It’s complicated
Like most father-daughter relationships, ours was…well… complicated. As I looked at his ashen face, grey stubble covering his unshaven chin, I found it difficult to resolve my own complex feelings about our relationship over the past sixty-plus years. So many conflicting memories flooded my mind.
Sailing Journeys
My father loved sailing each weekend over the summers when I was a child, and even into my teens. I couldn’t always understand why when I was younger. It seemed to cause a lot of stress for both my parents just to prepare – my mother packing all the food, towels, wine, the chihuahuas, and Dad fussing over bringing this or that for any maintenance or repairs. All of this seemed to exhaust them just to get the car packed. And then there was my brother and I alternately helping and trying to lay low as the rather tense preparations wrapped up before the drive.
Despite the preparations and the seemingly long drive (“Are we there yet?” my brother and I would ask) to get to the Adirondacks, we’d finally arrive at the slip on Lake George where our sailboat was docked, and then have to unload it all into the boat. As I got older, my Dad appointed me as the official quartermaster. He said it was because I knew “how to cram 10 pounds of shit into a 9 pound bag.”
Yet Dad seemed to find his balance on the floating decks of the increasingly larger boats we enjoyed sailing over the years. When I close my eyes now, and try to recall these summer holidays, I can find my father there. Sitting at the helm, tiller in hand, a genuine smile across his face. Then there were the Adirondacks rising behind him as the sun streaked across this 41-mile long glacial lake that cuts through the mountains, our quiet wake making a glimmering ribbon trailing behind us.
And when we camped at one of the many islands that spotted Lake George, we’d meet up with his friend Bernie, and another family, who fancied themselves gourmets. We laughed, we played, and joked about the fact that Mom would bring the silverware that had a three-tined fork, instead of the good stuff. This was a time when peace and joy – mostly – ruled our lives. And for that, I am grateful.
On the Job
Dad also struggled with severe stress from his job, and the balancing act of being an active duty army reservist during the Vietnam War. Working for General Electric, coming straight out of MIT into their training program when I was just an infant, he would tell me how he was excited to have a stable yet growing career as a purchasing agent for this major manufacturer. But I also remember Dad heading off to periodic trainings for the Army reserves throughout the ‘60s. And even as a child, I could see he bore a heavy guilt that weighed on him for being able to stay behind while others of his generation were not so fortunate.
When I was around 7 or 8 yrs old, we moved to Connecticut so we could be closer to his parents since his father had suffered a series of strokes. Yet during that time, working at Perkin Elmer, he was extremely proud of the role he played in the building of the Lunar Module for the first moon walk.
It wasn’t long after those missions, with his job no longer secure, that we moved again, back to upstate New York where Dad took on another position with General Electric, but this time at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory. GE was the contractor to design and build nuclear power plants for the Trident submarine and other US Navy ships.
Initially a source of pride, especially being part of the innovative work underway for the Navy, within a few years it had become a source of great stress. Because of the high level of security involved, Dad couldn’t talk about his work at home. One time I remember there was an Open House Family Day when employees could bring their loved ones to see the facilities. Yet I remember that most of it was kept out of sight, behind temporary walls of fabric curtains, and closed doors.
The stress of protestors who chained themselves to the fencing near the security gates he traveled through twice a day just compounded his conflicting feelings, and he eventually broke.
Four years after Keith and I had married, and after moving my maternal grandmother in to live with my parents, Dad announced his retirement at the ripe old age of 47. Their plans included moving to Florida. Mom would take care of moving the house, and Dad would sail his latest boat, a 29 foot cat-ketch they’d named the Talisman, from Albany, New York to Fort Myers, Florida. Keith and I would join Dad and his old friend, Bernie, to sail the first portion as far as the start of the southern Chesapeake Bay. There my brother, and then my mother, would take over.
The Chesapeake and a winding path
It didn’t quite work out that way. To this day, I cannot find on a map the particular tributary in the North Chesapeake Bay where Dad had his first meltdown. At least not one that seemed generally as narrow and winding with a small landing and amenities, a river surrounded by, and winding through, grassy marshlands. Now, nearly forty years later, this place lives only in my memory.
