Mr. Wonderful

by Daniel Smith

  “I know you’re exhausted,” I say as I get up from the table.

  I saunter back to the master bedroom. I don’t have to get too close to Dad to notice his breathing is loud. I bend down close to him. He’s asleep, I think, but his breathing sounds labored. “Dad. Dad, you want to get up?” I gently nudge his shoulder. No response. Then I do it again. “Dad, this is Brian. How do you feel?” I can hear air whistling in and out of his lungs. It doesn’t sound good. Oh, my God, I’m thinking. “Dad, wake up.” Suddenly, his eyes flutter open a moment. “Dad, it’s me. It’s Brian. Are you okay?” He looks vaguely in my direction and moves his lips a little but there’s no sound. I put my head down close to his. “Dad, are you trying to say something?” Silence. Then he looks at me straight in the eyes.

  “I’m going home.”

  “’Home’? This is home, Dad.” He starts gasping for air. “Don’t go. You stay right here, Dad! Claire! Jeff!” I don’t know what someone’s last words sound like, but this is way too close for comfort. I hear them getting up and rushing into the bedroom. They crowd around the bed with me. “He said he’s going home,” I tell them. Claire gets down on her knees alongside me next to the bed, her hands caressing Dad’s face.

  “Robert. I’m here.”

  “Will you . . . will you be there?” he says in a barely audible whisper, amid gasps for air.

  “Dad, what is it?” Jeff asks.

  “Where, Robert, where?” Claire says, tears starting to run down her cheeks, her hands rubbing his very pale cheeks.

  “Wait . . .” Dad says, “waiting . . .”

  “Waiting where, sweetheart?” Claire asks.

  “At our bench,” he whispers in what looks like a final effort to say something. Then he begins gasping for breath.

  “Oh, my!” Claire exclaims. “No, no! Not now. Not yet, dear!” She shakes him for a moment. I get down next to him and shake his shoulders a bit, as if we are awakening him from a too-deep sleep. Claire kisses him frantically as if her lips might provide a fresh breath of life.

  Dad looks up at me, then gazes a long moment into Claire’s face, makes the faintest smile, and the gasping and labored breathing just stops. Everything is still and silent. He is home.

  I’ve never seen someone die, and for the first time that someone to be as important and close as my own father is deeply disturbing. My God—he was just at the doctor’s today and getting a clean bill of health—well, as clean as a 93 year old can get. I assume he had a heart attack, but all Jeff and I can do is look at each other in total shock. For a long moment, there is total silence in the room, punctuated only by Claire moaning and sobbing as she lovingly rubs Dad’s face, whispers “I love you” into his ear, and brushes his hair. Then Jeff and I lose it, with both of us quietly crying at the loss. For the last several years, especially as he became so frail, we had certainly imagined our father’s death. But witnessing it, seeing a life just suddenly and unalterably stop, is a whole different thing. I wish the slight smile that crossed his face as he looked at Claire had remained in place but it didn’t. He looks content but not necessarily happy. If he’s in some place where he knows he belongs, he’s got to be happier than the often confused, angry world that dementia forced him into.

  While we look on stunned, Claire gets up from the bed, and through tears tells us what we need to do: call the Foster Funeral Home; get her a clean wash cloth and a new set of clothes out of Dad’s closet; finally, start making calls to certain family members. I would have thought we need to take to our beds and let the whole thing wash over us for as long as it took. Instead, it seems that we need to get on with the business of living, which includes the proper care of the dead.

  While Jeff calls the funeral home, I grab a wash cloth and some clothes that Claire points to in the closet. I do my best to help change Dad’s clothes, but after a minute, it’s too much for me and I have to leave the room. I go outside and there Jeff sits on porch smoking a cigarette. “Didn’t know you smoke, Jeff.”

  “I don’t except in, you know, stressful situations.”

  “This would qualify.” I sit down next to him and he offers me a drag. I take one long puff, and, it does provide a rush of awakening. “He doesn’t look . . . all that different.”

  “How did you expect him to look?”

  “I don’t know. Surprised or maybe at peace. Instead, he just looks like himself.”

  “Minus the confusion.”

  “Right.”

