Hole #18 - "Home"

The eighteenth hole on a golf course is often known as the “home” hole and when I originally decided to divide Golf My Way Home into eighteen “holes” or chapters I conceived of the “home” hole as being a literal return to our family home in Connecticut at the end of the trip. But in hindsight my return was, in many ways, just the beginning.

Even the end of my father’s life two weeks ago and the memorial service yesterday don’t feel like endings in the absolute sense. The experience of going through all of this with him and together as a family has had a lasting impact that will stay with each of us for the rest of our lives. His spirit is more a part of my life now than ever.

But our family home will never feel quite the same without him. Even though his clothes still hang in the closet with his shoes lined up in their usual place on the floor and his woodworking tools still hang from hooks in the garage with bits of sawdust, paint and glue clinging to the blades, a major part of  “home” has gone with him.

So home must be somewhere in the heart – the place where my father’s memory resides and where all of our life experiences gather and shape us. It cannot be sold or renovated or razed. It cannot be given away or lost or broken. It is who we are and how we interact with and influence the world around us. It is friends and family. It is love and a sense of self.

In the final months and days of his life my Dad was searching for that sense of self and taking stock of his own life and because he understandably felt the desire to reach out to the people he was leaving behind, I was the lucky recipient of many heartfelt thoughts and memories.

He said to me, “You never want to look back and wish you’d done more.” And then with his trademark twinkle in the eye, he nodded toward his own predicament – morphine drip, oxygen tank and hospital bed – and said, “Of course, you only think about these things when you’re not doing so hot.”

I asked him how he felt about his own life and he responded, “I think I did well with what I had to work with.” On the surface, this seemed like an odd thing for such a successful man to say. After all, he was the college-educated son of a successful lawyer, an excellent skier and handsome and charming enough to convince my mom to marry him. But after months of conversations, sometimes for hours at a time, I think I came to understand what he meant.

My Dad loved to ski, but was an asthmatic who sometimes became so out of breath at altitude that it frightened him. He was also afraid of high speeds and heights. This wasn’t a problem when he was skiing the slalom, his specialty, but ski racing wasn’t as specialized back in his day so he was also forced to compete in the downhill and ski jumping – a factor that contributed to his decision to ultimately give up competitive skiing and focus on his studies. We were watching a Womens’ World Cup downhill together shortly before he went into the hospital and he shook his head in awe of the speeds the girls reached. He told me he thought these young girls had more guts than he ever did and I know he meant it.

So even in doing the thing that probably allowed my Dad the greatest freedom, skiing, he was acutely aware of his personal limitations, real or perceived. This made him cautious, a characteristic that would come to define him as an investor in business as well. In golf we call that “playing within ourselves” – if you don’t have the 300 yard drive in the bag, play the par five as a three shotter and try to wedge it close and make a putt for birdie. You’re not likely to make eagle this way, but you’re not likely to make double bogey either.  My dad was the master of avoiding double bogeys.

He skied with men who reached much greater heights – three of his teammates at Middlebury made the Olympic team – and he worked with men who made greater fortunes. He admired them, perhaps even marveled at their success, but he never envied them. He remained focused on what he could do. He felt comfortable with the things he could understand and control in life and uncomfortable with those he couldn’t.

He approached his disease in much the same way. He always wanted the doctor to give it to him straight – what is the best possible scenario and what is the worst? What medical approaches are likely to help and what aren’t? Towards the end when the cancer began to spread in spite of the treatments, he agreed to stop the radiation and chemo, maintain what fragile quality of life still remained and face the inevitable. Even though the inevitable was one of those things beyond his understanding that frightened him.

In his pragmatic, somewhat fatalistic way he looked at Death as the one company that you had to invest in no matter how fuzzy the numbers, the one mountain you had to ski no matter how sketchy the conditions. He spent his life avoiding companies and mountains like that, yet in the end there he was on top of one.

One night when he looked visibly depressed and I found myself searching for words to lighten his mood, I somewhat dubiously said, “Look at the bright side Dad, you’re about to find out the answer to the age old question: whether or not the human soul maintains its individual identity after death.”

He scowled and rolled his eyes as if to say, “You can have all that cosmic mumbo jumbo, I’m perfectly happy just mowing the lawn, thank you.”

