bought a nice condo in Hyde Park. He wore tailored suits and had driven over
for dinner in his red Porsche 944 Turbo. I didn’t know it then, but none of this
made him happy. Like me, he had his own crisis brewing and in coming years
would wrestle with questions about whether his work was meaningful, whether
the rewards he’d felt compelled to seek were the rewards he actually wanted.
Knowing, though, how thrilled our father was by what his kids had managed to
accomplish, neither of us ever brought up our discontent over dinner.
Saying good-bye at the end of a visit, Craig would give my dad a final,
concerned look and pose the usual question about his health, only to be given the
merry brush-off of “I’m fine.”
We accepted this, I believe, because it was steadying, and steady was how
we liked to be. Dad had lived with MS for years and had managed always to be
fine. We were happy to extend the rationalization, even as he was visibly
declining. He was fine, we told each other, because he still got up and went to
work every day. He was fine because we’d watched him have a second helping of
meat loaf that night. He was fine, especially if you didn’t look too hard at his feet.
I had several tense conversations with my mom, asking why it was that Dad
wouldn’t go to the doctor. But like me, she’d all but given up, having prodded
him and been shut down enough times already. For my father, doctors had never
brought good news and therefore were to be avoided. As much as he loved to
talk, he didn’t want to talk about his problems. He viewed it as self-indulgent. He
wanted to get by in his own way. To accommodate his bulging feet, he’d simply
asked my mother to buy him a bigger pair of work boots.
The stalemate over a doctor’s visit continued through January and into
February that year. My dad moved with a pained slowness, using an aluminum
walker to get himself around the house, pausing often to catch his breath. It took
longer in the mornings now for him to maneuver from bed to bathroom,
bathroom to kitchen, and finally to the back door and down the three stairs to
the garage so that he could drive himself to work. Despite what was happening at
home, he insisted that all was well at the filtration plant. He used a motorized
scooter to pilot himself from boiler to boiler and took pride in his own
indispensability. In twenty-six years, he hadn’t missed a single shift. If a boiler
happened to overheat, my dad claimed to be one of only a few workers with
enough experience to swiftly and ably contain a disaster. In a true reflection of his
optimism, he’d recently put his name in for a promotion.
My mom and I tried to reconcile what he told us with what we saw with