  We sit there looking out on the quiet, rural landscape that surrounds the house. Nothing but crickets and the distant mooing of a cow. A few moments later, a big black hearse drives up. Out steps a small, corpulent man in his fifties, with greasy hair. He walks up to Jeff and me, extends his meaty hand, which we shake, gives us that “I’m looking you straight in the eye” gaze of conviction. This is Tim Foster who I vaguely remember from my high school days. He was an eighth or ninth grader when I graduated who played the trumpet in the school band. He was mercilessly hazed by many of us—a couple of times including me—for being such a band bird and a nerd. I don’t think he ever worried about what he’d become: his dad had owned the Foster Funeral Home for 30 years (and his father before him), so from the get-go Tim was headed for the funeral trade. He liked to say, “Make fun of me now; one day I’ll be the one shoveling dirt on your grave.” A wildly improbable claim, of course, but a cagey thing to assert: he had the Foster family connection that lent immediate street cred to the boast and the complete unknowability of the years ahead of us that none of us could dispute.

  Tim’s associate, a rail thin 30-year old man carrying what looked like a funeral home gurney of some sort, slithered past us and into the house. Tim stays with us and begins speaking in an affected, deliberately calm manner—cultivated in the funeral biz, no doubt, for grieving families. “So sorry for your loss, Brian,” a line he manages to deliver both with solemnity and a hint of a smile. “I want you to know, we’ll take care of Dr. Fenton and provide a service that will bring closure and dignity to you and Jeff, Mrs. Fenton and your family and friends. That’s the Foster Promise.”

  “Got it, Tim,” I respond. “But you can tone down the happy sales talk. You’ve got the gig. We just need some help and a clear game plan.” He looks a bit shocked at my unsentimental reaction. “Here’s the deal: Dad was a churchgoer but he was no religious nut. So we’re not going to turn his memorial service into an altar call, okay?”

  “If that’s what you and Mrs. Fenton want.”

  “That’s what we want, Tim.” Actually, this is one of the few things about final arrangements—other than a will—that Dad had ever mentioned to me. He hated big, overblown memorial services and as the town doctor he had been to many of them. “Death’s an awfully private thing,” he said, “and I don’t want a bunch of gawkers and gossipers showing up just for the hell of it.”

  “You’re not planning on a big service at the church or the funeral home?” Tim asks, now almost apoplectic.

  “No. Over the years, Dad sent plenty of the patients he lost your way at the funeral home, but to be honest he never liked the place. Sorry, Tim. It was too, I don’t know, antiseptic. Same thing with the church. Out in nature would be better. So we’ll just do a graveside ceremony.”

  “Wow. We can do that, Brian, but you’re going to lose some of your crowd.”

  “If people think Mt. Carmel is an unpleasant place, then there’s no hope for them and they’re probably not part of our ‘crowd,’ anyway.”

  Miffed but biting his tongue, Tim hands me his business card and goes inside. Moments later, Tim and his sidekick emerge carrying Dad out on their stretcher. Claire walks with them all the way to the hearse and gives Dad one last kiss on the forehead before they put him in the vehicle. Tim asks if Jeff and I want one last moment with him. Jeff goes over and says goodbye. Me, I just can’t look at a dead person, especially someone I know so well. It doesn’t look or feel like him and so I don’t know who I’m saying goodbye to.


  “Are you okay?” I ask Claire as we walk back into the house.

  “Not really. But I will be. He lived a long and eventful life, you know.”

  We stand around silently for a long moment in the master bedroom, the bed already made, thanks to Claire’s unflagging energy. Suddenly, everything feels quiet and empty. Claire brushes a tear from her eye, and then starts for the kitchen. “You boys want some coffee?”

  “Yes,” I say, “but I’m going to make a quick call first.”

  She nods as she and Jeff walk into the kitchen. I go back outside where the service is a bit better and call Corinne on my cell. Strangely, a man’s voice answers: “Fenton residence.”

  “Danny, is that you?”

  “Hey, Pops, yeah. Mom’s in the shower, I think, and I guess she left her cell downstairs. How’s it hangin’ down there?”

  “Not good. Dad passed this evening.”

  “What?! He died?! How the hell could that happen?”

