An Accidental Sportswriter (21 page)

But now Dad, as an official observer during the strike, was being spat on by black parents, kids, and even teachers. Rhody McCoy saw it and physically turned his back on Dad. The reality and the symbolism of that betrayal devastated Dad, although he tried not to show it. He talked stiffly about politics, not about personal hurt.

Rhody became a controversial and polarizing figure in the city, symbolic of an upheaval that came to be seen variously as a black power grab, a righteous revolution, and an honest attempt to transfer educational control from a hidebound bureaucracy to the people it was serving.

Dad was angrier at the white liberal city administration that allowed it to happen than at his black teachers and principals, including Rhody. We argued. In my wisdom as a newly anointed
Times
columnist, I accused him of having had a colonialist mentality. Brooklyn instead of India. It was not a good time for us, and I wish I could take back what I said. Sam was born that year, and Dad's joy cut me a lot of slack for callowness. Even if I was right, I wasn't.

He retired a few years later and his funk continued, even after he and Mom gave up their apartment in Queens and moved upstate full-time. He was lethargic, distracted. He lost interest in his three greatest hobbies: reading, gardening, and home repairs. He told me later that he had expected to be dead by seventy-five and sometimes hoped to be.

Then something changed. Maybe a survival mechanism switched on, maybe Mom kicked him into gear. Somehow he reached into himself and restarted his engine. I saw a version of that strong, distant man reappear, although a little softer around the edges. He and Mom joined and then ran groups lobbying for the elderly, volunteered at local libraries, helped neighbors fill out health insurance forms, edited an increasingly ambitious newsletter for their temple. He started reading three books at a time—usually one on current affairs, one on ancient history, and one Patrick O'Brian naval novel. He kept scrapbooks of my writing—sports, nonsports, he cheered them all. He and Mom roamed local thrift stores for inexpensive books, old lamps he could rewire, furniture he could restore. He dug out the basement to install shelves for more books. He patched the roof, mowed the lawn, climbed on the roof to repair shingles and clean the gutters.

One winter, he refused to let Sam or me shovel the snow in his driveway. It was his job. He said, “If you're not used to doing this, you could get a heart attack.” Sam was twenty, I was fifty, and Dad was eighty-four.

He also took increasing care of Mom. Throughout their marriage, she had often been sick, and Dad was quick to shop, cook, clean, launder. He made doing household chores seem manly.

When he himself was sick, which was rare, he would go into a corner and drink tea until he felt better. He refused to go to doctors. He said they just made you sicker. That worked until he was felled by stomach cramps at ninety. Against his will and with my phone support, Mom called an ambulance. I met them in the emergency room of their community hospital. Doctors were amazed—and annoyed—that he had no medical history, no previous doctors, no years of charts. For a week, each specialist poked him and suggested an invasive procedure that we deflected. Dad claimed it was just a piece of bad bologna. He got better without treatment, enjoying a week of jolly roommates and cooing nurses. He was cute as an old man.

It probably was bad bologna, to which he returned with gusto. A moderate eater who had never smoked or drunk alcohol, Dad allowed himself the vice of luncheon meats. The only member of the family happy to share his stash was Rudy, Lois's big old shelter dog. Dad loved Rudy, his first dog friend.

Dad was ninety-four when Mom's mind slipped its moorings. He insisted on taking care of her by himself. He could do it, he said. Maybe he didn't want anyone else to see her without dignity. She was ninety, a diabetic with osteoarthritis, high blood pressure, hiatal hernia, thyroid imbalance, congestive heart failure, and carpal tunnel syndrome, for which she had been operated on twice. Macular degeneration had left her legally blind. She took seven different medications every day, including injections of insulin and an antidepressant that had been prescribed for her diabetic nerve pain some years before. She might have been suffering from depression, as well as vascular damage and Alzheimer's, we were told. Eventually we found out she had a brain tumor.

