Return to Home Page

I hope I am not imposing, but I need some input-I wrote this ten years ago..it is about the summer my father died, now some 12 years ago. I wrote it for people to understand that each person handles things in his or her way, and I am letting people read it for the first time in several years....The first time around, it seemed to hit a certain cord with some people...please don't feel obligated to finish it or even start it if you don't feel like it...sometimes it brings about very personal reactions, and for that I am sorry, but...here it is...let me know what you think of it...it can cause emotional responses..., I wrote it in about 1991...there has been some interest in it from a certain group which deals with this sort of thing, but, I don't know if I will ever have it published...
Richard
THE YEAR WITHOUT SUMMER

The Reason

Whether or not my recollections of our year without summer reflect what actually happened is irrelevant to me.

I did not keep a daily of our plague year. I wanted to rely on what stuck in my memories many months later instead of being tied to what I wrote then.

This is a recounting of the way I saw those days, the way I saw my father die.

I write this not with the intent to enlighten you. You probably have been down rouglier roads than I can imagine.

Rather, I write it for a selfish reason. I write it to exorcise my dreams of those deamons who haunt them, to replace those visions with memories of laughter and love and beauty, for at times, even in the face of Death, God grants us a bit of each.

Eyes

My father, as my son does now, wore hazel eyes. Growing up, quite often I saw my father's eyes flash quickly to laughter, more quickly to anger.

It was at my grandmother's funeral that I first saw his eyes clouded with tears as he stood beside the casket, him gently touching her hand. I was nine years old before I saw my father's tears.

I was to end up looking deep into his eyes with horrified fascination as the doctor told him of his fate.

Laughter, anger, sorrow. Those I had seen reflected in his hazel eyes.

Now, as a grown man, looking at a man whose eyes had never shown fear of any thing or any man, who had been to me an invincible giant, I saw the look of naked terror.

"You have one chance in four the the therapy will work," said the doctor, speaking softly. He had a strange accent, and my father, slightly hard of hearing, strained forward in his hospital bed to catch what was being said.

"If it does work, you have one chance in four of living 18 months or more," the doctor concluded.

My father squinted, brow wrinkled and drawn. He was tired from all the tests, had gotten little sleep, but when the news struck, a peculiar look of terror and fear sprang from his eyes, covered his gray, lined face.

He shook his head slightly, his first denial of many that were to come. In a faltering voice he asked "What next?"

As the doctor explained the treatment program, the side effects and the schedule, I stood beside my sister Judi and stared at my father. It was obvious he was hearing only a small part of what was being said, that the monstrous burden of his own death sentence had shocked him terribly. At that moment, at that very moment, I saw the gleam of life leave those hazel eyes. I had prayed for better, but in one fleeting second I accepted what was to come, hoped for the best, prepared to accept the worst.

He never did.

In his final hours his eyes turned slate grey, when we could see them.

CURSING

My father could curse with the best of them. Not the four letter foul words so common today, words he detested for the most part. He used the words that teamsters' used during the Civil War, words full of raw energy, said with force and direction, not simply bantered about in idle conversation.

When he cursed, he had an objective in mind. One moment stands out from my teens, when he injured his hand in the body shop. "Goddamn the GODdamned GODDAMNED SONOFABITCH" he roared, turning and hurling his five-pound hammer through the front window.

I quietly crawled from beneath the car I was working on, slid out the side door, came back an hour later. Things were calm, and I had to replace the window.

He suffered from nightmares for years, and often when we visited at the house on the lake, he would wake everyone up with a string of oaths that would have made a sailor proud.

We talked about these dreams a few times. They centered, he said, around fighting. He would be in an unknown place, fighting men he didn't know. The dreams seemed to become more and more real to him as he grew older, the cursing and thrashing about more violent.

So it was in the hospitals early in his treatments. I remember one shy, tiny nurse saying, as an aside, "Your father can have quite a colorful vocabulary, can't he?"

Perhaps it was a reflection of his struggle. As ye live, so shall ye die. Right or wrong he fought

Every man, every thing with a determination that was not passed on to me. He divided the world into two camps, and two camps only: friends and enemies.