In a less imminent situation that scowl would have summed up the differences between us. I was always the one meditating on top of some mountain or hiking solo through the desert in search of the “meaning of life” and he was the one accepting and maximizing life’s “terms” as they were presented to him. He was the team player. I was the rebel. And yet here we were faced with increasingly uncertain terms and both wishing we could just mow the lawn.

Towards the end as my Dad’s physical health began to rapidly deteriorate and he realized that he was never going to leave the hospital again, the metaphysical questions became more pressing and our roles literally reversed. He was suddenly the one who wanted to know all of the answers and I was the one focusing on the basics – trying to get him to eat dinner and sort out his medication so he could calm down and get a good night’s sleep.

I couldn’t give him the absolute answers he was looking for, but I held his hand and told him clearly and honestly what I did know: that he’d been a good man and a good father and that I loved him very much. I told him he had nothing to fear, that he was not facing death alone even though it seemed like it – that our mortality is something we all have in common.

I am grateful that in trying to comfort my dad, I was able to speak the truth because I had no desire to placate or falsely reassure him on his deathbed. I did not see him as a frightened and infirm shell of a man gasping for breath and grasping for clarity in the confusing space between worlds. Nor did I see him as the rigid, incommunicative, authority figure that had been capable in so many aspects of his life, yet inexplicably incapable in some of the most basic aspects of fatherhood. The humbling presence of death and the process of reflection that was so important to him at the end of his life helped me see him, and myself, in a softer, more nuanced light.

As he pieced together his life – the relationships, influences, passions and disappointments – I began to see so much of what has shaped mine. Many of my character traits and even career path (one of dad’s grandfathers was a publisher, the other a Methodist minister with a flair for writing sermons) suddenly didn’t seem so boldly individual or far removed from the tree. The stories from his own lips and those of his friends’ – like the one my Godfather Jim Stewart told at the memorial service about my dad cashing a loan check at a bar in his bachelor days – sounded eerily familiar. I will even grudgingly admit that he looked almost stylish in ski pictures from the sixties with his stretch pants and dark shades – a far cry from the double-knotted Sperry Topsiders, yellow socks and flooded Nantucket red chinos I was used to seeing him in.

It’s ironic that it often takes our greatest limitation – mortality – to overcome some of our lesser ones. Whatever barriers my father and I had built up between us, whatever defense mechanisms or personality tics we’d developed to help us cope with things we didn’t understand or didn’t want to face, stubbornly withstood every challenge but the big one they were ultimately designed for. And when, in the face of that challenge, they came crashing down we both found ourselves wondering how life might’ve been different if we’d never constructed them in the first place.

For some reason we tend to identify things in absolutes – good, bad; right, wrong; alive, dead; here, there; before, after – but it seems to me now that this is a very limited view, that there is an element of shortsightedness and quick judgment to this mindset. We aren’t always aware of or in control of how we are perceived or how our actions affect others, nor are our perceptions of other people and situations always accurate. Often things become clearer over time and in hindsight. This has certainly been the case with the beautiful, gratifying, frustrating, complex relationship between my father and me. And if I’ve learned one lesson from all of this it’s that the concept of “closure”, the process of connecting with a loved one on his or her death bed, is more of an opening – an opening of hearts, an opening of new ways of thinking, an opening of new doors and directions.

Similarly, the concept of “home” no longer feels confined to a single time or place. I don’t think anyone would argue that, one way or another, my dad has returned to the “home” we all come from when we are born, but he also spent a lifetime building a “home” here on Earth that he continues to inhabit and influence. And on some level, the home I continue to build for myself, the path I choose to follow, no matter how far removed geographically from where I grew up, will be shaped by him as well. It is impossible to completely separate his life from mine.

This would’ve been true even if we hadn’t bonded in the last two years, but I am conscious of it now in a way I wasn’t before. I am aware of the substance of his legacy and how profoundly and deeply his spirit lives on in me. I don’t consider myself special or unique in this regard only lucky to have discovered this – to have had the opportunity, the patience and the courage to go through this with my eyes and my heart open. I owe a debt of gratitude to my father, my friends and family who encouraged me to step up and be present. It is impossible to describe the feeling I have now – the greater love, the greater responsibility, the greater respect and appreciation for life and death and how difficult this whole process is for each and every one of us and how interconnected we all truly are.

Thank you Dad, even if you didn’t know it at the time, even if you thought you were the one leaning on us at the end, you lived your life with dignity until the end and taught me the greatest lesson of my life in your final act. I love you.