My father died early last Wednesday morning.
Around 4:30 a.m., he called out my mother’s name a few times and woke her from a sound sleep. He calmly told her that he couldn’t move and that she needed to call 9-1-1. By the time my mother had made the phone call and returned to his side, he was no longer breathing. Within minutes an ambulance and a fire truck arrived. The paramedics didn’t want to waste any time putting him on a gurney, so one of them simply lifted all 115 pounds of my 84-year-old father up into his arms and raced out the front door with him. Once my father was in the ambulance, my mother was told that they could hear a heartbeat, but that it was very faint.
My mother called me around 5 a.m. When my home phone rings at that hour, the first thought that always goes through my head is, “Are the kids all safely home and in their beds.” But my dad’s health had been failing for quite awhile, and in the back of my mind, I knew what the phone call was about.
As I hurried to the hospital, just a few blocks before I reached it, I saw my brother’s car, with my mother in it, slowly motoring back towards her house. I spun my car around, chased down my brother’s car, and with the sun still not up, I was told through a rolled down window by my grief-stricken brother that our father was gone.
Robert (Bob) Fisher was born in rural Kansas and then moved to Missouri at the height of the Great Depression. His parents thought they might be able to find work there, and it was in the little town of Ava, Missouri, that he met my mother in the 7th grade. As a child he developed a stuttering problem that would stay with him his entire life, making him a man of few words. Also, as a youngster, he became so good at playing the trombone that he seriously considered playing or teaching it professionally. But after many years of “sparking and courting” my mother, what he really wanted to do was settle down with her and start a new life, and they married a few days before Christmas in 1941. Less than a year later, with war raging in both Europe and the Pacific, like most men of his generation, my father left to do his part in World War II.
He went to Hawaii first, where his Army infantry unit received additional training for the dangers it was about to face, and then he spent more than three years in the Asiatic Pacific, in places like New Guinea, the Philippines, and Japan. When the war was finally over, he returned home suffering so badly from malaria that he weighed less than 120 pounds and was almost unrecognizable to his family and friends.
Like many returning WWII veterans, my father saw California as a wonderful place to re-start his life. He finally got a job as an electrician for the Southern Pacific Railroad, found a nice little two-bedroom tract house which had a $53 monthly payment he could barely afford, and settled down with my mother to raise the family they had both always wanted.
He would leave for work a lot earlier that I left for school, and he came home late in the afternoon, tired and not very talkative. He would eat dinner, usually watch a couple of his favorite TV shows (the Jackie Gleason and Ed Sullivan shows were among his favorites) and then go to bed early because he had to be up at the crack of dawn to go back to “the shops” again. His job was important to him, and he rarely missed a day’s work, maybe six or seven in almost 40 years of toil. He took his responsibilities for supporting his family very seriously and his work ethic was something I always appreciated and admired.
Like most fathers and sons, my dad and I didn’t spend all our days together on the same page, but he was always there when I needed him, made sure I had everything all the other kids in the neighborhood had, and he hugged me tighter than anyone else when I left for Vietnam.
And now he is gone. And like most fathers and sons, we left way too many things unsaid. I never really told him how much I enjoyed those early camping trips, or how much I appreciated him going to my Little League and high school basketball games, or how much I always valued his support for whatever I wanted to do even if it made absolutely no sense to him at the time. I especially wish I had told him how much I always loved his easy smile and those moments when his worries weren’t so heavy, and he seemed to be at peace with the world.
Emily Dickinson once wrote that “Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell”, and a world without my father in it is not going to make much sense for quite some time. But his was a long and eventful life, well-lived and enjoyed. It’s true that like all lives, his was hard and sad at times, especially when he was young, but he understood from a very early age that life is rarely fair or just, and he always chose to look forward, never back. And most admirable of all, he hardly even complained along the way.
Well, Dad, I know you’re not exactly thrilled by me making such a big fuss over you with the written word, but you were always one of my favorite and most loyal readers, and I’m hoping these words will somehow find their way to you in one form or another. And I know you’ll be glad to hear that there is just one more thing I want to say.
The older I get, the more convinced I am that there is no higher praise to give a man than to say he was a truly kind, decent, hard-working human being who did his very best to be a good husband, father, and grandfather. You were such a man, Dad, and the lives you cared most about are so much richer because of you.