There is a theory in physics known as the “heat death of the universe” in which all life, everywhere, will end when the universe’s internal energy is depleted and it can no longer sustain motion or life. This, physicists say, is when the universe reaches “maximum entropy.” I wonder whether the universe sees it coming or is blindsided.
My father, a theoretical physics professor, is never questioned about his status as a genius, although perhaps “savant” is a more accurate term. He gets lost going to neighbors’ houses and even coming home, much like Einstein, and can definitely not drive and talk (or listen) at the same time. His lack of multitasking makes sense when you realize physics equations are always running through his brain. I mean, really, how many tasks can you concentrate on while doing theoretical physics? His driving scares the bejesus out of me, especially when he does things like come to a complete stop in the middle of a busy freeway, cars screeching and honking all around and my life doing the flashy dance before my eyes. But hey, I survive.
Probabilities are one of his specialties, which makes for rather bizarre games of Clue. He never wants to have the game end, never mind wanting to win, because then the answer to the equation about who did what where to whom is known and thus changes the math. His game sheets always have, not checkmarks, but complex equations next to the “variables” such as Miss Scarlet, rope, and conservatory. My desire to win at all costs and prove my “perfection,” however, cloud my ability to care about his scientific interests. Besides, he expects perfection of me, somehow, and I am always trying to be good enough to get him to notice me. A 4.0 and scholarships are expected, of course, but I cried when he still asked me whether I could have done better.
“No! I couldn’t! They don’t give grades better than that anymore, okay?” I bawled the words and then ran from his sight.
Part of my mind, heart, and soul lives in that moment, that realization that Dad may love me, but there really never will be enough for me to feel good enough to carry the last name. Still, he seems mostly harmless, and I know he loves me.
He’s a lot like Disney’s original Absent-Minded Professor, a guy fascinated by his work and often clueless about cultural norms. Dad loves that movie and doesn’t understand why those around the main character aren’t more supportive. He is, by all accounts, the stereotypically absent-minded theoretical physics professor. When teased about his absent-mindedness, Dad proudly states, “It’s not that my memory fails me, it’s that my “forgettery” is so incredibly effective.” He loves puns and retells his favorite homemade joke to anyone who will listen.
“What do you get when you drain the Mediterranean?”
Pause for effect.
“Why, the M, T, C!”
I roll my eyes and feel a need to apologize to the room for his reference to the Missionary Training Center as an “empty sea,” but everyone in Provo, Utah and general Mormondom knows that’s where new missionaries perfect their “door bonking” technique and sales pitch for the religion. Still, his delivery and the deviance from his usual formal speech patterns always makes me laugh.
Despite several years of a failed marriage, Dad’s mother—a woman more mother to me than my own—is still trying to dress him and educate him to follow expectations, but it isn’t in his nature to conform. He wears the expected suit, tie, and clean-shaven face mandatory of professors at the Mormon-run Brigham Young University (BYU), but all of that is buried under a fuzzy Russian hat and giant, poofy winter coat with overflowing pockets.
I found years of entertainment in long church meetings rummaging through his seemingly endless pockets. He was like the Mr. to Mary Poppins and what a role-playing gamer like myself refers to as Mary’s “bag of holding.” (Nothing beats gaming when you truly hate your life.)
Even Hermione would be impressed with the carrying capacity he seem to accomplish, all without access to magic—well, unless one counts a serious understanding of the laws of physics. His pants, shirt, suit coat, and overcoat totaled more than a dozen of pockets brimming with pens, of course, and never-ending collections of things like keys, toothbrushes, white-out, paper, scriptures, edibles, wallet, three pairs of glasses, and temple socks.
When he isn’t home, which he never seems to be anymore, I wonder whether he is helping brothers, sister, Grandma, students, or members of the church congregation? Is he assisting Guy with his PhD, Mark with his custody battle, giving tutoring sessions to students, running errands for Faith Anne, making a token (i.e. mandatory) appearance at Grandma’s, or working volunteer callings for the church. Does it matter? He isn’t home. All of my siblings get bits of his time, but getting a sighting of him in my world was equivalent to rare bird watching—all about hope.
