Today would have been my dear father’s 100th birthday. Born in Cuba, raised in Jamaica. Died in Canada. Dad’s passing, like his life, was not easy.

We know little about his early years, except that his father bled to death after being run over by a sugar cane-hauling train when dad was a young boy. His mother lay in her sickbed for several days with my young father by her side, waiting for her to awaken. In fact, she was dead. He wrote about his memories of that event in a long poem called Fragments of Time. I cry every time I read this part, thinking of my sensitive, curious, creative dad orphaned and virtually alone, left to the grudging charity of distant relatives. And I begin to understand his melancholy.

You were so peaceful lying there on the bed
we shared only a few minutes before. I could not help but think you were asleep. Justified, well-earned sleep, worn out
from contending with rambunctious tot.
 
Some may say the methods I used to waken you
were disrespectful, and unbecoming of one my age.
Necessity is not governed by sets of rules to be 
adhered to under any situation. To an infant
instinct is the signpost to the fulfillment of his
desires. He knows nothing of niceties.
 
And so, I remember as though it were yesterday,
playfully lifting an eyelid after receiving no 
response when I had made it known I had returned
from the errand on which I was sent, then squeezing 
your arm. There was not, of course the merest
flicker of life.
 
It was then I realized that things were not
as they ought to have been. This was something
beyond my ability to cope with. And so I ran
screaming from the room into the arms of the
nearest adult, sobbing incoherently. It was deduced
that something extraordinary had happened.
 
Many other times I have wondered
if you had prior knowledge–a premonition
that you were about to embark on a journey
from which you would never return. Dying seemed 
so easy, as though it was pre-packaged.

My dad – sweet Ronny – died on May 1, 2008, almost ten years after my mother passed away suddenly.

When I think back, his gradual deterioration started shortly after she left us. It was in the small things – forgetfulness, longer periods of silence, the faraway looks, as if he was in another place. 

In his ‘retirement’, he’d worked part-time as a caretaker in an autobody shop where he got to hang out with the guys, tell stories and share a smoke. He still tilled the gardens of St. Francis church and won prizes year after year for the exuberant beauty of the flower beds. His second wife – the woman he met while he was in England preparing to travel to the WWII conflict in Middle East with the British Army Corps of engineers – had been nagging him to stop work and spend all his time with her. So he eventually gave in. And started his slow slide to letting his spirit go.

He lost interest in writing, then reading. That’s when we knew something was seriously wrong. Gradually, he stopped speaking. He became immobile and would sit for hours staring at the tiny patch of garden behind his townhouse. She gave away his tools, then his typewriter. She threw out his file folders of notes. Then he forgot how to dress himself. No longer could he raise a spoon to his mouth without spilling the contents over his shirt front. But he never lost his sweet smile. He still enjoyed his meals, so I’d drop by regularly with coolers filled with his favourite foods. And his body, honed by almost nine decades of hard work, stayed strong.

He was admitted to the Palliative Care unit in Hamilton General Hospital in late April. I remember arriving to visit him, and one of the physicians told me, “He’s dying, you know.” 

Yes, I knew. Dad lay curled on his side in that narrow hospital bed under a bright yellow blanket. I took his hand and stroked the soft skin of his scalp. He smiled. I leaned in to whisper to him, to tell him I loved him. He knew. My son came by and did the same. Dad knew him as well.

I sat by his bedside for five days watching as he shrank back to the size of a boy – unmoving and small beneath the covers. There was a Do Not Resuscitate order attached to his chart. I read it and understood – he’d been through enough. When they’d come in to bathe him or turn him, though, he’d flinch and wince. I was told those were autonomic reactions and that he was beyond feeling. They lied. Whenever I was close, whenever I touched him, the corners of his lips would lift. We’d always had a bond; it endured even when he was past consciousness. 

On day three, I threatened the nurses and attending physicians with lawsuits if they didn’t give him something for the pain I knew he was enduring. In the face of my quiet rage, they relented. On the sixth night, I returned home for fresh clothing, and to sleep in my own bed. A few hours later, his wife called to say that he was gone. My dad protected me to the end.

At the funeral home, I shoved a photo of my mother into the hands of the attendant to place in dad’s suit pocket. Call it a bit of revenge, but I was not prepared to let him go without that final link to my mother, the wife he left with four children under thirteen, the woman who loved him until the day he died.

Years later, in 2018, when I came into possession of his cremated remains, my three brothers and three generations of dad’s family assembled at the base of the Three Sisters mountains near Banff. We whispered prayers and spoke about our happy memories of him, then we sifted his ashes into the waters of the Bow River, just as we’d done with my mother’s ashes in 1998.

You are loved, dear father, grandpa, great-grandad. Rest In Peace. Your legacy endures.