Eulogy
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My father agrees to the proposal; in fact, he confesses that he recently had a “cri de coeur” about this very matter. And so on Friday, December 1, 2018, I drive down to Hamilton to visit him at the nursing home where he is currently sectioned under the mental health act.
§
On Friday morning, before I even set out from home, I receive a cloudburst of increasingly paranoid voice messages from my father who is trying to procure another dose of the prescription painkillers to which he is addicted. This does not bode well for our meeting. But when I arrive I find my father peacefully reposed on his bed listening to Mozart.
My father greets me with a hug and a gaze that is steely but fearful. He is wearing mismatched nylon pyjamas. The hospital management have it in for him, he tells me in a strained whisper, and are maliciously withholding his drugs in the hope that he will break down in front of me. I suggest making a cup of tea. But no, my father is literally afraid to let me out of his sight. There are tears in his eyes as he confesses this. We decide to ring the bell and ask the nurse for tea. I sit down.
I decide to begin with my own wrongdoing. This, as I said, had been included to make the exercise appear less confrontational; however, in compiling a list of my sins against my father I discovered that they were greater in number and gravity than I had first imagined. I tell him that I am sorry for being haughty and insulting in my adolescence. I am sorry for cutting him out of my life for twelve years as a result of which he has never met his granddaughter. And I tell him that I am sorry for asking him for a large loan when we first reestablished contact—something that was ill-advised and ill-timed and which I only did in a desperate attempt to placate my ex-wife and save my marriage. My father is unmoved by all this. "All of that was so long ago," he says, "that it is no longer of any relevance."
Throughout my apology, my father grows increasingly restless. He tells me the reason: It is time for his lunch and for his lunchtime painkillers. And so the meeting is put on hold and my father and I go into the dining room.
Fifteen or so elderly dementia patients are now eating fish cutlets served to them by a woman in an orange boilersuit. But my father doesn't touch his fish. He can't eat anything until he is given his pills because, he says, he is in too much pain.
"I've never had to wait this long!" he tells the woman in the orange boilersuit. His voice is exaggeratedly sorrowful, having something of the singsong quality, the farcical lugubriousness, of a small child or a clown. "They always give me my pills at noon or shortly after."
I check the time. It is twelve ten, then twelve twenty. Indeed: Why don't they give him his pills? Seeing where things are headed, I too become restless. It is twelve thirty, then twelve forty. With each passing minute my father becomes more desperate. He still hasn't touched his lunch. He leaves the table. He paces the room. He cries loudly that he is going to faint and take a fall. At last he really does seem to fall, or rather, to get suddenly down onto his hands and knees. Then he is stretched out on the floor. I confront the woman in the orange boilersuit who presses an alarm. After a few moments, a nurse in a dark blue uniform enters the dining room.
"Quentin wants his pills," Orange Boilersuit explains to her, "and his son is very unhappy."
The nurse looks at me.
"Well, why is it taking so long to bring my father his pills? I think it's disgraceful to leave a cancer patient waiting in pain for his medication."
"I'm sorry, but we're understaffed," the nurse replies.
"Tell me: how many staff members does it take to deliver a paper envelope of pills?"
But before she can answer me a nurse in a light blue uniform enters the room. There are now three of us standing over my father who is still lying on the floor.
"I am the resident nurse here," the new nurse says. "As a matter of fact, your father has already had his pills. He insisted on having them—"
"Don't listen to her, Ben!" my father cuts in from the floor. "She's lying!"
"—insisted on having them early," the nurse resumes, "and he cannot have two doses within four hours of each other."
"Don't listen to her!" my father cries again. "She's a sadist! She's glib, with an easy smile, but don't be fooled. She's a sadist!"
With sudden embarrassment, I realise that the nurse may be telling the truth. My father wheedled his noontime medication out of the nurses early and is now demanding an extra dose. As they help my father to his feet, he remarks loudly of the nurse in light blue, "Look! She has a love bite on her neck. Look! I bet she'll put some powder on it now that I've called attention to it."
My father is still insulting the staff when Libby, his second wife, appears at the end of the hall. Seeing her approach, my father leans in to me and says confidentially, "She's a clinical sadist, too." But when Libby arrives at this side his tone and demeanour are instantaneously transformed. In a thin voice, quavering with emotion, he implores Libby to help him. This, however, does not last: As soon as it is apparent to him that Libby's soft and solicitous words, whatever else they might convey, are not advocating for the extra dose of painkillers, he turns on her.
"You're a sadist," he tells her frankly. "I've told you that before."
Libby, undeterred, repeats a soft-spoken explanation. My father interrupts her with something she does not hear. She asks him to repeat it.
