Dad

Dad
Dad was born in 1915. He was the oldest of five children. As such he had to leave school after grade eight to help out at home. He never complained about that. It was simply a fact. That’s the way things were done back then so he did it and got on with life. He worked on the farm at home as well as taking many odd jobs around the area, until his widowed aunt asked him to come to work for her in another town about sixty miles away. She was getting up in years and needed someone to look after the large mansion she lived in.

Dad accepted the offer and moved to Ingersoll in 1939. He became house boy,butler, chauffeur, and gardener to his aunt. That is where he met the love of his life, my mother. She was cook, maid, and everything else that Dad wasn’t. Together the two of them ran the house and looked after Dads aunt even after she became bed ridden. When she finally died in about1950, Dad continued to live in the house until it was sold, then he moved to the farm I grew up on and married Mom.

Two years later, I was born and things got a little more interesting for my folks. I could be a bit of a handful. I wasn’t a bad kid. I was just curious. I grew up on that farm. I left a couple of times and came back but finally moved off the farm for good in 1980. I had a good job driving trucks so I decided that I didn’t want to be a farmer anymore. Not long after that Dad sold his farm and retired to a small house in Thamesford where Brenda and I finally lived with Mom until her death.

Dad enjoyed his retirement for quite a few years. He and Mom traveled a bit and spent a lot of time with their grandchildren. They gardened and enjoyed their life together as a retired couple. The wheels started to come off their wagon when Dad was diagnosed with Diabetes and it was discovered that he had a heart condition. Doctors also said that judging from the scar tissue present he had experienced several small heart attacks in the past. This was scary news for Dad, but as he always had he stepped up to the plate and took his best swing. The only problem was that I don’t think he ever really believed that he had diabetes. He had a hard time staying off sugar.

Things went along pretty well for some time, until Dad had an attack of appendicitis. While they had him on the operating table, they removed his gall bladder and discovered that one of his kidneys had shriveled up to almost nothing. That was the beginning of Dads real health problems. From then on he had went downhill.

They soon told him that it was only a matter of time until his remaining kidney failed and he would have to go on dialysis. It took a long time with Dad getting sicker and sicker, but finally in 1995 they put him on dialysis. He was some better, once they got the dialysis going and working properly, but it meant that he had to spend four hours on a machine three times a week. The day of dialysis he would come home from the hospital and sleep the rest of the day. The next day he would be quite good. But on weekends when he went an extra day without dialysis, he felt quite ill on the extra day. Dad had his ups and downs and we made lots of trips to the emergency room.

Brenda and I would get calls at all hours of the day and night and have to rush Dad to the hospital as did other people. It always surprised me that a man with Dads strong religious belief was so afraid of dying. He said that he firmly believed in a resurrection to eternal life in an earthly paradise, yet he clung to this life like it was all there would ever be. Well I guess we’ll never know now what was really in his mind but it sure makes me wonder. This went on for five years, until dad died of a massive heart attack.

Dad was staying with us while Mom was in the hospital with a broken hip. We had just finished supper and were going to go and see Mom. Dad went into the livingroom to use his oxygen machine for a few minutes. I walked in about two minutes later and found him not breathing. We called 911. They were at our house in five minutes but, it was just too big a heart attack. We had him cremated and held a well-attended memorial service for him at the local Kingdom Hall.

His mind was as clear as a bell until the day he died. His body just wore out. I like to think that if Dad could have choreographed his own death it wouldn’t have been much different. He went quickly and quietly and he was surrounded by people he loved and who loved him.

I hope you found what you were looking for Dad.