OPINION

OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: A total of 13,476 days

My father died at 8:27 a.m. on Friday, July 28, 1984.

I know it was a Friday because normally it would have been one of my days off, but for some reason I was working that morning. I had made my rounds, drank four cups of burnt bitter cop-shop coffee, and took some notes in four different detective bureaus.

When I got back to the office, there was a pink phone memo on my desk; my uncle had called from the hospital. I didn't need to return the call. I typed up three briefs, hit the necessary computer keys to move them to the copy desk, and told city editor Thomas Mitchell I was leaving, that my father had just died. Mitch looked up with tender bovine eyes and nodded.

I remember a lot about that morning; the slap of my rubber-soled deck shoes in the slick waxed hallways, astringent smells of the cancer ward, bland smiling indifference of nurses used to death and the damnable patience of doctors. I remember molded plastic dining trays that reeked of hot water.

I remember a flooding relief, the feeling of finally being done with something.

I remember the body, the blankness of the hospital sheets, a darkening repose settling on my dead father's face.

I remember moans seeping through the walls, along with the muted hum of daytime soaps. I remember thinking a hospital is a bad place to die.

For a long time, I sat beside him. I felt like an actor then, tearless and numb. But if I think about it for too long now I tear up.

My relationship with my father was relatively untroubled. I loved him and he loved me. We played golf, tennis and basketball together. He liked to fish and I didn't, but I'd go with him anyway. We were never estranged. He lived long enough to see me on good footing with the world. I was glad when his hurting stopped. I was glad to be out of the hospital. I was amazed by the number of people who came to his funeral, who looked me in the eye and told me things.

People say I look like him. I think he looked like Daniel Craig's James Bond. He was smaller than me, more coiled and athletic. His eyes were blue. I recall his Air Force uniforms hanging in the closet; the cedar mysteries of his little desk. There was a small metal sensor wrapped in black plastic he told me monitored radiation exposure. There was a Smith & Wesson .38 Special in the top right drawer. There was a carved wooden statue of an extended middle finger with a red ribbon tied around the second knuckle that someone had given him as a mock award.

I remember his books. He liked classic mythology and John Cheever's short stories and sports. The last present I ever gave him was a copy of "Balls," a behind-the-scenes account of the Yankees' 1983 season written by the team's longtime third baseman Graig Nettles. We talked about it in the hospital in those final days. I smuggled in Dairy Queen milkshakes for him; another visitor brought him pot.

There was his baseball glove, which I had bronzed and which sits on a table in our house. There was his watch, which I wore almost every day after he died, until one day I didn't and it was stolen by burglars. I have his dictionary. I have the softball from the last game he played, after he came back from chemotherapy to play one last time.

Somewhere in my mother's house there is a scrapbook my father's mother kept of his boxing and baseball days. His Golden Gloves trophies and high school yearbooks are there, and some of his report cards, inked in an impressive cursive hand by one of the priests. He made good grades. He was a poor kid who went to a tony prep school on scholarship.

He was born in the middle of the Depression and never knew his father, and I think he felt shame about that. Sometimes when I think of him and my uncle--his year-older half-brother--growing up in Gastonia, in that house that didn't seem small when I saw it that one time (but I was a child and everything seemed so much larger then), and my grandmother taking in boarders before the war, I get choked up.

I wish I'd paid more attention to the stories he told me.

Or I wish he'd been more insistent; most of what I know about his childhood I learned while he was dying, or even after his death, from my uncle who would himself die the next year. I only found out last week his grandmother lived to be 97; she was born before the Civil War and outlived his grandfather by 53 years. She had 11 children--I knew only three of my grandmother's siblings. That there were others seems impossible. I can only guess at the reasons for the estrangement. There is no one left to ask.

He is buried in a pretty field in northwest Louisiana, a long way now from most of the people who loved him. My mother went back to Georgia, where she was raised and where most of her large family still lives. One of my sisters followed her there; the other moved to the swampy southern end of Louisiana. Now, except for the granddaughter he never knew who lives in Shreveport, I am closer to his grave than anyone else.

I could say it feels lonely here at the end of the line, but really it doesn't. I have my little family, a few good friends, a wider circle of people whose company I enjoy. I know the name of the man who was for a time married to my grandmother, who might have been my uncle's father but probably wasn't my dad's, if I ever want to go hunting in the city directories and census records. You can find out a lot these days--there are genealogy websites that, for a price, make it pretty easy.

But what do you get beyond a list of names, dates and addresses, a few lines jotted down in an official register? Is that preferable to the mystery, the mix of wishfulness and family legend that now informs the story? It might not be impossible to find a father for my father, to identify a likely suspect, but what benefit is there in pinning a name upon a ghost? Some boy from Carolina or Tennessee, no doubt long dead, might have contributed some genetic material. It seems likely that there are cousins I will never meet.

That doesn't matter much. I am not big on family reunions and don't trust certitude.

I just know I still miss my dad. And still love him. I don't imagine that I know everything about him--he had secrets he held onto. There were things he wouldn't tell me about his time in Southeast Asia. My mother never knew about the single professional boxing match he had after they were married. I remember him as a kind man, a strong man, and whatever imperfections he may have had didn't matter then and matter less now.

My father has been dead for 13,476 days. There's not been one when I haven't thought of him. I sometimes dream of him, and not all the dreams are happy. I still wake up regretful and filled with longing, feeling as though I've missed saying or doing something essential.

Maybe all of us walk around with missing parts, with phantom limbs that only occasionally throb.

pmartin@adgnewsroom.com

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