DEATH SCENES II: DAD by Karl Kindt IV [ Click here for a printer-friendly version. ] Copyrighted © 1999 by Karl Kindt IV | Published digitally 17 April 2000 I look down at my dad, and all I can think is his hands are too young to die. Yet here he lies on his bed at home, in the house I grew up in, and I know he won't be with me much longer.
He had a stroke two years ago, and this second one has finished him. When I asked his nurse at the hospital if he wasn't too young to have a stroke, she said it was unusual, but over the years she'd seen men even younger than he get hit with it. The first stroke left him with only partial use of his left leg. This second stroke has partially paralyzed him, and there is little he can do now. He told the doctors he was done with them and asked to be brought back here to die.
As I stare at his hands, memories begin to wash over me. When I was a little girl, he would delicately cut my toast in the morning into two perfect butterflies. No other toast tastes like those four perfect quarters of bread he set before me every morning. The edges of their wings were dark brown, the wings themselves a beautiful blend of golden butter and tanned white bread. I loved to watch him take the knife to the slice of bread. His hands made the cuts from corner to corner with delicate precision. Every time he would make a butterfly with sharp-edged wings and another with rounded wings. I can't remember a morning he didn't make me breakfast, all through my childhood. My mother died in a car accident when I was young, and dad did the impossible, raising a girl as a single father. When I asked him a few years ago why he never remarried, he told me, "I suppose I might have. I just never found a lady as wonderful as your mother."
Even though I only had one parent from the age of five, I never wanted for attention. If Dad was not working, he spent his time with me. When I was younger, I just took this for granted as what all dads did. By the time I got to high school, I began to understand how unusual he was. I probably hurt him many times by turning down offers to do things with him as I got older, when it became less cool to be seen with him. When I left to go to college, I'm afraid he felt as if I'd deserted him, although he has never said so. But when I was a kid, it was great. He would take me hiking and camping, two of my favorite things to this day. On one of our first camping trips, he found a long hickory stick in the woods that seemed to fit naturally in his hand, almost as if God had set that stick in front of him in the woods so he would discover it. He designated it as his walking stick and used it on all of our camping trips that followed. The last few years I lived at home, I would go camping with friends and turn down offers to camp with him, so the stick sat in the den collecting dust. Later, after his first stroke, he brought the stick out of retirement; he cut a foot off of it and used it as a cane to help him walk on his bad left leg.
When I was very little, Dad also tried to get me into fishing. I get chills when I think of it--probably because of my first and last experience with it. We were canoeing on some remote river I can't remember the name of, and Dad was trying to teach me how to cast. I was horrible. I was so preoccupied with not wanting to tip out of the canoe, I never caught on--although a hook from my line did, right in the middle of my cheek. I started to scream and shake. Dad crept to the front of the canoe. I was afraid the boat would tip and I'd be left to scramble in the water with a hook buried in my face. Within seconds, his hands were on my cheek. I could feel them move gently across my skin as he spoke in calm, even tones, although I have no idea what he said. Just as I managed to scream, "Get it out! Get it out!" he held the hook up before my eyes for me to see and said it was out. It's to his credit that the scar from my wound faded before I turned thirteen.
Despite his gentleness, I do remember being scared of Dad twice. At some point in my adventurous childhood, I decided I wanted to climb out onto our roof from our upstairs bathroom window. The frosted window looked out directly from the shower onto our front roof. As I grew older and taller, I became increasingly intrigued by the view. I made up my mind to venture out, but I knew Dad would be deathly afraid I might slip and fall. He was a photographer, so his work often took him into his homemade darkroom in our basement for long periods of time. I used the opportunities to explore. I surveyed the neighborhood from the crest of the roof, dug for things in our gutter, spat off the front edge just to watch it smack into our porch below, and generally felt like the most daring girl on the block.
I did this for almost two years before he caught on. When I got older, he told me his side of the event. He came out of his darkroom early one day and heard noises on the roof. I must have climbed back inside before he got too far because by the time he came up the stairs, I had hopped up onto the toilet to pee. Little did I know then that my excursions left sandy grit in the bottom of the shower. Dad came upstairs and into the open bathroom. I said, "What is it, Dad?" He walked past me to the shower door. He saw the open window to the roof and the grit on the dry shower floor. He turned to me and asked if I had climbed out onto the roof. For whatever reason, I have never been able to lie to him. I admitted it and hoped the admission would get me out of any deep trouble. It did not. After I confessed, he told me to finish on the toilet and then to come into the hall.
