A NICE LIFE, gone but never forgotten
March 8, 2023
I said goodbye many times, or at least you might call them ‘conversations about leaving – about death and dying.’
Each time it felt like all that needed to be said had been said, there was nothing left for either of us feeling that we couldn’t end it there, then …
Each time an EMT or nurse questioned him to validate his standing DNR (do not resuscitate) order, he would smile and day, “I’ve had a nice life.” I often wondered if that was his true feeling or simply a resignation.
Most of those conversations were in an overcrowded hall of gurneys in the emergency room or at the kitchen table after bringing him home again. Sometimes it felt like borrowed time. He’d outlived his parents and about half of his eleven siblings. His eldest brother farmed till he was 96 and died at 102. Nine years ago, at about 6:30 in the evening, I spoke to him for the last time. The urgency in the nurse’s voice on the call to “Get here as quickly as you can” is still fresh in my mind. When I asked to speak to the doctor I was told he and an ICY team were struggling to stabilize my dad. The belly infection they’d been bombarding with antibiotics was declaring victory …
They were still working on him twenty minutes later when I got there. I had a brief exchange with him – smiles for both of us, and I told him he was scaring the nurses. When they asked him, “Do you know who that is,” he replied, “That’s my son Mark.” She asked him again a few minutes later, and he only shook his head. Minutes later, with equipment and staff pulled away, he rested, slept, snored softly for about twenty minutes, and then he was gone. Hubert Kolke - born on the 21st of July, died on the 8th of March at 91.
What began that evening was my education, my understanding of what grief is like – but I don’t think of it that way so much as my relationship with my father has come in two phases: the first, all time from my birth until his death—the second portion, being the nine years from his death until today.
When I talk about this sense of him with my friends who’ve lost their parents, most agree that their relationships with parents divide similarly.
I missed many opportunities to ask questions that never occurred to me then, and now I can guess the answers and imagine what conversations we could have had.
Life, so tritely referenced as ‘too short,’ is not. Still, we waste a lot of our life not taking the time to do things and spending time with someone who matters so much more to us than we show them, and time passing only loudens that empty silence, a void that didn’t have to be, but wishing it wasn’t so doesn’t accomplish much …
While he was raised to be religious by his family, he was not a believer in an afterlife or a spiritual experience somewhere else. His donation of his body to the medical school was an easy choice for him because it was a simple one that gave parts of him an extended life by teaching tools in the education of others who will use that knowledge to treat and extend the lives of patients in their care.
It’s coincidental that my morning today involves a scheduled trip to the blood donor clinic, but it seems fitting – since his DNA is in me, that I’m giving some of mine away today ...
I don’t know how to end this piece, and it’s feeling a little sappy and a little painful, but I miss him lots and appreciate him more the longer he’s been gone. He could have done more if he knew more, but he didn’t. He could have given more, but he didn’t have more. He rarely spent much on himself and shared everything with others. That’s a fulsome legacy, as I see it. We all get many things wrong, but what matters most is getting the best things right.
He taught me to be kind, and I’m constantly at work trying to learn how. I see kindness in others and realize I’ve got a long way to go. He never tried to teach me how to love, but in his way, he showed me. He never shirked work; he showed me a work-ethic that has become mine too. There is much we shared besides the DNA, baldness, bags under our eyes and the ethical teachings of his father, my grandfather, passed from generation to generation.
When he died, while I got to work taking care of his affairs, I thought moving into his condo temporarily was a good idea. After nine years, temporary no longer describes this. He is gone, but I wake up every morning in the room where he awoke every day of his last seventeen years. I don't live as he lived, but I liver where he lived. I park in his stall. I check the mail in his box - he's gone, but bits of him are here with me, and in me, every day. I never knew if I ever lived up to his hopes and expectations, but he more than lived up to mine, and he does every day.
Reader feedback:
Steady as she goes! Wrong metaphor, if even a metaphor. Rest and restore, KK, Calgary, AB