My Tribute To Joe
As most of you have read in other posts on my Facebook page, my father-in-law, Joe, passed from this life about 48 hours ago as I start to write this; Sunday, January 21st. Joe was 80, and had been slowing down considerably over the past while, but with no evidence of strokes until the huge clot landed in his main cerebral artery and took him away from us. He had been in the basement of the house where he had lived for almost 52 years and had come up around 9:30, tired and feeling "not quite right". My mother-in-law watched him drop into a chair and, concerned, asked him to raise his arms as a stroke test; when he couldn't get them up very high at all, she declared that he might be having one, and he replied with either "Probably..." or "Possibly..." and... then... he collapsed and never woke up. It took something over 84 hours for his body to catch up with his brain, and in that time he went to St. Catharines GH, Niagara Falls, and ultimately to Hamilton GH, where he was from Thursday morning until his passing.
Now, we always read in obituaries that the departed died "surrounded by [their] loving family"; The Kat and I were not there. We were not there at the moment of his passing, and it wasn't that we'd stepped out of the room or gone for coffee or anything as regretful as that. My mother-in-law, B, had been with him in Hamilton until she got picked up by her son (my brother-in-law), K, so that she could get some rest on Thursday morning. The Kat was drive by our daughter and her fiancé to Hamilton on Thursday in the late morning and they stayed until evening with K, his wife R, her other brother WJ, and of course B. On Friday, we went down together - I had been dealing with a horrible but mercifully brief dose of food poisoning on Wednesday when she came down to give me the news that Joe had been taken to hospital; she said, "I need you," and I levered my head off the couch for long enough to cuddle for a moment while she wept those first fearful tears. She left me in bed on Thursday and I slept for the greater portion of the 24 hours of that day! on Friday, I was well enough to go with her, though still fairly weak.
I brought my electronics with me so that I could work while she kept watch over her father. I had a presentation to be made on Saturday morning, so I worked on perfecting that. Around 6 in the evening, after a full shift in a tiny room of watching and waiting, B declared that she wanted to leave and get some rest. Joe had started to develop the "rattle", the bubbly, wet gurgles of fluid buildup in his lungs, and we knew that this was just going to progress. The Kat said that she wanted to stay, so she took the chair beside his bed, while I settled into the fold-down chair on the other side. She had made sure to pack a Bluetooth speaker, and much of the day had seen Joe's music being piped through one way or another. I have to say that I was impressed - the battery actually lasted something like eighteen hours before finally going caput; the volume was low, of course, so not a lot of energy output when you look right at it. How long were we staying? She said to ask her at 7. At seven, I said I'd give her until 8. A bit after 8, I asked her to make the decision, are we staying, yes or no, and she choked out, "Yes." Fine, I was going to go home (an hour one-way), pick up some food and other things, and be back hopefully before 11. I think I was actually back in the room at 11:05, toting three bags - one of clothes and two of food. A friend who has been staying with us is German and her love language is food, so she had provided me with packs of store-bought lasagna, salads, veggies, treats, bottles of water, all of which was appreciated but not all of which got consumed. And then, we settled in.
The speaker kept playing old country gospel hits, fed by either a phone or a tablet; if we didn't know the song, we skipped it; if we knew the song, we'd hum it or sing along in harmony. The nurses came to check on Joe and complimented us on the music from the room, especially The Kat - normally a timid singer more content to play the keyboard, she simply didn't give a damn who was listening to her sing to her father except him, and it lent her voice an angelic quality: she was singing as he so often had, simply for the joy of the music. I dozed between 2 and 5. He coughed up a bunch of that fluid when production was at its peak, and we learned something: people often choke to death not because there's fluid in their lungs, but because they panic and close off their airway, desperate not to inhale whatever it is. Joe kept breathing, even when it sounded like he was breathing through one of the heavy plastic bags, the stiff ones that specialty stores used to give you. He'd cough some up, we'd call the nurse to come suction it away, and they'd give him a shot to control the secretions.
We asked if we were prolonging anything - is the suction making this keep going? No, it's just keeping him comfortable, not prolonging. The oxygen under his nose? Just comfort, not enough to do anything. His pacemaker? It's not a defibrillating model, so no. This was all his body just refusing to quit.
I went and did my Saturday morning presentation, then returned to find everyone else had returned as well. We scattered to various lounges to try to give ourselves a break as we were now into the third day since it had happened. The stroke doctors had conferred and had given us a guesstimate of 96 hours or less, and we were surely headed towards that number! We talked, sometimes deeply and painfully, about what we were all feeling. I took another nap in the late afternoon in the one lounge, shot bolt upright around 5 and went to tell The Kat that I think we need to head home; she was thinking the same thing anyway, and the others weren't going to be far behind.
Why did we have to go at that moment? Because in my dozing, I had been praying, and I had realized that my prayers had taken on a disturbing tone - when they had started, it was asking, "Please, Lord, take Joe - it's time, he's tired, and we need to let him go to be with you." Asking had given way to begging, then to pleading, then to shouting, and then to screaming... in my mind. Not that God doesn't listen to screamed prayers - heck, He listens to prayers, filled with bile, invective, and cussing! - but it meant that I was losing my grip on a few things. We left, drove the hour home, and The Kat went straight to bed; she laid down at 6:15, and except for a brief period of wakefulness around 8:00 when a minor crisis popped up for Sir Goobs, slept solidly until 7:30 Sunday morning.
