Waitin' for da big one: my father's last years

My father had a stroke in August 1976 at the age of fifty-eight. It put him in the hospital for about a month and left him with the right side of his face partially paralyzed and drooping. "Why didn't you tell me about my face?" he asked as he looked at himself in the bedroom mirror for the first time in four weeks. "It's not that bad," I assured him, "it'll straighten out." It did eventually, but the stroke marked the beginning of declining health that persisted for the remaining sixteen years of his life.

Up to that point, my father had been an active, vital, six-foot-four, 285-pound bear of a man. He worked for the State of New York for forty years, first, in the public works department, later in the education department, and he was known to everyone as "Big Jack." Like many of his generation, he had returned from overseas to start a family with his war bride. He bought a lot outside Albany and contracted for a house that he finished building himself when the contractor went bankrupt.

In spite of his vitality, my father had health problems most of his life, having to do mainly with his legs. He had been hit by a piece of shrapnel during the war and spent several months in a military hospital in Italy. His injury brought him a Purple Heart and a limp that got more pronounced as the years went by, especially when he worked all day in our yard. But his real problem emerged in his thirties. He was diagnosed with diabetes, a disease that even then was relatively manageable. Every morning, my mother would use tongs to dip a hypodermic needle in boiling water. Then my father would use it to draw the insulin out of a refrigerated glass bottle, plunge it into the fleshy part of his upper arm, inject the insulin, pull the needle out fast, and wipe his arm with a cotton swab. It was a simple, two-minute routine but without it he would have had "a reaction," as my mother would somberly remind my sister and me.

I remember two reactions. The first, when I was in grade school, left him sprawling on the living room floor with my mother spoon-feeding him frozen orange juice. He went into the VA hospital, and I remember being hoisted up and talking to him as he wore a surgical mask. The second time was years later. He and I were shopping at Woolworth's when suddenly he grabbed a handful of Hershey bars, headed past the cash registers and right out the door, leaning heavily on my shoulder, using it as a moving hand rail. Once in the car, he stuffed the candy bars into his mouth, and then, after he came out of it, he turned and ordered me not to "go telling your mother." He didn't want her to worry, and he didn't want the dietary regime she might impose, one that would exclude peanuts, potato pancakes, and his nightly six-pack of beer.

With time, his medical problems multiplied and overtook him. At the end of my freshman year in high school, we moved out of our two-story house into a one-story ranch because, as my mother confided, "your father couldn't take the stairs." When I was in college in Pennsylvania, he and she would drive down to see me, but the trips took a greater toll on his legs, sometimes leaving him moaning in bed. Looking back, I think he already sensed he was living on borrowed time. Between my junior and senior years, my roommate Eddie came for a three-week stay of nonstop partying. I would go to work as a lifeguard in the morning, Eddie would join me at the pool in the afternoon, then we would go out for the night. But we would always stop home first to drink beers with my father. He let us know that he could "still keep up with you guys." But on the day he dropped Eddie off at the thruway to hitchhike home, my sister rushed up to me in the lifeguard chair and said, "We have to go to the hospital. Dad had a stroke."

It was only then that people at work told us he had been having blackouts for months. The doctors surmised they were "mini-strokes," and he never returned to work. His "forced retirement" was not the kind he had anticipated. There were no trips to Buffalo to visit his cousin, no drives across country in a Winnebago. His eyes grew steadily worse from the diabetes, and family and friends alike began commenting on what a dangerous driver he was. Eventually, he turned in his license.

Following his stroke, my father did not vigorously pursue the recovery regime the doctors and physical therapists had prescribed. As a consequence, his massive torso grew weak and flabby. An even bigger obstacle was his emotional state. At first he was weepy and sad, a common response among stroke patients; then he became angry and finally depressed. Throughout it all he was deathly afraid, not of another stroke but of the diabetes. He worried about diminished vision, loss of circulation in the hands and feet, infection, and eventual amputation. And he endured them all. By 1985, most of his right foot was gone and he was forced to use a wheelchair.