EPTMy father had been in the hospital for a few days with some unexplainable weakness and back pain. He was also acting very erratic and his behavior just kept getting more and more bizarre.
She told me that the doctor told her that he had cancer in every part of his body: brain, bones, lungs, absolutely everywhere and that he only had a few days to live.
This was around midnight. I got dressed and we went to go see him at the hospital. He didn't look good. I called my sister and brother. They arrived at around four in the morning. My father died at 6 in the morning. He was one week away from seventy two. He was fifty when I was born. I'm almost twenty three.
He's been old since I've known him, but it never crossed my mind that I would lose him while I was still young. He was big and strong and he took care of everything for us.
He was born in 1939 to a German/Austrian family and they fled to Suriname in South America during the war. That's where I was born. He married my mother who was born in Suriname to a German immigrant family. He was lucky enough to meet a few other Germans and they created their own landscaping and construction business. That's how he supported us. He never went to school. He could barely read or write.
Basically, he only knew how to achieve things with his hands. That was something he always tried to teach me and I was very opposed to him about that. We were from completely different worlds. He was raising me in early 1990s American suburbia. His values really didn't have any relevance from my perspective.
But even though we didn't see eye to eye and I sort of hated him, I would never deny the fact that he was willing to fight anyone for his family.
My earliest memory of my father is when he took me to the barbershop for my first haircut. I was maybe four or five years old. I ran ahead of him because I was so excited to get my hair cut. When I got the barber's door, there was a man standing next to it who was clearly drunk out of his brain. I was too young to realize it at the time.
But he kept trying to offer me a baseball card and I kept saying I didn't want it. Since he was drunk, he got angry and started swearing at me. And then out of nowhere, I just see my father punch him in the throat. It was like a freeze frame when I saw the spit fly from the guy's mouth as my dad knocked the wind out of him.
He just fell to the ground and we walked inside. That's the kind of person he was. That was the only way he knew how to solve problems.
I remember another time when I was a teenager, maybe thirteen or fourteen. My dad's health had gone downhill around that time. Years and years of alcoholism and chain smoking had finally caught up to him. He was on a portable oxygen machine and he had to sleep with a special mask to make sure he didn't stop breathing in his sleep.
One night, our neighbors knocked on our door and my mom answered. I don't even remember what they were fighting over. But the husband and wife had my mom cornered. I was watching from the front door. My dad was asleep with his oxygen mask on.
It looked like the wife got so frustrated that she was about to wind up to hit my mother. I remember that moment, too. That moment when I thought I was going to have to step in. I was scared.
Once again, out of nowhere, my father runs past me. He had somehow woken up and took his oxygen off and figured out what was happening. He grabbed the woman by the back of her hair and threw her off of our porch. Her husband rushed my dad, but he turned around in time and grabbed the front of his shirt and punched him in the teeth.
My mom and me went back inside. They called the police. I watched the officer talk to my dad. He was a young officer. They were a relatively young couple. And my dad was so old. It just didn't matter to him.
I thought he was crazy. A complete psycho. That's what I thought of him when I was growing up. But the older I got, the more I understood him. He was taking care of us the only way he knew how. He had no education. He wasn't skilled at anything. He wasn't well-read, he was actually barely literate. He fought for everything he ever had and nothing scared him.
Dying didn't scare him, either. I remember holding his hand after he passed out. I felt his pulse drop slowly. I watched him take his last breath. I was with him the entire time. The cancer was smothering his brain and he wasn't making much sense, but he whispered to me and said "This is sunshine. I love you. I want to die."
And that was my dad.
I love him and I miss him.