“Who’s breaking into our house?” I ask Faith Anne when we hear someone scrambling at the lock.
“Oh, I think it’s that strange vagrant who comes here now and then. Let him in. Sometimes he brings us food,” she says jokingly of Dad’s increasing absence from the house and his extensive trips to warehouse stores. Her nickname for random tropical drinks he often buys is “Guava-Hava Googa-Java juice.” His shopping was usually random. I did the organized version. Well, when I could beg money out of him, anyway.
In walks an exhausted and scruffy version of our Dad wearing the worn and dingy gray coat with pockets bulging a foot away from him in every direction. Grandma keeps trying to make him throw it out, but comfort and familiarity always win over newness and style.
Even in those rare moments when Dad shows his face through the door, he always rushes into the bathroom and just stays there. Or sometimes he sits in the car for hours and falls asleep.
“My body is just getting old,” Dad says when I voice concern over his bathroom excesses. The body is always an empty, inconsequential vessel compared to the mind for this theoretical physicist, especially after watching his father succumb to a third stroke. Dad separated brain and body the way some people separate church and state, and it was pretty gutwrenching for all of us when Grandpa lost his mind.
It occurs to me that my father is not merely seeking a quiet place to think (not read, mind you, because that would be unsanitary). However, I brush it off until I can no longer sleep through the sound of his hacking cough at four AM. Warnings from so many magazine articles, books on alternative healing, and even public service announcements start drumming through my head.
“Go see a doctor,” I say in a low, concerned tone, my hypochondriatic tendencies heightened. The idea that a bad cough can indicate an impending heart attack has me in a panic, especially since I’ve been waiting—not so patiently—to finally have time with him. But I always fear the worst, so I brush it off as paranoia.
The next day, Faith Anne comes into my room, which is not quite set enough away from people for my taste, and yet I complain when forever left alone to suffer my own allergic reactions, Mononucleosis, and everything that a weakened immune system threw at me. She has the cordless phone in her hand and appears confused.
“There’s a voicemail from Dad. He says he is being admitted to the hospital but not to worry. What’s up with that?”
Dad is put on an IV due to severe dehydration and is immediately checked for colon cancer. He’s in fourth stage. It has spread to the liver, taken over his lungs, and he is near death—just like that! What about my time, my turn at his time and affection? How can I be thinking this is all about me? My poor dad. And no wife to be by his side. Is life really this fleeting? How horrible.
He only has a couple of students in his class, but my dad, the consummate professor, deals with grades and still lets his students come and learn all they can at his bedside before he’s gone. He immediately retires, only a day or two after the diagnosis, hoping to live another month and leave us the retirement money. He wants to spend his last days around family and imparting what knowledge of life and the universe (literally) that he can. Life is about knowledge, especially in relation to sharing it with others. Perhaps my health problems were just not something his knowledge could fix, while everyone else could use his wisdom.
Suddenly, there are family meetings, papers to be signed with an accountant, and goodbyes to be said.
Guy gives Dad a priesthood blessing for a full recovery and is so angry at all of us, especially Dad, for “planning his death.”
“I can’t believe all of you are wishing him dead! Where is your faith in Heavenly Father! In the priesthood! You are all causing of this, I hope you know! His death is on your hands! And you, Dad, I am disappointed in you. Don’t you care about those of us who still need you? Don’t you care about seeing your grandchildren grow up? Don’t you care about me? HOW DARE YOU ACCEPT DEATH WHEN HEAVENLY FATHER TOLD YOU OTHERWISE!” he screams at the top of his rather adequate lungs.
Guy yells when he thinks he’s whispering, so this is more of the house-shaking decibel level.
