December 2016,
My father Peter O’Nan had been in a Veterans Center for several months. The whole year his health had been declining.
He had began falling the prior year, however he took a very nasty fall in February of the year 2016. He fell from the porch, and I had to revive him. He had lost consciousness, and I called the ambulance and the medics didn’t do anything. “Just don’t let him fall asleep, and he should be fine”
For the next few months he was falling, and going in and out of long hospital stays, a rather dirty retirement home, and inevitably in a Vet’s center in Onton, Kentucky.
Was he weakened by Pneumonia? Was it the painful arthritis he’s been complaining about for years. Was it his knee which had to be replaced 24 years earlier after a car wreck in which he was pronounced dead, but lived.
While we were all seeking answers, I went to an Open Church in New Harmony, Indiana. I asked for an answer. A few weeks later, we got an answer. It wasn’t the expected answer. The doctor’s looked over all of his symptoms, and suggested that it was ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis is a disease that inevitably kills of motor neurons, and the loss of voluntary muscle movement. A death sentence. So, in September we thought okay, how long do we have him? Another year?
So, as the Autumn kept getting darker and colder, so did my father’s physical symptoms. He was unable to move on his own, and soon his voice weakened so drastically that he could no longer speak. A faint “I Love You, son” was often the only words he could muster. He had his 74th birthday on December 10th, by Christmas night he had passed away at 5 p.m. The last words he heard before going into deep sleep on Christmas Eve afternoon was me playing him Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman”
Here is a poem I wrote for that situation. That Fall when i’d be driving 45 minutes to and from my house to the Vet Center to see my father.
Some Season Like Christmas:
It was some season, like Christmas
I was driving down Highway 41
Past unbalanced bridges, wanting to become one with the Ohio River
To see my dying dad for the last time
Listening to “On a Faraway Beach” by Eno,
as I drive by a blue brassiere in the middle of the street.
Some drunk woman’s last hurrah,
before settling for that frat guy factory dreams,
and having 6 children that hate them both despite having a good house.
I am driving
Even the farm cattle are under the mistletoe
Can’t wait for the presents, honey baked ham and peach pies.
With a mom that looks like she is straight from a 1950’s JC Penney Christmas catalog
for a new oven advertisement
Well, for my drive is different
The snow that slightly comes down isn’t pure white
More grayish, almost Olive green death
Enough to slick a tire, but not enough to shake you from reality
This is the drive of mania
A mania of tears, a depression, a stoic coolness, a hate for holidays
Icicles that look like razors
And you get there
He’s barely there
He has recent birthday gifts
A Christmas gift or 2
A baseball cap he’ll never get to wear
And he can barely see you, barely hear you
barely can talk beyond his disease to say “I Love you, Son” an unfamiliar whispering
This flashes me back to watching my grandfather
In his last days
My Father played him Ernest Tubb
And I played my father Wichita Lineman by Glen Campbell, and I played him ol’ Waylon
And I talked about all the memories
And I talked to him of Kentucky basketball
And he looks at me
Pale as pure snow
And barely muffles another
“I Love you Son”
(c) David L O’Nan published in Fevers of the Mind Poetry Digest Issue 2
Photo by David L O’Nan
