A Father Like Mine

The Boston Globe

It wasn't intentional, the juxtaposition of an old man dying underneath a picture of an old man young. A grainy black-and-white, the picture was part of a collage that hung on a wall with other photos and plaques. It was hardly noticed when the room was my father's den, before it became the place where he would die. 

His wife painted the room yellow to cheer him. A hospital bed was brought in. And my father's sanctuary where he had watched TV and paid bills and organized files and ridden his stationary bike and talked on the phone and written e-mails, this room that was all his, wasn't anymore.

"See, Dad. I got you new pillows. Are you comfortable? Are you warm?”

"I'm fine. I'm good. Don't worry about me," he said until he couldn't talk any more. He left us little by little. A smile. A nod. Finally, just a light in his eyes. There was less of him every day.

And it broke my heart, not just his leaving, but seeing on the wall the boy my father was, 6 years old, with his whole life ahead of him, that life lived now, a good life, but like all lives, harder than a boy can imagine.

He wrote poetry when he was in the war. I found a box of it in my mother's bureau drawer when I was a child and snooping. I didn't know he wrote poetry. I didn't know any more about him than what I saw. He played the card game "War" with me and took me to the movies and to rodeos and to Paragon Park. He bought me a bike and taught me to ride it. He made me fried bologna sandwiches sometimes and fish cakes and beans every Friday night.

"If you don't cry at the doctor's, I'll take you to the Dairy Queen," he used to say, my polio shots his responsibility because my mother was too embarrassed by my wails to take me anymore. 

”I promise I won't cry," I'd swear every time.

But despite my best intentions I always howled.

He took me to the Dairy Queen anyway.

I thought the poems he wrote were for my mother. They weren't. The men in his unit used to pay him to write to their girls. My father didn't talk about the war. It took him years to tell me this.

He never had a father. His father walked out when he was 5. His older brother was 6, his youngest was a newborn. Every penny my father earned when he was a boy he gave to his mother. At 18, he quit school and joined the Army and had his monthly paycheck sent to her. 

And then Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

He dreamed about the war at the end when he was still at the hospital before he came home to die. Two nights in a row he woke himself up screaming and the nurses came running. Most of the men he served with were killed in combat. I didn't know this, either. I found out after he died.

Twelve years ago he wrote a letter to his older brother's daughter. She came to his wake last week and gave me a copy. Our families aren't close. I hardly know this cousin.

The letter was about the picture of my father as a boy. "The photo brings back memories," he wrote. "It was a Sunday afternoon. The location is where we lived, 314 Windsor Street, Cambridge, MA. The occasion was our landlady just bought a new camera. The year was 1930. I was six years old.”

I wish his life had been easier. I wish he had gone to school instead of war. I wish he could have played more and worked less. I wish his infant son had lived. I wish my mother hadn't been sick for so many years. I wish he could have traveled with her and enjoyed some good times like all his friends.

But what I wish most is that my father had had my childhood. I wish he had a father who stuck around and loved him. I look at the picture of the boy he was and wish more than anything that my father had had a father like mine.