"Yes, I'll repeat it—slowly" he says, "since you are of low intelligence."
"I'm leaving," Libby says. "I'll come back later when you're in a better state."
"I don't welcome that!" my father calls after her as she retraces her steps down the hall. The nurse in light blue, meanwhile, has left the room and now returns with some pills for my father.
"See if she has powered her love bite," my father remarks loudly when he sees her. "I bet she has."
He takes his pills one by one, washing them down with tap water. We return to his room so that he can lie down—this (he tells me) to help the drugs circulate through his system. The drugs have completely placated him. He shows no sign of embarrassment or remorse for his behaviour. After a short interval, the meeting resumes.
In 1995, when I was fifteen, I had been living with my father for about five or six months. One day, I came home from school to find him moving about the apartment with the brisk and resolute air of someone who has just come to an important decision. He led me to the table and sat me down. He told me that it was impossible for us to go on living together. Then he handed me a sheet of paper and seemed quite eager for me to examine it. It was, he explained, leaning over my shoulder to read it with me, “a list of my options.”
The first item on the list was the option of returning to my mother; the second, the name of a boarding school, possibly St. Martins, at which he could enrol me; the third was the name of a family friend, John Gray, a middle-aged bachelor, with whom I was given the rather improbable option of staying; the fourth was a question mark. I pointed to this question mark and asked my father what it meant. He said, “That’s what Kurt Cobain did.”
Quietly and calmly, I relate this episode to my dying father. He asks me if it hurt me. I tell him that it did.
"That's not good," he says. He tells me that he had been preoccupied with killing himself his whole life, and would have done it, too, if not for family, but this is mentioned as something of an aside. It is a very callous man indeed, my father allows, who would wish for his own son to commit suicide. There follow several moments of quiet reflection. The note, he suggests at last, contained options in ascending order of impossibility: Boarding school, to which he has always been deeply opposed, was undesirable; living with John Gray was still more undesirable than boarding school; and suicide was the most undesirable of all. The point of the list? To show the impossibility of every option but the one which topped the list: I would have to return to my mother.
If we grant all this, the explanation has, I suppose, a certain perverse logic. Given a list of "food options" that runs, "Bread, a chair, a building, the moon," one could construe it to be demonstrating the necessity of eating bread as opposed to suggesting the edibility of the moon. But even so, it was not a very sensible way of telling your fifteen year old son that he would have to move back with his mother. My father concedes this point and apologises—an apology that is brief and, it must be said, somewhat perfunctory.
Of the occasion my father lost his temper and denigrated the birth of my daughter by telling me that his mother would be ashamed to have a grandchild born into "impecuniosity," my father has no recollection at all. In fact, he finds it very improbable that he had said such a thing. "After all," he explains, "Christ was born in a manger." I allow that it was something said in the heat of the moment that he did not mean, but that it was nevertheless hurtful, and the reason I broke off all contact with him: A newborn child, I reasoned at the time, is off-limits. It was a blow too low. My father seems to accept all this. But his response is less an apology than a denial that he ever said it at all.
I have several more grievances of a similar kind on my list and countless more in my head. But I decide that that is enough. My father looks tired and a little bored. Things are not going the way I planned and the exercise may be taking its toll on a sick and unhappy man. My father has shown a willingness to repent for past wrongdoing in principle—even if he is struggling to fulfil it in practice. I decide to let these two apologies (or rather, the willingness to repent after receiving the letter, and the one actual apology) represent the further apologies that I could, perhaps, elicit from him.
"In order to complete the process," I conclude, "we can, in our respective prayers, ask God to forgive us for wronging each other." For in my letter I had included the theological point that when humans wrong each other directly they wrong God indirectly as surely as I wrong a parent when I strike their child—a person upon whom they have lavished their love and attention. But my father, somewhat to my surprise, asks me to pray at once. And so I do.
Our meeting ends. My father walks me to the door of the dementia ward. This has an electronic passcode that I know and he does not. After some vague arrangements for a subsequent visit are discussed, we embrace. Then I enter the passcode and cross the threshold. The closure of the door is braked by a hydraulic arm. Looking back at my father, framed by the open door and gazing after me from the dim light of the hall, I am somehow reminded of a specimen in an aquarium.
Deep in thought, I drive home along a winding country road in dazzling sunlight shattered by intermittent stands of foliage. My father and I did not embrace each other in tears as I had anticipated. But there were tears. I recall that, after being helped to his feet, and before the nurse arrived with his pills, my father had turned to me with a bloodshot, broken face and said, "If I had been more careful with money, I could have brought you and Chloe a house!" and then quietly sobbed. And then, when he had finally been coaxed into a chair, he had turned to me with the same expression and said, "We could have had so many wonderful conversations!"
