Story Frame 52 – Azaleas & the IRS

After his first few months at the Old Soldier’s Home, Dad’s health gradually deteriorated. The phone rang more and more frequently with urgent requests from the staff doctors to come over and take him to Walter Reed Army Medical. Eventually we moved him from independent living to the moderate care building.

In February of 2005, a call came in from one of the doctors asking me to come get Dad and take him to see a specialist at Washington Hospital Center. His kidneys were beginning to fail, and he needed to see a nephrologist.

After the examination, Dad and I sat side by side across the desk from the doctor, waiting to hear his thoughts. The doctor reviewed the paperwork before him, then looked up at Dad, studying his face for a moment. When he eventually spoke, it was to ask gently how much he wanted to know.

“Just tell me exactly what it is,” Dad replied calmly.

The doctor paused for a moment. He looked over at me and I nodded. If anyone could handle getting the hard news straight, it would be Dad.

“To be honest, Phil, you don’t have long,” he finally said. “It’s a race between your heart and your kidneys as to which one will do you in first.”

Dad nodded, with what I could only describe as an expression of keen interest on his face.

“How long do I have?” he asked.

“I can’t say for sure,” the doctor replied, “but it will be this spring. I think you have about 5-7 weeks.”

I turned my head and stared out the window, realizing Dad might not live long enough to see the azaleas bloom in Washington DC. They were his favorite plant and something I had always associated with him. When I was a child, he’d built a miniature greenhouse in our garden using an old wooden framed window. He’d demonstrated how to grow azaleas from cuttings using a special root stimulating hormone that looked like Noxzema to a seven-year-old. Tears filled my eyes at the memory.

Dad, however, seemed to brighten up immediately, even sitting up straighter at these words.

“Finally,” he said. “Someone who tells me the straight deal!”

That was when my phone rang. I saw it was Segundo’s lawyer friend from New York City. I excused myself and stepped out into the hallway to take the call.

“Good news!” she said, not bothering with pleasantries. “It’s all done. You are a free person; the IRS will not bother you anymore.”

Over the past eighteen months, she’d compiled a case on my behalf, which included a letter from Dr. Peckar – the man responsible for bringing the American Byzantine documentary film into my life. In it, he gently laid out the nature of the traumas I’d been through, including divorce and Karen’s death and asked them to show me some compassion.

I found it confusing to process this wonderful news within minutes of hearing what amounted to my father’s death sentence. As I walked back into the nephrologist’s office, I burst into tears.

Dad thought they were for him. Which, of course, they were.

Driving back home that night, I gathered more and more anxiety around me, once again feeling pulled and torn about where I was and where I wasn’t; what I had to do and what I should be doing, and even what I wasn’t doing that hadn’t yet occurred to me.

Looking at my phone, I saw my friend, Stephen, the editing and sound guy with whom I had worked at the documentary workshop, called and left a message. I played it as I drove along the Potomac River, listening to his voice reading poems that he said reminded him of me at this moment in my life. After the first one, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” I pulled my car over by the side of the river to concentrate on the second one, which was Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life.”

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream!

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest …

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,

Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

Seeing, shall take heart again…

Listening to Stephen read these words to me as I sat in the dark watching moonlight dance on the water, I leaned my head against the wheel – and just sobbed.

An hour later, however, an idea came to me.

The following day, I drove over to the local garden center to look for an azalea to buy and bring over to Dad. Just in case he didn’t live long enough to see them bloom in the gardens, he would at least have one to brighten up his room.

To my relief, they had half a dozen in flower. Unable to choose which one he might like the best, I decided to buy them all. I filled up my car with them. If he wasn’t going to live long enough to see spring, the kids and I would bring it to him.

That weekend, Zoë, Leif, and I arrived at the door of his room, each of us carrying two big pots of bright pink and red blooms. Dad was delighted. Over the coming days whenever we spoke by phone, he would tell me how many people came to visit him – staff and friends – to see and admire all the azaleas that filled his room.

A few weeks later, the flowers had peaked, turned brown and had fallen from the plants. Dad was moved once again, this time to a nice room in the hospice wing of yet another building. I had his furniture moved there and hung up his art and photographs of family and the many places he’d lived so he could see his entire life on the walls around him.

Dad was delighted to learn one of his doctors was Ethiopian. It was another affirmation (as if we needed it) that the Old Soldiers’ Home had been the right choice for him. That connection inspired a lot of happy and animated conversations between them. The doctor even approved his wish for a daily dry martini.

Throughout that year, Dad had kept a list of the tasks he wanted me to do on his behalf. One by one, we tackled everything until there was only one item left: his 2004 tax returns. I told Dad I’d put it off because I hated dealing with the IRS. But the real reason was that I was scared of what would happen once we had nothing left to do.

Sure enough, only a handful of days after he signed the completed return, he let go. His responsibilities finished, Dad slipped into semi-consciousness. He wasn’t able to speak, or he chose not to. And I’m not sure he could actually see anymore. Leaving the kids to take care of themselves, I moved into his room at the Old Soldier’s Home watching over him by day, sleeping in his recliner at night, leaving his room only for small breaks.

I read his mother’s letters to him – the ones she had written to him during the years she lived in Ethiopia when my grandfather was an advisor to the late Emperor Haile Selassie. Sticking to my theme of the past weeks, I added a few mentions of azaleas, even though there were none in the letters.

In the late morning of the third day, desperate to see the kids and take a shower, I decided to slip home for a few hours. I whispered in his ear before I left that I’d be right back. I told him a friend of his named Frank – the same name as his younger brother – would be stopping by so he’d have someone with him while I was gone.

I drove home, hugged the kids, made sure they had enough food and took a shower. Toweling my hair as I walked downstairs, I heard the phone in the kitchen ring. Once again, I knew that was the call. And it was. The doctor on the other end of the line told me Dad had hung on until Frank got there, then stopped breathing after he left. I wondered if he had thought his brother was coming and had waited for him. I also wondered if he’d waited until I left to let go.

Sadly, wearily, I put on fresh clothes, kissed the kids goodbye and headed back across town to the Old Soldier’s Home. I got to his room just before the undertaker arrived. Moments later, watching the gurney roll down the hallway with the body of my larger-than-life father zippered up in a black bag lying on it was the most alone I’d ever felt in my 49 years.

Mingled with the grief, however, was the huge sense of gratitude I felt for the past year of grace inspired by Bruce Norfleet’s documentary film. Had it not been for the inspiration of The Price of Freedom, I don’t know how I would have managed to take care of my father long distance. But I do know it would not have been the wonderful and serendipitous bundle of experiences it turned out to be. Thanks to the thoughts and ideas triggered by Bruce’s film, his last year was spent in an atmosphere of high quality of care, surrounded by a network of wonderful new friendships with WWII and Vietnam War vets at the Old Soldier’s Home.

It's hard to put into words just how meaningful that was to him. My dad had enjoyed a full and happy family life and a decades-long international career. Yet in his last months, he often thought about the war he'd fought more than sixty years earlier. And as his life came to an end, he often dreamed he was back in France during the war, leading villagers cross the mountains to safety.

I moved Dad into the Old Soldiers’ Home at 2 pm on the 23^rd of March 2004, and he died of congestive heart failure March 22^nd 2005 at noon – having lived there just two hours shy of a year.

Dad would have appreciated the near symmetry of that – although he would likely have fretted about those two hours messing up a perfect year.

Coming up next … Story Frame 53 – Angel With an Umbrella

[Note: The Price of Freedom aired nationwide on PBS stations and was one of eight semi-finalists in the 2002 Academy Awards competition.]