Waitin' for da big one
Baxter, Michael J.
Thinking -about Death: Part 2 WAITIN' FOR DA BIG ONE My father's last years Michael J. Baxter y father had a stroke in August 1976 at the age of fifty-eight. It put him in the hospital for...
...Works of mercy that my father brought to many others too, which were surely on our minds as we laid him to rest in a cemetery only a hundred yards from the baseball diamond where, sixty years before, he played as a kid...
...my sister sitting with him for hours...
...He was an impatient patient...
...T Commonweal 18 February 13, 2004...
...His eyes grew steadily worse from the diabetes, and family and friends alike began commenting on what a dangerous driver he was...
...An even bigger obstacle was his emotion-al state...
...then he became angry and finally de-pressed...
...On poor days, he was self-pitying and bitter...
...He didn't do as the doctors told him, didn't listen to my mother and the rest of us, ate and drank what he wanted...
...The morning after, the doctor said the same thing...
...He had been hit by a piece of shrapnel during the war and spent several months in a military hospital in Italy...
...Between my junior and senior years, my roommate Eddie came for a three-week stay of nonstop par-tying...
...It's not that bad," I assured him, "it'll straighten out...
...During my visits home, we'd reminisce and he'd bring me up to date on his illness, that alien within...
...I remember two reactions...
...Following his stroke, my father did not vigorously pursue the recovery regime the doctors and physical therapists had prescribed...
...I was at his bedside that night, watching the monitors and listening to the ventilator pump...
...He had had a massive coronary...
...I got the news as I was about to celebrate morning Mass...
...I would go to work as a lifeguard in the morning, Eddie would join me at the pool in the afternoon, then we would go out for the night...
...As a consequence, his massive torso grew weak and flabby...
...Until that time, there remains a part of ourselves that we simply cannot know...
...It was only then that people at work told us he had been having blackouts for months...
...With time, his medical problems multiplied and overtook him...
...Anna sister rushed up to me in the lifeguard chair and said, "We have to go to the hospital...
...But we would always stop home first to drink beers with my father...
...Up to that point, my father had been an active, vital, sixfoot-four, 285-pound bear of a man...
...the cash registers and right out the door, leaning heavily on my shoulder, using it as a moving hand rail...
...He was more peaceful than I had seen him in years...
...One old friend, a former parole officer, left muttering, "I can't believe this is it...
...He was listening to me from a very different place, where one encounters what the Greeks called "The Furies...
...By 1985, most of his right foot was gone and he was forced to use a wheelchair...
...This is a reality that would try anyone's patience, and we can only know how we will con-front that reality when we know it firsthand...
...But at one point or another my father would usually say, "Words are cheap...
...Eventually he slept there at night...
...He bought a lot outside Albany and contracted for a house that he finished building himself when the contractor went bankrupt...
...I wanted him to know the comfort and consolation of Christ's redemptive love...
...He let us know that he could "still keep up with you guys...
...It did eventually, but the stroke marked the beginning of declining health that persisted for the remaining sixteen years of his life...
...In spite of his vitality, my father had health problems most of his life, having to do mainly with his legs...
...At the end of my freshman year in high school, we moved out of our two-story house into a one-story ranch be-cause, as my mother confided, "your father couldn't take the stairs...
...He worked for the State of New York for forty years, first, in the public works department, later in the education department, and he was known to everyone as "Big Jack...
...Dad had a stroke...
...he asked as he looked at himself in the bedroom mirror for the first time in four weeks...
...Eventually my mother and sister said good night...
...At one point, he coughed and the monitors spiked...
...It was a glimpse of the patience by which all of us, after wavering throughout our lives between patience and mortal impatience, are brought home to the presence of God...
...I stayed, ready to call them when the time came...
...He was diagnosed with diabetes, a disease that even then was relatively manageable...
...There were no trips to Buffalo to visit his cousin, no drives across country in a Winnebago...
...But the following morning, the attending physician admitted that there had been a misdiagnosis...
...he big one came in December 1987...
...He worried about diminished vision, loss of circulation in the hands and feet, infection, and eventual amputation...
...But his real problem emerged in his thirties...
...Later tonight, I thought, you'll lose it and won't get it back...
...In May 1992, he was back in the VA hospital, this time with a multi-system shutdown...
...I was speaking to him from a place within the ordinary circumstances of life...
...My sister called me, this time to tell me he had died...
...He went into the VA hospital, and I remember being hoisted up and talking to him as he wore a surgical mask...
...On good days, he was pleasant and fun to be with, although there was always a note of sarcasm...
