My Father's Final Lesson
An hour of attending, a lifetime of tending.
A scent of chocolate lingered in the car. Beside me, a hoppy IPA waited.
The engine clicked to silence.
Through the windshield, the image began to blur as the rain intensified. Down the path alongside the house—twenty yards, maybe less—a man in a dark green slicker was tending the azalea. His hood shadowed his face, his bare hands worked gently at the dead buds.
That couldn’t be Dad, could it? He’d told me he’d be napping.
I flashed back to an hour earlier when we were seated in the living room, reliving stories from our childhood. The orange throw pillow on my lap felt different—not because it was, but because I was—and because everything was or, was about to be. Most of me was there, but another part of me felt on edge, my mind drifting toward what life was about to become.
“I have a few things to attend to. Could one of you run me into town?” Dad asked.
I spoke up before the others could, and they didn’t object. They’d come several days earlier, and I’d arrived only the day before.
Dad rose from his chair, slipped on his gray vest, and headed for my car. I started after him, but he waved me off from helping him in.
“Where to?” I asked.
“The bank,” he said.
It wasn’t the first time we’d gathered around Dad on that couch. Just three weeks before, with my elbows resting on the same orange pillow, he’d told us he was ready to go. Despite pulling through two bouts of pneumonia, he said it was time to end his three-year battle with leukemia. When he’d asked his oncologist how long he might live once he stopped transfusions and treatments, the answer was about three weeks.
“Well,” he told us that morning when we asked him how it would unfold, “the simplest way to put it is that I’m going to bleed from the inside out. It should be relatively peaceful.”
Peaceful?
Relatively?
We spent the first week trying to talk him out of it, and the second week beginning to accept it.
And here we were—a week to go.
We pulled up to the local branch two blocks from where his medical practice used to be.
“I got this,” he said. “You can wait here.”
I wanted to help, to steady him, to let him save his strength, but Dad wasn’t stubborn. He’d ask for help if he needed it. He moved toward the doors, gait measured, pace maybe ninety percent of what it once was. The missing ten looked less like frailty than lightness, as if his body were taxiing off the runway after a long flight, finding its way to the gate called home.
I wondered why we were here.
My phone buzzed and then buzzed twice more in my hand before I realized I’d grabbed it and was halfway through a text message, my reflex moving faster than my intention to stay present. I set the nagging screen back in the console as the absurdity of it hit me—attending to the demands of others instead of tending to time with my father.
Staring at the glass doors, I wondered what it felt like to bleed from the inside out. Could he feel it? Or to walk in his shoes, with only a week left, and still make choices.
I remembered his call years earlier, when he told me the fatigue and shortness of breath he’d felt on a routine morning walk wasn’t just illness, but leukemia. I gazed out the passenger window at the hospital tower, standing where he’d spent half his adult life, where his single-level office had once stood.
I thought of the lives he’d tended as a physician—thirty years of constancy and presence. From somewhere deep in my memory arose an image of the back side of our Christmas trees growing up—the hidden half typically void of presents in most homes—lined with gifts from patients he’d cared for, affectionate appreciation tucked where only we could see it.
The doors opened and he reappeared as he’d gone in—unhurried, deliberate—slipping a thick white envelope into the inside pocket of his vest.
Good grief. Why would he need cash?
“To See’s Candy,” he said before I could ask.
Dad wasn’t a sweets guy—he enjoyed a good dessert now and then, and chocolate was never his thing. I wanted to ask, but I let it go. I had more important questions.
“Dad, is there something you’d like to do that we haven’t talked about? Or see, or experience?”
He took a moment, eyes forward, his crusty golf cap pulled a bit lower than usual. See’s wasn’t far, just a few minutes, and we rode in silence as the skies darkened and it began to sprinkle.
“I’d like to see the ocean,” he said at last, “as I told Tom and Katy. And taste a fresh oyster. I think, if we go first thing Sunday morning, I’ll be up for the drive.”
“You got it, Dad.”
We pulled up. “I’d like your help this time,” he said softly.
I held the door open. “Hello, Dr. Bailey,” the young woman behind the counter said, smiling as she offered us a sample of English toffee. “So nice to see you again. I have your order right here.”
They knew he was coming?
Dad reached into his vest pocket, pulled out the envelope, and peeled off several hundred-dollar bills—barely making a dent in the green stack. The woman handed me two white bags, each with five two-pound boxes of mixed chocolates. Why all this, I wondered again. It was growing stranger by the stop, but I kept still.
He eased himself back into the passenger seat as I set the bags behind us. By the time I clicked my seatbelt, the car was filled with the sweet air of milk chocolate.
“Where next?”
“The hospital.”
I hadn’t been to the hospital in decades, before Dad retired. We retraced the streets back toward the bank, Dad peering out the window, immersed in April’s colors. For most of his life he’d exclaim when the leaves were turning that fall was his favorite time of year. With new life budding around him, and a week to go, I wondered if he’d now say it was spring.
As we turned onto the hospital grounds, I thought about his decades of tending to others—giving his time and himself to thousands of patients. He’d said more than once how hard it had been, these past few years, to be the one tended to. Dad’s nature was to give, not receive. That’s where he found comfort.
If there was a silver lining to chauffeuring a father with a week to live, it was the freedom of handicap parking. He moved a little slower as we approached the entrance, and I carried the two white ten-pound dumbbells of chocolate.
