by Chris Tharp
* * * *
I received the first bad news about Dad just two weeks into my first contract in Korea. I was in the staffroom of the Bayridge Language School during one of my ten-minute between-class breaks. Usually I’d fire up the Internet and check my email (this was before the all-encompassing online hellmouth known as Facebook) and maybe sip on some green tea, which, along with nasty little packets of sugar-laden Nescafé, were provided gratisto all of the workers at the school. When I looked in my inbox I immediately noticed a message from Mark, with the word Dad in the subject line. My stomach dropped to the floor while I clicked on it and waited for the message to load, tapping my fingers on the desktop. Once again, Dad was in the hospital–this time, with serious trouble breathing, so bad that the paramedics had to pick him up from home. Mark said Dad was now stabilized and on oxygen, so this wasn’t necessarily an emergency… but I should still call home as soon as possible.
Late that night I called my mom, who recounted the story. I could hear her light and suck down successive cigarettes as she described how scared and helpless she felt, how she’d never seen Dad so vulnerable. She’d thought she might lose him right then and there, and thank God they lived so close to the hospital. Help had arrived within a couple of minutes of dialing 911. It was my brother Glen who, after calling him the next day, informed me that Dad had been diagnosed with chronic emphysema and would never breathe without an oxygen tube again. He would be strapped to a tank for the remainder of his days. How long this remainder would be was anyone’s guess, though Glen reckoned we were looking at a handful of years, at best. He had worked in hospitals for many years and knew firsthand how some diseases cripple and kill. I knew then that it was the beginning of the end.
Soon after that I met my workmate Scott for a one-on-one meal of bul dalk, Korean “fire chicken.” We nibbled at the impossibly spicy bits of meat while downing glasses of Cass beer. I told Scott about my situation, how my father was now in what I understood to be the early stages of a steep and ugly slide toward death. Here we were, in a brightly lit restaurant with the aroma of grilled chicken clinging to the air, surrounded by tables of Koreans who were endlessly clinking glasses, eating, and laughing. The Lotte Giants baseball team played on the television and all I could do was look down into my glass. Though I was newly arrived and loving this new expat life, for the first of what would be many times to come, I deeply felt the distance between me and home. Scott just listened and nodded, refilling my glass as I emptied out my anxieties.
He looked me in the eyes and said, “Well, you’re not alone in this. I lost my older brother when I was sixteen. He was in a car wreck. He barely survived the accident and hung on in a coma for six months before finally passing. The only thing I can say to you is make your peace while you have the time and hold on to the good memories, because they are the ones that will survive.”
* * * *
Dad had a heart as big as a truck and a laugh that could move a house. This was a hearty, sonic boom of a laugh, drawn from a seemingly endless well of mirth. It was released most often around the dinner table (where Pops was the happiest), suddenly erupting and literally shaking the room. The man had an unstoppable joy, a playful, joking spirit that had a life of its own. He laughed, teased, prodded, and razzed, all the way until the end. My father was, among other things, a mighty jester. After all, he was born on April 1st.
He’s been gone for a few years now now, and while the material memory is beginning to fade, I’m left with these well-etched images:
bushy hair and a thick moustache that laid bare his Italian roots;
huge boa-constrictor arms, complete with tattoos: one a red heart declaring Johnny loves Gloria to the world; the other a busty brunette in a skimpy negligee (she used to be naked, but after the wedding, Mom demanded clothes);
a web of crow’s-feet around twinkling eyes, the result of a lifetime of laughing;
a half-asleep man shuffling through the kitchen for a midnight snack, not-so-tighty-whities sagging off his butt, V-neck undershirt stretched over his boiler of a gut;
a proud man spiffily dressed for family get-togethers, noble in stature and smelling of Old Spice;
glasses, cup of coffee, and cigarette, as he busted out a crossword at 6:30 a.m.;
nodding out and snoring in the chair as the Seattle Mariners played on the TV, this early bird unable to stay awake through the 9th inning;
serene at Mass, hands held out in prayer, palms-up, basking in a deeply-felt faith that I at once envied and never understood.
