My father-in-law died today. On my way to the hospital on an
already dreary, rainy late-November day, fall's empty branches hung from
miserable trees, forlornly accepting their lot. Siri guided me through
unfamiliar back-roads but all I recall of the drive to the hospital is the
branches. It was as if all of the roadside trees had decided that this was
weeping-willow day, and had dressed the part.
I definitely would not be able to retrace the drive from
work to the hospital. Other then the trees my next memory was walking into bay
5 in the Newton-Wellesley emergency room where my wife, my sister-in-law and my
mother-in-law sat at the bedside of my father-in-law's lifeless body. We all
started to cry, and hug. There was nothing else to do, no more to be done.
He was a brilliant man. It would be easy to say this out of
respect but that is just a fact. He spoke many languages, traveled widely, read
profusely, and exercised regularly. He was a mathematician who got his PhD from
MIT, graduating with distinction and was best known for his work on "pseudo
differential operators and the heat equation approach to the Atiyah–Singer index
theorem". He wrote papers entitled: "Trace Expansions for the Zaremba
Problem", "Conic degeneration
of the Gauss-Bonnet operator" and "Contraction semigroups for
diffusion with drift". He was a brilliant man.
He was a New England Yankee, and in his case the stereotype
of the "pull-yourself-up-by-the-boot-straps, no complaint, stoic, maple
syrup and nature loving, wood carving, intellectual renaissance man" fit to
the proverbial T. In this sense, in his nature he was sensible but never overtly
demonstrative. A hug given was one most definitely deserved.
Over the past few years and more so in recent months, his
heart began to struggle with the burden of incessant beating. All the top minds
in cardiology worked to figure out why a man as fit as he, someone who had run
track at Haverford and who would be seen biking around the hills of Meredith
and Sanbornton in New Hampshire in his early 80s could be struggling so.
Neither pacemakers nor medications made an enduring dent. Earlier this month,
he was admitted to the Brigham and was diagnosed with cardiac amyloidosis which
we were told is a condition caused by deposits of abnormal proteins, known as
amyloid, in the heart, and that when this occurs, the heart becomes stiff,
unable to pump properly and thereby causing fluid build-up in the lungs, in
turn making breathing difficult.
The last time I saw him was Thanksgiving. He labored walking
up our front steps and he lay on the couch while waiting for dinner. Throughout his struggle, his mind never failed. He had a wonderful sense of humor and purpose. His moments were rarely wasted with frivolity and that night he saved his energy
to bemoan the current polarization of our country, sharing his fear that many progressive
aspirations would be undone after years of fighting for a more compassionate
country, one tolerant of many views and one capable of listening even when the
views were dissonant. He lived the peaceable principles of his Quaker faith.
At the end of dinner, when the effort of sitting at the table
surrounded by loving children and grandchildren was more than he could bear, my
in-laws decided that it was time to leave. As I walked him out, he looked at
me, put his arm around my shoulders and said "thank you". Then
for the first time in our 26 year relationship he planted a kiss, through
bearded lips, on my cheek. I could still feel the bristles,
when he said "good-bye."
When I arrived at the hospital, the grand old man lay
peacefully still, surrounded by those who loved him. It is one of life's truths
that there is no perfect thing to say in the face of such a loss. It is hard to
know exactly what to do or what to say. The best option is probably to be there
for those you love while they come to terms with the finality of everything
that will forever more endure as memories. It was on entering the room that I
noticed the irony in this most sacred of moments when a well-meaning attendant
came in and left an otherwise nondescript pamphlet entitled "What to do
when your loved one dies." It was the kind of pamphlet street vendors give
out when selling their wares at 20% off, or that supermarkets dispense with
recipes for cream of pumpkin soup. How the magnitude of a life could be diminished
to a check-list of "to-dos" further surrealized an already surreal
moment.
I came home early to meet my soon to be 13 year-old, and
knowing that he would be surprised that I was home, I told him of his grandpas passing. We sat together and cried for 10 or 15
minutes, and then he asked me "Dad I have often wondered what I would say
to someone that I loved when I knew that I might only have a little time to be
with them. You just never know when that will be." I held him and told him
I had no plans to leave him anytime soon, and then through his tears he
whispered, "I love you dad," and then through mine I hugged him even
harder.
R.I.P Bob, you lived each moment pure.