Though not an experienced sailor, Keith handled the helm as we motored through the tight turns of the winding river. And more than once Keith mentioned how difficult it was to keep the boat from getting caught in the strong eddies as we zigzagged through the flatland marshes around us.
Finally we could see the landing ahead. And as we grew closer, I recommended to Dad that we should approach it by going against the current rather than with the current which was too strong, and would push us too hard and fast into the dock. But Dad insisted we’d go with the current and took over the helm to manage the landing himself. My job at that point was to leap off the boat at just the right time as we got close enough and then hold the bow line to keep her from going too far. All this while simultaneously keeping the Talisman from scrapping against the edge of the dock.
The current was just too strong. Feeling the rope begin to burn as it slipped my hand, I focused on keeping the boat off the dock. But even all the strength I could muster wasn’t enough. With an aching sound of fiberglass against wood, the Talisman slid hard against the dock along her starboard side leaving a deep scrape down her hull. I tied off the bow, and finally got her to slow down enough to grab the stern line and secure it before she floated out of reach.
The damage was done and yet somehow I managed to avoid the obvious “I told you so’s”. But Dad was pissed… at himself… at the world. Didn’t matter. At some point we all regained composure enough to plan some dinner. With Bernie as the onboard gourmet chef, and the boat well stocked with a bilge filled with cheap but tasty Chilean reds and white wines, he got started.
But as our in-house chef went to refill the fuel into the alcohol stove, the boat rocked, and a bit was spilled in the wells around the burners. So when he went to light the stove, it flared up a bit scaring my Dad who’d caught a glimpse of the flames from the cockpit. Never mind that this was quickly dealt with. Dad was now fuming and screaming at our friend. I knew it was a build up of our earlier mishap since he’d now gotten a good look at the 10 foot scrape on his beautiful boat. But Dad wasn’t willing to apologize and I had had enough.
At this point, Keith and I decided to jump off in this middle-of-nowhere spot off the Chesapeake Bay the next morning. At dawn, we stood on the dock waving goodbyes as the Talisman motored away, my Dad at the helm with Bernie on the deck. I took a photo from the dock as they headed off as the early morning sun rose behind them. Later, I would give Dad a framed copy.
The guilt of leaving Mom behind to manage the movers, and the loss of identity with his work, all took a toll on Dad. And, apart from the blow-up he had with me, Keith, and Bernie, and perhaps a few smaller meltdowns along the way after that, the sailing went mostly well.
Once they’d settled in at their destination in Florida, Dad didn’t touch the boat for nearly two years, a depression hung over him that only my mother could finally shake him out of. The photo of him at dawn on the Talisman still hangs on a wall in my home many years later.
Music – to heal or to harm
Dad was also a man who absolutely loved music. Especially when he and I could play our instruments together. He was a trained concert pianist whose prowess was never quite enough for a soloist, but more than skilled enough for accompanying my mother in her musical performances as a professional singer. And as they built a life around their work in community theatre, Dad would often be involved in musical direction, and lead the small orchestra that would support the musical productions. I still hold dear some fond memories of sitting beside him in the pit as his official page turner on theatre nights.
And when I became rather proficient on the violin, Dad would express his pride warmly, especially when he accompanied me through my increasingly complex and challenging concertos. And I loved those times with him.
But when I tried to reciprocate the exchange by attempting to learn to play his favorite ragtime tunes, one sentence closed me down. I’d been struggling with the syncopated beats that were particularly challenging in ragtime. And I apparently was not doing it very successfully. “If you can’t play it right, then don’t play it at all,” he shouted from the next room.
Dark Memories
With that one sentence, our relationship was cast back to a few years earlier when, as a mouthy 13-yr-old, I thought we’d reached the pinnacle of our tense relationship. Dad’s temper had gotten me a few times, even as young as 5 or 6 years old when I’d caught a fat lip from his large gold class ring from MIT that he wore on his right hand. Ours was a household that included the phrase “Wait til your father gets home!” and the threats of corporeal punishment that implied.
