Father’s Day

“Be comforted, good madam. The great rage,

You see, is killed in him. And yet it is danger

To make him even o’er the time he has lost.”

–William Shakespeare, King Lear

1.

On Thursday, May 3, 2018, at about half-past six in the evening, I found my father dead on the back patio. He was eighty-nine years old.

He had planted two tomato seedlings, and he left the long handled weeder-hoe on the earth near them. On his way back to the house, he lost his footing and fell head first into the concrete.

He had fallen many times during the past several years. Usually I was able to get him braced against something—a chair, a wall—while I levered him up. Twice, I had called paramedics for help. Doing the same repetitive movements, out in the vineyard and at work on his other tasks, had made him stiff as a block of wood. He couldn’t open his palms flat, or reach his arms up over his head. Exercise was for lazy people who didn’t work the way he did.

This time he was lying with his wide-brimmed straw hat under his face, in a pool of blood. His walking stick was under one arm, and beside him, the bit of carpet he used to sit on the low retaining wall that held the vegetable garden.

I put my hand on his shoulder and cried to him, but I knew he was gone. I phoned 911, and called the people next door, who came running, together with other neighbours. Two of them knew CPR well, and they tried to bring him back.

A couple of years earlier, before my mother’s final illness, I was seeing a therapist. I told him I hoped to God my mom wouldn’t die first, because I didn’t want to be left alone with Dad. But that was what happened.

My parents died at opposite ends of the house; she in the bedroom she had furnished, and my father in the back yard where he had spent so much of his time.

My mother’s decline had been rapid after her cancer came back. She died before Christmas 2015, but I had begun mourning her weeks before her physical death. My father—I couldn’t believe he would ever die.

It had become too dangerous to leave his dinner in the refrigerator with a microwave cover on the plate, as he couldn’t safely carry the hot plate to the table. I could still leave his crustless toasted sandwich on the table under light plastic wrap, when I left for church choir on Sunday mornings. His dark green mug, with a bit of cream in it, was positioned under the coffee machine, so that he could press the On button and make his own coffee.

There was cold water in several plastic cups with lids and straws, set at the table and next to his recliner chair in the living room.

He could still change his Depends and put the soiled ones into a garbage bag each day. He could wash himself. When he was no longer able to do these things, I knew it would be time for me to give up trying to care for him alone.

When I came into the house from the garage after returning from choir rehearsal on Thursday nights, I would turn on the light in the hallway, so he wouldn’t be startled on hearing my voice in the dark as he sat watching the news on TV. Supper was at 9:30 pm. He waited for me to come home to eat with him, then he went to bed.

He went out to work his grapes and garden, and spent most of the rest of the day watching TV. He could no longer follow movies well, or understand the details of the newscast. His favourite programs were cooking competitions on the Food Channel.

That morning at late breakfast, he asked if I could make two servings of semolina pudding for him daily, instead of just one. He thought it would help alleviate his chronic constipation.

He’d had a shower a day or two before. When he stepped out of the shower, there was a grab pole with soft padded shelf liner I’d duct-taped around it, to keep his wet hands from slipping on the pole as he steadied himself.

I had clipped his hair and tidied his head. I washed his feet. I tried to give tooth medicine for his sore tooth with a cotton swab, and dropped the cotton swab. It was lost somewhere in the joints of the recliner chair my mother had bought for him. He swore, and I swore.

I had checked my email before I went to take my shower. There was one from my little brother, saying that he was on the road. His holiday had started, and he was arriving early. I told my father that his youngest son might arrive soon. He said, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” He often said things like that.

He insisted on going downstairs and out into the back yard to plant some tomato seedlings. I told him it was too early, the weather wasn’t warm enough. The seedlings would die. “I don’t care if they die,” he said. I reminded him that there was one hour before I needed to leave for choir rehearsal. He said, “All right, don’t preach me a sermon.” He used the walker he had inherited from my mother to walk himself to the top of the stairs. The carpet had scuff marks where he would put his feet as he descended, gripping the banister with his right hand, his left hand on the railing my little brother had installed so that he could make it up and down.

I was feeling more than a little fed up with him.

While I was having my shower, I kept repeating, “Thanks Dad,” to calm myself, to not be angry, to remember the good things he had done for me in spite of himself.

When I finished my shower it was almost half past six. By this time he would be back upstairs, sitting in his recliner chair. I needed to get him settled, so I wouldn’t be late to choir rehearsal.