A sudden pang of emotion causes all the muscles of my face to clench up. Tears, as though squeezed out, drop from the outer corners of both eyes. And as I hurtle through space along the winding country road at 100 km per hour, I begin to sob; and so hurtle and sob, sob and hurtle, until a wobbly cyclist at an upcoming bend calls my attention back to the road. After successfully negotiating this threat, I drive on for a while in silence. My face is blank and tear-streaked. But in another moment the tears and sobs start up all over again.
My father greets me with a hug and a gaze that is steely but fearful. He is wearing mismatched nylon pyjamas. The hospital management have it in for him, he tells me in a strained whisper, and are maliciously withholding his drugs in the hope that he will break down in front of me. I suggest making a cup of tea. But no, my father is literally afraid to let me out of his sight. There are tears in his eyes as he confesses this. We decide to ring the bell and ask the nurse for tea. I sit down.
I decide to begin with my own wrongdoing. This, as I said, had been included to make the exercise appear less confrontational; however, in compiling a list of my sins against my father I discovered that they were greater in number and gravity than I had first imagined. I tell him that I am sorry for being haughty and insulting in my adolescence. I am sorry for cutting him out of my life for twelve years as a result of which he has never met his granddaughter. And I tell him that I am sorry for asking him for a large loan when we first reestablished contact—something that was ill-advised and ill-timed and which I only did in a desperate attempt to placate my ex-wife and save my marriage. My father is unmoved by all this. "All of that was so long ago," he says, "that it is no longer of any relevance."
Throughout my apology, my father grows increasingly restless. He tells me the reason: It is time for his lunch and for his lunchtime painkillers. And so the meeting is put on hold and my father and I go into the dining room.
Fifteen or so elderly dementia patients are now eating fish cutlets served to them by a woman in an orange boilersuit. But my father doesn't touch his fish. He can't eat anything until he is given his pills because, he says, he is in too much pain.
"I've never had to wait this long!" he tells the woman in the orange boilersuit. His voice is exaggeratedly sorrowful, having something of the singsong quality, the farcical lugubriousness, of a small child or a clown. "They always give me my pills at noon or shortly after."
I check the time. It is twelve ten, then twelve twenty. Indeed: Why don't they give him his pills? Seeing where things are headed, I too become restless. It is twelve thirty, then twelve forty. With each passing minute my father becomes more desperate. He still hasn't touched his lunch. He leaves the table. He paces the room. He cries loudly that he is going to faint and take a fall. At last he really does seem to fall, or rather, to get suddenly down onto his hands and knees. Then he is stretched out on the floor. I confront the woman in the orange boilersuit who presses an alarm. After a few moments, a nurse in a dark blue uniform enters the dining room.
"Quentin wants his pills," Orange Boilersuit explains to her, "and his son is very unhappy."
The nurse looks at me.
"Well, why is it taking so long to bring my father his pills? I think it's disgraceful to leave a cancer patient waiting in pain for his medication."
"I'm sorry, but we're understaffed," the nurse replies.
"Tell me: how many staff members does it take to deliver a paper envelope of pills?"
But before she can answer me a nurse in a light blue uniform enters the room. There are now three of us standing over my father who is still lying on the floor.
"I am the resident nurse here," the new nurse says. "As a matter of fact, your father has already had his pills. He insisted on having them—"
"Don't listen to her, Ben!" my father cuts in from the floor. "She's lying!"
"—insisted on having them early," the nurse resumes, "and he cannot have two doses within four hours of each other."
"Don't listen to her!" my father cries again. "She's a sadist! She's glib, with an easy smile, but don't be fooled. She's a sadist!"
With sudden embarrassment, I realise that the nurse may be telling the truth. My father wheedled his noontime medication out of the nurses early and is now demanding an extra dose. As they help my father to his feet, he remarks loudly of the nurse in light blue, "Look! She has a love bite on her neck. Look! I bet she'll put some powder on it now that I've called attention to it."
My father is still insulting the staff when Libby, his second wife, appears at the end of the hall. Seeing her approach, my father leans in to me and says confidentially, "She's a clinical sadist, too." But when Libby arrives at this side his tone and demeanour are instantaneously transformed. In a thin voice, quavering with emotion, he implores Libby to help him. This, however, does not last: As soon as it is apparent to him that Libby's soft and solicitous words, whatever else they might convey, are not advocating for the extra dose of painkillers, he turns on her.
"You're a sadist," he tells her frankly. "I've told you that before."
Libby, undeterred, repeats a soft-spoken explanation. My father interrupts her with something she does not hear. She asks him to repeat it.
