My dad died last Sunday. It was his time … hell, it was way past his time. His life had been in the quantity over quality mode for several years now, so it wasn’t a moment of sadness as much as relief when he finally passed on.
The old man was 80 when he died. He wasn’t exactly the picture of health during his lifetime, the last five years in particular, struggling with congestive heart failure, type II diabetes, and a list of other ailments too long to mention.
He lived his life as only he could - way outside the norms of what most humans encounter during a conventional life span. He worked 31 years at the Ford Motor Company in Lorain, Ohio, and then he retired. Nothing unusual about that … except he was only 49! That may seem young to most people, but my dad made sure everyone within earshot knew of the struggles he endured working there … every … single … day!
If one was easily offended, within earshot was a dangerous place to be around my dad. He spared no one, and I mean no one, and yet, somehow was very much liked by those who met him. A short, very plump, extremely vulgar bald-headed white guy with an unmistakeable twinkle in his eye, and a shit-eating grin that was uniquely his.
I once read that swearing was actually a sign of intelligence. If that truly is the case, then my old man should be mentioned in the same breath with the likes of Einstein, Aristotle, Socrates and Oppenheimer. He was just that good, a walking version of a B-52 … F-bombs endlessly rolling out of his mouth, peppering unsuspecting targets into submission.
He was so adept at swearing, that it wasn’t all that uncommon for the old man to use F-bombs consecutively, the first one acting as an adjective for the second, as in “What in the f***king f***k are you doing??”
I once asked my brothers how many times they thought the old man dropped the “Big Effer” (what we called it as kids) in a typical conversation? We put the over/under around 20, but we stopped counting at 30 only a minute in.
Swearing was just a part of who he was, probably the biggest part aside from his brutal candor. Let’s just say you never wanted to ask my dad how he was doing, because he would actually tell you. When we were kids, one of my mom’s best friends spotted us in the local grocery store and stopped to chat.
“How’s it going Tom?” She asked.
We all cringed as we watched our dad’s mind working overtime, loading up the ammunition before opening his lips like two bomb bay doors and letting it all spill out.
“Well, my a**hole’s on fire and it feels like someone stretched out my peter and smashed it between two bricks!” He replied.
We all stood there wondering why this had to happen. I mean didn’t this lady know any better? She knew my old man, what was she thinking?
Not that you had to know my dad to be on the receiving end of his lack of couth. We were at a Cleveland Browns game once in 1986, when smoking was still very much a thing in public stadiums. An older lady sitting directly in front of us must have made her way through two packs of cigarettes before halftime. Her smoking was so constant, she would actually light up a fresh one with the one she still had smoldering in her mouth. I had a splitting headache from the constant bombardment of her Marlboro madness, and even though my old man was a smoker himself, he too was repulsed by the never-ending cloud of smoke in our faces. Finally, he had had enough. He tapped the lady on the shoulder and calmly said, “Jesus Christ lady, why don’t you just roll up a f***ing newspaper and torch that up!”
I smiled at that memory as I was driving to the funeral home. I realized that my dad hadn’t really changed all that much over the years, even down the home stretch the last few weeks of his life. Just two weeks before his death, my brother Lance stopped by to see my dad, who was watching the Price is Right on TV with the volume set at his typical jet engine decibel level, so he had no clue Lance was even there. Apparently Drew Carey was taking a little too long chatting up a contestant before the “Showcase Showdown” for my dad’s liking, so while Lance was cleaning up the kitchen two rooms away, he hears the old man screaming at the TV “Just spin the f***ing wheel!!!” This was funny to me on so many levels, one of them being the show was probably pre-recorded from several years ago. The other being, what the hell is the rush? He wasn’t going anywhere.
We’ve known for quite some time that my dad was on his way out. Although with him, you never knew. For the last several years I would tell my siblings “Ain’t no way the old man makes it to Christmas!” and every year we’d be celebrating Christmas with my dad. So nothing was for certain. We didn’t really talk about death all that much with him, but we would talk about it amongst ourselves. We weren’t really sure what he wanted; a burial, or a cremation. Sometimes those norms didn’t seem creative enough for someone like our dad, so we would come up with some alternatives. My sister Dina probably had the best of the bunch. She suggested we somehow get NASA aeronautical engineers to soup up his Lazy Boy recliner so it could launch his lifeless corpse out of the living room window and into Lake Erie - a very unceremonious burial at sea, if you will. But, like a lot of things, our dad really surprised us. He lived longer than anyone expected, and he did not die in his recliner.
As it turns out, he died in a bed in a nursing home, unfortunately with none of us around. That is not only unceremonious, but also pretty sad. We were, however, lucky enough to learn that my dad wanted to be cremated. Turns out it was as simple as just asking him what he wanted and he said, as only Tom could, “Up in smoke!”
So there I was, the first to arrive at the funeral home/crematorium in Sandusky, Ohio last Tuesday. It gave me a chance to stretch my legs while waiting for my brothers to arrive. It was pretty warm and breezy, even by late August standards. I strolled about the parking lot because the place was actually closed for lunch. The director was inside waiting for the three of us. He made it possible to see my dad one last time before he was cremated, and this was that time.
A little park sat just off the edge of the parking lot. It had two benches and a fountain and lots of flowers and looked like a nice place to sit while I waited for my brothers (Lance and Duke) to arrive. I looked up and noticed two large smoke stacks coming out of the roof of crematorium right next to the park. “Man, what an odd juxtaposition?” I thought to myself. “I wonder what the old man would say about that?”
Inside the home, our dad’s corpse was waiting for us to say goodbye one last time before being loaded into the oven in the same room I was looking at from the outside. I didn’t know what to expect. I had just seen him alive less than two weeks before. My brothers arrived a few minutes after I did, we acknowledged each other the way we always have, without much fanfare, and called the director inside to let him know we were ready.
Once inside we took care of the business side of death, memorial details, cremation costs, obituaries, death certificates, and the like. That didn’t take but 15 minutes, and then the director asked us if we were ready to see our dad.
He walked us into a viewing room, and there, on one end of the room filled with other caskets, with all but his head completely covered in a white sheet and looking way better than any of us expected, was our dad. “Shit, he looks pretty good.” Lance said. “Yeah, what the hell?” I replied. “He doesn’t even have wrinkles.”
There wasn’t any crying, it wasn’t all that sad. We were glad to see him one last time. It was weird to think that the body in a box I was looking at would soon be reduced to much smaller contents in a much smaller box. It was a bummer my sister wasn’t there. She gambled on the Old Man making it to Christmas one more time and left for a month long trip to Italy two days before my dad died. So this was as much a recon mission for her, complete with photos of my dad’s last stand, as it was for his sons saying goodbye.
My brothers and I talked a bit about what to do with the ashes. None of us really knew. Bury some with mom, scatter some on the lake, maybe a pinch or two in the parking lot of the now shut down Ford Plant in Lorain? We didn’t really know. And then it hit me. It didn’t really matter. Two weeks ago I was holding my dad’s hand in the hospital. It was softer and warmer than I expected. Dare I say, he felt healthy and alive and I thought the next question out of my mouth might be ill-timed, but I asked it anyhow.
“Dad, are you ready to die?”
My dad looked up at me, gave me a quizzical look and as only my dad could, he said,
“What the f***k do I care? When you’re dead you’re dead!”
I laughed, kissed him on the forehead, and told him I loved him.
That was it. The last time I would see him alive. The last words I would hear him speak.
“When you’re dead, you’re dead.”
RIP Dad.
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