very seldom do you meet someone who is caring, generous, strong, intelligent, giving and loving. For anyone that knew my father, they would agree that these words and more sum up his life. Hard working his whole life, his only concern was to make sure others were taken care of. Even when he was sick and hallucinating he would talk of helping people.
He passed away at 2:45 am today with Ash by his side and his head on my shoulder. Luckily he didn't suffer any pain and passed fairly quickly.
My mother used to tell me all the time "If you can be half the man your father is, I will be proud of you"
It's a hard one to live up to but I will keep trying
(the kids all got together that night and although not big on singing in public, we did 'Lean On Me' as a family. I am lucky to have the greatest kids around)
My son's Derek poem
........
In
Memoriam
My
grandfather was cremated. His remains were placed in a wooden box
on which is inscribed the dates of his birth and death, as well as a
phrase that, for him, was a most fitting verbal segue: “Ah, what
the hell.”
Charles Robert
Spanfelner.
When he was a
company man,
they called him
“Moose”, a nickname
my brother
confirmed at the urinal.
I know him as
Grandpa,
a man always old
to me, who had
always lived in a house
of well water and
homemade pies
and dried apricots
and Reader’s Digest
and glasses that
hurt my eyes to wear.
In these past
months,
my passive
sensitivities have allowed me
to feel as I feel
for the dispossessed
of Sudan, the
invisible poor
of my own country,
the sweatshop kids
of India, treating
word of his cancer
like subtle
advertisement in my daily pages,
a skirmish at the
fringe of my sensibilities.
Then my sister
calls.
You’ll regret
not coming, she says.
She is weary,
wounded by his shoulders
more and more like
wire hangers,
wrapping herself
most nights
in a liquor cocoon
from which
she crawls in the
morning,
still a
caterpillar.
I’ll be
there, I tell her.
I arrive within an
hour and
my grandfather is
in the bathroom.
A hundred
thirty pounds now,
she warns, he’s
lost sixty.
His bed is in the
old dining room,
a hearing aid and
a glass of ginger ale
gathering dust on
the nightstand.
When he steps out,
it is slowly,
like a man with
cataracts stepping
into the dwindling
impressions of his life.
His bare legs are
spare white birch,
the bark pulled
back
from the thick
knots of his knees.
He is oblivious of
me.
Once he is in bed,
I greet him, hug him,
gently grasp his
corn husk hand.
Words catch in his
bottlenecked throat
and he swallows
them down, choosing carefully
those that may
trickle through.
He recollects
picking me up on the side
of the road with
laundry in my arms,
how he let my
stepmother have it.
I thank him. I
remember.
He is barely a
scarecrow beneath the sheets.
I want to say I
love him, that I’ll miss him.
He sighs. Ah,
what the hell, he says.