:( He sounds a little bit like my own father quite work-driven, and seemingly always unsure of how to show love and affection for others outside of “being the provider”. I’ll always wonder how much longer he could have lived if he hadn’t smoked, but there’s comfort in knowing this self-inflicted plague is nearly over. It’s been weeks since the last time I saw someone with a cigarette in their hand and I haven’t seen an ashtray in years.
Over the last 37 years – in the time it took Dave to go from Groundskeeper Willie levels of fitness to a man who no longer had the strength to breathe – all of that vanished. It felt like everyone was always smoking all the time. The ashy odor of cigarettes permeated clothing, carpets, cars, drapes, blankets, and people’s breath. The paint on the walls needed to be refreshed every few years to hide the jaundice discoloration. Every poster or handbill hanging indoors was eventually stained yellow or brown. Every public space had a drifting haze that circulated at head height. Every table and every countertop in every public place had at least one ashtray. Same goes for the stoop of every building and anywhere else people might stand for more than 30 seconds. The gutters of every street corner were peppered with orange butts.
GROUNDSKEEPER WILLIE BRAVE HEART FULL
When I met Dave, the world was full of cigarettes in a way that you just can’t see from watching Mad Men. It would drive me BONKERS when I'd see a large floor ashtray like this one, surrounded by butts. You can’t ever say that losing a parent is easy, but this is probably about as gentle as death gets. He kept his wits until the final weeks, when the morphine made him distant and drowsy. 68 isn’t a bad age, and it’s pretty good for a guy who worked in a steel mill and smoked for 40 years. He gripped my hand and gave me a firm nod, which counts as an emotional outburst by Dave standards. I thanked him for the hard work and let him know he did a good job. It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.Ī week ago I sat at his bedside and read him the bit from my blog / book, where I talked about the positive influence he had on my life.
I watched the years heartlessly grind this superman down to a frail grandfather. In 1999, he saw Heather struggling to stuff our two kids and the groceries into the compact car we owned at the time, so he bought us a station wagon. Once I moved out, he’d come around the house to fix something I couldn’t, or give us money when my family got into trouble. I think he only said he loved me once in our 37 years together, but he showed it on a regular basis. He worked, and then he’d come home and take care of the house and his other duties. Even if he was currently living on midnight time and he’d just finished a double shift, he’d still be there on Sunday. If he had Sunday morning off, he’d always make it to church. Then his schedule would switch to afternoon shift for a few weeks. For a couple of weeks he’d work daylight. For over a decade he worked rotating shifts. He was a machinist at the steel mill, and he took his work seriously. He was a hard worker and a man of few words. More than anything else, this drove home just how fast the clock is running. But Dave is the first person that I’ve known in the prime of their life, who has since died of old age. It always seemed like my father Jim had one foot in the grave since his stroke in 1971. Eventually I realized it was because I always thought of him as invincible. While upsetting, neither of those deaths filled me with the existential dread I felt whenever I saw Dave in his sickbed. My grandmother helped raise me, and she died about that same time. It took me a long time to figure out why his decline was so scary to me.
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