“When my father died, it felt like a library burnt down.”
–Laurie Anderson
My father, Albert Mason, Jr., died on May 7, 2017. He was ninety-eight years old. He was born on March 28th, 1919. There is much to be said of his life which lasted nearly a century. A decorated veteran of the US Armed Forces (Army/Air Force), he served in World War II where he unloaded the dead and wounded off of helicopters.
H e was already legally blind in one eye – a surgery to correct his cross eyed condition blinded him at the age of eight. (As my mother always said, the military at that time would take anyone who could hold a rifle.)
He also (my mother told me with a shudder decades ago) was a passenger (as a soldier) on an unescorted ship in Japanese territory. I remember the photographs of him as a young man serving in the armed forces in Guam and the Philippines.
After coming home from WWII, he married my mother. They were both twenty-five years old.
After a stint as a roofer’s assistant and a plumber’s assistant, he took a job at Rohm and Haas (since bought by a different company), he worked shift work his entire career – more than thirty years – in the boiler room at the plant. (My mother told me to say he was a ‘stationary engineer.’)
He was one of the Great Generation and one of the lucky ones. He got a union job when unions were still in vogue and was able to support his family. A few years ago, a childhood friend of mine (really a friend in adolescence) Alec Klatchko, read my book Tea Leaves, a memoir of mothers and daughters and remarked that the life I led was made possible by having a stable and secure father.
I acknowledged that this was true – but it really hit me after his death. Even though he was ninety-eight, he was mostly independent and wanted to live a few years longer. He told me this in the hospital on his where he went the third time that he was having problems breathing. He was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, a condition that people can live with – at least for a while.
I lobbied for him to go to a physical rehabilitation home which is where the hospital discharged him to. There he started to get better. He was able to walk with the help of a walker and he did well in his physical therapy sessions. He was a lifelong walker (except in recent years when his eyesight worsened drastically due to glaucoma and he was afraid of falling) and he was very strong. But he lost his ability to swallow in the rehabilitation home – and was losing weight drastically.
My partner (who is my rock and who is remarkably like my father) and I were with him on the Saturday of May sixth. (He loved Barbara like another daughter.) He was rushed to a nearby hospital (St. Mary’s) late that night and died Sunday afternoon. I went to the hospital that morning. Before his death, he told me he was not in pain. He was very emphatic about this. After he passed, the house doctor came in and told me that when he “went to heaven” he was not in any pain.
I was raised secular. My father was an agnostic, but before I was born he was a lay reader in his church (a branch of Protestant-ism). I always considered my secular upbringing a gift, even in recent years when I have become a Unitarian Universalist and a lay minister.
My father’s death hit me like a ton of bricks. I just turned fifty-eight years old and that’s a lot of time to have had my father. He was a good father and a good man. The goodness in me was born from the goodness in him.
One way I’ve been coping is to keep a list of the memories of my father – things both my father and mother told me and things that I remember. Like my father and mother, I am a walker. I am also strong. According to my partner, I am obsessive as my father – except about different things. I attribute my success as a writer to this streak of stubbornness and obsessiveness that I inherited from my father. (Sometimes it’s important to persevere and not to take no for an answer.)
Also to heal from this loss, I’ve been laying on the floor doing yoga and at the same time listening to Buddhist videos on YouTube. Tich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist Monk, was very helpful in talking about life and the afterlife. He talked about the life of a cloud – how it doesn’t die but just changes energy. First it might be a pond evaporated to the cloud. After it is a cloud it may become rain. It never dies – it just goes away. It changes energies.
My father was my cloud. He rained down on me and I grew from the earth that he watered.
Janet Mason, author 