REMEMBRANCE and LEGACY / by Dick Swanson
My old man died as he lived--by himself. Not alone, but by himself.
Even at 58, I saw him as a stranger and a loner even though he had many friends. I found out during his dying
years that he was indeed an emotionally solitary man. Being together,
even during those final years, was hard for us. Always present
was the past; an undefined, low-grade embarrassment at missed
pleasures and remembered mistakes-- pleasures and mistakes that
define a family. I was an only kid trying to please a part-time
and fundamentalist father. Tough stuff going on in his hardscrabble
years of the 30's and 40's.I learned that he was known for, if not always valued for, his uncompromising honesty and unrelenting work ethic; that his pungent wit and sometimes destructive sense of humor served him, if few others, well.
I learned also that he was internal and his nature and character were not to be shared, even now. I grew up in the 40's, self-directed, and my decades of the silent, forgotten 50's and the tarnished Camelot of the 60's left a chasm too wide to be bridged with understanding; his decades were of
the "lost generation" of
the Roaring 20's and the "radical" 30's--decades that
had no meaning for him beyond the Great Depression and rural
poverty.
Born in 1910, he was a coarse product of
isolated rural America and grew up poor and uneducated through
the depression. His formal education had ended at sixteen when
farm machinery snagged his hand and ripped his arm off at the
bicep. The arm dangled from the artery and he supported it with
his good hand as he made his way to the small country hospital
where, with threats and curses, he intimidated them into sewing
it back on. For the rest of his life he had this deformed, not
quite useless, flipper-like hand and arm, an appendage that fascinated
me as a child. The accounts of this accident didn't come from
him but, as in all things I have learned about him, came from
his friends.
Dad became a farm-to-market truck driver and was on the road
constantly in a rigid, mulish International truck that he called
home. It pulled a Fruehof single-axle trailer full of hogs or
cattle or sheep that he had loaded at somebody's farm. Childhood
memory tells me those days were either July-hot with choking,
barnyard clouds of dust or January-cold with white fogs of breath
and steam rising from the bellowing, resisting animals. Cursing
and kicking at them, sometimes
using an electric cattle prod, he would pack the trailer and
begin an 8 or 9 hour drive to the Chicago Stockyards.
The two lane highways wound through small Illinois towns
named Rio and Plano and Sandwich and he would arrive early to
be first in line to unload his livestock. Then, sleepless, he
would scrounge for a "turn-around" load to haul on
the return trip: barrels of pickles, wheels, crates, lumber,
grain and once, a boat and a dog; anything not to have to come
back empty and broke. During those depression years, Dad always
made sure that some animal died on the trip. He bartered some
meat for staples and we ate the rest.
It seemed to me to be a brutish and mean existence but I've been
told he mostly liked it. I remember making the Chicago trip with
him only once. I was five or six years old and three memories
have forever remained from that trip: I threw up in his lap,
he wolf-whistled at girls in the small towns we passed through
(I told Mom on him) and the third memory is of his face--illuminated
by the glow of the dashboard lights as he struggled to describe
to me the beauty of driving a truck through the late night. His
face and neck were deeply lined, the facial crevasses bottomless
in the angled light. It was as if all the cracked and rutted
roads he had driven over were overlaid there.
His life was hard labor and at his most successful,
he had three trucks and a gas station in our small town of 1100
people. Eventually, Teamsters, taxes,large trucking companies
and "interference by the goddamn government" 
drove him crazy and out of business.
He was proprietary about his hard work and honesty and he became
bitter that he had lost control of his independence. His work
ethic couldn't save it and I found out years later that it was
a terrible time for him. There was no money and Mom had to go
to work which further dispirited and isolated him.
At age 79, after 50 years of smoking Camels, he was diagnosed
with lung cancer and was told that, with treatment, he had 2-3
years to live and that there would be some quality to his life
until near the end. He came to grips with his mortality in his
own way, privately, unable to articulate the fearful path of
denial, anger, bargaining and acceptance (even to himself, I
suspect). Outwardly, he was a mean sumbich. Predictably, Mom
hunkered down and became the gate keeper of his dignity while
yielding her own. The dark side of Norman Rockwell came to mind.
