Excerpt: Watching Him Go

From 7 Days:

The hardest thing about my father's death wasn't getting up every day. It wasn't going to work, it wasn't eating, it wasn't holding myself together.

The hardest thing about my father's death was watching it happen. Knowing there was nothing I could do. Seeing him lie in his hospital bed, praying for it to either be over or to be healed, and hoping God made a decision quickly.

Since my childhood home, I’ve not lived in one place for more than three years. And at some point it became no longer appropriate to ask friends to help me move in exchange for pizza and beer. I've reached the point where moving time requires hiring movers. But the days when movers were not necessary and it was easy to find a few friends to help with the heavy stuff, it was also easy to find my father helping with the heavy stuff.

My father was one of the strongest men I’d known in real life. He wasn't a body builder. He didn't lift weights. He wasn't bulky with giant pecks or bulging biceps. But he was strong. I remember seeing my father could carry a solid oak door from his truck on the street to the front of a house like it was a tin can on his shoulder. Day in and day out he carried Skilsaws and grinders and sanders and paint cans and tool belts and 2x4's and 4x4's and miter saws and table saws and toolboxes full of nails and screwdrivers and screws and wrenches and hammers.

These are things that, done once or twice or even for a week at a time, seem like not a big deal. My father did this every day, save some Sundays along the way. For thirty years.

And then his body started to give out. His knees went first. If knee surgery didn't take weeks to recover from, he might have had it. But he didn't. He just waited to feel good enough to start working again and went back about his business. His back got tight. His joints became the antithesis of free swaying. And still, my father went on with his days, knowing that these were just the signs of growing older.

I could handle the graying hair, the weakened knees, the fact that he could no longer pick up solid oak doors and haul them around like tin cans. All that seemed to happen gradually. But seeing him lie in his hospital bed, unable to get up without pushing the button that raised his head for him was all too abrupt.

My father went from aging like a 55-year-old to aging like an 87-year-old in the span of two months.