"Yes, I'll repeat it—slowly" he says, "since you are of low intelligence."
"I'm leaving," Libby says. "I'll come back later when you're in a better state."
"I don't welcome that!" my father calls after her as she retraces her steps down the hall. The nurse in light blue, meanwhile, has left the room and now returns with some pills for my father.
"See if she has powered her love bite," my father remarks loudly when he sees her. "I bet she has."
He takes his pills one by one, washing them down with tap water. We return to his room so that he can lie down—this (he tells me) to help the drugs circulate through his system. The drugs have completely placated him. He shows no sign of embarrassment or remorse for his behaviour. After a short interval, the meeting resumes.
In 1995, when I was fifteen, I had been living with my father for about five or six months. One day, I came home from school to find him moving about the apartment with the brisk and resolute air of someone who has just come to an important decision. He led me to the table and sat me down. He told me that it was impossible for us to go on living together. Then he handed me a sheet of paper and seemed quite eager for me to examine it. It was, he explained, leaning over my shoulder to read it with me, “a list of my options.”
The first item on the list was the option of returning to my mother; the second, the name of a boarding school, possibly St. Martins, at which he could enrol me; the third was the name of a family friend, John Gray, a middle-aged bachelor, with whom I was given the rather improbable option of staying; the fourth was a question mark. I pointed to this question mark and asked my father what it meant. He said, “That’s what Kurt Cobain did.”
Quietly and calmly, I relate this episode to my dying father. He asks me if it hurt me. I tell him that it did.
"That's not good," he says. He tells me that he had been preoccupied with killing himself his whole life, and would have done it, too, if not for family, but this is mentioned as something of an aside. It is a very callous man indeed, my father allows, who would wish for his own son to commit suicide. There follow several moments of quiet reflection. The note, he suggests at last, contained options in ascending order of impossibility: Boarding school, to which he has always been deeply opposed, was undesirable; living with John Gray was still more undesirable than boarding school; and suicide was the most undesirable of all. The point of the list? To show the impossibility of every option but the one which topped the list: I would have to return to my mother.
If we grant all this, the explanation has, I suppose, a certain perverse logic. Given a list of "food options" that runs, "Bread, a chair, a building, the moon," one could construe it to be demonstrating the necessity of eating bread as opposed to suggesting the edibility of the moon. But even so, it was not a very sensible way of telling your fifteen year old son that he would have to move back with his mother. My father concedes this point and apologises—an apology that is brief and, it must be said, somewhat perfunctory.
Of the occasion my father lost his temper and denigrated the birth of my daughter by telling me that his mother would be ashamed to have a grandchild born into "impecuniosity," my father has no recollection at all. In fact, he finds it very improbable that he had said such a thing. "After all," he explains, "Christ was born in a manger." I allow that it was something said in the heat of the moment that he did not mean, but that it was nevertheless hurtful, and the reason I broke off all contact with him: A newborn child, I reasoned at the time, is off-limits. It was a blow too low. My father seems to accept all this. But his response is less an apology than a denial that he ever said it at all.
I have several more grievances of a similar kind on my list and countless more in my head. But I decide that that is enough. My father looks tired and a little bored. Things are not going the way I planned and the exercise may be taking its toll on a sick and unhappy man. My father has shown a willingness to repent for past wrongdoing in principle—even if he is struggling to fulfil it in practice. I decide to let these two apologies (or rather, the willingness to repent after receiving the letter, and the one actual apology) represent the further apologies that I could, perhaps, elicit from him.
"In order to complete the process," I conclude, "we can, in our respective prayers, ask God to forgive us for wronging each other." For in my letter I had included the theological point that when humans wrong each other directly they wrong God indirectly as surely as I wrong a parent when I strike their child—a person upon whom they have lavished their love and attention. But my father, somewhat to my surprise, asks me to pray at once. And so I do.
Our meeting ends. My father walks me to the door of the dementia ward. This has an electronic passcode that I know and he does not. After some vague arrangements for a subsequent visit are discussed, we embrace. Then I enter the passcode and cross the threshold. The closure of the door is braked by a hydraulic arm. Looking back at my father, framed by the open door and gazing after me from the dim light of the hall, I am somehow reminded of a specimen in an aquarium.
Deep in thought, I drive home along a winding country road in dazzling sunlight shattered by intermittent stands of foliage. My father and I did not embrace each other in tears as I had anticipated. But there were tears. I recall that, after being helped to his feet, and before the nurse arrived with his pills, my father had turned to me with a bloodshot, broken face and said, "If I had been more careful with money, I could have brought you and Chloe a house!" and then quietly sobbed. And then, when he had finally been coaxed into a chair, he had turned to me with the same expression and said, "We could have had so many wonderful conversations!"