Yet at 13, I had grown either the hubris or courage enough to stand up to my Dad, to not put up with what seemed to me to be an entirely irrational response to whatever small crime I had somehow committed. At nearly 6 ft, my Dad projected strength and power for a guy who usually worked behind a desk. And as I’d slipped to the floor, his left hand held my arm, while his right hand was raised for the swing.
“Go ahead!” I shouted back. “Go ahead if it makes you feel better!” It stopped him cold, and so stopped the argument. We never spoke of it again.
Years later, after they’d settled in Florida, music eventually became Dad’s savior. I remember him excitedly telling me on the phone one day, “I finally am getting paid to do the thing I love!” They’d gotten involved in the local and regional theatre and my parents had been able to rebuild their creative life together again.
An Engagement
While our relationship had generally reached a stasis in my young adult years, and even some tender moments, I still found it ironic when in my senior year in college, I would see Dad stand up for me after I announced my engagement to a man who preferred building cars by hand than engineering them on paper.
When I’d first told Dad about my dating Keith, his first comment was the proverbial advice from a father to a daughter – “You could do better.” But he soon came to care about Keith nearly as much as I did, realizing that he brought a curiosity and intelligence that was less defined by book learning and more by creative analysis and practical hands-on applications.
On a visit to my paternal grandparents’ apartment in Connecticut, I would witness a different side to my Dad. My grandmother, the youngest daughter of Jewish immigrants who still spoke the Yiddish of their Russian shtetl roots, took my news of our engagement with a polite smile. But soon after the announcement, she took me aside into her bedroom for a talk. While my parents sat in the living room with my ailing grandfather, she began her examination. It wasn’t that she was questioning that I wanted to get married. But that my choice of husband to a non-Jewish man, a goyim, was not her preference.
Would I ask him to convert? she asked. No!, I replied with certainty. He didn’t have a strong connection to his own Methodist/Baptist parents’ faith, so why would I ask him to go through the rigorous process of converting to a religion that I held as more of a cultural connection, rather than a religious one?
I left the bedroom conversation as politely as I could – I truly loved my grandmother – and went out to have a quiet conversation with my Dad. I could immediately see a change in his demeanor, something I hadn’t witnessed before. An only child, Dad would almost never say “no” to his mother, a woman who’d spoiled him and doted on him like a little prince.
But when it came to his choice of who to marry, he’d also faced resistance from his parents, which left him deeply bitter on this one point. My mother was considered a poor choice in my grandmother’s eyes. Mom was not raised a “good Jewish woman”, AND had been married previously for a short time and was now divorced, which made my mother “spoiled goods,” unworthy of their special boy. A Jewish divorce was demanded by my grandfather before they’d even consider blessing the marriage. Rabbis were quickly arranged at two ends of a long distance phone call. Three repetitions of “I divorce you”, and the deed was done.
“Harriet! Where have you BEEN all my life?!”
Then there was the argument over whether Mom could bear children because of her hypothyroidism. My grandmother wouldn’t be satisfied until 8-1/2 months after the wedding when my parents handed me – a swaddled baby girl – into dear Sadie’s arms, she pronounced in a loud exclamation – “Harriet! Where have you BEEN all my life?!”
So it was the reminder of how much drama his parents had put them through when he announced his engagement to my mother that ignited my Dad’s defense of my choice.
“You did that to me and Connie,” he shouted at her. “And you’re NOT going to do this to my daughter, too.” I’d never heard my Dad raise his voice to his petite mother. Then he told her, “There’s going to be a wedding with or without you. Join us, or not. The choice is up to you!”
As I watched this exchange with both awe and anxiety, I admit to being very proud of my Dad, and was touched deeply by his defense. And while Dad and Keith didn’t always see eye to eye, as is often the case between one’s husband and the in-laws, we accepted that we came from different backgrounds and it was that blending that made our family stronger.
