The following article was originally posted on the Courier Record website.
Part of life’s journey is losing a parent.
Even if they are suffering and you need to let go, it doesn’t make it any easier. My father died on March 4 at 93-years-old and what was upsetting is he was doing so well at the hospital after heart surgery. My brother and I planned for him to return to the health unit at his retirement home.
All of a sudden, everything collapsed, his heart quit working, and he was on machines. A few days later, the doctors said there was nothing they could do. Within a week, he was put in hospice care and once they took him off life support, he died. In his sleep. At peace.
It has only been in the last few weeks I have stopped reaching for the phone to call him.
What’s odd is I never cried which I couldn’t quite understand until my pastor, Jeff Dunn from Mercy Outreach Fellowship, pointed out God was helping me cope.
I was in the middle of feeling sorry for myself when my husband’s cousin, Tuckie Kile, made a good point: That Dad had gotten sick the last few weeks of his life, didn’t suffer for years and didn’t have dementia which often doesn’t happen to people in their 90s.
She was right — he went quickly — and I look at his passing with gratitude.
I am almost 70 and, as we grow older, we tend towards reflection. Now I am looking back and seeing the enormous influence my father had on me and what he did as not only a good father and grandfather, but a good husband to my late mother; when she was diagnosed with a rare blood disease, he took wonderful loving care of her, never complaining, giving her hope, and she lived for five years with a disease which usually killed people in six months.
My father worked hard for a heavy equipment company and made sure my brother and I were well educated. It’s because of him I love reading, history, and opera, not to mention he opened the world of Mother Nature to us with all the fishing and hiking trips we went on.
And Dad was a great hunter. (I went duck hunting with him once in South Carolina; since gators bury down in the mud in winter, every time the mud buckled, I was sure I was standing on a gator. Not to mention it was cold and about 4 a.m.)
How could you not love a dad who put a bowl of popcorn on your bed when you were little and were supposed to be falling asleep? Took you to UVA football games (with family tailgates)? Taught you how to catch bass and pike? Sent you to the Sorbonne in Paris for a year to broaden your horizons? And was very kind and supportive when your first marriage didn’t work out?
I remember a lot of his advice and some of his funny lines – he had a terrific sense of humor. A favorite?
Once when I was acting up as a teenager, he asked me, “why I was always shaking a stick at a hornet’s nest.”
Growing up, our dinner table conversation much of the time was about politics and UVA sports (He was a Wahoo and he served in the Marine Corps as well.). Because of his influence, I remember sitting on my bed when I was about 12, realizing I was probably a Republican. I have been interested in politics ever since.
Kemp Norman was born in Norfolk in 1932, the son of a stay-at-home mom and a bridge builder who travelled a lot. (To my grandfather’s great credit, he founded Tidewater Construction which later helped build The Chesapeake Bay Bridge- Tunnel.) They divorced when Dad was about 13, and I think that’s why he worked so hard to make sure our family life was in many ways different and better than what he had.
I was overwhelmed at the outpouring of cards and calls when he died. Dad was bright, a raconteur, and a true Renaissance man, Southern style. I was also surprised to discover he had saved many of the letters I had written, some going back to the early 1990s.
By the end, my father was saying he had had a good life, and it was time to let him go, that he didn’t want to struggle anymore.
As we spent the last days by his hospital bed, the grandchildren having travelled to spend time with him, there were many moving moments. The prayers. One friend sang a hymn. The conversations.
Dad saying, “You all are happy” to a large ring of family members to which I replied, “You had a lot to do with that.”
Towards the end, when he couldn’t speak because he was hooked up to an oxygen machine, he wrote notes. “What is my status?”
“Will I go tonight?” “Should I pray more?”
When my mother died, my mother-in-law told me it’s like she’s in the next room: You just can’t see her. And that’s how I feel about Dad now. He is still a part of everything. We just can’t see him.