He would cry a bit when my little brother arrived. That would be a nice surprise for him, and a diversion for me, as the heavy and oppressive atmosphere of the house would be lifted somewhat.

When I went downstairs, the back door was ajar. Through the window I saw him lying face down on the concrete, in front of the white plastic table with his tools spread on it. There were the clippers I had modified with two pieces of white PVC tubing, to make long handles so he wouldn’t have to bend over or reach up high to use them. There were old tools I remembered from my childhood. There was the battered old tote bag with the big roll of twine that had lasted for years, until he used it up not long ago, tying the grapevines for the last time. The hooked twine cutter blade he held on one finger, like a ring. Once when I was helping him tie the vines, he tried to make me use it instead of scissors to cut the twine, and my hand hurt for days afterwards. I understood why his hands were like claws and he couldn’t open them any more.

There was the grey plastic chair where he used to sit, looking at the grapevines in their rows. The tomatoes, yellow banana peppers and squash were crowded together along one side of the yard, in soil held in place by a low retaining wall. He sat out there together with my mother, before it became too difficult for her to go downstairs.

2.

My dad was born in a village in western Hungary. His father was an alcoholic, traumatized by his experiences in the first world war. His father’s ‘friends’ would get him drunk in the local tavern, and persuade him to sell off pieces of his land for a pittance.

My father’s mother was hard, wiry and set on survival, and raised the children herself even before her husband died in 1944.

She would set a pot of milk soup on the table, and tell the children that that was what they had to eat for the day. There was a weekly ration of bread, and my father was beaten for taking more than his share.

His mother would pick up her hoe and go out to cultivate the bit of land they had, and the neighbours’ land, for a little money. Some of it would have been the same land her husband had lost in the tavern. She would show up at the school with a broomstick, intimidate the teacher, and beat my father out of the classroom, because he was not supposed to waste his time in school when he could be helping her to earn some money.

She raised a pig, and when it was time to take it to market, she rode into town on a cart together with my father and the pig. She bought some pork crackling and shared it with him, and he thought that was the greatest thing in the world.

She was the only grandparent I ever met, in 1975, and I found her terrifying. She had one tooth in the front of her mouth. She spoke to me about the hardships of her life, and how she had fought to keep the little bit of land I could see from her bedroom window. Her family was also afraid of her, and tried to keep her appeased and comfortable. My father bought her a lounge chair so she could sit outside, and all kinds of other presents, before saying goodbye to her for the last time.

My father was angry during that trip in 1975. He couldn’t cope with his family, or with his pain. His family was a burden and a nuisance. One day we ate in a basement restaurant in Budapest, and as we were leaving I looked back down the stairwell. At the bottom of the stairs, an old man was seated at one of the tables. He had just finished his meal and was unable to pay his bill. The waiter was telling him that he would not be allowed to get away with this again. It is one of the saddest things I have ever seen.

When he was fourteen, my father was apprenticed to a blacksmith. His mother said she would no longer provide him with food, as he was now working and his employer should feed him. He ate woody pears that had fallen from a tree. He slept in a dark, scary old mill.

His older sister would bring him boiled eggs. Once he broke one open and there was a half-formed chicken inside. Near the end, when I was caring for him, he asked me not to give him boiled eggs because of the memory.

When he was fifteen, he was forced into the army, like many other young boys. He was captured in Germany by the American 45^th army on April 30, 1945, the day after the liberation of Dachau. It was one of the happiest days of his life.

After the war, he worked for a while for a man in Germany, then he returned to Hungary.

Food was scarce and people had to stand in line for their rations. One day he stepped out of line while waiting for bread, and someone hit him in the upper arm. For the rest of his life, he would periodically wince and gasp when he felt the pain.

Around the time he met my mother, he had a mental breakdown, and spent some time under psychiatric care. He rejected my mother’s son from her previous marriage, and the child was left to be raised by her sister. When his own son was born, he found the crying intolerable. He kept shouting at her to make the baby shut up, and one day it obligingly died on the couch in their home.

In October 1956, he was working at the Ibusz bus factory in Budapest, which manufactured buses for countries in eastern Europe and beyond. At the time of the uprising against the Soviet occupation, he was a member of one of the workers’ councils, which were worker-run groupings outside of the officially sanctioned trade unions. When the attempted revolution was defeated, my father was among those whose lives were in danger. He fled the country, and my mother, holding a new baby, followed him to Canada. The train bearing their cohort of refugees arrived in Regina, Saskatchewan, where they received an official welcome from Tommy Douglas, the premier of that province. My mother remembered the impression Douglas made on them, like a little bantam rooster speaking through a translator. My parents instinctively understood that the socialism Douglas represented was a kind they could believe in. Still, their experiences were exploited as Cold War propaganda.