We went to LH and told everyone what was going on as we led worship, me in the pulpit, her on the piano. As the service ended, we sang "Go Now In Peace" as we do every week, as I have at many church services over the past thirty-some years, including at Rockway, where I remember helping the choir there learn it. The Kat found herself wondering if her dad needed to hear that song one more time. At the same time, the Rockway and North Pelham congregations, worshiping jointly, were saying their Prayers of the People, and were mentioning Joe during them. The Kat had driven separately, needing to get some house stuff done before heading either to the hospital or to her brother's place once more, so I headed to Knox and did the service there while she went home. At 12:02, just as we started the final hymn (yes, I ran over slightly at Knox!), she tried to call me; I called up the keyboard on the iPad and texted her that we weren't done yet, and I got back "10:30". I let everyone know, and then as soon as I could once the service was over, I headed for home.
Visitation will be on Sunday, January 4th, from 2-5 (probably at least to 6), with funeral on Monday at 11. Tallman's Funeral Home in Vineland will be where the visitation takes place, but the funeral itself will be out of the Rockway Presbyterian Church.
So who was Joe to me?
When I met Joe in the summer of 1991, he was a friend's father - Kathy needed a plus-one for a wedding, and since I was the guy whose house she stopped at on the way in to visit Windsor friends from her co-op work posting in Leamington, I got asked. I came up early for the wedding and she treated me to the "full Niagara Falls experience" as a thank-you, and then we went back to her house for supper. Joe was 47, not much older than WJ is right now, and when he was asked how work at the hospital had been the night before, he told a story about how he had been cleaning up a patient (he was an orderly, the position that became a porter in later years) when the gentleman had sat up just before expiring messily all over the nice clean bed! The family laughed with a bit of "Ew!", and so did I, and we all just kept right on eating. I've asked by times over the years if I was being tested, even though The Kat and I weren't a couple at that point; the best answer I got was "Indirectly, but in case you're wondering, you passed it!"
First and foremost, Joe was a farmer. He grown up tending his parents' farm, and when they no longer had the land, he went and worked as a hired man with his brother for a time. When he left his brother's place to come back to St. Catharines to raise his family, his brother needed two others to replace him. His formal job was at the hospital, but he "played at farming" on another friend's land, spending many hours out there on most days. When they farmer was cash-poor and couldn't pay a lot, Joe took part of his pay in meat - when a cow was slaughtered, Joe got half the cow, just paid for butchering costs, and filled the freezer with everything from hamburger to T-bones! The Kat told me that she was "poor" in that the money being brought in was below the poverty line, but she certainly didn't know it by the food on the table! But Joe helped his friend the dairy farmer, his brother-in-law the grape farmer, and various others as well. He never really slept a whole lot - five or six hours at most. He'd get home from the night shift in time to have breakfast with his family, then they'd go to school while he slept until early afternoon, at which point he would head out to the farm for a few hours. He'd get home for supper, do something in the evening with everyone, then head back to the hospital while they went to bed. But the land was everything to him.
In later years, after he retired, the pattern of life was to go to bed early if possible (perhaps 10), but be up by 4:30, the same as he would have been for chores at the other end of his life. B would wake up and find a second load of laundry already in, coffee brewing, and Joe singing away to a devotional song down in the basement. He'd read the PCC Daily Devotion before shifting over for a round or two of mahjong on Pogo.com, where his dragon was absolutely ageless!
Joe loved people, and spending time with them. Though he could be content in his own company, The Kat remembers days when he would roust the family, drag them into the car, and then head out looking for someone to visit - it could be the fourth or fifth door they knocked on before someone asked them in, but away they would go!
Joe loved to sing. He had a lovely tenor voice - not the refined voice that came with training, but the powerful one that comes from loving to sing and being able to do it well. I have many memories of singing great old songs of the Church with him, especially a jazzy arrangement of Leaning On the Everlasting Arms that we had sung in Sarnia and then transplanted to Rockway one Sunday. I also remember singing a duet with him at B's nephew's wedding, which had been the same summer as ours. And of course if I was ever up on a Sunday morning, for many years it was a given that my place was in the choir, not the congregation - I'd be standing next to him, either trying to match his notes are sing the baritone counterpoint.
And dancing! Joe was an amazing dancer, and had been for many years. His mother had led a dance band for decades while he was growing up, and he could lead a partner across the dance floor like the best of them. We heard many stories about his dancing - stories from when he and B were first on the floor together, chatting up a storm while other couples cuddled, or from when The Kat was young and he was spinning her giggling form around in a wild polka. Music was a HUGE part of his life, and over those last hours, we tried to find the "soundtrack" that he would have enjoyed.
But Joe was tired. He had wanted to make it to our daughter's wedding, yes, but there were some thing that seemed to be saying that time was drawing close. Life was defined by trips to various doctors, as it had been for his parents and then for B's parents. He was tired. And now he will rest in the cemetery that he mowed and maintained for forty years.
Above all else, Joe was a man who, in my eyes, was dedicated to life. From raising animals, tending crops, caring for patients, visiting friends, being present for family, and all the rest, he was a man who was dedicated to life and cultivating it in those around him. He was a tremendous blessing to the world, and though he will indeed be missed, we have his example to reflect on for the rest of our lives.