Dad always went to Mom's doctor's appointments but never into the examining room. That was a job for Gale or me. He just couldn't handle the increasingly hopeless news. He'd be in the waiting room, reading a year-old magazine, ready with some factoid he'd just picked up. I'd give him the headlines of my doctor's notes. He'd nod without comment and write a check for the doctor's bill.

“One hundred and five dollars and sixty-seven cents, you wonder how it is that's one thing they can always figure out so easily.” He passed the check to the receptionist, and as the three of us left, he'd ask me, “Should we get something to eat? Need money, Bobby?”

Eventually, it was obvious that Dad couldn't keep up with ministering to Mom alone. He didn't want nurses in the house. He was haggard, fatigued, wearing out. Gale, a Jungian analyst, lived in northern California, and I was finding it harder and harder to give up days to drive Mom to her doctor's appointments. We found a pleasant nursing home that was part of a nearby hospital complex that Dad could easily drive to every day. She was fine there for a while, then collapsed and was moved to the intensive care unit. She was a crumpled heap, a respirator breathing for her. Dad could sit at her bedside for only about twenty minutes before he would have to go into the hall and be alone. He refused to be seen weeping. He would say only, “These tubes have a bad effect on me.”

I asked him, “Are you sad?” and he was silent so long I thought there would be no answer. Finally he said, “That's a hard question to answer.” For another few minutes I thought the conversation was over.

Then he said, “When you've been with someone for sixty-six years, they are a part of you.” Now the conversation was over.

The nurses treated her like a pet, washing and combing her silky white hair. She looked peaceful, except when she twitched reflexively. Dad said he liked to believe that she was having good dreams. And maybe that's why he refused to let her go.

He was her health care proxy. He wanted to keep her alive, despite the living will that Mom had signed a few years before: In the event she suffered from a condition from which “there is no reasonable prospect of recovery to a cognitive and sentient life” and no longer could communicate “meaningfully” with others, she wanted no medical treatments to prolong her life.

I was angry for a while after Mom's heart stopped and was pounded back to life, after massive doses of antibiotics were injected to control the pneumonia. Why not let her rest? But Gale persuaded me that Dad wasn't ready yet; Mom was the campfire at which he kept himself warm. Gale reminded me that Dad would always do the right thing, once he had thought it through. On his timetable.

And then the hospital called. Medicare would be ending payment. Because she was on a respirator, Mom could not go back to the pleasant nursing home attached to the hospital, and if she stayed in intensive care it would cost $2,000 a day. She needed to be moved to a custodial care facility that could handle a respirator, a facility that was a warehouse too far for Dad to visit every day. How many life-and-death decisions come down to money?

We went over all the options with Dad and wrote down questions for us to ask the doctors again. How long would she continue to live on the respirator? Weeks, perhaps months, one doctor told us. How long without it? Hours, days. Was there any hope? No. There were indications her heart was weakening. Nothing was going on in her brain. She might even be in pain.

After a few minutes, Dad suddenly signaled with his hand, a quick chopping motion, that the conversation was over. Gale went out to talk to a passing doctor. After Dad could talk again, he told me that he had just seen the 1997 movie
Titanic
on TV. He said he thought it was a silly movie, although he enjoyed the effects. He talked again about hearing the SOS on his brother's radio when he was eight.

When I recounted the conversation, Gale wanted to know exactly what Dad had said about the
Titanic
. She thought there might be clues to his state of mind.

“C'mon,” I snapped, “don't start distancing yourself like he does. Don't start being a shrink in your own life.”

Later, I apologized. “You were right,” I said. “There was something Dad said that I forgot to tell you. He said that one thing they missed in the movie was a reaction from the shore. He would have liked to know what the families of those passengers were doing and thinking while the ship went down.”

We allowed the respirator to be unplugged, and Mom slowly sank. After she died, Dad sat in his house, stared at the piles of books that had always been his comfort, and cried when he thought we weren't watching. He barely ate. He roamed the house through the night. He dismissed any suggestion of talking about his grief, much less with a professional. We thought he wouldn't survive. We remembered the last time Dad had been in a depression. But that had been thirty years earlier and he had lost a job, not his life's companion.

