Commitment

My father died yesterday. 

I had just spoken with him the prior evening. The conversation was prompted by his partner who had written me earlier, terribly worried about the alarming symptoms Dad had been experiencing for 5 days. And indeed, they were alarming. 

Only more alarming than those symptoms was his persistent aversion to emergency rooms, hospitals and physicians. 

I had concluded that call with this parting shot: you really should go to the emergency room now, but if you insist on seeing your physician tomorrow morning, I can't make you do otherwise. 

The Spouse mused: I wonder why he is so distrustful of medical practitioners? 

I know precisely why. The formula for producing a person like this is to take one mother - his, of course - with an utter reliance on a general physician who was well past his prime when he was advising her to use folk or low impact remedies when more serious interventions were required. And let's not forget that once upon a time, your primary physician was the person you saw for almost everything. That person held a lot of sway, rightly or wrongly. 

Later, as cancer ravaged what remained of her body, my father witnessed the terrors of at-home hospice care. She wanted to die at home, she insisted. It was a horrific experience. 

The equation requires the addition of my sister, who at the 9 month mark in utero was in breach position. In the mid-70s, doctors did not automatically resort to c-section deliveries in such cases. They took their chances. In this case, the chance yielded a brain-damaged baby, issued into the world with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. During her infancy, multiple tests were performed to determine the extent of the damage. Terrible predictions of no walking or talking or who knows what else (I was 5, in the beginning, so forgive my gloss) unfolded with one specialist after another. Despite this, she lived to be 35 before dropping dead (from a free, standing position, after saying "I don't feel good") of either a neurological or a cardiac issue. We will never know what precipitated what. 

And lastly, we have to factor in my mother, who went into the hospital with pneumonia in 2017, and never successfully emerged from the induced state she was placed in so that she would no longer fight the mechanized assistance for breathing. Every time there was an attempt to bring her back to consciousness, she had seizures. One hospital threw up its collective hands and transferred her to another. An attending physician said to Dad: I don't know what exactly is going on, but your wife has significant health issues that may prevent easy rehabilitation. At the two week mark, while no one could manage to bring her safely out, her heart stopped. My father theorized that mistakes must have been made by - you guessed it - practitioners. Something was administered in the way of a too-strong sedative or...well, you could spin this a variety of ways. But for him, the cause was always going to be the same thing: medicine is a practice, and in his estimation, it is too often practiced poorly.  

He would fight with his own physicians if he didn't agree with their advice or declarations. He grumbled about his ultra-healthy tee-totalling primary care physician asserting that he should stop drinking beer. He had atrial fibrillation, but he hated taking blood thinners and finally, when a specialist retorted - OK, stop taking them if you hate them so much - he did. He took plenty of vitamins and his blood pressure medications. He rationalized that he, and not genetics or the plain fact of aging, was still in charge.  We pseudo-argued (hard to explain, but in this family, a discussion sometimes sounds like an argument, when it isn't) for the last month over whether he should consider undergoing an outpatient procedure to help thwart his high potential for stroke, particularly given his discontinuation of blood thinner meds. He veered between claiming that he'd never heard of the procedure before (as if that alone indicated that it was inappropriate for him) and talking off the ears of anyone in (or out, I can testify) medicine about whether it was a good idea for him. No one but his overworked cardiologist would make the hard sell. My father would inform his own son-in-law - a public health specialist and a veterinarian - what was what in the worlds of disease and medicine, telling me privately that he thought my Public Health Specialist was a know-it-all. Because three degrees and years of experience didn't amount to a hill of beans for him. 

He was infuriating and exhausting, in this regard. He would rare up like some kind of cobra, always at the defensive, ready to go full-on in the ring with anyone who had the temerity to suggest that he needed medical intervention. His loving partner grew accustomed to calling on me - the only equally stubborn person he might listen to? MIGHT? - to help with coercion for a sleep study to see if he had apnea (he did). Finally outfitted with his breathing machine and after surmounting difficulties and complaints and sheer orneriness, he expressed simultaneous bitterness and wonder (how is that possible?) at the prospect of sleeping deeply and awakening rested. 

And there was no 'I told you so' on the tip of my tongue. Because another battle would come up, most assuredly, and I would need to have his openness, if there was any. 

The night before last, I argued alongside his paramour on that online call, looking at a man who was miserable with symptoms that he had rarely ever had before. But here is where he still had reason to distrust medicine: he had been to an urgent care facility two days prior, because he had agreed with her that yes, he was not feeling well at all....where they tested him for Covid and flu, informed him he was negative for both, and he was sent home to 'treat his symptoms.' 

The last things we said to each other, once the battle to get him to go to the emergency room appeared resolutely unwinnable, were 'I love you" and that we would 'talk tomorrow.' 

We will not do that. 

To be utterly and totally fair, that same bullheadedness was another kind of shaping force in my life. 

It drove his sense of unwavering commitment. 

As a child, I recall summer after summer of babysitting my sister while my mother was at work and Dad was driving us across our small town between three different yards to mow and gardens to tend. His parents divorced sometime during those years, and like every confounding family member I have, practically, they kept vegetable gardens. Dad kept one (and produced so much yield that neighbors would sometimes have to waive him away, claiming an existing surplus of tomatoes and zucchini from his last giveaway). My mother complained that almost all of the trees, and it was apparently a great number, in the back yard came down so that the earth could be tilled, plants could be staked and weeded and tended. That man was committed - to making things grow, to keeping a tidy yard, and to taking care of his estranged parents' gardens and yards. It was a seemingly endless repetition of bi-weekly visits, with me situated in the cab of a Ford pickup, my sister to my right, my shirtless, denim cut-off wearing father to my left. Brown as a nut from the sun. These arduous tasks kept him fit and busy. Right up to the point that he changed clothes and went to work as a welder on second shift. 

Commitment came also in the form of simply staying close to his mother. And later, keeping his promise to her to take care of his little brother. Of sticking it out in a challenging marriage, with a handicapped child who would never leave home on her own. Of paying for - with small loans and extra work shifts - his oldest daughter's college degree, leaving her debt free and in possession of a diploma. 

Commitment came in the form of hanging upside down in impossible positions to perform welding tasks at General Electric. The ultimate result, decades later, was a spine riddled through like Swiss cheese, and constant, unrelievable pain that he simply lived with, because medicine would fail him on that count, too. 

Commitment came in the form of loving someone new when the time was right. First was Charlie, a mature tabby supplied by the animal shelter as, per Dad's request, 'the one who was too old for anyone else to want to adopt.' And second, more importantly, was a Rose, with a wicked sense of humor and the strength to take on his most stubborn qualities. The love of a lifetime squeezed into just a couple of years. I am so grateful to have as a lasting memory the sight of those two, walking hand in hand. One tall, one small. Such big, warm and raucous love. 

Busy taking care of others. Not always taking care of himself. Exhausting. A force of nature. Hellbent on doing the right thing. 

That was Dale Clayton Looney. A curmudgeonly paragon - and paradox - of commitment. 

I have to pack up and go home now. I have to do all of those expected and unexpected things. Some day I will stop being angry about this. 

I will never stop being his daughter. 

Four generations: Me, months old, in the lap of my father Dale, his grandfather Ryan Gordon, father Ryan Gray, mother Ruth, and wife, Barbara.