Tim Dowling: I thought my dad would live for ever. I was wrong
I’m sitting in a stationary aeroplane at Madrid airport, looking idly out the window as a team of baggage handlers repeatedly try and fail to unload a shipment of mangoes from the hold, when I receive a text from my sister telling me that my 102-year-old father has been taken to hospital in the middle of the night.
As I digest the message, the group chat I share with my three siblings begins to buzz: my dad is in ICU; he has low blood pressure, a probable infection, and may have suffered a mild heart attack; my brother is also on holiday, and thinking about returning. I explain where I am, and about the mangoes.
My sister says my father may also have pneumonia. My other sister writes, “He is being feisty AF,” which I take to mean that he is agitated and ungovernable.
“These mangoes are going nowhere,” I write.
Two days later, when I am back in London, my father is moved to a regular room. Some of the potential things wrong with him have been eliminated: he hasn’t had a heart attack, and he doesn’t have pneumonia. But he also hasn’t eaten in two days, and they are reluctant to let him out until he can swallow.
“Shouldn’t you go out there?” my wife says.
“They told me to sit tight,” I say. “My sister has a work trip coming, and I might be more use next week. Anyway, he’s improving.”
I sit in on a video meeting with a palliative care social worker, staring at a sprinkler on the ceiling above her desk while my sisters ask questions about our options. In the US, insurance-sanctioned palliative care is not for lingerers: “hours or days” is the phrase they keep using. If your prospects are any sunnier than that, you have to pay.
The next morning I am sitting in my office shed when my brother calls. I know he has driven many hours back from his holiday, with three kids in the car, and that he has probably not slept. I know that it is 5am where he is. I am so ready to absorb his many complaints about his circumstances that at first I don’t understand what he is telling me – that my father died earlier that morning.
“Oh no,” I say, finally.
My brother only just found out himself, and doesn’t know much more. My sisters, he says, are on their way to the hospital. He is about to join them. They will call me soon.
He worked until 81, and still enjoyed more than 20 years of retirement. Even at 102, he went for a walk at least once a day
I sit for a minute, listening to the birds, as alone as I have ever been. I am thinking about what to do next, but nothing presents itself. My wife is at the dentist having a crown fitted, and will not be in a position to answer her phone. I look at my computer screen; I am halfway through writing a column about the dog having a haircut. I draw a deep, shuddering breath, and finish it. When I am done, I book a flight to America for the following day.
In almost every conceivable respect, my father led a good, full and active life. He played ice hockey into his late 60s, tennis until his late 90s, and swam almost every day until he was 100. He worked until he was 81, and still managed to enjoy more than 20 years of retirement. Even at the age of 102, he went for a walk at least once a day.
When someone you love reaches the age of 102 you become accustomed to thinking that every time you see them could be the last time. But with each day that passes you also get more and more used to the idea that they’re going to live forever. That they will always be there, that they will always have more to teach you.
He was modest, and very fond of telling stories from his youth in which he figured as an abject cry-baby or a terrible moral coward. When I had children of my own I did the same thing, in direct imitation.
I can’t tell you all the things I learned from my father, over my life and his, but I can tell you a few: that you can always make people happy with a story told against yourself; that self-esteem is great, but possibly overrated; that character is not your reputation, but a thing you do every day; that your only real enemy is fear, unless it’s a fear of heights, which is really just a specific form of common sense. And that as you age, a little caution is no bad thing.
“I’m very careful on stairs,” he once told me. “Everyone I know died falling down the goddam stairs.”
RIP, Robert T Dowling, DDS: my father, my hero, my dentist.