Somewhere between the lobby and the elevator, I found myself hundreds of miles away, thinking about a client I needed to call and a meeting to reschedule. I wasn’t surprised that my thoughts drifted elsewhere, but I winced when I had no recollection of pressing 2 for Oncology.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when the doors opened. I wasn’t ready. The smell met me first—the same one that unsettled me as a boy tagging along on Dad’s weekend rounds, when he’d tend to his patients and have me wait quietly in the hallway. I’d sit there feeling unease, drawn toward my father-son time yet trying to endure the sharp, antiseptic smell that surrounded me. It was a smell of sickness. A smell of sadness.
Now, fifty years later, I stood in awe as I watched my father embrace the nurses and staff who’d tended his life—extended it, actually—offering them an overdose of chocolate gratitude. For the first time, I realized that for him, it had never been the smell of sickness or sadness. It had been the smell of service.
I smelled it too.
“I thought of something else,” Dad said while I helped him back into his seat. “I’d like to taste my favorite beer—a fresh, hoppy IPA.”
“Oh, Dad… perfect!”
“But first… to the bird store.”
“Why not?” I smiled.
I was beginning to feel like I was on a scavenger hunt without the list.
As far back as I could remember—no matter where we lived—we had birdfeeders nestled throughout the yard and hanging from the eaves above the deck. Alive with song. It was no different when Dad and Mom moved into the care facility a few years back—hanging the feeders was one of the first orders of business, and keeping them full was the second.
“How about the large bag?” I quipped, both of us knowing the large would last about a month. Inside, the smell of cedar birdhouses kept me company. With Dad waiting in the car, I stood at the counter and wondered how often we meet grief with humor—how laughter is sometimes the only way to keep from breaking.
I came back with the medium bag and set it gently on his lap—splitting the difference between hope and reality.
“James,” he said quietly, “I’m fading and could use a nap. Can you take me home, then run back to the Tap House and get that growler of a hoppy IPA—and a second one of your choice?”
“Of course, Dad.”
As we pulled up in front of the house, Dad’s phone rang. He looked at the screen, then slipped it back into his pocket.
“You don’t want to talk with Jack?” I asked, having caught sight of the caller ID.
“No, not right now.”
Moments later, my phone buzzed … a number I didn’t recognize. I started to silence it when Dad looked over. “That’s Jack,” he said.
He hoisted himself up using the handle above the door, then tucked the bag of seed under his arm. “Would you answer and tell him how much I’ll miss him—and how I so loved his sense of humor. The hardest I ever laughed was with Jack. Please be sure to tell him.”
“Hello, Jack… ” I murmured, watching Dad make his way up the walkway in the rain.
A scent of chocolate lingered in the car. Beside me, the hoppy IPA waited.
I drew in the sweet smell and sat transfixed, hoping for another glimpse of him—a break in the downpour, or that moment when four or five drops come together and streak down the windshield, parting the blur. Within a week, Dad’s image, one I’d never lived without, would take up permanent residence inside me.
“I have a few things to attend to.” His words echoed. He hadn’t said a few errands to run, or a few things to take care of. He’d said attend. My phone buzzed again, and it sank in how much of my time is spent attending to the wrong things. Headlines crafted to steal my attention. Inbound requests from people I barely know. How often I confuse urgency with importance, mistaking the nonessential for the essential. I was suddenly haunted by the possibility of becoming so busy, so misguided, that without noticing I might attend my marriage right onto the rocks, attend myself away from closeness with my daughters, even attend myself into poor health.
It occurred to me that attending is not tending—not even close. Tending is how we stay connected to what matters. Unlike attending, tending isn’t a task. It doesn’t start and finish. Tending spans time and expresses love and care through our presence.
And yet, our attending can serve our tending. In one short hour, and now, through the blur of rain, with his body bleeding invisibly, my father gave me a lesson in connecting the two.
We’d attended to getting chocolate so he could tend to lives that prolonged his. We’d attended to getting birdseed so he could tend to the songsters that filled his mornings. And he’d attended to the azalea’s dead buds so he could tend to a life he’d planted—a life no less than any other, one that brought him joy.
And by forgoing a conversation with a longtime friend and giving up a nap, he was tending his priorities. Still making choices.
As the windows began to fog, and I could see no more than a few feet in any direction, something in me stirred—an odd awareness, an intuitive inkling I couldn’t quite grasp. I sensed what I would discover days later when I opened the kitchen drawer beside the utensils—the one with the phone chargers, tape, and scissors—that white envelope with Dad’s nearly illegible handwriting across the front.
For groceries, take-out, and other sundries while you’re here. - Dad.
Though he knew we didn’t need it, he’d attended to getting cash so he could tend to his family—lives that would outlast his. Lives he loved. Lives that mattered most.
I looked over at the hoppy IPA and the hazy cousin I’d chosen, resting on the seat where Dad had just been.
It was time for that taste.
And then, a toast.
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As you know I found this to be an exquisite share and piece of writing James. The blurry view of your dad through the windshield was in complete contrast to the clear and revealing detail of his character in your storytelling. He was in focus the whole time, and as is the beauty with memoir, that focus is preserved for you and your family to forever enjoy.
James, I wholeheartedly agree with everything shared here thus far. What a beautiful piece of writing, a wonderful tribute to a really great man.
By so vividly introducing us your father in the last week he was alive, you revealed the kind of person he’d been his entire life. It's fitting that one of the last things he ever did was attend to some errands … so he could tend to others: his children, the hospital staff, even the birds outside. Wonderful.
I hope you enjoyed that IPA ...
... and that toast.