Dad's Wallet

When my dad died, I went through his wallet and found two photographs... only two.

My half brother and sister from his first marriage, Jeff and Jennifer.

Repost #7 The Dead Woman in My Truck

Recently the subject of cremains and what to do with them has come up on Facebook and it reminded me of this story. Obviously, this was written when my dad was still alive and I was still married, just to avoid any confusion.

Original post August 5, 2006

I rode around with Erna's remains in my truck for quite a while. I honestly didn't mean to. I would have liked to have dumped her somewhere, anywhere, rather than drive with her daily. But Erna, in death as much as life, was hard to shake.

I don't remember exactly when Erna became one of my dad's patients. He always had one or two little old ladies that depended on him completely. He'd go grocery shopping for them and take them to appointments with specialists. The first of these was Mrs. Wildt, who crocheted me a baby blanket that I have to this day. The last, and perhaps greatest, was Erna.

Erna was a little old Italian lady. I didn't know her age, but I'd guess she was in her late 80's. Her husband had been dead for years, and had probably committed suicide if she was half the woman then as she was when I knew her. She'd call at all hours of the night; a hypochondriac that was dying. There's no worse kind. It's not like you could just tell her to suck it up, you aren't really sick, because in reality, she was inching closer and closer to death. But her complaints were only tangentially connected to her illness. And she didn't care who knew about them.

"My vagina hurts!" she told me over the phone. Only she didn't pronounce it vagina, she said "ba-gina."

"Ok, Erna... I'll tell Dr. Joe."

"My ba-gina hurts! Get Dr. Joe. I think I'm dying."

"Ok, Erna... You have to get off the phone so I can call him. He's not here."

"Oooooooh.... I'm dying." click.

That's how most of our conversations went. I sometimes went with my dad to see Erna in her little mobile home. She had no sense of privacy about her body and would often partially disrobe with me in the room in order for my dad to check her heart with his stethoscope. There we'd be. Erna with her sad, wrinkled breast resting in her lap. My dad asking her to take a deep breath... and again... and hold. Me sitting on the couch wishing I was anywhere but there and the motheaten deer head watching forlornly over the whole affair.

When I graduated high school I forgot about Erna for a couple of years. I'd moved out of state, but when I came back she was still there. Still calling dad's office and home whenever she felt a twinge of panic.

Then dad had a stroke. They didn't expect him to live. It started one morning in his office. He didn't feel very well and when he tried to get up out of his chair, he found he couldn't. I was living in an apartment above his office at the time and going to UCF. When I got back from class, there was a note on my door from his receptionist that said to meet my mom at the hospital. They never have determined exactly what it was. One neurologist thought it was a clot, while another believed it to be an unnatural constriction of the blood vessels to his brain stem brought on by high blood pressure.

He survived, despite the poor prognosis. He was on a ventilator for months and does physical therapy to this day. He never recovered any of his fine motor skills and is unable to walk.

While dad was still in the hospital, Erna was still dying. Without my dad, I think she finally decided that she didn't want to live anymore and she passed away a few months after his stroke.

While he was on the ventilator, my dad and I communicated via an alphabet board. I would run my finger down the letters and he would blink at the correct letter.

E
R
N
A
D
I
E
D

"I know," I told him.

I
N
E
E
D
Y
O
U
T
O
P
I
C
K
U
P
H
E
R
A
S
H
E
S

"Ok. But do you need anything?"

N
O

So I went to the funeral home and picked up a small box with her ashes. She had declined even an urn. She wanted her ashes to be spread in the ocean.

I retrieved them, but I was still busy with dad. I'd drive several hours daily to stay with him during the day at the rehabilitation facility. After a while, it just became another object in my truck: a cd case, books, and a box of Erna.

When I moved to Massachusetts I forgot about her. I had to leave my truck in Florida while I drove the moving truck north. My brother-in-law drove it up a couple of months later. I didn't tell him about the box.

We came back for a visit and my wife insisted I bring Erna. It was a busy time, visiting with everybody... checking on dad's progress which had noticeably slowed.

Our last day it was raining, but Britton insisted that we get rid of Erna. She wasn't driving back to Massachusetts with her. I didn't know what the big deal was. I'd been driving around with her for a couple of years by then. We drove to the Intracoastal and Britton got out with Erna's box and let her go off a pier. According to Britton, her last word was, "Bloooop."

Some might call it laziness... or indifference... or even passive aggressiveness. But I think my failure to let her go was something deeper. Maybe I was holding on to a time when my dad cared for people and wasn't cared for, a time when he was the most important person in the world to someone else.

Treasure Hunting

My dad was, for the most part, a sane and rational man. Actually, I use "sane" rather loosely, but he was not one to dwell on intangible things. He did not go to movies or read fiction. He was a pragmatist.

So his one real departure is rather ironic. He believed unflinchingly in hidden treasures.

Florida is full of treasure, or so one is lead to believe. Growing up I was spoonfed stories of people finding Spanish pieces of eight on the beach after a hurricane. John Dillinger supposedly buried money from a bank robbery in the yard of a house where a huge beachside condo now stands. Plantation owners buried literal pots of gold before the Seminoles came through and burned their sugar mills to the ground. It was this Florida that my father grew up in and he spent a lot of time with a metal detector and entrenching tool in his hands.