Pops was a gentleman, in the most basic sense of the word: he was a gentle man. He was built like a bear but never once raised his hand in anger. The closest he would come was on one of those not-infrequent occasions when my sister and I were fighting and he was trying to rest.
“That’s ENOUGH!” he’d roar, bursting from his chair and jerking his big leather belt from the loops that held it around his waist. This alone would turn our blood to ice and terrify us into instant submission. The threat was enough. Never once did he actually carry it out.
This isn’t to say that Dad didn’t have a temper. He did. It didn’t arise so often, but when it did come, you and anyone else within a three-block radius knew it. I once saw him take a lifetime of aggression out on a push lawn mower that wouldn’t start. Each fruitless pull on the cord cause a wave of ire to wash over his body. Like any time he was frustrated, he bit his tongue and furrowed his brow, until the stubbornness of the machine pushed him over the precipice. With the strength of an ogre, he picked up the mower and repeatedly slammed it on the ground, then chucked it the entire length of the driveway with one awesome push from his chest. This was one of the few times when I saw both the strength and the fury that my otherwise docile father was capable of.
Another time I was out with him fishing in our boat, near the town of Gig Harbor, Washington. I hooked into a massive Chinook salmon–to this day the largest fish I’ve ever had on a pole. It slammed the herring-baited hook and nearly bent the pole into the freezing dark waters of Puget Sound. I was just a kid at the time and this fish was out of my league, so Dad grabbed the pole and proceeded to fight this monster, which rolled on the surface, giving us a glimpse of its slab-like flank. The fish then proceeded to run straight out from the boat–the reel whizzing as the salmon pulled out yards of line. At this point it was about one hundred and fifty feet out. Just then we saw a giant sailboat–a yacht, really–heading our way. It was running parallel to us, right between my pole and the fish. We began to yell and wave in an effort to get the skipper’s attention, but the yacht would not deviate from its course. It pressed straight ahead. As it got closer, our shouts and gestures became more desperate, until finally the behemoth of a boat sailed right over my line, the rudder acting as a knife. The line went slack and the fish went free.
My dad never cussed much, but the fountain of profanity that exploded out of his mouth that day was nothing like I had ever heard. He bellowed f-bombs and other violent oaths with an unfettered rage. He literally shook his fist to the sky, the closest I’d ever see him challenge a God that he not only believed in, but feared and loved. He was helpless to net his son’s fish because of the arrogance of some rich asshole. This inflamed my dad’s soul. He would have gladly gone to blows for me that day. This was my first lesson in class consciousness.
* * * *
As soon as I hung up the phone with Mark, I told Da-jin what was up, and she was right on the computer, searching Korean sites for any last-minute airline tickets available. Flights to America usually left Korea in the afternoon, so we’d have to act fast. The cheapest we could find was for nearly two and a half grand. Desperate for a seat, I punched in the card info right then and there (the airline later informed me that bereavement fares weren’t available on international runs). I called a few of my friends and workmates to let them know I had to leave and to get my classes covered, and immediately began packing, grabbing my darkest suit first. All optimism would be staying
in Korea. I learned that day that I can be out of my door in Busan and on the ground in Seattle in about sixteen hours, if I time it properly. That’s not bad for crossing the whole Pacific Ocean.
The flight to Seattle was the first non-sold-out plane I’d been on in a while, affording me a bit of space to attempt relaxation, which never came. The on-demand films on the small screen in front of me were successions of color, movement, and sound; I was thinking of Dad the whole time, sure he’d be gone before I touched the ground. I readied myself as much as possible for the chance that I’d never see him alive again. This thought had always hovered in my mind, every time I had seen him since coming to Korea. I remember that last hug in Olympia during the previous summer visit, when my mother and he stepped out onto the street in front of their mobile home in the retirement park where they lived. I grabbed him for all it was worth and wrapped my not-small arms around his even bigger frame, holding him close–bear-hugging a bear–and smelling the remnants of his cologne. As my sister started her van and we pulled away, I watched the image of him standing in the passenger’s mirror, until we turned the corner and he was gone. Was that it? Was that going to be my last memory of seeing him alive?
