2001-05-16 - 11:12 p.m.

The Last Night Before Christmas

The last twenty-four hours have been a blur. When someone dies there is so much that needs to be done.

Harry appeared in the afternoon to help with matters. After several hours of sorting through papers and making phone calls, we decided to break for dinner. To avoid getting another barrage of mockery from Lily and Harry I suggested that we eat at a Thai restaurant that was a favorite of Lily's that we hadn't been to in a while. Both Lily and Harry seemed enthusiastic, so off we went.

Even though it was a weekday night, and they didn't seem that busy, the service was incredibly slow. They seemed unable to make any sense of our drink orders and both Harry's and my entrees were not very good. So, we had a bad dining experience.

In spite of that the three of us had a good time. Harry was in fine form and Lily was a receptive audience.

Of course, we spent a lot of time talking about Dad. As I am remembering it now, nearly all the stories were senile escapades from recent years, some of which I have related here. There was the disturbing incident with the school bus, the fun game of naked hide-and-go-seek he played with the air-conditioner repairman, his utter bafflement at the workings of the phone answering machine, the time he finally discovered that Agness was NOT my girlfriend, and so on. Maybe I'll relate these stories some other time.

These tales are actually pretty funny, at least in retrospect. When I was taking care of my father on a daily basis, nothing was funny. I remember feeling at the time that I was trapped in an inane sitcom called "My Dingy Dad" that was hilarious to everyone but me. I don't know how I survived those times.

That's not a terribly respectful way to talk about my dead father, is it? The fact is, he was not a figure of respect. He's a man who worked half his life to build up a family and a pile of worldly possessions and spent the other half of his life destroying them. Like I've said so many times before, it's not clear whether he did the things he did because he was mentally ill, or whether he was just a jerk.

All that seems to be left of him is the senile old man he became at the end, and that seems to have colored all that went before. We look backward, searching for signs of the mental problems that eventually undid him and made casualties of us all.

This sounds rather somber, but the mood of the evening was actually pretty lighthearted. I'm not sure it was because we were all overcompensating, or we were just relieved to have the ordeal of Dad's illness over with.

And I told Harry the story of Janis' last visit with Dad.

Shortly after I got the news of Dad's death last night I put in a call to Janis. She, too, did not seem to upset at Dad's passing. She said that she was probably not going to be able to make it up for any kind of memorial service, since she couldn't get the time off from work.

Which HAS to be an excuse. As Lily said when I relayed this to her later, any job that won't let you have time off to attend your father's burial you should quit immediately.

Well, fine. If Janis doesn't want to spend time with her family, I won't make her.

However, she did tell me a little story of what she did during the one time she visited Dad while she was up here that was kind of touching.

When we were kids, there was a tradition that on Christmas Eve, we'd all get together on the living room couch and Dad would read the poem "The Night Before Christmas" by Clement Moore to us. We had a very old, very beat-up looking hardcover book with Victorian illustrations that Dad used to read out of. I think this tradition continued on long after everything else fell apart, even when Harry and I were in our early 20s.

Anyway, in a used bookstore Janis found a facsimile copy of that book, and so she bought it for herself. She brought it up with her to Frown Town when she came to visit Dad in the hospital. She seemed to be under the impression that she's missed a few readings after she move out of the family house, but I think they had ended long before she left.

She asked Dad if he wanted her to read the poem to him, and he said yes. So up there in the Intensive Care Unit, surrounded by all those medical machines, Janis read The Night Before Christmas to Dad.

That is such a typical gesture for Janis: sweet, but a little odd. And I also think she got a some closure out of it, something we could all use.