Time Passages
There have been decades of our lives fully lived since then. And many more stories to tell, perhaps for another day. Keith died of pancreatic cancer, having made it to just past our 30th anniversary, having seen our oldest daughter wed, and our younger daughter graduated from college. He’d enjoyed a fulfilling life, as he himself said. And I, as the grieving widow, deeply missed him.
Then Steve showed up in my life at a time when I was looking only for another adult to talk to. He was kind, helpful, and always had a smile for me when we’d meet. After holding him off from the idea for awhile, his patience finally paid off and we married a couple of years later.
During that time, Steve had only met my parents on FaceTime. But, as the second youngest in a large family, he had demonstrated a deep dedication to his own parents. So it was completely in character for him to offer to help my parents during one of those online conversations with my Mom and Dad.
Mom – the urgency of decline
When we’d first started building this home, the design focused on aging in place. A residential elevator provided access to a large lower level apartment which was designed for Dad and Mom, now often in a wheelchair, to live in.
The decision had been made when Dad had been at his breaking point, struggling to be the caregiver for my mother. But caregiving was not Dad’s strength and he was frustrated at the gradual loss of the woman he loved, right before his very eyes. By the time they moved, she had slipped into the full fantasies of Alzheimers, much like her own had mother years before.
Thinking of this now, I feel a deep stab of apprehension over the potential to follow them in this generational pattern of cognitive decline that had been emerging. I wished that, at least in this regard, I would take after my father’s mother, Sadie, who came from a line of long-lived fully functioning elders.
Yet as we built the home, even with the delays caused by construction nightmares, the focus was always on creating a space where my parents, along with Steve and I, would live out our long lives together. Alas, fate had other plans.
Despite the delays, my parents did move in with us, but to my old house, with most of their belongings put in storage while we sorted out the home still under construction, and now caught up in legal battles and remediation efforts.
But the move from Florida to Michigan proved too much for Mom, and she collapsed just a few days after their arrival. When we brought her home from the hospital to pass her last days in peace, I had her favorite music playing to a photo reel of her very creative life and the people she loved. My Dad seemed fully willing to hand over Mom’s care to me and hospice.
During her last days, I invited over several friends from the Jewish community hoping they could provide comfort and sit with Dad who always seemed to find comfort in the rituals. As the older gentlemen chatted and got to know each other, Susie, the wife of one of them, asked if she could meet my mother, though I explained Mom had been mostly unconscious these days.
We entered the dimly lit room and I turned down the music that had been playing. Susie started talking to my mother as if she were awake. I’d previously shared that my mother had been quite the accomplished singer and artist in her day.
“Do you know this song?” Susie asked Mom. And she began to sing to my mother a song from the musical Carousel. “When you walk through a storm hold your head up high…”
As Susie sang the first line of the song, something shifted. And before we knew it, my mother had picked up the song, singing louder in her “on-stage” voice, perfect pitch, and beautifully expressive, though I don’t think she ever opened her eyes.
As the song came to an end, I nudged Susie that it was time to leave. And as we slipped out the door and walked down the steps to rejoin the men in the living room, we could still hear mom’s voice, now singing another song we couldn’t identify. Once it ended, that was the last thing I heard from my mother. She died the next day.
Moving In
A couple of years later, we finally moved into the new house and Dad was thrilled. I remember the smile on his face when his dear Baldwin baby grand piano was put in place by the movers. It was indeed a momentous day!
Yet there were over 100 unpacked boxes of books that were lined up two deep and three high down the 30 ft long hallway, and another 250 more boxes stacked floor to ceiling in his over-stuffed “office”. These all coexisted with the many pictures he had hung on the walls, and the antiques that were arranged in the spaces that were already crowded with furniture. It seemed that there was still a need for some deep downsizing despite having over 1800 sq. ft. for one man to live in.
“We don’t have room for the New York Metropolitan Museum!
We hardly have room for the New York Public Library!”