We obviously have no faith in God’s ability to heal if we are signing documents and planning Dad’s funeral, as far as Guy is concerned. When he screams at Dad—a common occurrence in normal life—it is so maddening considering Dad’s condition. We ban him from the house unless he can actually behave in a civil manner…or maybe I’m imagining that any of us thought Guy at all capable of civility.
Dad sits us all down around his bed and tells us that we should allow for Guy’s craziness.
“He truly believes what he says, and he is just highly aggravated by the situation.”
“But Dad,” I say, “you get so sick after he comes in screaming like that. We can’t let him keep not-so-slowly killing you.”
“It saddens me greatly that he cannot accept that God wants me to come home soon, and that I feel at peace with Him, but it causes me equal distress to see the conflict among you children. For my sake, let Guy come. I will try to keep him under control and ask him to leave if he cannot contain himself.”
“Dad,” I argue, “Guy doesn’t take no for an answer. You know how he will hit you and how he hits Grandma whenever either of you disagree with him.”
“That may be the case, but do this for me. Please. I will show leniency to his behavior for now due to how much he relies upon me, more so than any of the rest of you. He has lost his wife, nearly lost his children, and he believes the future of his education is dependent upon my help. I fear the most for him when I am gone. He truly has no one to turn to for help, unlike the rest of you.”
Dad has taught for so long and given so many formal presentations that he really does talk like that. He has playful moments with language, hence the puns, but formal language was my “home language.” Sometimes focusing on what is said is more emotionally difficult than focusing on syntax and grammar, sort of my nerdy coping mechanism, and I am in a great need of coping.
I latch onto Matthew, a guy I later learn is only 18, to try to hold onto something real in the world. Matt moves in with my sister and me to help nurse Dad in these last days. The doctors said he should drop dead any minute, but he has to pass the month mark to officially retire. He refuses medication and is in unbearable pain every day. He just wants a few more moments with his offspring before meeting God.
Guy alienates everyone with his intense behavior, and few people anywhere can have physics discussions on Dad’s level. (Stephen Hawking is a schmuck, in case you are wondering.) We all agree to try to be patient with Guy, but I keep thinking of his night in jail after the third time he beat Dad to the point of needing hospital care.
The nurse asked Dad, “Who is abusing you? They should really be arrested. Please let us help you.”
The idea that Guy (or any of us kids) deserves to have consequences or learn from mistakes is alien to Dad’s thinking. A parent’s role is to save his or her children from any distress—not teach them about cause and effect or discipline them. I have to wonder why, with this mindset, I was left to my own misery. Perhaps if I’d learned to squeak as loud as the rest of them . . . But I could see that being a single parent to immature adult children was a full-time job, as was a professor, and even a church and temple worker. That was triple-time, so something had to give, had to be forgotten or put off ‘till later.
Guy’s yelling at Dad continues, but having no consequences tends to mean nothing gets learned. Dad never understands the concept of negative consequences bringing positive learning, and he feels it is his duty instead to protect us from such things. This makes for a difficult transition for all of us into real life, being viewed by others as privileged snobs, and it gives us a sense of injustice and pain from life’s normal cause and effect.
Upon the cancer diagnosis, Dad stops shaving his sensitive skin permanently burned from the Scarlet Fever outbreak of his youth, finally free of the BYU grooming code he’s so long resented. I can only imagine a fever so hot that the skin starts to burn from the inside. He could have gotten a medical exception years earlier, but he shaved to keep his mother happy.
Grandma often says, “I always wonder what a man with a beard is hiding. I can’t trust such men.”
“Probably a baby face,” I reply. “It’s just hair, Grandma.”
I think beards are sexy on guys and that it’s ludicrous Dad had to shave to appease some Mormon standard—the look of Christ be damned, apparently.
He usually has stubble halfway through the morning, so it takes less than a week for a white, Grizzly Adams-quality beard to emerge on his face. His grandchildren don’t recognize this hairy man (well, hair grows on his face, anyway, but he’s mostly bald). They find him scary, although he has the same deep double-bass voice…but where is his plethora of pockets bulging with interesting objects? Who is this hairy, yellow-skinned man in bed?