A sudden pang of emotion causes all the muscles of my face to clench up. Tears, as though squeezed out, drop from the outer corners of both eyes. And as I hurtle through space along the winding country road at 100 km per hour, I begin to sob; and so hurtle and sob, sob and hurtle, until a wobbly cyclist at an upcoming bend calls my attention back to the road. After successfully negotiating this threat, I drive on for a while in silence. My face is blank and tear-streaked. But in another moment the tears and sobs start up all over again.
§
Chloe and I arrive outside the hospital late in the morning on Christmas Eve. It is sunny and seems strangely still and quiet. The buildings, trees and signposts project long shadows across the softly lit concrete. We wait for my sister, Rachel, and, when she arrives, we all go upstairs to see my father together.
I wonder what my sister's thoughts were as we walked through those long corridors. I was sad and overawed but I also know that a small part of me was at ease: It was the part of me that had been deeply hurt by my father's words over the years and knew that, since he was now in a coma, it had nothing to fear in that connection.
My father wears an oxygen mask. His eyes are closed. But he is also propped up with pillows as though he had just fallen asleep watching TV. We are told this is to prevent his lungs from filling with fluid. His breathing is shallow and rapid. His chest rises and falls in a regular rhythm. If he is dreaming then probably he is dreaming of fleeing or fighting or swimming to shore from a ship that has been wrecked on a high sea.
We stand around him and speak in low voices. We play him music on a portable speaker. We read to him from the Bible. There are detailed discussions among us. Rachel has to return to the Coromandel. Libby has a chicken in the oven and is tired. Chloe and I are free. We decide that Rachel will spend a moment alone with him before she leaves; Chloe and I will sit with him through the night; Libby will go home to her chicken and bed and then return in the morning. But my father already seems a hundred thousand miles beyond such concerns. His body is like a suit of clothes left behind by its occupant.
A gaggle of relatives arrive, offer platitudes, and leave. Then Rachel leaves, too, and finally Libby. Chloe and I are alone. I know that my father is soon going to die. The doctors have said, "Hours or days." But I reason as follows: There is a certain probability that my father will die in the first hour of our bedside vigil; a higher probability that he will die in the second hour; a still higher probability that he will die in the third—and so on. Therefore, the best hour in which to get some sleep (I haven't slept in 48 hours) is the present one since he is less likely to die during that hour than any other.
Chloe agrees to sit with him while I lie down on an armchair in the lounge down the hall. For a moment I watch him mechanically heaving for breath. I refresh the wet facecloth lying across his hot brow. Then I wrap my Rosary Beads around his huge immobile hands and go.
It is dark and cool but hard to sleep in the lounge. There is a loud buzzer that buzzes. Someone turns the light on and then off. A Filipino nurse comes into the hall and has a long repetitive conversation about pills with a man in a wheelchair. At last the silence and darkness last just long enough for me to nod off.
I am awoken by Chloe. "Your father has stopped breathing," she says. "You need to come back." I sit up. Chloe runs out of the room. Still half-asleep, I stumble after her.
Two nurses are beside my father when Chloe and I enter. They inform us, softly and solemnly, that Quentin passed away some time between their last check at 11:20 PM and their present check at 11:50 PM. Ten minutes earlier, at around 11:40, Chloe says she heard him give a cough but thought nothing of it. Probably, that was the moment he stopped breathing.
The nurses leave. I untangle my Rosary Beads from my father's hands—hands still soft and warm and lifelike. And soon I realise with sadness this entailment of his coma and death: That my father's last words to me turn out to be those spoken as I was leaving from a visit with Katie a week earlier.
I wonder what my sister's thoughts were as we walked through those long corridors. I was sad and overawed but I also know that a small part of me was at ease: It was the part of me that had been deeply hurt by my father's words over the years and knew that, since he was now in a coma, it had nothing to fear in that connection.
My father wears an oxygen mask. His eyes are closed. But he is also propped up with pillows as though he had just fallen asleep watching TV. We are told this is to prevent his lungs from filling with fluid. His breathing is shallow and rapid. His chest rises and falls in a regular rhythm. If he is dreaming then probably he is dreaming of fleeing or fighting or swimming to shore from a ship that has been wrecked on a high sea.
We stand around him and speak in low voices. We play him music on a portable speaker. We read to him from the Bible. There are detailed discussions among us. Rachel has to return to the Coromandel. Libby has a chicken in the oven and is tired. Chloe and I are free. We decide that Rachel will spend a moment alone with him before she leaves; Chloe and I will sit with him through the night; Libby will go home to her chicken and bed and then return in the morning. But my father already seems a hundred thousand miles beyond such concerns. His body is like a suit of clothes left behind by its occupant.