I arrived in back in Seattle with no hassle: Immigration and Customs were both courteous and quick. I stood with my bags in the SeaTac terminal and, with a huge cup of coffee and the New York Times crossword puzzle, killed the hour before my brother Mark’s arrival from Texas. Again, my concentration was nowhere to be found. Finally, I saw my brother approach. He was smartly dressed in a dark jacket and jeans, and looked handsome with his close-cropped Air Force officer’s hair. We managed a quick hug as I got out the question, “Any news?”
Some of my tension eased when he told me that Dad was still hanging on. I’d get to say my goodbyes.
We raced to the hospital in our rental and made it to the intensive care unit. Mark filled me in on the goings-on of the night before–what had transpired while I was in the air. My suspicions were correct: Dad had almost died. He had gone into cardiac arrest and stopped breathing. The medical team had revived him by sticking a breathing tube down his throat to keep him alive. This ran contrary to what I had believed would happen, since I knew both of my parents had signed Do Not Resuscitate agreements. No longer able to breathe, my father was now hooked up to a machine to do it for him. I knew this was something he would not want, but I was in no mood to be adamant: I just wanted to see him alive, one more time, even with the aid of some unwelcome technology.
My family was there when I arrived–my mother, my sister Molly, my brother Glen, my Aunt Anne Marie, and my two uncles, Bob and Dan. My aunt led me into the room where Dad now lay, squeezed my hand, gave me a nod, and left me alone with him.
Wearing only a white-and-blue gown, he lay amid a mass of equipment which monitored all of his vitals. His arms were bruised and bloody from the IVs that had been stuck into him over the last many months, as well as from the leukemia. His eyes were closed. A plastic tube–secured by a mass of tape and connected to a regulated air pump of sorts–sprouted from his mouth. I sat next to his bed, kissed his forehead, and grabbed his hand, hoping he could feel me, hoping he knew I was there.
“I’m here, Pops. I made it. I made it.”
The following morning we–the immediate family, joined by my aunt–met with the doctor, a keen-eyed woman with short brown hair, who managed compassion without skirting the realities of the situation.
“We can remove the breathing tube, but only with your consent, Gloria.” She looked to my mother, who nodded in understanding. “He will unlikely be able to breathe well without the tube. The body will begin to shut down, leading to an eventual failure of the organs. It will then not so much be a matter of if, but when. He could last minutes, hours, days, weeks, even months. We really can’t know for sure, but my guess is that the eventuality will happen pretty quickly. He’s a very, very sick man.”
My mother’s hesitation was brief. She shook her head and let out a deep sigh and said, “Do it. That’s what he would want. It kills me to say, but he would not want to go on like this. Please remove the tube.”
The doctor scheduled the removal for the following morning, giving us all a day to ready ourselves, though this was likely more for my mother than anyone else. My parents had been married almost forty-seven years, and in that time had become nearly one organism. The process of letting go of such a deep, ingrained partner must be almost impossible to come to terms with. To see my mom’s anguish stabbed me even harder than taking in my dad’s diminishing form on that hospital bed. Dad was nearly gone and nothing could change that. The real pain would exist among the living.
That night the family gathered at my Uncle Dan’s house, were we had a huge meal of pasta, salad, and garlic bread, while swapping stories about Dad. We ate, drank some red wine, and laughed well, sitting side by side as family, never speaking of what we knew we would have to face the following morning. That needed no comment. It was the bitter water that pooled underneath. So we just lived as Dad lived best, through a hearty meal and joking words. This was the only way we really knew how to honor the man.
