After a very loud, chaotic bout with a disease that steadily beats an old person down, he died. Quietly. Almost silently.
Consumed by defeat, exhausted by an eldercare system that never got to know my father beyond his outbursts and his “vitals,” I paused at his deathbed, put my hand on his face and whispered, “Rest, Dad, rest. It’s over.”
It wasn’t just his life that was over, it was the uphill, head-into-the-wind, death-by-a-thousand-cuts battle against aging and against a system that can keep a person alive in body even as time continuously eats away at his mind and spirit.
I thanked the hospice nurse, truly one of the kindest people I’d encountered, gathered his things and walked out into a chilly darkness. So many times he had raged in a fit of dementia for me to “get out and never come back.” At last, I could abide by his demand.
Even though my husband and sister were with me that night, I was the loneliest person on Earth. I had been his caregiver long before he went, first, into assisted living and, shortly after, a nursing home. I had watched him decline on a daily basis, despite what seemed like herculean efforts to stop the rock slide.
As anyone who has ever been a caregiver knows, it is a desolating, thankless job that typically does not end well. Dementia often made him sullen, angry, argumentative. He desperately needed help but he desperately didn’t want it.
His was not the only spirit broken by the experience.
They say gratitude helps with grief so I tried to focus on two relatively positive things: One, he got to die in the quiet comfort of a lovely hospital room as opposed to the noisy chaos of the nursing home; and, two, he awoke the previous Sunday morning for just a few minutes, grabbed my hand and said, “thank you, thank you, thank you.” I don’t know if he knew what he was doing, but I am heartened to have heard the words.
And now, I wondered, what about a funeral? When he’d made his burial arrangements years before, he told me he did not want a service, definitely not a viewing. He had always been a periphery kind of guy, staying with the group but avoiding the spotlight, comfortable just being in the room where everyone else was getting the attention they needed.
More Top Picks Best Portable Air Conditioner
Still, others believed there should be a service. Funerals, they said, are for the living.
I wondered if anyone would remember him. It seemed he’d been gone from himself for so long. Would the world remember how kind, helpful and high energy he’d been? He was born into that generation of doers, people who often worked two jobs and never slept in on Saturdays because the deck needed to be rebuilt or the garden needed weeding or somebody’s car needed an oil change.
I wondered if anyone would come to a funeral now that COVID had given us all permission to decline such invitations.
I cobbled together a short sendoff and wrote his obituary, focusing on the good years when he was a wisecracker and a prankster. He had been everyone’s go-to when they needed a tire change or a screen fix or a ride. He was the fun one, ordering a pizza late at night while we all watched “Creature Features.” He was a believer in DYI before it became a movement, relying on duct tape and ingenuity to fix almost anything.
In the days leading up to his funeral, I was filled with dread. Literally, every single day of his final journey seemed to be worse than the previous. The past few months, in particular, had been gut-wrenchingly difficult.
I did not expect the service to go well.
I was wrong.
In the span of three hours, hundreds of people came through the doors of the funeral home. They brought hugs, cards and stories of a different time, when my father was a different man.
They told of how he had personally affected their lives, how he had been kind to them, made them laugh or made them feel special.
My college roommate recalled that on graduation day, he treated everyone to dinner at a fancy restaurant. My cousins remembered he was the person who often stood between them and their raging father. One young man brought an old stuffed toy that my father had given him when he was a child about to undergo pediatric surgery.
What I thought would be a difficult day ended up being cathartic, even uplifting. It helped me travel back to the days before he was a broken, insulated man resigned to a wheelchair. I could once again see him standing in the school office, signing me out early so we could get to an afternoon Cubs game. We met Ernie Banks on that outing. I was over the moon and I think he was too, despite being a lifelong White Sox fan.
Turns out, I needed that funeral. I needed those lost entries to be reprised, those forgotten treasures to be unearthed, that balance to be restored.
I had been so overrun with institutional madness, so into my own despair over how society treats the elderly, that I hadn’t even considered that he would want everyone to remember his jokes, his shenanigans, his annual Fourth of July fireworks displays that always went awry and the times he rode the Mad Mouse at Playland because his kids insisted on it.
He would want me to remember him happy, his body strong, and the times good.
And now, thanks to his funeral, I can.
Donna Vickroy is an award-winning reporter, editor and columnist who worked for the Daily Southtown for 38 years.