Then one day he made Gale and me French toast for breakfast and urged us to hurry eating because he needed the dining room table to start laying out a family scrapbook. There were two more monster scrapbooks in the six years after that day. He continued to talk about Mom wistfully, but then he would get on with whatever he was doing. How had he been able to reach into himself and start the engine yet again? That's the DNA I want even more than the longevity.

His corners got even softer. He let Gale and me further in. The humor came back, although sometimes with an edge. Reading about Dr. Martin Luther King's philandering, he said in a deepened voice, “I've got a dream . . . girl.” Looking at the fetal sonogram of his first great-grandchild, Alfred Major Lipsyte, he said, “He looks just like me.” When he finally got to hold Alfred, he looked the newborn in the eye and dramatically intoned, “I am your ancestor.”

He was driving around again, looking for bargains in books and food. He paid his utility bills in person so he could have a little chitchat with the clerks, who treated him as an endearing grandpa. I'd go upstate and hang out for a day or two. It was fun. We'd talk, sometimes just sit and read. I'd usually bring Rudy so the two of them could bologna up together. We'd even watch TV together, especially women's basketball, which he told me he'd “discovered.” He couldn't stop talking about the players' passing skills. He urged me to write about it. I could never persuade him that the rest of the world, including me, already knew about women's basketball.

Those were the warmest, closest years. He told me stories I had never heard and would answer any question. He remembered an old friend from college who had introduced him to opera. He became a noted professor, opera translator, and author. He died in 1998. In one of many letters he wrote Dad, he admitted he was gay. In the fearful fifties, Dad told me, he had destroyed all the letters lest they fell into the wrong hands and destroy his friend's career. And his? I wondered. He regretted having lost touch with him. He wished he had the letters.

I asked Dad if he had ever felt physically attracted to another man. He smiled and said, “Not yet.”

He was ninety-seven then, and I thought it was the most life-affirming line I had ever heard.

That was also the year he stopped going up on the roof. On his hundredth birthday, he stopped driving. By then he had allowed Gale to hire a former nurse to “drop by” two afternoons a week, check him out, tidy up, and cook a few meals. She and Dad seemed to enjoy each other's company. Dad had his survival skills.

Except for one, it seemed at the time, although now I'm not so sure. He refused to wear one of those I've-fallen-down-and-can't-get-up alarms, a must for old people living alone. He felt that if he fell down and couldn't get up on his own, he wouldn't want to, that it would be the signal that his time was over.

Three months before his 101st birthday, apparently while getting into the shower, probably on a Saturday evening, he fell. By the time he was found on Monday, his organs were failing. Three days later, January 20, 2005, he died peacefully with Gale, Lois, and me at his bedside.

It was while pawing around nooks and crannies in the house that I had found his medals a dozen years earlier and then after his death a letter from his old opera buddy. He hadn't destroyed them all.

The four-page handwritten letter on the stationery of his piano studio was undated. The script was as ornate and whimsical as the words. Operatic. It began, “Sidney, And why the wherefore?” and went on to demand that “my literary executor and Biographer” show up at his Brooklyn home on the coming Sunday to hear “inchoate dreams and plans and Intentions—now Alas! to remain forever unrealized.”

He promised a “death-bed scene. Will you do less for me than Dumas fils did for the Lady of the Camellias (the part suits me to perfection, except that I don't use flowers for whooping cough).”

The letter ends “I'll call you up Saturday at 1.00 to make arrangements.”

Did he call? Did Sidney go? What year was this?

I love the mystery of this letter and of their friendship. I don't know everything about Dad.

An antiquarian bookseller came to assess Dad's books. Gale thought there were treasures among them, I thought the collection was basically worthless. We were both right.

The bookseller spent several hours reading, touching, even smelling the books for mold, of which there was too much. He lingered over the big art books, the thick old leather-bound histories, the two sets of the 1911
Encyclopaedia Britannica
.