Death was a frightful enemy to him. He had two worries. One was to have a stroke and lie helplessly as his father had done. The other was cancer, which had taken his mother.

Dad had been in his late 20s when he drove out to the farm, found his father lying out in a field a half-mile from home, carried him back in his arms. My grandfather spent his last years in a wheelchair.

My grandmother was diagnosed with cancer in the mid 50s. At that time it was an automatic death sentence most of the time, and she lived just a few months after the diagnosis.

It is ironic that within the last two years of his life he suffered two strokes, two bouts with cancer.

That goes a long way in explaining that haunting look, the look of a doomed man told he would likely die of cancer. We all have our fears, all face them, some of us every day of our lives. But when the confrontation is over one's death, in the worst way one has imagined it, what then?

And there was one time that I both cried and felt betrayed.

The first time the diagnosis of cancer was given he gave up, but the family did not.

I did not cry then. There would be a time for that somewhere down the line.

And, as one of those 4 in 1 and 4 in I shots came in, he actually beat the first cancer. It had been four months of chemotherapy, sickness, that gnawing fear that it would do no good anyway, but then one bright day in early April we got the best news imaginable. The cancer was receding at a rapid rate. The next set of X-rays showed that the lung cancer was gone.

Holy of Holies. It had happened. He had beaten the odds. Except for this nagging pain in his hip. My father had a CAT Scan years before, refused another, but finally agreed to one to settle once and for all the hip question. He clung to the theory of arthritis almost to the very end . It was not the case.

The second time was much worse than the first. Same doctor, different approach. This time I watched as he outlined the possibility of radiation treatment for bone cancer, but no time lines were given. A week passed, and then another, with no calls coming to set treatment times, I headed out one beautiful May morning for a conversation.

The personage to whom the conversation was directed may or may not have been listening. I have no was of knowing. I do know that I found a spot overlooking a small lake my father and I had fished on many years ago, a place full of good memories of a bright October day when the trees glowed and the fish were biting.

I remembered coming back to camp that night with a large pike, the first really big one I had ever caught, my father's face beaming.

It struck me then that I was almost the age my father had been that day, my son about the age I was that time, nearly 30 years before.

Then the memory faded. I had to deal with matters at hand.

I parked my father's car on a sandy turn-around, sat on the hood, drank a beer, and commenced.

I told Him that fair was fair. My father had beaten two strokes, could still fish, indeed had just been fishing with my son, as he had fished with me on this lake. He had beaten one cancer. Why this?
My fears and frustrations came to the surface, sitting there in the early Michigan mist, watching the steam rise gently off the lake, knowing full well I had to talk, knowing full well I would never get an answer.

It is difficult to accept such a thing once, but it hit me that misty morning that it is nearly impossible to accept it the second time, after thinking the battle had been won once.

And as long as he was able, as long as he could speak, up to the sleep that marked the start of the final sleep, he cursed the darkness and his fate.

Different roads

It had been a long hard struggle for my father. lt had been almost as hard on mv mother and two sisters and myself. Each of us were handling things differently. There was no right. no wrong, just each seeking some relief from the constant shadows and fears that hung about us like some kind of malevolent mist morning,noon, and might.

My oldest sister, Nancy, would burn off her energy walking along the lake, keeping things mainly to herself.

My middle sister Judi would sometimes go to see friends down the road.

I, the youngest, would retreat nearly every morning, two beers in my pocket, tour the back roads for one hour of total solitude, to think of what was unfolding, or of something else, as was my choice. It became unspoken, these rituals, these releases, these small mental oasis in the vast and terrible desert of what we were facing.

My mother? There were times she could be strong, times she could not make decisions. She watched the man she had been married to for 52 years slip down the path of a long and tortuous death. I do not know how she really felt. Nancy and Judi and I had more than ample time to talk about our feelings in our many 4 hour trips to and from our homes to Michigan, in many long days tending to my father, and in the many days since he died. But I never have found out, unlike I feel I have with my sisters, what really went on those 10 months with my mother.