A gaggle of relatives arrive, offer platitudes, and leave. Then Rachel leaves, too, and finally Libby. Chloe and I are alone. I know that my father is soon going to die. The doctors have said, "Hours or days." But I reason as follows: There is a certain probability that my father will die in the first hour of our bedside vigil; a higher probability that he will die in the second hour; a still higher probability that he will die in the third—and so on. Therefore, the best hour in which to get some sleep (I haven't slept in 48 hours) is the present one since he is less likely to die during that hour than any other.
Chloe agrees to sit with him while I lie down on an armchair in the lounge down the hall. For a moment I watch him mechanically heaving for breath. I refresh the wet facecloth lying across his hot brow. Then I wrap my Rosary Beads around his huge immobile hands and go.
It is dark and cool but hard to sleep in the lounge. There is a loud buzzer that buzzes. Someone turns the light on and then off. A Filipino nurse comes into the hall and has a long repetitive conversation about pills with a man in a wheelchair. At last the silence and darkness last just long enough for me to nod off.
I am awoken by Chloe. "Your father has stopped breathing," she says. "You need to come back." I sit up. Chloe runs out of the room. Still half-asleep, I stumble after her.
Two nurses are beside my father when Chloe and I enter. They inform us, softly and solemnly, that Quentin passed away some time between their last check at 11:20 PM and their present check at 11:50 PM. Ten minutes earlier, at around 11:40, Chloe says she heard him give a cough but thought nothing of it. Probably, that was the moment he stopped breathing.
The nurses leave. I untangle my Rosary Beads from my father's hands—hands still soft and warm and lifelike. And soon I realise with sadness this entailment of his coma and death: That my father's last words to me turn out to be those spoken as I was leaving from a visit with Katie a week earlier.
§
Dad had just had surgery on his leg which he had broken during a fall. He was conscious and talking but so drowsy from all of the painkillers he had been given. I do not think he opened his eyes once during our visit. All of his energy and focus was on trying to get more painkillers. He implored both Katie and me to help him.
I spoke to the doctor who said it would be unwise to give dad more painkillers. If the dose were increased, dad would fall unconscious and would not be able to eat which he needed to do to regain his strength after the surgery.
I explained all this to dad. In doing so I hoped to appeal to his reason and so his dignity. “He who has a why,” said Victor Frankl, paraphrasing Nietzsche, “can bear almost any how.” I wanted to help him understand that not giving him more pills just now was in his best interests. It is what I would have wanted someone to explain to me if I were in his position.
“That sounds very tenable, Ben,” he said, “very tenable.” His tone was monotonous, bitter.
After an hour or so, it was time for us to leave. We both knew it might be our last moment with our father. On her way out, Katie said, "I love you, dad," and dad replied, "I love you too, Katie." She walked through the doorway ahead of me. It was my turn. I stopped on the threshold. I said, “I love you dad." An appalling silence followed. To fill it, I added, "God bless you.” Without opening his eyes, dad replied in a clear, even voice. He said, “God bless you, Ben, and you'll need that blessing if your Christian convictions are going to take you anywhere.” Libby guffawed. I stood in the doorway and let his unkind words sink in for a moment. I decided to interpret them philosophically.
“That's very true,” I replied (after all, who can do anything without God's blessing?) and then I said, “Goodbye, dad,” and left. We would never speak to each other again.
Below is the eulogy I read at his funeral.
I spoke to the doctor who said it would be unwise to give dad more painkillers. If the dose were increased, dad would fall unconscious and would not be able to eat which he needed to do to regain his strength after the surgery.
I explained all this to dad. In doing so I hoped to appeal to his reason and so his dignity. “He who has a why,” said Victor Frankl, paraphrasing Nietzsche, “can bear almost any how.” I wanted to help him understand that not giving him more pills just now was in his best interests. It is what I would have wanted someone to explain to me if I were in his position.
“That sounds very tenable, Ben,” he said, “very tenable.” His tone was monotonous, bitter.
After an hour or so, it was time for us to leave. We both knew it might be our last moment with our father. On her way out, Katie said, "I love you, dad," and dad replied, "I love you too, Katie." She walked through the doorway ahead of me. It was my turn. I stopped on the threshold. I said, “I love you dad." An appalling silence followed. To fill it, I added, "God bless you.” Without opening his eyes, dad replied in a clear, even voice. He said, “God bless you, Ben, and you'll need that blessing if your Christian convictions are going to take you anywhere.” Libby guffawed. I stood in the doorway and let his unkind words sink in for a moment. I decided to interpret them philosophically.