I found out about his cancer when he called me from Florida to
ask how I felt about cremation. He was not so much looking for
approbation--for he had already decided--as he was letting me
know he was still in charge. It was his way of telling me he
was dying. That one question, an implicit statement, really,
was the substance and meaning of our relationship. That approach
was the simple purity of his character.
Predictably, Dad's cancer and then his death was direct exposure
to my own mortality. His life no longer shielded mine and I wanted
to define him and our relationship. I needed to sift through
his privacy, his emotional personal effects, to find closure
that hopefully would illuminate and connect us.
Although we had kept in touch, it was sporadic. I had left home
early and I saw Mom and Dad infrequently. As a child, I had invented
myself and was reluctant to expose my adult identity to parental
scrutiny. Four years in the Air Force, college, a journey through
addictions, marriages, a career in photojournalism and worldwide
travel served to keep us apart; in retrospect, an absence that
kept us nominally functional as a family. 
During the last few years phone calls became more frequent, mostly
due to my wife's Asian sedulity about parents. We would call
them before their annual winter migration to the trailer park
in Florida and again before they drove back to Illinois in the
spring. We would phone at anniversaries, birthdays and holidays
(one Thanksgiving trip to Florida ended in boozy disaster; holiday
visits never happened after that).
When his instincts, instincts as primal and uncomplicated as
the animals he hauled to slaughter, told him it was time to die,
he called and asked me to come to Florida and drive him home
(for weeks, he had fiercely resisted the suggestion that he fly
or that I drive him--to ask for help was defeat).
He broke down and cried when I walked in, embarrassed and angry
that he had lost control of his life. I said it was OK, because
he had seen me cry a lot, and now it was my turn to see him cry.
The insensitivity of that statement had barely registered before
he said that, yeah, but my crying had been his fault and that
we always hurt the ones we love. It was the first time I had
ever heard him use the word love.
As we sat on the edge of the bed in the gloom of the small trailer
home, I massaged his shoulders, kissed his head through the short,
snow-white crew cut and, behind his back, wept at his labored
breathing.
The next day we began the drive north to Illinois. Dad and his
oxygen were crammed in the back seat with the things that wouldn't
fit in the trunk. Mom, in front, closed and self-contained as
always, composed her dread and foreboding for the trip home.
For the next three days we hurried north through Florida, Georgia,
Tennessee, Kentucky and finally into Illinois. Only once was
I able to get him to talk about himself. He talked briefly, with
humor, about working on road gangs in the twenties. The rest
of the trip was tense. Death didn't frighten him but dying did.
We arrived home on a Friday. Monday, I leaned over his hospital
bed and said for the first time, "I love you, Pop."
He said, "Yeah, OK," and turned away and died, peacefully,
by himself. By himself, but not alone.
I had never learned to grieve or at the least to distinguish
it from depression; an emotional indifference that began to
change with Dad's death. I felt a growing sense of loss and
it surprised me. In the end, and much later, his death taught
me the certainty of love and grief. And, finally, I understood
that I was just the son of a man who did the best he could with
what he had.
I love you, Pop.
EPILOGUE
Shortly after Dad's death, Mom became physically unable
to care for herself and is now in a christian nursing home in
the small town where she grew up. Her fellow residents, for the
most part, are all kids with whom she grew up and went to school
...together again.
I love you, too, Mom.
Mom...1915--1996
EPILOGUE II: Mom died in September. All those physical and emotional things that make up the end of life claimed her; heart failure, pnuemonia, strokes, weary of living as an invalid, loneliness for Dad (not because she loved him so much, I suspect, but because they had spent 60 years together and she missed him). And Mom, like Dad, unwilling to accept emotion and love, willingly accepted her coming release. Unwilling to talk to me about love and life, she willingly talked of death and dying. She was ready and told me so...that life had been fair to her and she knew that death would be fair also. The end of her life exposed her hidden character and independence; she didn't fight to stay, but welcomed the journey. But, just like my father, I couldn't get her to tell me the words of love either. It's my turn to deal with it now. I love you both, you big jerks.
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