Dad, A Corpse at Last

Or Having King Lear for a Father

By Barbara Groark

Ten days before he died in October 1996 at age sixty-nine, I visited my father in the local hospital’s Critical Care area, where a bank of beds with no doors and no screening walls faced a central nurses’ station, an arrangement that gave an impression of a theatre-in-the-round, except that the several stages surrounded the central audience instead of the audience surrounding the central stage. As I approached my father’s section, the tableau before me showed him playing dead under the bright light, the white, wavy-haired head the only body part uncovered on the gurney’s right and six feet of white sheet over his 260 pounds, peaking at his feet to the left. Amused, I, his oldest of six, unmarried and in my forties, approached and whispered hello to two women seated behind and at the foot of the gurney; they were his mistress Barbara and my cousin Blanche. Then turning and folding arms across my chest, I faced out under the light, as if on stage myself, to observe the patient. A doctor passing glanced in and laughed, surprised to recognize something, but I could not tell what, and he kept moving on to whatever errand he was on.

Dad then “startled” awake, saw me there, chatted about the little stroke, how it was not a severe case, how he was doing, how he just needed time in the rehabilitation facility. The rest of the conversation with him and the ladies related how Barb had been worried, on his return from visiting my sister and her family in Atlanta, to be awakened one night to find Dad bawling his eyes out as he sat on the edge of the bed. The next day he had had the mild stroke. Did I know what had happened in Atlanta? Did some extreme stress bring about this condition? I only knew what everyone knew, that my five-year-old nephew had been in a coma for a week following a car accident. The boy was now awake and would likely make steady progress to recovery. We had all dramatically taken turns visiting Georgia from New Jersey to see that branch of the family and visit our nephew in the hospital, probably because my sister and her husband had already lost a girl at age seven in another car accident five years earlier. We had been requested to come if we could and join in prayers and be a physical presence. I had only returned from Atlanta myself in the previous two weeks.

Nothing more was discovered in conversation, and I left the hospital within an hour.
His doctors had Dad moved to the cardio rehab building on the same medical campus in the following few days. I visited him there but felt I was not especially welcome. Dad was alone in the semi-private room and had no other visitors while I was there, but it was an Eagles football Sunday, and conversation distracted him from following the game on television. My habit from the recent decade had been to take all opportunities for reconciliation with him – lunches in nearby restaurants once a month that always felt like formal diplomatic missions – to try to develop an authentic relationship. However, this afternoon I started feeling overly dutiful and soon left. He shrugged as I kissed him on his cheek.

But one morning a few days later he actually did die. The phone call from his mistress came at about 6 a.m. requesting I meet her and my (local) sister Carolyn at her condominium and all go to the rehab center, where we would meet my Uncle Tom, Dad’s brother, Blanche’s father. I agreed and hung up the phone.

Pausing to allow whatever emotions would come to come through truthfully, I was puzzled and surprised to find something amused. Most of the real grieving over Dad and his double life (no other children) among my sisters and mother had occurred years earlier and in fact may have been entirely spent. I had figured on twenty more years of politeness due to this slightly demented relative we knew, but now we were relieved of that burden and I was thankful. And amused.

I’d seen this phenomenon at the funeral of a lifelong alcoholic. That man had lived into his late seventies. His son at his funeral could not stop smiling, even when he was not speaking to anyone, through the funeral, burial, and lunch reception. His grin had nothing to do with any expected inheritance, since that would be modest. But the man’s life had been a long haul for everyone he knew, and now the strain was over.

This is how I felt. I got myself ready slowly and was a little late getting to our meeting at the rehab center. However, I can be polite as hell and wore a sober expression as I entered the room where my father had died.

He looked serene, having died in his sleep. A nurse coming in to wake him with some medication had found him gone. A doctor had suggested an autopsy since the death was unexpected, but Barb had said no to that.

Another nurse was now preparing the body for transport to the funeral home. She was platinum blonde with a strand coming down over one eyebrow, tall, buxom in white with a small waist and good legs, the kind Dad would have ogled in life. Her hands, efficient, unembarrassed, moved over his large corpse, respectful of him and of us, his daughters and his brother and his mistress. I was thankful to this nurse too, since in the old days this was women’s work, and we daughters would have had her job to do. My father was, I bet, surprised as we at his death. I saw that he slept as I did, with one knee bent.

My tone dismays people who have affection for their fathers, and whose fathers, astonishingly to me, have sincere affection for them. Though I work on envy, I am glad to see their example, their possibility, and I apologize for dismaying them with my tone. They should live long in good health and continue their line and spread like seeds their body of knowledge on how to do things the right way, and the reasons why. I hope this story only confirms them in their choices, and I hope it is some medicine for people whose fathers are more like mine.

Our high school yearbooks have little mottos under our names, phrases that supposedly describe our individual selves. Mine said “Constant in spirit and free of anger.” I always wondered who came up with that one. I knew it was inaccurate then. I lived till age 28 (the year of the Big Reveal about my father) feeling as if I had been insulted but I didn’t know why.

And as for the turmoil of the 1960s and -70s, some percentage of it I believe benefited me. That is, it was a in a way good for my mental health to be breaking a few rules so as not to fall into any inherited hypocrisy or primness regarding conventional wisdom. [What did she say?]

Shakespeare’s King Lear had three daughters: Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. I’d like to think I’m more like Cordelia, the nice one, but I probably have a pretty good percentage (like two-thirds) of Goneril and Regan. Lear opens the play asking the daughters “Who loves me best?” and Goneril and Regan flatter their father with what he wants to hear, whereas Cordelia says she loves him, but only to the degree appropriate for a father and daughter, and that begins the action of the play, since she is then banished from the court. It seems to be a day the daughters were trying to decide what to do with Dad in his old age; he probably had been behaving irrationally for a long time. Lear seems to throw off all their plans by his vanity. By the end of the play, Goneril and Regan end up gouging some poor old fool’s eyes out, but of course they get the wrong guy, someone innocent of the charges against him (like some feminists I know). Cordelia ends up dead too, an arranged “suicide” the way I read it.

I better start identifying with one of the comedies. My family experience does give me a taste for tragedy, especially the old tragic plays, which I don’t find depressing as some people do but more of a commiseration. Give me some Shakespeare or Eugene O’Neill on a summer day and I’m happy. Or Beckett. Or Law and Order reruns.

But enough about all that. It’s been 12 years since my father died, and my anger is pretty much spent by now. I can tell because I am able to write this, rather than metaphorically taking a knife and repeatedly stabbing a pile of paper, which is what I had been doing off and on for thirty years whenever I attempted to express myself on this subject.

So thank you, class, for allowing the therapy. And by the way, I’m still unmarried. Any takers out there?

It’s all good, right?