“Where’s Grandpa?” they ask as they shy away from him, breaking everyone’s heart.
Always the chemist, thanks to his degree from MIT actually being in chemistry, he has us juicing and testing the pH of different foods to see what might not clog up his liver, now fully blocked and giving him the abdomen of a starving Ethiopian. It is so hard to watch, and the chemo makes his mind fuzzy—something completely unacceptable—and such toxins gave only the tiniest hope of prolonging his life.
“I want to die with my mind intact,” he had always said after watching his father’s intellect and ability to communicate leave him. Dad is, for the most part, a living, walking brain; take that away and there’s just a shell. He loves us to the best of his ability, and the rare moments I get with him I try to appreciate. I love his punny jokes, and love, to me, is bringing new exotic fruit for me to learn about and try. Love is teaching.
I have the strangest birthday, wanting only for Matt and I to eat decent food and get some actual sleep. Renting a hotel room specifically for this purpose was amusing. Two days later, Dad stops teaching from his hospital bed we have set up in the house. He says, “I just can’t do it today.” He then quickly starts falling in and out of a coma. Grandma hasn’t yet been told of his condition, now going on five weeks, because he knew how much she’d hover and drive him crazy, but Mark knows she needs to come—Now. She is shocked, horrified, and hurt. It shows in her face as numb knowledge that she’s too late to do anything but watch. Her son had been avoided her calls, yes, but that wasn’t so rare of an occurrence when in the middle of a project. Now he’s on his deathbed. She’s had no time to process like the rest of us, and now she is saying goodbye. She stays strong for us, always a trooper and caretaker, but she can barely stand.
I go to get groceries, foods with a better pH to help him, and to use up the money in the estate account before the government takes it all. I come home and head with my fruit towards his makeshift room we’ve created out of the add-on family room. I’m hopeful that I’ve finally found something he can eat, and I’m anxious to tell him about it. Sure, it is late, after 1:30 AM, but no one was keeping normal hours in that house anymore.
Mark has been trying to get my attention and grabs me as I start towards the sliding glass door. “Lorna Marie,” he says in his calmest tone. “He’s gone. Dad’s dead.”
It takes a second for me to grasp what he said. I look towards the glass and see what looks like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, the ring of white hair around a bald head, the body all yellowness and giant stiff jaw sticking out but with that Ethiopian belly. That image, I know, will forever haunt my dreams. It looks nothing at all like my dad.
At the funeral, a definite closed casket, my focus is on singing to pay homage to him properly. Faith Anne surprises everyone by stepping up and taking care of many of the preparations. When Grandma, my sister, a family friend, and Mark’s wife go shopping for Dad’s burial clothes, they bought a brand new temple suit—the one Dad had always been too busy to shop for and appease Grandma. Now she can buy one without him impeding the process. (How morbid.) There is some debate, however, as to whether white cotton or nylon socks will be better.
“Cotton is more comfortable,” says Willow.
“But nylon wears better,” says Faith Anne.
They look at each other, realizing that neither issue is an actual concern for our “late” father, a term we had only associated with his tendency to live in another time dimension whenever we tried making plans. Grandma believes in looks over comfort, something typical of her generation. I try not to think about how silly the idea of a new suit for a dead body is to me. Dad is gone. Life ends. No afterlife; no happy reunions in heaven. What they are doing is dressing up his carcass in the beauty pageant of the dead to make themselves feel better. It’s all just pageantry, and Dad would hate it.
But Grandma is happy knowing he is being buried in a shiny coffin in brand-new temple whites. This brings her some peace, and she is in great need of feeling useful for Dad at the moment. I sing “Wind Beneath My Wings” by Bette Midler. It’s that song with the lines, “Did you ever know that you’re my hero? Everything I wish I can be. I can fly higher than an eagle when you are the wind beneath my wings.” I may not have gotten much of his time, but he was still my hero.
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