  “He was 93, Danny, and I guess he had a heart attack.”

  “Jesus. I cannot believe this. Now I’ve lost both my grandparents.”

  Do I detect Danny crying? Never imagined he would react so strongly to losing his grandpa. I’m taking this as a good sign. Even still, I have to point out to him that I’ve lost both parents, prompting a deeper sense of loss than what he’s experiencing.

  “Yeah, I get it,” Danny replies. “Well, here’s what’s happening: I’m coming down to Juniper. Me and Dawn. We’ll drive down tomorrow; I figure Mom’ll fly, but we’ve got to get started. Lots to process, Pops.”

  “OK, but the service is a couple days away.”

  “It’s the grief process, Pops! You can’t rush through that.”

  So where was all this love of Grandpa while he was alive? And I’m really concerned about Dawn coming down here too. For all I know, she’ll be wearing a t shirt at the service that says I SEE DEAD PEOPLE.

  Back in the house, Jeff is having coffee with Claire. I explain that I had to inform Tim that we didn’t want a big service. Claire agrees but I can tell Jeff—always mindful of status—wonders if such an arrangement will, as Tim suggested, arbitrarily prevent a bigger display of affection for Dad. “I think we have to honor what Dad would have wanted, Jeff, pure and simple.”

  “Yeah, well, he said that a long time ago when he was pissed about Juniper’s mayor and how they treated him when he retired from the clinic. He might well take a different view now,” Jeff notes.

  When Dad decided to retire 25 years ago, he didn’t appreciate how Juniper, especially its leaders, reacted. Instead of a celebration for 40 years of tireless service to the town, he was criticized for leaving the community in the lurch—the nearest doctor was now nearly 20 miles away in Greenville—and blamed in advance for the unnecessary pain and suffering sick people would have to endure until they could get adequate care. The grumbling mayor and town council did have a point: Juniper was no longer anyone’s idea of a destination, bucolic small town, so finding a decent doctor willing to settle there was not going to be easy. Indeed, it took nearly a year for the town to lure a young man, fresh out of medical school, to come work in the clinic. And even he refused to live in Juniper, preferring to drive from Commerce, a small college town that’s a good 15 miles down the road.

  “Robert still has his doctor bag from back then,” Claire says. “He was glad to retire but he was very proud of all the work he did in this town.”

  “I remember him taking us both out on house calls when we were kids, don’t you, Jeff?”

  “I sure do. I think it was a way for him to try to introduce us to medicine and see if he had a potential doctor in the family.”

  “Sure didn’t work for me. When I was maybe 14, he called me over to the clinic to observe and help out as he stitched this guy’s finger—which was nearly completely severed—back on. I was supposed to be mopping up the blood as Dad worked on his finger, but halfway through the procedure, I passed out.”

  “I’m sure that violated an assortment of medical ethics laws,” Jeff says, “but back then nobody cared. And he learned real quick that there weren’t going to be any doctors between the two of us.”

  I glance at Claire who has a dazed look in her eyes. “Are you going to be able to sleep tonight, Claire?”

  “If I do, great; if not, well, I’ll know why. And who I’ll be missing,” she says, starting to tear up a little. Jeff gives her a quick hug. As she gets up from the table, she suddenly remembers something and gives us both a look: “You know what your dad used to tell the family of any of his patients who died: ’You just gotta keep on living.’”

  “Good night, Claire,” I tell her. She nods and ambles off to the bedroom. Jeff says he needs to go home but will be back in the morning. We hug—something we almost never do—and he takes off for Dallas. I look at Dad’s empty recliner and sit down in it. Jeff is right: he didn’t go out well, but except for near the end, he lived life mostly on his own terms and seemed to have no regrets. Who among us can make that claim?

  As I undress for bed, Corinne calls. Can’t believe I’ve forgotten to call her back. But she’s not upset; Danny has filled her in on the basics of what’s happened down here. She’s flying down late tomorrow and will get a rental car. It will be good to see Corinne and share all this grief and upheaval with her. When I finally plop down into bed, I’m so drained I don’t even worry about sleeping.

