It’s been four years.
It’s been as long as a presidential term, or a stint in local government. It’s been longer than what we call four years of college, longer than the time we owned any of our Country Squire station wagons in the 1960s and ’70s.
Dad died in the early-early hours of Feb. 11, 2015. He was 85⅔. He had been sick, really sick, though none of us knew it until nearly the end.
His illness was not the only unknown.
As we came to realize that Dad’s time was almost at hand, my brothers and sisters-in-law and Andrea and I recalled things about Dad — things we did, things we said, character quirks. It became obvious quite quickly, quite startlingly, that each of us seemed to know someone a bit different from the person the others knew.
Each of us had a different story to tell, and some of us were hearing them for the first time.
To be clear: This was no multiple-personality situation, not in a clinical sense. Dad was many things to many people. Many, many, many people. He gave of himself generously, and could mingle with titans of industry (his favorite) as easily as he did with row-house ladies who reminded him of the residents of the steel-mill town he left behind in 1947.
It just was a shock to learn things about our father on his deathbed. Finding out that some things we recalled as funny or cute had a slightly darker edge … but which always led to redemption, resurrection, renewal, lessons learned.
Just. Finding. Out.
Beyond unexpected.
In my four years in college, longer ago than I prefer to note, I did learn a lot, terrible GPA notwithstanding.
In the last four years, though, what I’ve learned is that I knew just a few facets of this not-fully-polished diamond, and that’s all I ever will know. And I’ve learned that I’m not alone in having a parent shrouded in mystery.
I also learned that other people had fathers and mothers whose lives were open books, family albums in the flesh, and of them I’m jealous.
I’m savvy enough to understand why Dad pulled on his cloak of invisibility, even when it led to his under-communicating with my brothers and me. Understanding helps dull the sting, a little.
Because he had given so much of himself to so many people for nearly half a century, and because he feared — or at least suspected — that his people would want just a little more, Dad essentially dropped off the face of the Earth when he retired to Florida. He huddled with his core friends, played golf and cooked, traveled internationally with a sand wedge in hand, and when golf slipped out of his life, he slid into a chair in front of a huge flat-screen TV.
“This! Is! Jeopardy!”
His retreat from the wider world pulled him back from us, and in that retreat, as his memory faded and dementia took his edge, his secrets were sealed in the vault that eventually would become his tomb.
It’s been four years since the night we sat in chairs around his bed, hearing him tug for each breath, pressing ourselves to stay awake while he transitioned into his final rest. Our memories are the ones fading now.
I’ll never know everything about him that I want to; I won’t even know what I don’t know. But I do know that I can’t and won’t be as much a cipher to my family when it’s my time.
That’s Dad’s final lesson.