They couldn’t speak a word of English, and it was a long time before they were able to use the language with any kind of facility.

Xenophobia was rampant. We were called all kinds of names. My father was mercilessly bullied at his job, which he once told us had driven him near to getting a gun and killing his family and himself. He changed his mind and we survived.

Later, he started an auto body repair business with a partner.

In 2010 I went with him to Hungary. It was his last visit to the country of his birth. He was 81.

We arrived a few weeks after his older brother had died. My father’s sole surviving sibling, my aunt Mariska, made potato pancakes for us. They reminisced about their mother and the milk soup.

As he drove the rental car, he pointed things out to me. Here was a village that had been so remote, it was cut off from the rest of the world. Now it was just off the highway. Here was a brick shed his mother had built, now on land owned by someone else. Here was the old house into which they had packed all the Jews before they took them to Auschwitz in 1944. They were dying of thirst, and my father was one of those who secretly brought them water and handed it in through a window.

I hadn’t driven a car for years. I kept a vigilant eye on the traffic, told him when to pass into the other lane, and where to turn a corner. He was all right on the highway, but he had difficulty negotiating traffic signals, driveways and parking lots in the cities.

Walking was more problematic than driving. He would have been hit by a car more than once if I had not restrained him from crossing the street on a red light. He was wearing the wrong shoes, and had a painful corn on one of his toes. One day in Budapest, he was walking slowly and painfully across the street from the big public market, the Vásárcsarnok. The light had changed, and a young male driver, impatient with the old man’s slowness, snarled at him to get out of the way already. I wondered what he would have thought if he could have seen my dad in 1956.

My father and mother had become friends again, after having been separated for nearly two decades. They would sit together on the back upper deck of the house, and they called each other Mami and Papa.

Most of my father’s wealth and property, including a substantial vineyard, was lost during his second marriage. The divorce from his second wife was finally settled two months before my mother died. She had enjoyed helping with the mountains of paperwork: lists of numbers, costs and inventories. My father was tired of lawyers and litigation, and no longer had any desire to follow the process, or deal with the bills. When it all ended, my mother was visibly happy; I knew she felt she had been vindicated.

One night they drove out into a blizzard to have dinner with two of my brothers. A couple of hours later, he called me from a cell phone lent to him by a young couple who had been parked at the lookout, some distance away from the house. He had left my mother with my brothers at the casino, and on the return drive he lost the way and slammed his van into a concrete barrier. When I arrived there in a taxi, the air bag was deflated inside the cab of the van, and he was in a state of shock. That was the last time he drove.

After he was cremated, my older brother tried to seize his ashes at the funeral home. They were taken to his lawyer’s office.

3.

In Canada in the 1950s and 60s, if you wanted to drink alcohol anywhere but at home (or in a licensed restaurant), you went to the beer parlour, This was a bare-bones establishment, designed to make patrons feel what they were doing was slightly furtive and disreputable. My parents did go to one in Saskatoon, and at home we had some of the beer glasses for ladies, big enough to hold a few ounces poured from the men’s bottles.

My father made wine, both white and red. He ordered California grape juice from a dealer, as did other home winemakers. Later, he had his own vineyard.

When he jingled the change in his pocket, I would always ask for deer money. Deer money (quarters) was worth more than boat money (dimes), and definitely more than mouse money (the beaver on the nickel).

My father brought home a box of BC Apples at Christmas. Each apple was individually wrapped in green paper and nestled in its own little hollow of cardboard. They smelled like heaven.

Riding in the back seat of the family car, I would gaze at the oceans of wheat. They blew in waves, and I thought I could drown in them. In winter we played outside in the extreme cold, and made snow forts with multiple rooms connected by tunnels. There was flooding in the spring, and a brief, intensely hot summer.

When I was eight, we moved to Kelowna, British Columbia. As we drove through the mountains of the Rockies, I was afraid they would fall down on me. We stopped at an orchard and my father picked a sweet apple straight off a tree.

My father was one of the Hungarians who clandestinely imported paprika seeds through the mail from relatives, and so the yellow banana peppers, sweet and hot, began to be cultivated in the Okanagan.