We once bought a house in New Smyrna all based on a second hand story told to him by a patient who had worked on the house. The story was that the man's father had been the cook for a bunch of outlaws in North Carolina, I think. They all got killed or thrown in jail and he took off with all the gold. They buried it in North Carolina somewhere and the man's son eventually moved to Florida in the 1920's, bringing the remaining loot. My dad's patient had been hired to put bars on the windows of the house.

For me, two questions would have immediately popped up:

First of all, why would someone who is putting bars on his windows be dumb enough to tell someone the story?

Secondly, why would someone who had that much money choose to settle in a ratty little house in the middle of nowhere?

But those particular red flags were never raised in my dad's head. We bought the house and began using the metal detector as inconspicuously as possible around the yard.

Inconspicuously, I said. A middle aged white dude and his son digging holes in the yard of a house in the middle of the poor, black section of town. There were these two ancient guys across the street that would just sit out on their porch and watch us.

When we'd gone over the entire yard several times, we figured it was time to start on the house. Over the course of a hot Florida summer, we proceeded to completely demolish that house by hand and cart it away, a dump truck load at a time. The two guys across the street just watched us and shook their heads at the things crazy white people do.

We never did find anything of value. I can't say I was all that surprised. But my dad never seemed disappointed.

And looking back, I guess he gave me a little nugget to carry with me.

Repost #6: My Dad's Contribution to Biological Warfare

Original post: February 7, 2007

I bet you think this is a joke, don't you?

It's not.

With all of the emphasis that's been placed on biological weapons and terrorism since 9/11, there has been a renewed interest in the U.S. government's forays into bio warfare. While my father was in the army, he was a participant in biological warfare experiments at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, home of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. I caught a show on PBS the other night about Operation Whitecoat, which reminded me of his participation.

Operation Whitecoat was the U.S. Army's solution to dealing with conscientious objectors and the perceived threat of biological warfare by the Soviet Union. My father was one of the conscientious objectors that became a human guinea pig.

Many of you know that I was raised a Seventh-Day-Adventist, which probably explains a lot about how screwed up I am. My father was also raised Seventh-Day-Adventist and like a number of others during wartime, felt a duty to serve their country, but were opposed to killing. Many, like my father, became medics. During the Viet Nam war, medics were often sitting ducks. They were inserted with slow flying helicopters and were often targets of the Viet Cong. When the U.S. Army needed human test subjects for their germ warfare experiments, they asked for volunteers from their ranks of Seventh-Day-Adventist draftees. The top secret experiments on humans were given the code name Operation Whitecoat.

My dad's experiments involved Q fever. He was exposed to the bacterium Coxiella burnetii, which usually manifests itself with flu like symptoms that last between one and two weeks. As far he knew, this was all he was ever exposed to, but you never know when it comes to this type of experimentation. In most of these experiments, the scientists would fill a 40 ft. diameter steel sphere called the Eight Ball with the particular virus or bacteria that they were studying. The volunteers would attach gas masks which had been hooked up to the Eight Ball and breathe the infected air. Then they would wait. When they began showing symptoms, treatment would be given.

I think my dad was one of the more fortunate ones. Some of the other things to which volunteers were exposed were rabbit fever, anthrax and black plague, significantly more serious diseases. Of the 2300 volunteers, none died, although there is evidence that some did experience health problems related to their exposure for years and even decades after. Operation Whitecoat came to a formal end in 1973. In 2003 on the 30th anniversary of the end of Operation Whitecoat, my dad was sent a medal for his service. It now hangs in my studio.

One surprising conclusion to which the PBS show came was that Operation Whitecoat most likely had a direct effect on Richard Nixon's decision to ratify the 1925 Geneva Protocol which prohibited the use of chemical and biological weapons in 1969. Work at Ft. Detrick continues to this day, revolving around defense against biological weapons and infectious diseases. It is also home to the National Cancer Institute.

A Blog for Him

The phone woke me early, in those hours reserved for bad news. It was my Aunt Doris.

"Joey, your father has passed," she said in her simple southern voice.

There was more. There had to have been more, but those are the only words I remember. Jesus was mentioned more than once.

And all at once my life changed. I began making the obligatory calls.

I'd made a commitment to meet my friend Barry at the gallery that morning to help him load some books. Barry grew up in Chattanooga and his southern dialect gives comfort against the flinty background of the north. I naturally gravitated to him when I moved to Massachusetts and he became a friend and mentor.

So when I saw him I broke down and cried. I told him about my dad, and of course he yelled at me for not calling to cancel with him. But he was the person I wanted to see more than anyone else right then. So we talked about fathers, and dogs, and losing both of them. And in the end I was ready to get on the plane to Florida.