As I looked at these crowded spaces, with a dozen bookshelves already set up and filled to the brim, there were still so many boxes of books about everything from music, to world and military history, art of all kinds, literature, and religious and spiritual explorations. I was reminded of a playful argument my parents had when I was a child when we’d just moved into our new home in upstate New York. The interchange went something like this: “We don’t have room for the New York Metropolitan Museum! We hardly have room for the New York Public Library!”
Dad – His Final Days
He lay here in the bedroom that Steve and I had created as part of an entire “house under my house”. We’d begun planning this home over five years before. And now, after living here only two years, it looked like we were looking at the end. Dad’s illness, advanced pancreatic cancer, was diagnosed only 5 weeks before, during the week of the Covid shutdown.
I remember that moment. I was working from my home office, the doors hadn’t even been installed yet. But Steve moved them to the top of the list so I could do my job with a bit more privacy while he continued with various house projects.
Dad had just gotten home from his second doctor’s appointment and I’d been unable to join due to the urgent meetings that were happening as we rushed to convert the entire college into an online institution. I was in an interim executive role at the time and was needed to help with planning.
“Dad, how did it go?” I asked before he could walk by my office. “Here. The doc was wondering why you weren’t there, too. But I told him it was due to the college preparing for the Covid shutdown,” he said handing me a CD and a typed report. Reading it, I recognized the lingo. The prognosis was poor.
Me: “Did the doctor explain this to you?”
Dad: “Yeah.”
Me: “Do you understand it?”
Dad: “Sorta.”
Me: “Do you want me to go over it with you?”
Dad: “Not necessary.”
Me: “So what’s your next step?”
Dad: “I’m going to fight it.”
Me: “Okay,” I said, unconvinced.
Five weeks later, as I looked at Dad’s haggard face, I remembered all of this and wondered how we got to this point. How did I end up as Dad’s primary caregiver? How did I end up being the one who would talk him gently through his most undignified experiences, cleaning him up and lightening his most embarrassing moments after his body betrays him? Yet he trusted me for these comforts and assurances. But we both knew the end was near, and so my brother and his family came out to help with Dad’s care.
My introspections were interrupted as I heard Dad asking me a question from his bed. Weakly, pleading. A question I felt completely unprepared for.
“Where do we go when we die?” he asked meekly.
I stood there, quiet, admittedly flabbergasted. I had always assumed that Dad, raised in a conservative Jewish household, would have at least some faith-based concept of the life to come after he leaves this plane.
But surrounded by books that my mother would read while exploring her own wide range of spiritual roots, I stood there processing his question. Finally, I responded, at first with a bit of incredulity.
“Dad, with all of these books filled with explorations of the spirit, did you ever think to read any of them?” I said, slowly waving my arms towards the tall book cases in the bedroom filled with just these subjects.
His answer was a slow turn of the head, and then… “No. Those were Connie’s books.”
So I was left with a new profound responsibility, thoroughly unprepared to share this philosophical investigation with my Dad.
My brother had entered the room and was standing near the foot of the bed. I finally found the words, drawing from everything I learned after losing Keith.
“Dad, it is what you want to believe,” I replied quietly.
“For me,” I went on, “I don’t see it as an ending. I don’t believe in the waste of the energy of the spirit, the soul.”
“And for you, Dad, I know your bond with mom was strong. Find comfort in that, and the possibility of what you’ll find together…in the next life… whatever that means for you.”
A few days later, as I walked down the stairs to check on him, my sister-in-law came from Dad’s room to tell me something wasn’t right.
As I went in to check on Dad, I heard the rattle of his last breaths. I gently wiped his chin, and within a short time, he was gone.
His last words had been spoken just the night before… “Connie, I’ll see you soon!” He had practically shouted to the skies to assure that she would hear him.
We knew they were together again, at last.
Epilogue
To Dad, I know you have found peace in the great beyond, dancing and singing with Mom. For me, I’ve cast off the old pain, preferring instead to embrace the loving and joyful memories from my youth when roughing it was a three-tined fork. There were more of these memories than I realized.
Love, Mara
Mara Jevera Fulmer's Blog 