My father died seven years ago today. He was seventy years old. He died because he would not take care of himself.

He smoked. He didn’t exercise. And, even though he wasn’t overweight, he ate poorly. Most of his lunchtimes were spent at the local Burger King.

He had his first heart attack when he was forty-nine years old. It was so severe that he had to be revived on an operating table. Once released from the hospital, he swore that he would do better with his health. He began watching what he ate. He started walking five to ten miles a day. He quit smoking.

All of this lasted a little under a year. Then, gradually, his walking stopped, and he  began smoking cigarettes again and eating French fries again almost daily.

Seven years ago in February, he left work saying that he felt dizzy. Later that evening, he collapsed in his bedroom.  Face first on the hardwood floor.  Splat. My stepmother called 9-1-1, and he was rushed to Hartford Hospital. By the time I got to the hospital, he was in the intensive care unit, and we, the family, were not allowed in. I looked through the little window in the door, and I saw Dad lying on the gurney, with tubes coming out of him.  I saw his face. He looked scared to death.

I spent the better part of that night in the waiting room of that hospital with my step mother, my two younger brothers, and my wife.

Periodically, the doctor would come in with an update. The prognosis was poor.  All tests showed that Dad’s heart was functioning at only ten percent of capacity. The doctors didn’t know what was keeping him alive.

Strangely enough, he pulled through. It took two weeks, with all of us siblings taking turns camping out in the hospital waiting rooms while keeping our vigil, but he pulled through. The doctor’s said that the man had a strong will to live. I knew better. It wasn’t so much his will to live that kept him going as much as it was his fear of death.

Dad was absolutely frightened of diseases and of death itself. He would become so preoccupied with his health at times that he would work himself up into a nervous frenzy.

It’s funny that, even though he was SO FRIGHTENED of dying, he didn’t quit smoking and he didn’t take care of his body.

Even though Dad survived the initial onslaught of the heart attack, the news wasn’t good.  His heart was so destroyed by years of neglect that he would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of life.

For the next seven weeks, I visited him every day. I brought my first granddaughter, his first great grandchild, in to visit him once. She was just an infant at the time. He weakly reached over, stroked her cheek with one finger and whispered, “So soft!”

All Dad wanted to do was go home.  That’s all he talked about for the entire seven weeks he was in the hospital.  He just wanted to go home.

He never made it.

He developed an infection from having a tracheotomy, (a hole cut into his windpipe just below the adam’s apple to help him breath.) and, because of his weakened condition, it spread rapidly to the major organs in his body. And finally, his weak heart couldn’t take it any longer, and he died.

He just died.

The last time I saw him, tubes were sticking out his arms, his nose and his mouth.  His unseeing eyes were open, and the eyeballs were just rolling around in their sockets.

I left the hospital that night knowing that I would never see him again. 

I was awakened at 2 a.m. that morning with the phone call saying that he had passed on.

He hadn’t “passed on”. He fucking died.

I hung up the phone and rolled over and went back to sleep.

The next day, I was SO ANGRY at him for letting himself go.  He had had a warning twenty-one years earlier with his first heart attack, and he failed to do anything about it! (Hell, I quit smoking because of his first heart attack! And I was smoking three packs a day at the time!)

The deep sorrow of his death didn’t hit me until his funeral, through which I blubbered like a baby from beginning to end.

I remembered times when I was a child and I thought that he was Superman, and that he was indestructible.

Well, guess what? Superman died.  And it wasn’t kryptonite or some super-villain that killed him.  He died from his own actions (or, to be more accurate, his own inactions), which, to my way of thinking, was tantamount to suicide.

I loved my Dad, and I miss him every single day.  I am still angry with him, although not as much as I was initially, and I cannot shake the feeling that he should be alive today. He refused to listen to his doctors, to his body, and to just plain and simple common sense.

That baby great-grandaughter with the so soft cheeks is seven years old today. She’ll be eight in August.

Dad never got to know her, and he never even got a chance to meet his other two younger great granddaughters either.

Such a waste.

I really don’t understand it.