“That's very true,” I replied (after all, who can do anything without God's blessing?) and then I said, “Goodbye, dad,” and left. We would never speak to each other again.
Below is the eulogy I read at his funeral.
§
It is impossible to give an adequate portrait of any man in a single short speech. In fact, Borges has written that reality is so complex, and history so fragmentary and simplified, that an omniscient observer could write an almost infinite number of biographies of a single man—each emphasizing different details. One book just to catalog all his dreams; another all the mistakes he made; still another, of all the moments he gazed out to sea or thought about the moon. If those innumerable books were to tell the complete story of my father's life, at least one of them would need to record a period of complex conflict between us followed by many years of estrangement. But today the occasion itself imposes a helpful constraint. The word eulogy comes down to us from the Greek word for “praise.” And when Borges' omniscient observer came to that biography—the one cataloging all the details of my father's life worthy of praise—he would find no shortage of material.
All I can do is share a few representative anecdotes.
Some of my earliest memories of my father are great fun. He retained throughout his life a childlike quality that often manifested as a capacity for wonderful silliness. I recall him circling a roundabout in Rotorua fifteen times for his children's amusement while continuously sounding the horn; I recall him going into stores to demand, again for our amusement, ridiculous and impossible items—like turtle bile or snake oil. And when as a boy I took a giant stuffed bear to a cafe in Tauranga and sat it at the table, I recall that my father gave our order and then, gesturing curtly at the bear, said in a deep, even voice, "And he'll have a glass of orange juice." The waitress laughed. My father stared her down and repeated the order with still more solemnity. And so at last my bear was served. As children, needless to say, we found all of this delightful.
My father, meanwhile, was a talented lawyer; and just how talented I only recently discovered. After giving up work as counsel for the ACC to go into private practice in 1982, dad received an unsolicited letter from the Judge of the Compensation Court. In the letter the judge frankly declares dad a first-class barrister. "It is always a pleasure to have you appearing," it continues, "because I know that your case will be fully prepared and properly presented. It lightens the task of any judge when he knows that the facts will be fairly summarised and the law argued on the basis of acceptable evidence." The judge's only criticism? That dad did his work so thoroughly that the judge was often compelled to write lengthy judgments to cover all the matters raised.
In his last weeks, concerned to defend his intellectual legacy against the rumours of dementia, my father gave me a booklet of such letters from various official sources. All of them are filled with praise that is glowing—and often superlative. Dad's success as a lawyer was a source of pride for his children.
Lawyers, of course, are not famed for their virtue—something that my father himself loved to point out with cynical allusions to the Pharisees and Sadducees of the New Testament. But the vast bulk of my father's own career was devoted to representing ACC claimants. I doubt that anyone will disagree with me when I observe that helping the unemployably sick and injured to secure a livelihood was a fine moral application of his legal skills. And I believe that my father's passion for social justice had a positive moral influence on his children.
My father liked to quote Socrates who said that, "The unexamined life is not worth living." And by this criterion, too, my father's own life was of great worth. In conversation he was intelligent, articulate, intense and unflinching—and often drawn, as though by instinct, to deep and difficult subjects. By dad, even while children, we were invited to reflect on and speak about God, death, Victor Frankl, the supernatural, democracy, famous legal cases, Carl Jung, Christ, nuclear war, social justice, Shakespeare—and much more. And I know that Katie and Rachel will agree with me that in this connection dad had an incredibly stimulating and inspiring effect on our young minds.
Not that we spent our time with dad sitting at home in conversation. In reply to Socrates' view that the unexamined life is not worth living, Andrew Klavan has said that, "The un-lived life is not worth examining." And this is something with which I know dad would agree. During our holidays with dad he shared with us his love of activity and adventure. At great cost of time and effort to himself, we hiked, wake-boarded, fly-fished, swam, camped, snorkelled, caved, canoed, surfed and boated in Waikeremoana, Hamilton, Rotorua, Mt Manganui, Taupo. Katie and Rachel and I all agree on this point too: We feel a deep gratitude to dad for these experiences which gave us some of our most interesting childhood memories.
I will conclude.
The memories I have shared are all special to me and there are many more. But if I could only take one memory with me into eternity it would be this.
Czeslaw Milosz said, "Probably only those things are worthwhile that can retain their validity in the eyes of a man faced with instant death." Milosz, a Polish poet who helped Jews escape from the Warsaw Ghetto, had reason to know—and I think he is right. The question arises: What things have this quality? Here one recalls the phone calls made from the aeroplanes and towers of 9/11. These all had one purpose: A person faced with death wanted to use their last moment to say, “I love you,” to someone. And my father, on the phone to me before the surgery from which he would not recover, was the same.