The grief, yes. The private thoughts, no. And in turn each of the children would deal in a particular way with her, and she would react in differing ways with each of us.

Foraging

The initial round of chemotherapy took its toll on Dad. One of his concerns was the loss of hair. He had a fine, thin mustache, had had it since his late teens. There was one time, when I was 8 or 9, when he trimmed one side too short. tried to even the other, ended up cutting it off. No one, not even my mother, had ever seen him without his mustache. It caused a great deal of laughter in the family.

Now, facing his first treatment, he asked his doctor about the hair loss one more time.

"Will it," he asked hesitantly, " make my mustache fall out?"

I repressed my urge to smile, wondering at the concern he had about that, facing what he had to face, then smiled in spite of my sell: It was typical Dad.

The doctor also smiled briefly, and relied " It may. Right now we don't know."

In the end the mustache stayed. But the treatments, which started out rather easily under the circumstances, soon grew worse, with the nausea coming sooner, lasting longer.

It became a wearing battle to find things he would eat, could eat.

We located a small family market in the nearby small city where he went for treatments. We would get the best meat here, best ground beef, big franks or brats.

On the way back home we would pass a roadside produce market and get fresh tomatoes, melons, and in the mid-summer, fresh blueberries from the farm down the road.

It became some kind of contest to f~nd out what he would eat. Each mouthful was carefully considered, each meal a kind of test of whether he was gaining, staying still, or dropping back.

His meal times were becoming very irregular, and it became a juggling act to have things ready when he was ready to eat.

In the early days we cooked on the gas grill outside, since the smell of food could cause him to become queasy. Later it didn't seem to make much difference, but we had grown used to it, and it was a pleasant diversion to plan most of our own meals to be cooked outside, sitting on the deck overlooking the lake, watching our families of geese promenade about, coming close for handouts of stale bread.

Relaxing in the so-familiar scenes and beautiful sunsets, feeling close to my sisters, there were times when it was almost, almost an idyllic setting. One wanted to grab onto moments such as these, freeze them in amber, keep them locked away, for we all knew it would never look this way again, never.

It was as if one had one of those calm days in mid-winter, between great storms. What had gone before was bad. What was inevitable would be worse. For a time, we were granted a few fleeting moments of peace and beauty.

It became nearly an obsession for me to bake my father fresh pies, one every other day, peach or blackberry or apple. At times he would awaken at 3 a.m. and wonder if he ought to have some pie and ice cream.

As the days dragged on, the summer grew hotter, those times grew fewer and fewer, until, at last, there no longer were berries or peaches or apples to buy, no more dough to roll, no more pies to bake, for he was not at home to bake them for.

The Cluster

There was one wild week in either late June or early July where the entire family gathered in Michigan. I can't be sure of the dates, as I cannot be sure of any dates that year. With something like 12 or 14 or 20 or God knows how many trips, those little details are not important now.

We had been told the end probably was near. My parents' two bedroom house had 11 or 12 people in it, plus my sister Judi's two dogs. We gathered as an entire family for the last time.

Dad, once again defying the predictions, came home from the hospital. He was able to sit on the deck overlooking the lake, participate in the family meals, offer advice or criticism about the lawn mowing, cooking, or whatever caught his still sharp eye.

One evening my niece's husband wanted to fish. There were plenty of people around to help with Dad, so I volunteered to guide the boat. I didn't have a license, didn't want to fish, just to cruise down the river again.

This set my father off into a very typical temper tirade, warning me I would get arrested for fishing without a license. I told him three times I wasn't going to fish. His response was to raise his volume higher each time, even offering to buy my license for me.

Finally I just gave up talking, walked to the boat, hopped in and set out. Here was a man facing death and he still had not eased up one iota. As ye live...

Late that night I sat up with my niece, Jenny, in the living room, now really a dormitory.

There were plenty of people to help in any emergency, so I had gone into town to the bar Dad frequented. People always asked how he was, we traded fishing and hunting stories. I sometimes just sat back and watched the evening go by, thinking of nothing in particular, certainly not of what was to come. That thinking would come after I hit the door.