The next day I flew down and stayed at my mother's house in Ormond Beach. She and dad had gotten divorced several years before and she was in Michigan at the time. Dad had lived the last year or so of his life in Palm Coast, just a little north of Ormond. The funeral home was located in Palm Coast as well. I drove up to make the arrangements for my father. Jeff, the funeral director, was an earnest guy. He took me into a room to discuss the procedure and was treating me with kid gloves. He had no idea what he was in for.

My father was matter of fact about his death. He had his stroke in 1997 and wasn't expected to live. I assumed he would ask me to end his life, rather than linger on attached to a machine. Through sheer determination on his part, he recovered quite a bit of his mobility and his ability to breathe without a ventilator. From this point on, there was an understanding that if he should ever have another stroke or health crisis, nothing should be done to prolong his life. In a sense, I became resigned to his death many years before, and his life after had been on borrowed time.

So when it did come, it was with a mixed sense of sadness and relief that it was finally over. He had been trapped in that numb, unresponsive body far too long.

Jeff was a little taken aback by my disposition. I informed him that my father had requested no service. He wanted to be cremated and no fuss made whatsoever about his death. It was an interesting experience being the person to make these decisions for my dad that he could not make for himself.

"What kind of urn would you like?"

"No, no urn."

Jeff grimaced a little and took me into the "showroom" so to speak, where the caskets were kept. There he showed me three containers. One was a cardboard box reinforced with plywood, one a simple wooden box, and the last a finished wooden box.

"These are the cremation vessels." he explained. "They hold the body when it goes into the crematorium."

"The cardboard one," I said without hesitation.

This was, after all, what they intended on burning him up in. My dad would have haunted me if I'd chosen one of the wooden ones. As it was, I was afraid he'd appear like Hamlet's father to hector me for spending $85 on a cardboard box.

Then Jeff asked me about the container for the ashes.

"We have several options for transport of the cremains. You can purchase something here or bring something from home."

"Bring something from home?" I asked, "What do you mean?"

He said I could bring an appropriate container. I got the impression that when he said appropriate, he meant one of sufficient volume to contain the ashes. Now the only cremains I'd ever seen were those of his patient, Erna, but she was a tiny Italian lady. I wasn't quite sure what would be appropriate for the average man sized cremains.

"Would a five gallon bucket be ok?" I asked.

He looked at me a little funny.

"That will be fine," he said, before he realized I was kidding. He told me I would be surprised by some of the things that people brought in. I told him that the simple wooden container that they sold for $180 would be suitable. After getting shafted on the service, grave, gravestone, casket and cremation vessel, I figured I should throw him a bone. $180 for a $2 box still stung a little.

So he took me back to the room and began adding everything up.

"Would you like to see your father?"

It was the question I'd been anticipating.

"Sure," I said.

He left and informed the person that prepares the bodies for viewing to get him ready for me to see him. He said it would be a few minutes and after a little while he came for me. He took me to the doorway of a room where the bodies were placed for viewing. He cracked the door and told me to take as long as I wanted. Then he left me alone.

I entered the room. Frankly, dad looked pretty good. Or maybe he just looked that bad alive, but still. I didn't have that sense of uneasiness that arose when I'd seen other people I knew who had died. They never quite looked like the same person. I took a few minutes with him and then went back and opened the door. Jeff came out of the office when he heard the noise.

"That isn't him... That's not my father," I told him.

Jeff blanched.

"I'm just kidding," I told him.

Poor Jeff. He was a good guy just trying to help a kid get rid of his dad's body in the most expedient manner possible. I'm sure he had to deal with a lot of horrible, untimely and tragic passings. And here I was being an ass, while he was making final arrangements for my dad. I'll never forget his patient assistance and good humor.

When I left, I visited the Bulow Sugar Mill Ruins, just south of the funeral home. It was there that many years ago, my father and uncle waded neck deep into Bulow Creek in the middle of the night. They were trying to feel with their feet for the 19th century bottles tossed in in the creek by partygoers at the plantation. He loved to tell the story how, as he and my uncle shuffled their feet in the muck to try and find the bottles, a six foot alligator slowly passed between them within arms reach, eyes blazing with the reflection of their headlamps.

I sat there for a long time. An egret fished along the edge of the brackish water through which he'd waded those many years ago. And on the bank of Bulow Creek, under a sky more holy than any church, I said goodbye to my father.

Dad on his 73rd

My dad would have been 73 years old today.



Most people knew him as an easygoing family practice physician.

While in high school, he pulled a pistol on his principal.

He once shot out the back window of the truck owned by a guy that was trespassing on our farm. Another time he took two guys at gunpoint from our farm to the police station in town... sitting with them in the back of the truck while my brother drove... for picking shrooms.

He broke his neck in a car accident and had to be put in a halo... he was seeing patients in his office three days later.

He twice pissed away more money in the span of a couple of years than I am likely to ever see in my lifetime.

Snakes feared him when he had his golf clubs.

He was generous with time and money, but rarely with patience or praise.

He imparted the wisdom in me to not judge a man by what he wore or how he spoke.

At times he taught me how to be... and others, how not to be.

He was a man for which the words pride and shame had no meaning.

Happy Birthday dad. I don't know what you'd think of me if you could see me today.