video camera a few inches from my face and then—bang!—his voice, bursting with an unlikely amalgamation of suburban and underclass, street-thug drawl (imagine J.D. Salinger crossed with Biggie), came blasting out at me and the rest of the first-class section of the airplane. Unaware of the commotion he was creating, David scrutinized my face for the slightest reaction, unconsciously mouthing along to the words of his songs. I had to make a conscious effort to hold myself in check and resist the urge to tell him to turn down that “racket” (Dad’s favourite word for music he loathed) before other passengers started complaining about the litany of swear words and various ingenious, and to my ears offensive, rhymes for “nigger” bouncing off their champagne flutes.
As David’s rapping and songwriting started to take over every facet of his life, I advised him to expand his talent to prose writing: articles, short stories, film scripts. (Was it so long ago that my high school English teacher took me aside to say my real future lay in journalism, anything but music?) I reminded David of when he was voted valedictorian of his elementary school, based on a graduation speech he had written. Then I pointed out, in much the same way Dad did with me, how unremittingly competitive the music business—especially rap—is. When he gave me that “times have changed since you made records” roll of the eyes, I reminded him that one of his heroes, Jay-Z, had said that statistically, it’s ten times harder to make it as a rapper than as an NBA player.
I neglected, however, to share with David my deepest concern: that perhaps he didn’t possess the innate sense of rhythm (not to mention street cred) needed to excel as a rapper. I knew telling David this would wound him deeply. Though he pretends not to be affected by what I say, I know he carefully calibrates my every word and observation. Besides, wasn’t it better for David to pursue a dream without achieving success than to abandon it and fall into idleness, which carries with it other, unforeseen dangers?
Roughly a year later, David played me a demo he’d recorded. It stopped me in my tracks. His timing was dead on. The earnest, pleading tone of his voice gave his words a distinct and hypnotic spin. I had underestimated him.
Mom’s kissing Dad. Exactly the way he used to kiss her. Smack, smack, smack: three loud smooches on top of his bald head. “I’m right here, honeybun,” she says. Lying on his back on a rented hospital bed that takes up most of the family room, Dad’s hooked up to his dialysis machine. He wants more ice. He opens his mouth wide, like a baby bird anticipating feeding. Mom delicately places a few ice chips in his mouth. Dad’s seventy-seven. He’s fighting off an infection in his remaining leg. I’m here to comfort him, but I’m even more concerned about Mom. I don’t want to tell her that I’m worried Dad may be facing yet another amputation. Mom, seeing the gloom on my face, decides I’m the one who most needs comforting. Dad’s decree that the strong take care of the weak has flipped. The weak are now taking care of the strong.
“Do you know what your father wanted when he returned home from the hospital after his leg was amputated?” Mom asks.
I shake my head.
“He wanted me to crawl into bed with him. So we could get reacquainted.”
It takes a moment before the full impact of what Mom is saying sinks in. Get reacquainted. I want to take a sliver of comfort from this, but it makes me even sadder. I try to follow Mom’s example, take strength from her strength. I realize that Mom will not fade, or even falter, so long as Dad’s here. Because Dad’s life is her life. She devotes herself to his care. She doesn’t complain. Through it all, the health care costs keep rising: the home hospital bed, the rented dialysis machine, twenty-four-hour home care and Wheel-Trans. All Dad’s stories about saving for a rainy day, which I’d always dismissed as neurotic, Depression-era talk, have now come true. More and more, Dad’s lessons, as unfathomable as they struck me at the time, have turned out to be rules to live by.
And so the battle went on: death inching closer to Dad one day and retreating the next, as if daunted by Dad’s determination. I’m not going anywhere for a good while—I’m sticking around to take care of my wife and to make sure you keep behaving yourself. But always in the air were the macabre calculations of how long he had left to live and how much money he had socked away.
“Son,” Dad said, as I heard Mom untangling the phone line and telling him to aim his lips at the mouthpiece, “you and Bev need to get over here to review your mother’s and my finances! On the double.” Click. It was the week after Christmas 2002, the time of year Dad knew Bev wouldn’t be busy with work.
“Is this a good sign or a bad sign?” Bev asked, after I’d relayed Dad’s demand.
“Whenever Dad’s ordering me around it’s a good sign,” I answered, “because he’s still fighting.”
As a lawyer, Bev had rushed into hundreds of family emergencies where a husband or wife was dying and affairs needed to be put in proper legal order, often within forty-eight hours. Afraid that this could be the situation with Dad, she’d balled her right hand into a small fist and pressed it against her mouth, a sign that she was fighting back tears.