I came home very tired that night, started talking to Jenny, just the two of us awake, looking out over the lake now glistening in the mid-summer's full moon. I don't remember too many details of our conversation, but we shared similar work interests and talked about that, then remembered a few stories about my father, her grandfather. I do remember feeling a sadness about this having to happen so we could talk.

In a day or two it became apparent the struggle would go on for quite a while. The family gradually disbursed back to Ohio, waiang for the call to come back again.

I came back a few weeks later. Dad was back in the hospital. I managed to knock the fan into the big screendoor at the deck entrance, and had to take it into town to be fixed. It was very necessary to be done that very day, for tomorrow he would be coming home. It wasn't much of a tear, but something my father would spot immediately and raise Holy Hell about.

The job came out perfectly. AhHa, I thought. He will never know. I readjusted the rollers, got it working perfectly. So I thought.

He wasn't back from the hospital ten minutes until he noted the door wasn't lined up to suit him. I carefully realigned it as he went to the bathroom. only to have the entire frame fall out. In a flash I took it around the corner of the house, and nonchalantly sauntered back in. I told my sister to start supper, and when Dad was eating I'd fix it. I got away with it. I was at the point I could have lied, cheated, stole, perhaps even murdered just to keep him calm and quite, for his always volatile temper was on the rise, any little thing causing a reaction.

Family

As much as the ordeal affected my sisters and I, it went much deeper, to the core of our families.

Nancy had been through a lot just two months before. My brother-in-law had open heart surgery. He was having a difficult time recovering. The doctors did not know what the problem was, and I could see it bear~ng heavily on her as the year progressed. She had four young grandchildren to think about also.

Judi's husband traveled a lot on his job. There were times when she could not see him for days at a time, times when she had health problems that had to be attended.

All three spouses stood by with suggestions, but when the essential decisions were to be made, it came down to the three children, right or wrong. There were a few times I felt being steered one way or another, but it always came back to the three. It was not spoken among us. lt was accepted. And without the help of the other three, I don't see how we could have made it. There were, to be sure, some very dicey times when a lot of people bit their tongues.

I was self-employed, just let my work slide when I had to. After a trip in July I could see things heading downhill. I discouraged my wife and son from coming up.

It became a sore spot to Beverly. In trying to protect her from my father's slide from dignity, I denied her the chance to make her own choices in the matter, her chance to say her farewell the way she wanted.

There were times I could tell she was upset that I chose to try to go it alone. If it were to happen again today, I would have done things differently, let her participate more

But what was done was done.

One could sense the stretching of bonds at times, times when the three of us had to choose between our own families or my father and mother, times when we had to just get out of Michigan, back across the border to home for a few days respite. It reminded me of soldiers being pulled out of the line of battle for just a few days of rest.

The telephone bills were astronomical but they provided a brief release, a chance to joke our trio's private jokes that we had assembled over the long haul, keep marital relationships on the best keel we could.

We quickly learned that, whether in our out of the hospital, it took two of us to handle this affair. We had an informal rotation through those long months, and times when one counted the hours unh1 one or anther would arrive.

Duty? I guess. Love? I guess. But duty to whom and love for whom? In the end, for me, it was love for those who would be alive next summer, duty to the one whose last summer was coming to an end.

One stint stands out above all others. We spent three weeks, Nancy and Judi and the dogs and I, late July and early August, sweltering in the Michigan summer as Dad progressed from walking to walker, walker to wheelchair, wheelchair to hospital bed, hospital bed to the nursing home.

I have two impressions of that time. It seemed as if it were three months, then at times three days, for each day gave out different sharp and clear images that seemed to pile up higher and higher, but the same underlying theme condensed that time, blurring memories until one day really seemed like the day before.

And I made it by relying of our rituals, on our foraging. We split the shifts, and when 7 a.m. came up, that was when I hit the door for my hour, no apologies from me, no questions from anyone. More than once I thought about my father dying while I was not there. The thought passed quickly, without regret.

