By Mark David Blum, Esq.

Here’s a good question for all aYa’all. You have waited all of your life to make a statement to someone at a specific moment. After more than 30 years, that moment arrives. Dashing to your car, you head out and drive eight solid bladder busting hours to your destination. You have five minutes; tops, to speak your peace. What do you say?

If “you” are me and the moment is my father’s death; saying your peace is not as easy as it sounds. Unbeknownst to me, for about the last year or so, my father has been living about six hours drive from my home. A month ago, he went into respiratory arrest and was taken by paramedics and put on life support. He resumed breathing about two weeks ago but was told he needed a kidney transplant or dialysis. Turning both down, he was given two weeks to live. I found out via email that started out “FYI --- your father is dying --- here is his phone number. Love, your sister.”

I have waited more than thirty years for that news. Now in these last moments, it dawned on me that I may have but a few minutes to speak my peace. I chose not to see him before he dies and there was no possibility of resolution and no reason to bring any further pain to a dying man or his family. My sisters just left the hospital; having said their goodbyes. I am waiting for the funeral.

Because what I have to say is not going to be pleasant for anybody’s ears and intended only for my father’s and my own, I am going to need some privacy. At the most I figure I will five minutes or so before I will have to stop or someone else will be listening. What I say to his box, I would not be ashamed to say to his face and will do so when I see him in Hell.

It dawned on me the other day that a moment for which I waited so long and the time and energy necessary to get that message delivered; it would really suck if at the last and only moment to do so, I was without the words. Like any good and well trained trial lawyer, I play the scenario and change the program over and over inside my head. Weeding out the garbage, sorting through the relevance, and arranging the facts to make the point, I am immersed in self absorbed world of trying to justify why I am bothering to do any of this in the first place.

Amazingly, despite nearly thirty years of divorce, my mother asked me the same question. Actually she has not the courage to ask me, so she badgers my wife as to why I would take the time and spend the money to go the funeral of someone who despised me so and treated me so poorly. My mother should stand in front of a mirror the next time she makes such a statement.

It is a fair question: Why indeed would I go; there is neither benefit nor chance to heal what has been irreparably broken. The anger, frustration, loss, and emptiness all subsided long ago. Ambivalence and distant curiosity were the limits of my attitude toward him. I mourned and buried the image of a father long ago. His actual death only confirms my life long held self imposed status of being an orphan; notwithstanding my parents still being alive.

There are people in my life and who I have met over the years whose deaths will be far more devastating and for whom I will feel a far more fatherly loss than the death of my own blood. But with my father, goes my history. I will never learn of him, his life, or know anything about my roots beyond the rot that provided ample manure called my own life. It is a void that will never be filled. In his actual death, I get one last finger in the eye: My father took away from me the ability to have a Dad over whose death I can freely mourn. Instead, whenever sadness overwhelms me, it takes but a moment to re-experience a lifetime of intentional and deliberate pain inflicted by him. He is the only person to have ever sucker punched me in the face and got away with it. (Yet another reason I did not see him in his last hours as I may have been tempted to pull the plug and strangle him with it).

Right now, I am on a death watch. He is the first relative or someone with whom I have a personal relationship to have ever died. This is a first for me and my wife. Of course, there are many to follow and this may be a good training ground. Sitting around and jumping out of my skin when the phone rings is no life. Perched and ready to travel at lightspeed to a funeral home really can mess up your plans.

There are other, more serious ramifications of all this. First, there is the actuality of my own mortality. Like life itself; we never really ponder the time limits within which we may have left to enjoy breathing. My father was 20 years old when I was born. Believing as I do that genetics determines longevity and lifestyle only modifies that slightly; I can hear the clock starting its tick tock in the background. Twenty years I have left and every day after that is a blessing and every day less is a rip off.

Second, being the only and last surviving male in my family, unbelievably it falls upon me to assure the ascension and transition of my father’s soul. I am no fan, but if my atheistic paradigm and world view is wrong and there is indeed a God ... and I don’t say Kadish for my father, then he spends eternity in limbo. The same fate then awaits me. I would be destined to die alone with no one to say a single prayer for my soul. So I will get that job done; because I am the only one who can. It is still an unknown if anybody will say one for me.

Any moment the phone is going to ring or an email is going to arrive that will have me zooming down the highway. I will have those hours alone to rehearse my last words to him. I still am not convinced I should even thank him for giving me life. Whether that was a good decision is yet to be determined. I know I was a mistake, but Tijuana abortions were commonplace at the time.

My last words to my father may be nothing more than “goodbye”; but it will be the most heartfelt and meaningful goodbye ever said.

Goodbye Dad; its been a pleasure.