COMMENTARY
Memories of Dad help ease the sorrow

By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer

It's Father's Day, and for the first time, I am awash in memories.

Dante Viotti with great-grandson Nate

This changed April 26, when my father died at home, family members around him. It's difficult to believe that he's gone, because he had lived so heartily for so long, and he tried to stay connected to us until very nearly the end.

The decline, because of prostate cancer that had spread to his bones, was swift. In the fall, he first noticed that the pain in his hip was growing worse, but it didn't stop him in December from celebrating the holidays with us, his great-grandson on his lap, his great-granddaughter on the way.

He continued his regular outings with friends — those Friday night "soirees" that had sustained him after the death of our mother three years earlier, those Tuesday-night meetings with the artists' group that, in widowerhood, had become his extended family.

The night after he began radiation treatments to control the pain, he went with them to the opera: "La Boheme," one of his all-time favorites.

But radiation took its toll, and then it really began. The change, the loss of power. Other hands reaching in to take over tasks he had handled with such vigor and pride all his life.

His children accepting the mantle of parenthood, caring for the one who had cared for them.

He didn't relinquish the mantle very willingly. The minute he got home from the hospital, after a transfusion had temporarily replenished his energy, he rose from the wheelchair and padded over to his tool chest and, with painful slowness, repaired the broken toilet in the bathroom. My brother watched, incredulous.

Or maybe it wasn't so hard to believe. "Daddy fix!" had been my brother's rallying cry when, as a child, he had been caught breaking something around the house.

My brother and sister-in-law, who had been visiting and handling the initial medical appointments, returned home to the Mainland. My sister and I took over his care; on leave from work, I managed things during the day; my sister would come right after work and stay over at night.

Stealing a slogan from the Peace Corps, it became the hardest job we'd ever love.

The hardest part was watching a man who had always handled his family's affairs give in to a gradual diminishment of his abilities. One day he could sign his legal documents, his checks; a week later, he could not. When the hearing aid needed repair, he struggled with shaking hands to fix it, at last agreeing to let the repair shop do the work instead.

Help came to us in the form of a study being done by Kaiser Permanente, a study aimed at examining how best to help families in the home care of their loved ones. He volunteered for the study, was lucky enough to be selected for the group receiving the most professional service, service including visits and phone consultation by doctors and nurses, help from social workers and physical therapists, respite nursing care.

But at first my father flatly refused the home health aide who would come to the house to bathe him and shave him. He insisted on adapting his surroundings so he could do it himself, setting up his shaver and toothbrush to be reachable from a seated position.

My sister and I let him do as much as he could, but it sometimes became so frustrating and difficult, given our steep learning curve. We cringed about taking over his personal care; we longed for help, even if he didn't.

Eventually, everyone relented; he accepted our care and that of the professionals; we got over our aversion to these invasions of his privacy.

There were dreadful moments to endure. Watching him fumble with the morphine pack, with its spaghetti tangle of tubes and wires, that dispensed the painkiller directly into his body. Having that "How is this going to end?" conversation and fending off his musings that he should end it himself, somehow.

But there were moments of stark beauty, too.

A hospice priest counseled us about the freedom that comes from letting go of control. My father thought quietly, then told me as I helped him back to bed that this realization had been a powerful assist, an emotional turning point. Each day, he told my sister later, had become a gift, not a burden.

One morning we went downstairs to sit in the sunlit garden, where I read a book and I guess he was watching me. "You look like a McBride," he said softly. That was my mother's family name. I took it as the highest compliment.

He continued to indulge his sense of humor, singing along with my husband to a particularly silly song we all loved. My brother called one day and told him that a mutual friend "sent his best." "His best what?" my father wanted to know.

On another day, my sister's eldest was sitting with him alone for a moment when suddenly Dad told his grandson, "I smell Fendi." That had been our mother's favorite perfume.

We began to feel that somehow he was becoming detached from this world of mundane sensory experiences, from the bedroom where the cable TV we had installed was reeling out another "Law and Order" rerun. That he was drifting toward another realm, a place of dreams, spirits, memories and a loved one's scent.

Finally, his compromised immune system gave out and his body exhibited signs that doctors and nurses read as the final decline. An infection sent his temperature soaring; the nurses worked with me, my sister and brother-in-law to keep him comfortable. We told him he was free to leave us, as the Kaiser team advised us to do.

He could no longer speak, but he could hear.

"Hey, Dad," I said in his ear, "is Mother there? Can you say hi for me?"

It comforts me now to imagine that she was, and that he did.

Weeks of grief and disbelief have followed and will continue beyond today, I'm sure. But having had the opportunity to return a little of the care he gave to us over the decades has illuminated our understanding of what the word "father" can mean. Today has become a time to reflect on that, and to let the memories, and those moments of stark beauty, wash over me and ease a sorrowing heart.

In memory of her father, Dante Viotti, Advertiser staff writer Vicki Viotti would like to wish every dad and his children a Happy Father's Day.