My
Father's Legacy
Rose E. Grier
in issue nine: humor
Scintillations
Hair Dye Hell
Morning Glory
Made With Extra Love
My
Father's Legacy
It's A Gift
Toe Job
Need
A Laugh?
Cleaning Day
Letters to
My
Younger Self
Moody Girl
photography
Beach
Foot
Leaf
Gnome
Picnic
Tables
Flower Circus
Yellow
Bikes
poetry
Jellyfish
artwork
Cover: El
Grillo
Falling In Love
workshops
Play With Your Words
@ 826 Valencia - 1/11
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My
father was a very funny man.
In fact, he was the funniest person I have ever met.
He could deliver a one-liner like no one else.
He could have a whole room laughing and in tears
with just a comical face.
Dad could remember every joke and if he really
liked it, he told it as if it were an experience out of the
book of his life.
Unfortunately, the sound of his wonderful humor vanished when
he passed away from kidney cancer in November of 1996, and we
all lost a vibrant, vital, beautiful person.
Now I cry for my father so much it’s not funny.
When we found out he was sick, we rallied to his side.
As his condition worsened, I went to my mother
and we were connected at the hip for at least a solid month.
With the help of hospice and dear family members we
were able to keep Dad comfortable in his own home.
During my stay at Mom’s, I took on the important duty of
shaving my dad and keeping his nails trimmed.
Grooming was a meticulous and deliberate routine
of his in healthier times.
He was a Marine Colonel, which was the other side of
this funny man’s life.
He spent 34 years in the military, moving up from
private to colonel.
No small feat for a young Jewish boy from the Bronx.
Dad was very strict and very proud, organized and neat
about his personal self.
His duckies were all in a row, as it seemed to me.
Each time I let Dad know when I was going to be touching him
and where and what I was doing, as the medicine he was on
freaked him out.
It made him feel out of control.
I always said, “Okay Dad, be still.
I am going to shave you now” as I calmly turned
on the electric shaver and placed it to his face the way my
cousin Sandi, who is
a nurse, had taught me.
On the early morning of his passing, Mom and I heard his last
breath.
We had our moment there in the room -- soft, forgiving,
beautiful, relieving and oh so sad.
We cried and embraced the great man who had finally
accepted his release from the physical world.
All along it was important for us to let him know
it was okay to let go of his pain.
We did not see it as a weakness to let go.
It put him at ease knowing that we did not feel he was
giving up.
Mom and I shared our own moment, reassured each other and then
got busy.
We called hospice.
They came to help with Dad’s body.
Mom picked out an outfit for him taking extra care his
socks were not mismatched, and started cleaning him up for the
transfer to where they would cremate him.
We had permission to cremate him in his clothes to
preserve his dignity.
I noticed he had beard stubble.
I went to the bathroom while the hospice crew was
shuffling around.
I approached my father one last time and why I said
this I don’t know, but I leaned in tenderly by my father’s face as I had done so
many times that month and said, “Okay Dad, be still.
I am going to shave you now.”
The tension in the room exploded into laughter and
people were having to hold each other up, they were laughing
so hard.
We all hugged and giggled.
It was a marvelous icebreaker and a powerful way to
know my Dad’s humor lives on in me.
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