Read My lips

When we wanted to talk about dad's condition without mother listening in, we would go in pairs for a walk or to the grocery, and then switch partners. My sisters and I called this the "Read My Lips" methods. that is what one of us would silently mouth to the other two when we though these conferences were needed.Some things had to be discussed that my mother just couldn't handle and that is the way we got things done, until very late at night when all three of us could quietly confer.

One day my sisters had to run to Sturgis for some things, and when they came back, they were giggling.

Judi took me into the spare bedroom and pulled a sweatshirt out of a sack.

I broke out laughing. It was imprinted with lips of all different colors and said "Read My Lips". They had found three of them.

Later that day a friend came over and we had our pictures taken wearing them.

That was one of the good times we were granted. I still have mine, worn once and only once. Someday I will wear it again.

Another Family

During Dad's last hospital stay I had a lot of time to just wander the halls, burning up energy and frustrations.

There was a family waiting room on the floor. One day it suddenly became very crowded with the relatives of a woman who was just down the hall from Dad.

It was fairly early in the day for so many visitors. I asked one of the nurses about it. She tilted her head to the side, sighed and said that the woman was probably not going to make it through the day. She had cancer for two years, said the nurse, and now the family was gathering for the last time.

The people in the waiting room were quiet, but calm. Once I walked by the room and saw the woman touching the face of a grandchild. She was alert, apparently knew who was coming in. It lasted for several hours. I avoided the lounge and her room after that, felt somehow like an intruder, but somehow also as being shown a preview of my father's final calling..

We left when Dad fell asleep, returned the next morning. The woman's room was empty.

I have no way of knowing who she was, but there was a certain air of dignity about that episode that made me wish I could have known her.

Dreams

Just as my father struggled with his dreams, so I started fighting mine.

I staked out the floor as my sleeping spot. Don't ask why. I could not tell you. But one night just before Dad went to the nursing home, weary to the bone as we all were with Dad's constant struggles, I fell asleep beside his bed, with the TV softly droning on.

Suddenly I started, seeing my father straining against his restraints, one hand free, starting to get out of bed.

I jumped up, shook my head, stared at him lying quietly back in bed, not moving a muscle. It had been a dream, but a dream so real that for a moment I was stopped in my tracks, confused.

The dreams kept coming. One day I talked to Nancy. I had had a dream about our parents' 50th anniversary. My father was there, not healthy but still mobile, nothing like his real condition. That same night she had had a similar dream.

Right after he died I dreamed one calm and pleasant dream, indeed the only one of its kind I can recall. My dad was twenty years younger, I was my age. I told him some of the things that had happened that summer, things he had missed. He sat there somewhat bemused, shook his head, made some reply I couldn't catch.

Just as I longed to know who or what my father fought in his dreams, some day I am fighting in mine, and know if ther is any connection witht he two.

HELP

There are indeed Angels. I do not know how many can dance on the head of a pin, but I know we found many that summer, Angels in white both in and out of the hospitals.

I can stand the sight of blood. I can stand some suffering. I had a hard time watching my father's disintegration. I can't imagine doing it for strangers.

The nurses in the hospital were very kind, very helpful to me. Our father's main doctor was a gem, straight forward and kindly, a Norman Rockwell drawing come to life, always ready to help, always straightforward and honest.

But the nurses were the ones I relied on day to day for information. There was so much they could convey with just an expression, a glance. There was, at the end, a certain sadness in the eyes of every nurse who attended Dad, no matter what had gone before

Lord knows my father was, to put it mildly, not what one would call the best of patients. (When my mother and I discussed this for admission to the nursing home we were asked "What was his disposition before his illness," word apparently having reached the home from the hospital about a tantrum or two of his. My mother started to reply "Fine..." when I interrupted with the information that he was, under certain circumstances, the most belligerent man I had ever seen. He would fight at the drop of a hat.)

In his final three weeks at home we had the services of the nurses from the county health department and the area Hospice. If I ever see more dedicated and caring people I will let you know. They not only tended to my father and taught us as much as they could, they really cared about him, and, in retrospect just as importantly ( since they had been through this many times before and knew how the end would be) cared about us, made sure we could accept it in the best way we could.