My mother went to Hungary with my little brother in 1973. I didn’t know she had told my father she might not come back. He put a passport-sized photograph of her on the pillow beside him on his bed.

Her first husband committed suicide. My half brother, my mother’s son from her first marriage, the one my father had rejected, died in an apparent drunken brawl in 1996.

While my mother was away in 1973, I tried to cook for him, but I couldn’t do anything right. I was supposed to cook and clean the house, but I was no good at it, in spite of the fact that I was already thirteen. He would eat a little of what I made, and throw his napkin into what was left on the plate. Once I was having a shower, and he needed to come into the bathroom to get something. “Oh,” he said. “A nude girl.” I was often reminded that I was female.

He would talk about the dumb girls at the bank, who didn’t understand anything about his business. “Dumb woman,” he would say, and look at me for my reaction. I was supposed to accept that it was a joke, and that it was meant to hurt, and that I was supposed to accept the pain.

I believed that what he and my mother had experienced was so awful, anything they did to me in comparison was nothing. I couldn’t take it, so I was nothing.

Dad’s fists raining down on me. He would demand that I take off my glasses so that he could discipline me properly. When I no longer obeyed his demand, they would fly off my face, and the lenses dropped out of the bent frames. I would end up cowering in the corner, covering my face, the blows coming down on my arms. His rage like he was tearing himself apart. I always had three crops of bruises on my arms: the fresh ones, the ones that were very colourful, and the ones that were halfway healed.

Dragging me down the stairs by one leg. Because I was hiding in my room reading a book, instead of sitting with them in the living room watching TV.

I would be standing or sitting, and there would be a sudden heavy blow on my back, sending me flying. He would lull me by speaking gently, telling he wouldn’t hurt me, until I got close enough, then the slap on the face or another part of my body. When I said, “Please stop,” it was like a red rag to a bull. He would beat me harder, yelling, “What is please? What do you mean please? Tell me what please means.”

Once I locked myself in the bathroom to get away from him, and he kicked a hole in the door. I opened it and he pulled me out for a beating. The hole stayed in the door for years.

After the Hungarian Society Mother’s Day celebration, where I didn’t know how to dress or speak. He and my mother tossing me back and forth between them, as they alternately berated me and each other, shouting “What is wrong with her? What is wrong with you? Why don’t you know how to raise her?”

My father threw the library book I had been reading against the wall, so that the spine broke. “This one cares about nothing but the stinking books! What is in books?”

I wouldn’t stand up straight, so he jerked me upright and pointed at my breasts.“What’s wrong with these? Why don’t you stand up straight? They’re nothing to be ashamed of! Your time has come and you still don’t know how to be a woman!” I had begun menstruating. Neither of them knew what to do with me. Females didn’t have rights. Their rights were between their legs. I couldn’t understand that. I was defective. I had no friends, and it wasn’t their job to find me any. By the time I reached the age of fourteen, it had become apparent that I was going to be an embarrassment.

At the dinner table, he would yell about how worthless we all were, with variations based on our apparent merit or value. I was lazy, so he didn’t understand why I was allowed to eat. I kept on eating. I could never eat enough. I would steal food even though I had already eaten too much.

I am supposed to learn how to work in an office, at my father’s auto body repair shop. “Soft core” porn covered the walls. I couldn’t talk to the men. I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do. By this time I was completely lost in a fantasy world. I cannot envision a future. I stop doing my homework.

He wanted me to work in the vineyard with my shirt off, because that was what the men liked to see. I was no good at working for him or for anyone else.

During the years that I was taking care of him, he sometimes still threatened to hit me.

4.

My father was lying dead on the back patio, covered with a hospital blanket the paramedic had draped over him. My little brother had arrived. The neighbours brought wine, and we sat there, next to my father’s body, drinking wine and talking about him, while we waited for the coroner’s van.

During the last years, when he was no longer physically able to do it, I had taken over making the wine from the dozens of vines of Gewürtztraminer.

He was afraid of dying. He cried about the crematorium that awaited him. He said, “The music is over.” He had become, in many ways, very childlike.

After all the years in Canada, both my parents would still lower their voices at times, when they were talking about things they didn’t want the neighbours, who might be spies for the authorities, to hear. It was a habit so deeply embedded that they never completely lost it.

I thought I ruled the world. But it was my pain and fear that ruled me.