In that moment dad and I learned or remembered what the Bible has been trying to tell us all along. That Love is the fulfilling of the law; love is the greatest commandment; love the only thing that really matters and endures. And I believe the reason for all this is given in First John, Chapter 4, verse 8: “God is love.” Dad: You and I loved each other as all humans love—imperfectly. I pray that you have now found eternal sanctuary in the perfect love of God.
All I can do is share a few representative anecdotes.
Some of my earliest memories of my father are great fun. He retained throughout his life a childlike quality that often manifested as a capacity for wonderful silliness. I recall him circling a roundabout in Rotorua fifteen times for his children's amusement while continuously sounding the horn; I recall him going into stores to demand, again for our amusement, ridiculous and impossible items—like turtle bile or snake oil. And when as a boy I took a giant stuffed bear to a cafe in Tauranga and sat it at the table, I recall that my father gave our order and then, gesturing curtly at the bear, said in a deep, even voice, "And he'll have a glass of orange juice." The waitress laughed. My father stared her down and repeated the order with still more solemnity. And so at last my bear was served. As children, needless to say, we found all of this delightful.
My father, meanwhile, was a talented lawyer; and just how talented I only recently discovered. After giving up work as counsel for the ACC to go into private practice in 1982, dad received an unsolicited letter from the Judge of the Compensation Court. In the letter the judge frankly declares dad a first-class barrister. "It is always a pleasure to have you appearing," it continues, "because I know that your case will be fully prepared and properly presented. It lightens the task of any judge when he knows that the facts will be fairly summarised and the law argued on the basis of acceptable evidence." The judge's only criticism? That dad did his work so thoroughly that the judge was often compelled to write lengthy judgments to cover all the matters raised.
In his last weeks, concerned to defend his intellectual legacy against the rumours of dementia, my father gave me a booklet of such letters from various official sources. All of them are filled with praise that is glowing—and often superlative. Dad's success as a lawyer was a source of pride for his children.
Lawyers, of course, are not famed for their virtue—something that my father himself loved to point out with cynical allusions to the Pharisees and Sadducees of the New Testament. But the vast bulk of my father's own career was devoted to representing ACC claimants. I doubt that anyone will disagree with me when I observe that helping the unemployably sick and injured to secure a livelihood was a fine moral application of his legal skills. And I believe that my father's passion for social justice had a positive moral influence on his children.
My father liked to quote Socrates who said that, "The unexamined life is not worth living." And by this criterion, too, my father's own life was of great worth. In conversation he was intelligent, articulate, intense and unflinching—and often drawn, as though by instinct, to deep and difficult subjects. By dad, even while children, we were invited to reflect on and speak about God, death, Victor Frankl, the supernatural, democracy, famous legal cases, Carl Jung, Christ, nuclear war, social justice, Shakespeare—and much more. And I know that Katie and Rachel will agree with me that in this connection dad had an incredibly stimulating and inspiring effect on our young minds.
Not that we spent our time with dad sitting at home in conversation. In reply to Socrates' view that the unexamined life is not worth living, Andrew Klavan has said that, "The un-lived life is not worth examining." And this is something with which I know dad would agree. During our holidays with dad he shared with us his love of activity and adventure. At great cost of time and effort to himself, we hiked, wake-boarded, fly-fished, swam, camped, snorkelled, caved, canoed, surfed and boated in Waikeremoana, Hamilton, Rotorua, Mt Manganui, Taupo. Katie and Rachel and I all agree on this point too: We feel a deep gratitude to dad for these experiences which gave us some of our most interesting childhood memories.
I will conclude.
The memories I have shared are all special to me and there are many more. But if I could only take one memory with me into eternity it would be this.
Czeslaw Milosz said, "Probably only those things are worthwhile that can retain their validity in the eyes of a man faced with instant death." Milosz, a Polish poet who helped Jews escape from the Warsaw Ghetto, had reason to know—and I think he is right. The question arises: What things have this quality? Here one recalls the phone calls made from the aeroplanes and towers of 9/11. These all had one purpose: A person faced with death wanted to use their last moment to say, “I love you,” to someone. And my father, on the phone to me before the surgery from which he would not recover, was the same.
In that moment dad and I learned or remembered what the Bible has been trying to tell us all along. That Love is the fulfilling of the law; love is the greatest commandment; love the only thing that really matters and endures. And I believe the reason for all this is given in First John, Chapter 4, verse 8: “God is love.” Dad: You and I loved each other as all humans love—imperfectly. I pray that you have now found eternal sanctuary in the perfect love of God.