I cannot speak for the others. For me, they succeeded. There was an aide who came to bathe and shave Dad. Dad called her " the big German," ,at times liked her, at times not. She also used a kind of meditation to ease his fears, calm him down. It worked. She showed me how to do it. We had tried taping her routine but it never came out, for she would gradually lower her voice as Dad would slowly, visibly start to soften up, surrender from the fight for 10, maybe 15 minutes.

She taught me to use it, and, with varying degrees of success, it we could get to him before he became greatly agitated, it would work.

On her next-to-last visit she took me aside. asked me quietly about my father's religious beliefs. I answered her the best I could. He believed in God, had no regular faith, and that was not a topic of discussion for him.

She nodded, said simply "He is fighting so hard, harder than anyone I have ever seen. He won't accept it, will he?"

All I could say was "No. He knows he is going, but he won't go willingly. He fought his whole life. This won't be any different."

She paused. "Do you think he's afraid?" "Yes," I replied. "He knows something is out there. He just doesn't know what it is."

Decisions

Dad fought every new turn, every doctor's call, of fice visit, hospital stay, every Xray.

But as we watched him slide ever so slowly, but ever so certainly down that path we knew decisions had to be made.

The final line was this: He would not go to a nursing home willingly.

He went from a walker to a wheel chair ( both borrowed from the local American Legion) without much fuss, but a few days later it became apparent a hospital bed was needed. We eased Dad into that because he could still see his lake and river, instead of being confined to his room.

A certain look had settled over Dad's face, a look that told of the fate being known, but not accepted. The talk of treatment and doctors wound down.

After three weeks of my sisters and I trying, even with the help of the nurses, to keep Dad at home, we just could not do it any more.

One might think three healthy adults could take care of one 75-year old man, now withered down to a whisper of his old self. But the struggle is not just physical. The mental aspects had taken their toll on us also.

I admire those who can handle such a struggle. We did our best, but we came to a point where the needs of the living had to be considered, and the plain fact we could not handle the needs of the dying had to be finally, once and for all, faced.

We feared a fight. Dad had been in chest restraints because, even though the cancer had stripped him of nearly 40 pounds, he retained his great upper body strength. At times, when his outbursts would strike, it took hoth my sisters and me to keep him in bed.

Finally one day I called the visiting nurse and asked for wrist restraints. She had not been gone for an hour before he became violent. I took off my glasses, and as gently as I could, strapped my father's arms to the bed as he cursed and fought against the restraints.

After that. the decision to take Dad to the nursing home was not too bad. The nurses were there to help, and as they were moving Dad out of the house he said something to one of my sisters. I didn't catch it, don't remember now if it was nancy or Judy, but instead of the great fuss we expected, he had softly said "God bless you kids..."

It seems now, looking back, the central person has to be considered, but cannot be the only person considered. Decisions have to be made, sometimes in haste, sometimes with the luxury of consideration. But decisions have to be made, one way or the other.

We have two cousins who faced placing both their parents intr a nursing home. They gave us the best advice...do what you must, don't feel badly. You are not abandoning your father. We know you care, the family knows you care. No one else matters, your lives must go on...

And when my turn comes...

In his last days when he was 12 miles away, I would rise, early in the morning, take one of his poles and walk the few yards to the lake just as the sun was rising over the old grain mill to the East.

One day I hooked a big bass. He was off the line in seconds, but Judi had seen it from the deck. That happened three more times, until finally one morning I hooked him, held him for several moments. Then the line parted, the fish made off with the lure. I was to try several more times but never made contact again.

That morning, as I walked back to cook my breakfast on the deck, I turned and stared at the lake he and I had been on so many times in the past 35 or so years. I could just hear him telling my about not changing line, about this and that... And it came to me that I never would be able to tell him about this little adventure, or indeed any other adventure. I was overcome with a sadness that, while not grief as I think of it, was an overwhelming sense of my loss (not my impending loss, for now I knew now that the loss was complete, though he still had the breath of life in him).

At that moment, I felt sorrier for myself than I did my father.