Minutes later, we were in the car, Bev on her cell phone trying to exchange gifts during the madness of Boxing Week sales.
“Did I ever tell you what Dad told me twenty years ago, when I explained to him that I was putting you in charge of managing our money?”
“Make this a fast story, okay? I’m on hold with the Bay.”
Doing my best imitation of Dad, I boomed, “Daggum, Danny, it’s high time to let your wife know who’s boss! Who’s the man of your house, anyway?”
“Good thing you didn’t tell me that at the time,” Bev said.
“I’m telling you this now because our dropping everything—to drive over to his house ‘on the double’—well, this is a big deal for Dad.”
“In the middle of all this holiday stuff—which I have to do because you can’t stand doing any of it—we’re summoned over to meet with your dad ‘on the double’ and this is big for him? When we jumped into the car I thought your dad was in …” Bev caught herself here, knowing talking any more would leave her too emotional.
This was the trouble with talking about Dad to Bev. No matter what I ended up trying to say, it came out wrong. Still, I needed her to hear this: “Dad doesn’t want me to look over all his savings. He knows I’m clueless about money stuff. He’s reaching out for you. Your guidance. He just wants me to be there so he can pretend he’s asking me.”
“It’s been twenty years, and I still don’t always know when you make up crap, just to please me, and when you actually mean what you’re saying.”
Bev turned off her cell. Maybe she believed me this time.
As I gathered snacks in the kitchen, Mom started laying out mountains of paper on the living-room carpet. I returned with a platter of crackers and cheese to find Bev sitting cross-legged on the carpet, patiently breaking down what all the hieroglyphics spread across dozens of sheets of paper—everything from investments to bank statements to various pensions and life insurance—represented in real dollars.
“Your mother took perfect care of my books and accounts for almost half a century,” Dad boasted, reaching out from his wheelchair to stroke Mom’s arm. “But the big money decisions were always up to me. And for a broken-down old sociologist, I did a pretty good job.”
Dad, like the proverbial grandfather who prefers to keep all his cash savings under a mattress, never truly believed the dollar figure on his financial statements.
Dad always liked to see and feel, even smell, his cheques. He would hold them up close to his face before Mom yanked them away for deposit, to be printed out as cold, detached numbers.
“You see, Dan,” Bev said, her estate lawyer voice on full display, “you and Donna have nothing to worry about. You have enough saved to take care of both of you for years to come.”
Bev had scribbled the total of all of my parents’ savings on a small piece of paper and was pressing it into Dad’s curled and crooked fingers. He looked up at Bev, beaming.
Dad, in his abstruse way, really did love Bev. The only snag was that it had taken him twenty years to feel that way. You could be angry that it had taken him so long, or you could claim that its long incubation period made it all the more precious.
There were moments that evening when Dad, basking in his role of supreme breadwinner, was able to relax and enjoy watching Bev and Mom calculate what represented, to him, his life’s work. I stood behind him throughout most of the goings-on, as lost as he was among all the number-crunching, offering the odd, “Hear, hear. Whaddya know about that. Take a look at all that loot!” Just as Dad used to say to me when I showed him my newspaper route savings. All the while, I gently rocked him in his wheelchair.
“Can you hold these for me, Danny?”
“Sure, Dad.”
He’s lying on the hospital bed in the family room. His brown arm is extended towards me, his hand twitching as if conducting an imaginary orchestra with an invisible baton. His hand is empty.
“What is it you want me to hold, Dad?” Playing along with him makes this seem less depressing.
“My keys, son. Don’t lose them. Your mom’s gone to get my jacket.”
What is it this time that’s thrown Dad’s mind out into space? The toxins that his atrophied kidneys and liver can’t process? The morphine that dulls the pain of yet another amputation? No, that was last week. This week it’s Percocet or something. He’s on so many different meds that it’s a miracle he can string a sentence together.
“Where are you guys going, Dad?”
“I’m taking your mother for a walk. Where’s my wallet? I had a ten-dollar bill so we could do some shopping.”
His voice takes on an accusing edge, as if perhaps I’ve taken it. In his confused state he could be fifteen years younger. Maybe younger still. It’s been a while since ten dollars was enough spending money. “Son, I can’t afford to go to Mushmouth’s funeral. I need you to get his wife on the phone for me.”
“It’s okay, Dad, I’ve talked to her already. She understands.”
Mushmouth’s wife is long gone. Mushmouth died forty years ago of cancer. Dad’s ravings can go on like this for hours. Often he’ll voice regrets—that he didn’t visit his parents enough, that his sister Margaret would be alive today if she’d lived with us, instead of dying all alone—the kind of concerns and wide-ranging guilt that I never knew he felt.
