A father's last words...

He had had at least two serious heart attacks in the last five years, which, however, had prompted him to make few if any changes in his life.  He smoked gaspingly.  He drank way too much, frequently binge drinking to the point of aggressive sloppiness.  He loved to tuck into large portions of his wife's delicious traditional Polish cooking.  His idea of exercise was to recline on the couch and watch football on his plasma screen TV.  He'd lost his job a few years ago (not the first time, Ola told me) -- ostensibly invalided out because of an overlong recovery from an operation on his small intestine.

In fact, it was alcohol that sank him -- as it always did.  He received a small disability payment each month, and seemed to want nothing more.  I never heard of him trying to find another job.  There was a lot of football to watch.  By contrast, his wife worked 10 - 12 hour days as a nurse, starting at six in the morning.  Nursing is even less well paid and more downtrodden in Poland than in most countries. Once she got home in the late afternoon, she kept on working at all the household chores -- including keeping their apartment spotlessly clean and ironing everything that could be ironed.  Though her work ethic is admirable even astounding, she is not an easy woman to get along with, and I don't like her much.  Of course, she's my mother in law, so she and I naturally have our conflicts.  She has also caused me more unpleasantness than I like to remember, including two nights in the Poznan police jail, and considerable expense redoing her decorating work in our apartment.

There is some very strange stuff hidden away in the Świder family (as there might have been in my family, had my brother and I not decided to "out" it all in favour of as much truth and sunlight as we could muster), but I haven't figured any of it out.  Brother and sister (that is, Łukasz and Ola) don't speak.  Father didn't work; mother never stops working.  Ola doesn't work; her brother has three different jobs (he didn't learn of his father's death until the following day, because he mustn't be called at work).  No one reads or shows any interest in history or literature or science or much of anything.  No one is obviously happy, though that doesn't surprise me.  They aren't stupid, but they do an excellent job of pretending to be.  They are cave dwellers in some metaphorical sense.  And yet I can't figure any of it out -- what is the cause of their strangeness?  Who benefits from it?  Why did I marry into it?  These are complex but worthwhile questions.  The thing is, I cannot answer most of them by myself?  And no one else, including Ola, shows any desire to answer them.

I have again digressed.  The reason is that Ola is angry with me, though won't say why, and is again threatening divorce, though that seems more extreme than ever.  Our marriage is probably better and stronger than it was six months ago.  Our marriage counselling bears fruit, though slowly and only with a lot of cosseting.  We argue weekly instead of daily.  And the children are fantastic.

But again I digress.

The late morning of the day he died, Ola's father rang her up to ask her about the battery recharger we had left there (to charge batteries for Chris's many toys).  Her father wondered if, because it had berths for four batteries, it necessarily had to recharge four batteries at a time.  Could it recharge two or three?  The fact that he chose to ask Ola was meaningful, because of all the people in the world to ask, the one least likely to know the answer may be Ola.  She isn't technically inclined at all.  It may have taken her a while even to understand the question.  He might have called his son, someone who loves gadgetry.  He might have called his brother, Mariusz, a worldly person, or his cousin, Janusz, an even more worldy person.  Or he might have called a friend from one of his former jobs.  Or he might have gone to Google.  But he called his daughter.  I have to assume that he called her for some reason other than to learn the answer.  We'll never know, of course.

Ola found his call very sad.  Among other things, she felt guilty for not recognizing that he was ill and within hours of a catastrophic event that would kill him.

I tried to point out that his call, though a call for help, was on the smallest possible scale.  He may have just wanted to hear her voice, and since he had no other reason to call her had used the excuse of the mysteries of rechargeable batteries.  When he wasn't drinking, I believe Ola was his favourite (as daughters often are for fathers), but I know very little about it and am simply guessing.

What Ola should take away from the conversation, I suggested, was that her father on the day he died wasn't particularly anxious, wasn't in pain, didn't need anything.  She shouldn't feel guilty for not having seen through his smoke screen, because it was not a smoke screen, just the way he felt on the final day of his life.  And that should be seen as something good.  He wasn't angry or sad or particularly ill. He wasn't grasping or blaming or wriggling -- all of which he could be.  He reached out to a family member to hear her voice -- the voice of someone he loved.  Several hours later he died -- as we had all known he would sooner or later.  Probably sooner, since he did not ever choose to protect or improve his health.

As often happens, his last words can be invested with more poignancy than they probably deserve.  Asking about recharging of batteries seems an almost clumsy metaphor for the process that we had all hoped he would embrace -- the recharging of his own batteries.  Calling the family member least likely to know the answer to his question seemed, too, characteristic of a man who was often lost and inclined to asked the wrong person for directions.  He meant well (when he wasn't drinking), and he liked to be kind to people (when he wasn't drinking).  When he was drinking, everything changed.

Now our children will have only one grandparent, Ola's mother.  How long that will last is open to guesswork, because she too smokes like a chimney.  She is one tough old bird, but her iron constitution can't last forever.