...The fruit of Christ's Passion comes to us in the flesh, through the works of mercy: my mother helping my father through the long ordeal of getting to the bathroom...
...People who are sick over many years, whose lives are consumed by the suffering signified in the cross, often find it difficult to see anything but the cross...
...Still, his surroundings shrank...
...After talking it over and swallowing hard, we agreed...
...As he slept, I read the psalms and eventually fell asleep myself...
...Then my father would use it to draw the insulin out of a refrigerated glass bottle, plunge it into the fleshy part of his upper arm, inject the insulin, pull the needle out fast, and wipe his arm with a cotton swab...
...Most days he would move from bed to kitchen to his reclining chair in the living room...
...He and my mother made it to their fiftieth wedding anniversary, but medically speaking, it was all downhill...
...The next morning the doctor told us my father would probably die that day...
...And he endured them all...
...But on the day he dropped Eddie off at the thruway to hitchhike home, my "Irt's see...reec taken i/,m oft smoking, drinking, and rich food tl hat cis(' do lion t iriott...
...The doctors surmised they were "mini-strokes," and he never returned to work...
...we and our friends finally burying him...
...x.S SCHWADRON Commonweal 17 Februaru 1.3...
...Eventually, he turned in his license...
...That afternoon, his hospital room was the scene of a pro-cession of family and friends coming to say goodbye...
...Looking back, I think he already sensed he was living on borrowed time...
...My father died four and a half years later—his worst years by far...
...r- 4 a Srts .., s4r - ~4 jy...
...Thinking -about Death: Part 2 WAITIN' FOR DA BIG ONE My father's last years Michael J. Baxter y father had a stroke in August 1976 at the age of fifty-eight...
...It would be wrong to characterize these years as ones of total darkness...
...It put him in the hospital for about a month and left him with the right side of his face partially paralyzed and drooping...
...Once in the car, he stuffed the candy bars into his mouth, and then, after he came out of it, he turned and ordered me not to "go telling your mother...
...His "forced retirement" was not the kind he had anticipated...
...As he faded in and out, my eyes went back and forth between him and the monitors...
...I lost my breath," he whispered...
...Looks like his heart is stronger than we thought," he said...
...Over the course of twelve hours, he would be weaned off the drugs...
...Throughout my father's long decline, we—family, friends, doctors, nurses—would urge him to "be patient...
...Why didn't you tell me about my face...
...He would philosophize about being ready to go, and reprise a Redd Foxx line: "I's waiin' for da big one...
...He didn't want her to worry, and he didn't want the dietary regime she might impose, one that would exclude peanuts, potato pancakes, and his nightly six-pack of beer...
...Yet the cross signifies a further reality, one that has to do with more than suffering, for it involves and evokes God's mercy...
...He saw the birth of his grandson, and al-though he was unable to attend my ordination, he and my mother visited me in Phoenix the following year...
...My father was anything but...
...Oftentimes, I tried indirectly to impart to my father some-thing of the Christian vision of suffering: how Christ is with us every step along the way, how we should strive to unite ourselves with Christ on the cross, how this can help us be patient...
...It was a simple, two-minute routine but without it he would have had "a reaction," as my mother would somberly remind my sister and me...
...He still got around town with the help of his friends, and many people came to see him...
...He and I were shopping at Woolworth's when suddenly he grabbed a handful of Hershey bars, headed past Michael J. Baxter, CSC, teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame...
...The second time was years later...
...When he came to, a day later, he gestured that he wanted the ventilator out and the heart drugs discontinued...
...Looking back, I can see that he was right...
...Like many of his generation, he had returned from overseas to start a family with his war bride...
...When I was in college in Pennsylvania, he and she would drive down to see me, but the trips took a greater toll on his legs, sometimes leaving him moaning in bed...
...At first he was weepy and sad, a common response among stroke patients...
...His injury brought him a Purple Heart and a limp that got more pronounced as the years went by, especially when he worked all day in our yard...
...My father and I talked a long time that night...
...A few days later, as he was being transferred to bed, his body gave out...
...The first, when I was in grade school, left him sprawling on the living room floor with my mother spoon-feeding him frozen orange juice...
...Every morning, my mother would use tongs to dip a hypodermic needle in boiling water...
...What I thought of that morning in May was the many times my father had brought me to that same ball field when I was a kid, and patiently taught me how to catch, throw, and hit...
...Throughout it all he was deathly afraid, not of an-other stroke but of the diabetes...
Vol. 131 • February 2004 • No. 3
