One. More. Conversation.

 

At one point in time, we all want it. Maybe when we get kids of our own. Maybe as we get older. I know I have. We wish for something. Just One. More. Conversation. With somebody no longer around.

For me, it’s my Dad. He died in 1997 a week after he turned 84. I can tell you that he lived a lot longer than he should have.

At 45, he had his first heart attack. Back then, cardiac science consisted of blood thinners. Period. That’s it. I can remember going with him to UT Hospital on a regular basis to get his blood checked.  I don’t recall how often he went, but that visit determined the level of Coumadin that he took.

He returned to work in the factory where he had been, but then, at 55, he had another heart attack. This time, he was forced into retirement. That was when he learned of the other part of cardiac care—a sedentary lifestyle.

And when I say “sedentary lifestyle,” I mean he was not allowed to do anything. No exercise. No lifting. No hunting or fishing. Nothing.

His garden—I took care of that.  His bees—I did all the work, he just supervised. We didn’t have a clothes dryer back then and he was forbidden from even hanging clothes on the clothesline that we used to dry our clothes. I did that while my Mom worked.  Such was cardiac science back then.

My Dad was an uneducated man. He dropped out of school in the 6^th grade after his own father died, and went to work in a factory in his small hometown. During the Depression, the factory closed so he moved to Knoxville and lived in one room in the basement of an old building and worked wherever he could find work, sending money back home to his mom and sisters.

I realized in more recent years that my Dad was likely illiterate.  I don’t recall ever seeing him read and his signature was crude and simple. Yet, he was a really smart man. He could fix anything. He built a motorized ice cream freezer, when hand cranked was how everyone else did it back then.

When I was 10 and dying for a go-cart, he built me one out of parts and wood that he had around his garage. It was crude but I remember proudly driving it in the 4^th of July parade.

When I was in high school and playing football, he could never attend. His cardiologist forbade it. Too much excitement. He would sit at home, listening to my games on the radio.

As a college senior, I received an award that I was ready to blow off. I just wanted to graduate and get on to physical therapy school in Memphis. A wise professor told me that not only would I be there, but my parents were to be there as well.

At the awards ceremony, I nonchalantly went to the stage to receive this award, thinking at the time that it was no big deal. But when I turned to return to my seat, I saw my Dad. This little, simple man, who had known nothing but hard labor and hardship his whole life, sobbing where he sat.

I realized what that award and that college degree meant to my Dad.  All his dreams wrapped up in me. All that he could not accomplish, I could accomplish. All that he might have hoped to become, I became.

He lived long enough for my own kids to know their “Pops,” but he didn’t get to see them become a doctor and a lawyer and parents. He wasn’t around to meet my own grandkids. I wish he had. He didn’t live to see me become Dr. Black. He would have been so proud.

I do wish I had one more conversation with him. I know exactly what I would ask him. Dad, how did I do?