Missing Dad

Three years ago I asked Dad about his plans for retirement. He said that he didn’t have any plans to do so, although he had given a little thought to the idea. It reinforced my conviction that my dad would die with a scalpel in his hand, still going until the Lord took breath from him. Two years ago I asked the same question. At the time several rounds of litigation were passing through the Pennsylvania courts regarding caps on awards given to the plaintiffs of medical malpractice cases. He said that since there were no caps at that time his malpractice insurance premium was getting so high that it was hard to stay in the black. (Oodles of docs had left Pennsylvania for this very reason in the last ten years or so.) So retirement was becoming a possibility—though Dad didn’t talk about it with much relish.

Relish or no, I started thinking about a retirement gift for Dad. I was going to round up the sibs (there are five of us from my dad’s two marriages) and see if we couldn’t coordinate giving him a trip to Europe and especially a trip down the Danube River, which has its headwaters in southern Germany and its mouth in the Black Sea. I know that he would have got a thrill out of such a trip—and after all he’d given me, I thought it was the least I could do as a son.

Then he died, and retirement took on a different kind of meaning. Now he has no worries about malpractice insurance or enjoying trips to Eastern Europe—no worries at all, in fact. And perhaps there is some way, in the next life, that he is enjoying the whole world in ways that are not possible in this life. Dad always did enjoy learning about the wide world.

And now I’m in Europe, in the very region I had wanted to send Dad as a retirement gift. It is a strange phenomenon, being in a place whose interest for me was really sparked by stories Dad told about his own travels. He talked about crossing into (then) East Germany in the 1960s, and crossing back by just waltzing across the DMZ of Checkpoint Charlie right before the tanks lined up to prevent further commerce. He remembered having the undeveloped film torn out of his camera by an East German police officer before he got to West Berlin. The developed roll was safely in his shoe. He reminisced about hitchhiking across North Africa, working as a translator of technical documents in Tunisia when he and his traveling companion needed money. He recalled trying to hitchhike on a Russian freighter setting sail from Libya and being rejected. When we were sorting through his memorabilia before we sold his house, I found piles of handwritten journals that look like they come from his medical school days and his days at the Sorbonne in Paris. “Ode to a Urinalysis Sample” is one gem that I happened to find—definitely med student material.

Now I’m wandering around Europe with Sara and seeing heaps of things that make me think of Dad. What’s more, they make me think, “Dad would really enjoy this,” and “Dad would really love to hear about this adventure.” If he were still alive we would stand in his kitchen in August and talk about crazy train experiences in Central Europe and swap stories about shady characters on the street asking if we needed to change money. Someone once told me that before your parents die you think about them only when you have to do so—and then it’s really for pragmatic purposes. After they die, this person said, you think about them every day. That has certainly been true for me since August 28 2005, and it has taken on a new dimension since arriving in Europe.

In Venice, as we wandered through the narrow cobblestone streets looking at sexy decrepit buildings and trying to follow a map with different names than the physical signs, we passed a violin shop. Now I have zero intrinsic interest in violins. I played one for all of six months in elementary school and promptly gave it up (which I now regret). But Dad learned when he was young and in the last five years was returning to it with a passion. Playing the violin was a great joy of his. I stood outside this violin maker in Venice, looking at the instruments hanging in the window, and had a sudden impulse to go in. I don’t know what I would have done inside, not speaking Italian and knowing nothing about violins. I guess I would have stood there and basked in the joy that I know Dad would have felt poking around the shop and learning about the names of violin parts in Italian.

I stood in that street and stared at the violins in the window. I think all I said to Sara was, “Look! A violin shop!” without going into the deep repercussions I felt at that moment. Of course, those repercussions probably couldn’t have had words at that point. I stood there in the sensation that I didn’t fully understand, then walked on with Sara into the next moment’s adventure. But I missed Dad right then.

It’s happening a lot here in Europe, and I think it’s a good thing even though I get a little choked up sometimes. (I think Paris may be particularly intense, although going to the Sorbonne is probably out of the question unless the students stop rioting.) I remember them telling us something in seminary or chaplaincy training about stages of grief or some such. Right now it’s just another day without Dad, and another day in Europe to boot! Can’t send postcards or letters (which he would actually read and write back, dinosaur that he was!) to him, can’t swap stories about Roman ruins or language blunders. I’ll have to enjoy Europe in his memory.

Yeah, I miss Dad.

~emrys