I must have asked my self a thousand times that summer how I would act in his place, how I could handle the news of my impending death.

Two or three times I made the long trip north alone. The very last time I preferred it that way. It was late October, just two days before my birthday. For the past three months every phone call would cause me to start, wondering if this was the word. The nursing home had my number. I would be the first to know.

As I drove along the familiar route I turned again to how would I handle it. I didn't decide then, I can't tell you now. Someday I will know. Right now there are times I have great fears, thinking of what might have been passing through his mind toward the end.

I was tired, anxious to see how my mother was, worried that my father would die while I was on the way up. I went directly to the nursing home. There, curled into his now-familiar fetal position, was my father in restraints, in a diaper, one hand desperately clutching the bed rail, the other twitching randomly as if he were striking out at some unseen foe.

He could not have weighed more that 90 pounds. I carefully wiped his lips, found an aide, learned he had been asleep for the last 24 hours. When she left I stood there and looked at what had been my father. I ached for it to end, for the release to come. Each visit was worse than the previous one. It could not, dear God, get any worse.

l thought back to a nsit three weeks before. Dad had been sleeping except for very rare times. I had walked an before my mother. He was propped up in bed, eyes and mouth open. I said, as I always did, "Hi Dad."

He turned slightly, blinked, and said "Hi Dick." My mother entered just in time to hear his reply. I was stunned. It was the first voluntary response from him for weeks. I asked him how he was. He replied "Not too good."

My mother asked him if he knew who she was. He nodded, and turned back to me, saying "Where's Beverly?", my wife.

I said "Dad, she couldn't make it." He nodded, and then, leaning back, he softly said "I'm tired. I want to sleep."

That was the last words I ever heard my father speak. And three weeks later there was no reply, no notice, just the shell of my father.

I went back the next day, alone again. Rightly or not,I had discouraged Mom from going, as I had my sisters a few weeks before.

I went home to Ohio for my birthday. That night I went out for a few beers with friends, and about 11 p.m. they wanted to go somewhere else. I declined, when home, sat with Beverly. About 15 minutes later the phone rang. I knew, as sure as I know I am writing this, it was over. And it was.

A feeling of relief swept over me. Relief for him, and for all of us still living.

There was no time for crying yet. That would come.

Funeral plans had already been lined out, done in a time of cool reason, prices checked, transportation arranged.

Calls to my sisters, a 2 a.m. trip back to Michigan where I had just left 15 hours ago.

It was still dark, about 6 a.m.. when my mother answered the door. She was an early riser, had ben up for a while. She had a puzzled look on her face as she stared at me.

"Mom, he's gone, We're going back to Ohio."

She nodded, started to sob. My sisters stepped forward and we went into the house.

The year with no summer was over.

EPILOGUE

We buried my father on a beautiful October morning. The cemetery overlooks the fields Dad had hunted as a boy, right across the road from the creek where his older brothers taught him to fish.

The viewing and funeral were easier than I had imagined. The pain had passed a

long time befone those ceremonies. The ntual was actually comforting.
After the minister had his final say, my sisters and cousins and aunts and my one remaining uncle visited the other family graves, fifteen in all, all in the same area. We put fresh flowers on all the graves, talked about each one, made all those promises to keep in touch we had made for years, sometimes kept and sometimes not.

The one face that stands out the most from that day is my uncle, the last of eight brothers. He was older than Dad, always the most reasonable, considerate one. I watched him as he gazed out over the fields he and his brothers had grown up around. There was a distant look in his eyes, as if he were recalling those days sixty or seventy years ago .

I watched as he turned to my three aunts. There was a way about him, an aura at once of being the family patriarch, and at the same time an aura of sadness. I had seen an era pass with hardly a whisper, just that look on Uncle Rueben's face.

And so life goes on. We grieved, but we also laughed. We saw terror, but we also saw love. We were not perfect, but we did what we could do . Looking back I know we didn't do too damn bad a job. Worse than some, I'm sure, better than others, I hope.
As for me, the deamons are still in my dreams, as they were in my father's. Maybe someday they will be gone.