I took forever. I tried to keep peeing so I could stay in the bathroom. Eventually, I pulled up my panties and skirt and hopped off the toilet. As I made my way to the doorway to the hall, my steps were no longer than the tiny tiles on the bathroom floor. Dad took my hand into his, pulled me into my bedroom, and sat on my bed. He turned me around and put me over his knee. I knew what was coming, although he had hardly ever spanked me before. What struck me most wasn't the delayed sting of the swats, but the sound it made when his hands slapped my bottom. The smack hit my ears so loudly it was all I could hear; the pain came later.
The only other time I was genuinely afraid of Dad came when I was in high school. I brought home my first serious boyfriend from the prom. He and I sat on our porch swing into the wee hours. I got the feeling the boy was just listening to me talk to humor me so he could feel me up. After a few minutes, I found I was right. He slyly reached over and cupped my breast in his hand. I pushed his hand away and told him to stop. He put his arm around me and tried to pull me close. I told him I meant it. He pulled my head closer to his to kiss me. I screamed for him to stop. In the next second--and I swear it all happened in one moment's time--the porch light was on, Dad was standing in front of us, and my date and I were getting up from the swing. Before he could fully rise up, Dad socked him right on the chin. I heard the boy's teeth click as my father's fist knocked him back onto the swing. The swing's chains squeaked in the hinges as he sat there dumbly rocking back and forth by himself. In a scarcely audible voice, Dad said, "Leave," as he pointed down our porch steps. In the last few days of my senior year that followed that weekend, I never saw the boy again. I'm sure he was too terrified, and that was fine with me.
In those last years living at home, what I remember most is the time I spent with Dad in his darkroom. He had walled off a section of our basement and made his own full service darkroom. At first, he used it for pictures he took as a police photographer. He would get called out to the weirdest hours to take pictures of the latest crime scene. A darkroom at home meant he could spend more time with my mother and me.
After my mother died, he used the darkroom to launch his own photography studio. I spent hours helping him develop portraits and family photos. I loved it. I would beg him to let me do the developing stage. It was like magic. In the dark, surrounded by an eerie red light, I swished the heavy, silvery paper in the developing chemical and watched the faces appear. Thankfully, he was there to stop me from overdeveloping. He had a timer in the darkroom, but I never saw him use it. He had an uncanny sense of when to pull the rubber-tipped tongs from my grasp and to switch the photo over to the stopper. Dozens of photos of our family fill our mantel. Each picture perfectly captures the personality of my relatives. Dad caught my goofy uncle just as his thin mustache was twisted upward by his usual wry grin. I could see the twinkle of mischief in my cousins' eyes. After Mom died, Dad removed all the pictures of her but one, a portrait he had taken of her when she was pregnant with me. That image is burned forever into my mind's eye; her gaze is otherworldly, almost as if she's still watching me from behind the glass. Her smile is so gentle I can see the kindliness in her soul that Dad loved so much.
Dad's photo studio became popular because he got a reputation for knowing just when to click the shutter to capture people's expressions at their best. After several years, he hired a manager for the store and headed out to pursue his life's dream. Most people would probably call it artistic photography. Dad called it pastoral photography.
He traveled across the country with his cane and camera, taking hundreds of photos of America at her best. Just before his first stroke, local galleries picked up some of his pieces to showcase. Critics began to say the same thing about his artistic photos that was said about his studio photos--he could find the beauty in any person and in any scene and draw it out at just the moment he activated the shutter. All of the photos seem to capture more than just the scene depicted within the four white borders of the paper. When I look at his work, I almost feel as if I could reach into the photo and touch the things in it with my hands.
In a recent interview of him in TIME magazine, they asked him why he did what he did. Even as just an amateur sculptress and want-to-be artist myself, I can recognize how banal the question was. His reply made me miss my mother more than anything else. He told them, "Before my wife died, she made me promise that one day I would do what I really wanted--to take pictures of beautiful things. That's all I'm doing."
Now Dad lies there barely breathing. I kneel by his bed to see if his chest is still rising and falling and thank God it still is. I know he has to go. I know it's best for him if he does, but I don't want him to. I have so much I still want to tell him.
In his fitful slumber, his hands have moved from his chest to his sides. From where I kneel at his bedside, I look at his hand. It smells of those familiar chemicals. Maybe it's that the chemicals have made his hands appear younger than they should, but I cannot help think his hands are too young to die.
I hear Dad's breathing become shorter and more labored, and I don't know what to do. I decide to do something I haven't ever done, as far as I can remember. I reach down and hold his hand. I remember many times he held mine, especially when I was very little, but I don't recall if I ever initiated it myself. I clasp it and pull it close to my cheek and hold it. When I open my eyes, I see Dad's awake. He looks at me and smiles, as if he has waited all his life for this moment, to look over and see me holding his hand in mine. When his eyes close and his breathing stops, I kneel there a long time and shut my eyes tightly. The odor of the chemicals permeates my nose, and for a moment the odor seems to change, to smell almost like golden, buttered butterflies.
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