My dad was Jim Williamson, Jr., a machinist mate in the Navy who had a stellar military career having graduated from the first Nuclear Power School class in Vallejo, California, taught at the nuclear reactor prototype in Arco, Idaho, and served on numerous ships from the tiniest tin can (destroyer) such as the U.S.S. Eaton through the largest aircraft carrier at the time, the U.S.S. Enterprise — and many other ships as well.
He always called them ‘multimillion dollar yachts’. Later, during my own hitch I would call them ‘floating gray prisons’.
Having attained the rank of E-9, or Master Chief, dad was a no-nonsense straight shooting, hard drinking, cigarette smoking type of fellow who believed in three schools of thought; those being: “the right way”, “the wrong way”, and “the navy way”. He sometimes admonished me regarding the three cardinal sins he could not ever tolerate: “a liar”, “a thief”, or “a cheat”.
To my chagrin much later in life; throughout my rebellious childhood I fully equated “the navy way” to simply be a variation on “the wrong way.” My dad and I had become estranged. His heavy handed discipline coupled with the fact that the navy took him away from me for large spans of my years as a ‘navy brat’ was the source of endless consternation for a child who became obese long before it became a national tragedy.
Every two years it was another new school. I was always the new fat kid with acne. The cruelty of school day peers was only met at home by a dad who thought I was supposed to just bear it regardless of the ridicule and embarrassment — I think he was just trying to toughen me up.
Yet I remained a ‘non-hacker’ … one who could not ‘cut the program’ so to speak. My endless A’s on tests were outweighed by the Zeroes I got for never submitting homework. The standardized tests were a breeze. Teachers took me into the halls and asked why it was that I scored highest in science and language skills only to fail these classes so miserably. I think I just didn’t care because I didn’t feel anyone else did.
Apathy is what happens when a sensitive twenty first century schizoid boy meets the Great Santini head on. So life went on with dad and his hard work, drinking, smoking, and fishing and me in my sullen resistance of everything that he was.
It was years before I would try to reconcile with my father, but finally the communications channels opened. I made efforts to visit each weekend when I wasn’t teaching some weekend class. Dad and I were talking about who we were and what we were all about. He had helped me remodel my house, lent me countless dollars otherwise as well so I took out an equity line and repaid his generosity. We were finally connecting.
Though we still had those inevitable problematic moments, I had resigned myself that dad was getting on — and appearing to do poorly to boot. I continued to have interaction with him, spending a lot more time at his place sitting on the porch and watching his hoards of hummingbirds feed on the two quart feeders I hung from the oak tree in his front yard which mom kept full.
He had said that he never thought he would ever see a hummingbird in person. After a while, several would sit on the railing of the porch and look at him for hours up close and personal! It was very gratifying.
Gardens were planted. Harvest were taken in. Vegetables were canned. Nephews and nieces were born and raised. A three vessel bypass went by and those cigarettes kept right on burning and those highballs kept getting downed.
Though it seemed suddenly but it really wasn’t; dad’s health took a nose dive. He had been diagnosed with a ‘blister on the lung’ way back when. This evolved into a nasty thing known as ‘empyema thoracis’ and was complicated by an equally morbid injury called ‘bronchopleural fistula’. This was in addition to the de rigueur emphysema, cor pulmonale, and other sequela of a lifetime of smoking.
Though he was seeing a doctor who was supposedly one of the ‘foremost pulmonary experts in the area’ the goober misdiagnosed him. This coupled with the fact that he had the beside manner of a fish left me with nothing but loathing for him, his flippant resident assistant, and his entire rude office staff. To think that dad had referred to him as ‘his doctor.’ Such a terrible frustrating farce.
The only hope was offered by his surgeon who had the sad duty of informing us of the correct diagnoses and seeing us through to the sad ending. At least this man had skills and empathy and was out for more than insurance payments.
After the surgery we had a month and a half of ups and downs culminating in a superinfection, kidney shutdown, and dad’s wishes not to be kept going by artificial means. Sure, he could have woke up in the Veteran’s Administration hospital on dialysis and a respirator. He would have been mad as Hell at us. He had resented the oxygen machine of the past several years referring to it as that “… tether”.
He had left strict instructions for protecting his interests in the event of medical catastrophe. In accordance with wishes he had stated many times, our only option was to take him off life support and let him slip away using a protocol of morphine drip with increasing doses every two hours.
We took him off of life support at four p.m. We spent the horrific eternity of uncertainty telling him how much we loved him and what a good dad he was and how lucky we were to have him. I cried inconsolably — me a bald 45 year old 300 pound bruiser at the time.
He passed quietly away the following evening at eight p.m. The monitor told the story in it’s cold mechanical readout. Bradycardia, insufficient respirations, and as he passed this man who never let me see him cry shed a single tear from his right eye which rolled down his cheek; and it was over.
Having reflected a lot during and after the funeral I have come to the conclusion that we are subject to innumerable circumstances beyond our control when we engage in parenthood.
As my dear mother has said many times, “Children don’t come with instructions”.