My offer of forgiveness comes in the form of wiping his cheeks and neck with a cool, moist washcloth. This calms him. His skin is still so smooth, so perfect. “Like honey,” Bev always says, in a kind of admiring disbelief. I gently glide the cloth along the side of his head. What few tufts of hair remain there are full and dark.
“Thank you, son.” He’s come back.
“You’re welcome, Dad.”
Dad doesn’t appear to be the least bit afraid of dying. Still, it’s clear he plans on hanging on to life as long as possible. The closest he comes to broaching the subject is to say, in what sounds like a cross between a last request and an order, “Promise me you’ll take care of your mother.” One beat later, he always adds, “And your sister.” I follow his lead and never allude to the fact that he’s dying. For one thing, every time he seems to be hanging by his final thread, he bounces back.
I disappear to get him a glass of water. When I return he’s got some of his old spirit back. “I suppose people think I’m gonna recant on my deathbed and embrace Jesus,” he jokes, in between loud, satisfied, straw slurps. “Trust me, Danny,” he says, once he’s watched my eyes widen, “that ain’t gonna happen.” It almost sounds like a boast. Or a dare.
Later that evening, rattled by Dad’s audacity, I tell David, barely fourteen: “I’m taking you to visit Granddad tomorrow. You don’t know how much longer he’s going to be around.”
David replies, “You always say that, but he never dies.”
Even though I’ve had plenty of time to steel myself for Dad’s death, it’s started to take on the shape of a distant, amorphous threat—an idle bluff, not unlike a repeated warning of punishment from your parents that you always knew, as a child, they’d never enforce. Even with the loss of both his legs, even with him sleeping as much as twenty hours a day, Dad still vibrated with life. Besides, suffering in silence was not Dad’s style.
When Josie, Dad’s favourite nurse, announced that she was pregnant, Dad made no attempt to hide his annoyance.
“Dan, Josie can bring her baby to work with her,” Mom offered.
“Absolutely not,” Dad yelled. “No babies! I’m the only baby here.” Somehow he managed to strike a perfect balance between bravery and neediness, chutzpah and vulnerability.
It became increasingly unbearable to live each day never knowing if it was going to be the last day of Dad’s life. What if, when I’m out of town, he …? There was a part of me that wanted him to be set free, so that I’d be set free.
Leaving Dad was always the hardest part of my visits. I’d slowed down on my songwriting so I could see him more often, usually two or three times a week. But when I headed home, he’d feel rejected. It got to the point where I’d sometimes put off visiting him because I couldn’t bear his anguish once it came time for me to leave. I made the mistake of telling him, once, that I had to rush home to record a vocal on a new song I’d just written. He could still pick out my fibs almost before they fell out of my mouth. He gave me one of those “yeah, right” looks and said, “You just wait, son, pretty soon diabetes is gonna destroy your singing voice, like it destroyed my kidneys.” He still had the power to rip me open with little more than a single sentence.
I gathered my stuff, breathed in and bent to kiss his cheek. As the stubble of his face gently scratched my lips I drew back, wondering, as I looked down at him, what was the point of life, of living, if in the end it all came down to this.
It hurt so much to see his face start to buckle. To see his tears. It was the kind of hurt that took over all of me, leaving no fibre or cell unaffected. I was afraid of what would happen if the hurt plunged any deeper. Afraid that if I allowed myself to hold him in my arms I would simply come undone, never to be put back together again.
As I walked to my car, I spotted an old suitcase in the garage. It looked just like one I hauled off to summer camp back in 1965. This took me back to yet another memory of the Hill competitive disorder, which managed to cheer me up. I’d taken part in a contest to see who could pick up the most shells by diving to the bottom of the lake. I would win this competition if it killed me. It almost did. Sure enough, I was trawling along the bottom of the lake, stuffing the inside of my swimsuit and hands with shells, long after everyone else had surfaced. But it wasn’t enough for me just to win. The margin had to be huge. Then everything started to slowly swirl from grey, to indigo blue, to black with white spots. I made it to the surface just as I was passing out, still clutching my winning shells.
All my life I’d been diving to the bottom of that lake, scooping up the most shells, damned near killing myself, like Dad. Could I carry Dad’s passion in me without allowing it to destroy me? How could I take the best of all the things he’d taught me, and yet not succumb, like him, to catheters and dialysis and revolving caregivers? Was that the never-ending riddle? When do you drop the fucking shells and come up for air?