  I stand before the college of Arts & Sciences tenure committee making my case for promotion to associate professor. It’s a simple, slam-dunk case: I wrote a book, published by University of North Carolina Press, a peer-reviewed press for sure, which received good, if not rave, reviews in several scholarly journals. Several fellow scholars flipping through my materials nod their heads. But then I get questions about my “collegiality” and whether I’m a “true, team player.” None of that should matter, of course, since tenure is almost completely focused on publications and teaching. Early on in my career at EMSU, there were these episodes, I admit, when I got into some difficult situations on search committees with some of my more senior colleagues over whom to hire and why. Jerry Linton, in fact, our French Revolution scholar with Aspberger’s, took umbrage that “a young guy who barely knows how to use chalk is trying to tell us who’s the best person we should be hiring in early modern European history.” (Never mind that hardly anyone uses a chalkboard anymore, an observation, in retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have made in his presence.) A couple of other colleagues point out how opinionated I am, which, they claim, is “a double-edged sword in academe.” Sure, it’s expected that smart, independent thinkers with Ph.ds will always have their own point of view, but “you can’t going around telling your senior colleagues that they’re wrong, Fenton, even if they are.”

  Just as I’m about to defend myself, my father suddenly steps up beside me and, after a good long stare at a shocked committee, lets them have it: “You people are lucky to have my son on your faculty. He knows b.s. when he hears it, sees it, and smells it, and instead of questioning his value to this second-rate school, you should be honoring someone who speaks a little truth to power—or in your case, old guys who probably need to move on.” Then, as he leans over on the table and gives them all an intense look: “So promote him or you’re gonna have to deal with me!”

  Startled, I nearly jump out of bed—my heart’s racing and my eyes wide open. I take a few deep breaths and then wonder: was this a dream or a nightmare?

  13 | brian

  For the first time in over forty years Claire wakes up alone in the world. But you wouldn’t know it just to observe her: by the time I wander into the kitchen the morning after, she’s preparing another of her elaborate and tasty breakfast feasts: southwestern omelets with fresh cilantro, sliced pears and mango, two kinds of freshly-baked muffins, a pot of hot coffee at the ready. My dad, decent guy though he was, did not deserve her. None of us do.

  Jeff and Rhonda arrive just in time for breakfast. Jef
f announces that their daughter Sarah, recently graduated from SMU, will not be able to attend the funeral because she’s in the middle of moving into housing at the University of Utah up in Salt Lake City. Sounds about right. Sarah never got along with Dad so she’s no-showing for his funeral. Always ready to transform a traumatic moment into an evangelical opportunity, Rhonda insists on everyone joining hands and praying with her for “our dear, departed loved one.” Thankfully, Claire changes the subject to something more materialistic: “You boys” she says, “should look around the house and select a few things that Robert would want you to have.”

  Jeff lights up at this prospect and immediately asks for, of all things, the mounted moose head that dominates the living room. Taking such a monstrosity that he played no part in shooting—growing up, Jeff was as uninterested in hunting as I was—baffles me. To her credit, Claire is happy to be rid of the moose, and approves of Jeff’s choice. While Jeff gets up on a ladder and begins dismounting the moose, I nose around in the attic, wondering if there’s anything of interest up there. It’s mostly junk—old clothes, picture frames, a beat-up mattress, stacks of patient records going back nearly 50 years, and some dusty paperbacks no one read. But just as I’m about to click off the light and come back downstairs, I nearly stumble over a small file cabinet. I get down on the floor and try to open it but it’s locked or just stuck shut from years of rust, I can’t be sure. I tug and pull and finally manage to open it. Inside, there’s file folders with old tax records. But at the very back I find a thick binder full of letters and little notebooks. As I sift through the pages, I realize it’s an unorganized collection of letters Dad wrote to various people—mostly my mom, Louise, but also his brother Jack—during the 1940s and 1950s, along with what looks like journals or personal notebooks he kept in medical school, while he was in the Navy learning to fly in Iowa City, and some fragmentary notes he made while doing medical charity work with the Tarahumara Indians in northwest Mexico in the 1960s. What a find! I don’t know what’s more surprising—that these documents (can’t help thinking like an historian) even exist or that Dad never have told me about them. Maybe he meant them to remain private.