I was there the next morning when the doctor pulled the tube out; I was there as his breathing got lighter and lighter, until it was no more. It took less than ninety minutes. For one moment, after they pulled the tube, Dad came to. His eyes opened and he took us all in, and for the first time I saw him there. I saw inside. Whether he was actually conscious or not, I can’t say; perhaps it was nothing more than a physical reaction to having to try and breathe with ravaged lungs once again: panic. I just hope that, if only for one second, he saw me. I hope that he knew that, even though I was on the other side of the world, I had made it; I had made it there to hold his hand when he died.
* * * *
My dad died destitute, leaving behind a morass of debt that left our mouths agape. Things were much worse than we thought. My mother knew little of the details, or more likely had chosen to deny them, so it became my aunt’s charge to sort out the mess–which ended up taking her the greater part of a year. We kids had to pay for the funeral and other expenses straight out of pocket. My sis, who lived three minutes away from my parents and had assisted them in every conceivable way while they ailed, was exempted; she had more than pulled her weight. That left it to my two older brothers and me to open our wallets and cough up at each onerous hidden charge hurled our way.
The funeral industry has perfected the art of quietly nodding and looking at you with caring, sympathetic eyes, all the while ramming a broomstick up your ass. It really is one of the greatest rackets running today. We were slapped with fees at every point. A funeral cannot be paid for in one go: it’s a series of itemized measures that grows like a tumor. The cheapest funeral runs in the thousands of dollars, and though we loved our dad immensely, we opted to go budget. We had little other choice. The fact that no arrangements had ever been made stung hard, and we weren’t about to go extravagant in spite of it. We couldn’t afford to.
My father was a devout Catholic. He loved the Church and often said that he would have gone into the priesthood had it not been for that pesky little vow of celibacy. He just loved my mother–and women in general–too much. But he was at home in the Church and for many years volunteered, at one point even becoming a lay minister. He read about the Church extensively and used to educate us about the various orders of the priesthood, how they were founded and what their missions were. When Dad was at Mass he would relax and let the spirit enter his body. You could sense the grace that he felt, and whatever your feelings on God (mine run firmly on the agnostic side), to say that religion gave my father no peace would be folly.
Some years before, both of my parents had agreed to be cremated. Evidently the Vatican had reversed its views on the practice and no longer looked upon it as some kind of pagan abomination. Perhaps the Church was trying to catch up with the times, atoning for its unwillingness to budge on birth control by saying, “Okay, we reali
ze that our policies are leading to overpopulation, so sure, go ahead and start burning bodies. Don’t ever accuse us of not looking after the environment, capiche?” Not only is cremation an environmentally friendly way to dispose of the dead (choking smoke excepted), but, lucky for us at the time, it also happens to be the most economical.
We used a service called Memorial Choices to arrange the cremation and the nuts and bolts of the interment, as it’s called, which consists of placing the urn containing the ashes in a wall. Memorial Choices claimed to be the cheaper way to go, and they were, but even they weren’t above gouging us when the opportunity arose.
My brothers and I were in downtown Olympia at the time, sipping coffee at a local coffeehouse while attempting to compose a eulogy–which Glen would deliver–for our father. Mark’s phone rang and he picked it up:
“Hello, Mark? This is Bill Halton from Funeral Alternatives.”
“Hello, Bill.”
“Hi, Mark. Um… listen… there’s a small thing that’s come up.”
“Uh-huh?”
“Umm… yeah… listen, I’m not sure how to really put this, but… was your father a large man?”
“Uh, yes. Yes, he was… he was large.” I took my eyes away from the screen of the laptop. Mark caught our gaze to indicate that trouble was afoot.
“Okay. Well, um, you see, unfortunately, for anyone over 250 pounds, there’s an extra charge.”
Mark rolled his eyes and sighed. “Hold on, Bill.” He put his hand over the mike. “They want to charge extra to cremate Dad. They say he’s too fat.”
