The final memory I have of my dad is the time we attended a Chicago Bears football game at Wrigley Field about a month before he died. It was in November of 1958, a cold day, cold even for November on the shore of Lake Michigan. I don’t remember what team the Bears were playing that afternoon; mostly I recall the overcast sky, the freezing temperature and visible breath of the players curling out from beneath their helmets like smoke from dragons’ nostrils.
My dad was in good spirits despite the fact that the colostomy he’d undergone that previous summer had measurably curtailed his physical activities. He ate heartily at the game, the way he always had: two or three hot dogs, coffee, beer, a few shots of Bushmill’s from a flask he kept in an overcoat pocket. He shook hands with a number of men on our way to our seats and again on our way out of the stadium, talking briefly with each of them, laughing and patting them on the back or arm.
Later, however, on our way home, he had to stop the car and get out to vomit on the side of the road. After he’d finished it took him several minutes to compose himself, leaning back against the door until he felt well enough to climb back in behind the wheel. “Don’t worry, son,” he said to me. “Just a bad stomach, that’s all.”
During the summer, after my dad got out of the hospital, we’d gone to Florida, where we stayed for a few weeks in a house on Key Biscayne. I had a good time there, swimming in the pool in the yard and watching the boats navigate the narrow canal that ran behind the fence at the rear of the property. I liked waving to and being waved at by the skippers as they guided their sleek white powerboats carefully through the inlet. One afternoon, though, I went into my dad’s bedroom to ask him something and I saw him in the bathroom holding the rubber pouch by the hole in his side through which he was forced to evacuate his bowels. He grimaced as he performed the necessary machinations and told me to wait for him outside. He closed the bathroom door and I went back to the pool.
I sat in a beach chair looking out across the inland waterway in the direction of the Atlantic Ocean. I didn’t like seeing my dad look so uncomfortable, but I knew there was nothing I could do for him. I tried to remember his stomach the way it was before, before there was a red hole in the side of it, but I couldn’t. I could only picture him as he stood in the bathroom moments before with the pain showing in his face.
When he came out he was dressed and smiling. “What do you think, son?” he said. “Should I buy this house? Do you like it here?”
I wanted to ask him how he was feeling now, but I didn’t. “Sure, Dad,” I said. “It’s a great place.”