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In 1984, at age 74, my father collapsed on the floor of a restaurant. Kate and I were there, and thought he was having a heart attack. The bartender called the medics, but Daddy refused to go to the hospital. "I'll be all right," he said. "Just take me home." He began popping nitroglycerine pills.A few months later, he had a stroke. "No fried foods and no cigarettes!" his doctor ordered. "This is serious." Daddy didn't listen.
"Oh, you know how your father is," said Maureen, my father's new wife, when I worried. "He doesn't like being told what to do."
A few months later he had another stroke. When I visited him in the hospital, he was sleeping and his mouth was open. He had only sparse gray hair around his temples now, and deep, puffy folds under his eyes. I tried to remember the man who had held such power over me as a child.
He never regained his health. After he got out of the hospital, Daddy asked to see Kate. We were stunned. Following a series of arguments, they hadn't seen or spoken to each other in five years.
"Maybe it's worth a shot," I told my sister. "He's not going to live much longer." At his apartment, he smiled and hugged her. They tried to make small talk. Finally, Kate asked to speak with him in private.
When they came out 20 minutes later, I saw tears in my father's eyes. "Come on, Mary," Kate said. "It's time to go."
She explained what had happened. Wanting to rid herself of the angry feelings that had festered in her for years, she finally confronted him. "We were your children, but you were selfish and cruel," she told him. "You caused so much pain in our lives and in Mom's life."
She said he bowed his head as tears filled his eyes. And then he looked up at her and said in a small, childlike voice, "I'm sorry."
That was the last time Kate ever saw him. She refused to visit him in his final days, saying she'd already buried him. By then, I had undergone several years of therapy in an effort to understand the unhappiness and loneliness I had felt for decades. Something inside me, maybe the same flicker of light that had guided my mother, made me think that life could be better.
I went to see my father a few days before he died. I held his hand.
He was cremated, and his ashes were scattered over the ocean, as he wished. There was no memorial service. He had no friends anymore.
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