Dad died this evening

My father’s battle against cancer ended about 5:45 this evening. He died peacefully, I hope. We brought him home Thursday afternoon. Nurses cared for him from then until his passing. They prepared me to take care of him as of 8 p.m. this evening. That was the end of the last nurse’s workday. Maybe he didn’t think I was up to it. Maybe he wasn’t up to it himself.

I want to say he was a remarkable man, and most of me believes that. But many of us think our fathers were remarkable. Maybe we’re all right. I know my father worked his way out of a poor beginning into a middle class middle. I know he started as a “greaser” (his word) and became a playwright, TV writer, novelist, and journalist. Bootstrapping if there ever was any.

He was born in St. Louis in 1928. Dogtown. He told me he would ask his mother and sisters where Dogtown was. “We lived there,” they told him. He was the fourth of four, and moved away, so he wasn’t ever sure he lived in the ghetto.

Dad went on to college because of something that never even helped him in an economic way. He credited the G.I. Bill. He was too young for it to pay for his schooling, but his older brother George was a signalman in World War II, and when he got home, he went to the University of Missouri on G.I. Bill money. My dad had never known anyone in his world could go to college before that, or at least that’s the way he always put it to me. He liked to talk of the G.I. Bill’s residual effect. It gave people like him an idea. So he went to Missouri himself and got a journalism degree.

That eventually turned into a career working on newspapers in St. Joseph, Missouri, Topeka, Kansas, Kansas City, Chicago, and eventually New York.

But from the beginning, dad wanted to write creative things, so he did. Plays, novels, TV shows. I won’t go into details. Those will come in future posts. But he never stopped writing.

My brothers and I will miss him. We’re grown up now and can take care of ourselves. But it’s one thing to be grown up, and another to have to deal without the man who made you who you are.