IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER

Dad went into hospital on Friday after suffering a heart attack the day before. I got a call from the doctor on Sunday morning. She said dad’s condition was serious and that he might only last hours, or at most, days. I booked a flight to Toronto and arrived at the airport at about 12:30 am.

Neil picked me up and drove me right to the hospital. Because of the SARS outbreak, I had to put on two gowns, two pair of gloves, a mask, a visor and a hairnet. Because of the visor, I had to take my glasses off, so when I walked into dad’s room I couldn’t see very well.

He was lying on the bed, conscious but not aware of me. He had an oxygen mask on and there was an IV drip into his arm. His eyes were closed.

I took his hand and held it firmly. I could feel him squeeze my hand. I couldn’t see him very well, so I brought my head very close to his head and then when I was about eight inches away, everything came into focus: I could see his skin, his eyes, his nose, I could see every hair in his moustache.

What I want to do today is try to bring dad into focus, especially for those of you who hadn’t seen him for several years and may no longer have a clear memory of who he was and what he was like.

Last year I wrote an essay about dad. I’d like to read an except from that essay.

“My father was born in 1916, the second of five children. His parents were first-generation immigrants from a German farming community in the Ukraine. My father was a quiet man from my earliest memory so I imagine he must have been a quiet child, too, happy to occupy the middle, inconspicuous position in a large family. His father was a bricklayer; his mother raised the kids and ran the house. They were part of a larger extended Gauer clan spread throughout Winnipeg, some richer, some poorer, some living in fine mansions with servants near the Red River, some, like his parents, living modestly in the north end of the city.

My parents met at church in Winnipeg and married in 1942. The pictures of their honeymoon in Calgary are tiny black and white snapshots. My mother, age twenty-three, poses with the easy assurance of a model who knows how much the camera loves her; my father, twenty-six, is a handsome man wearing dress pants, shirt and tie, as though about to leave for the office.

After the war, my parents moved east to Toronto, bought a house in the suburbs, started a family and lived lives of slowly increasing prosperity, as millions of other Canadians did. My father fit the model of 1950s suburban dad: he worked a straight nine to five, and walked through the front door like clockwork at 5:30 to announce, “Hello, dear, I’m home” to my mother and then pat the dog and read the paper and sit down to dinner with us at 6 o’clock. When he wasn’t working, he pursued the standard hobbies of the era: gardening, golf with co-workers, building Heathkit radios in the basement, mastering the basics of carpentry, plumbing and house painting. He taught night school for a few years at a downtown technical college. He coached the softball team and taught us the meaning of practice, patience and good sportsmanship. But none of these pursuits were passions and none survived the changes that were to come. In a way, my father’s truest hobby in those days was helping people. He took a first-aid course and then happily played emergency doctor to anyone on the street needing a swab of antiseptic, a bandage, some calming words. When a neighbour almost cut off his thumb with a power saw, Dad raced across the street and applied a pressure bandage and cleaned up the blood and then waited for the ambulance to arrive.”

In some ways, dad was a Norman Rockwell kind of dad. His virtues were old-fashioned but in some ways very contemporary too.

If you knew him, he’s easy to describe, isn’t he?

Dad was kind, patient and gentle.

He was instantly likeable. He wasn’t gregarious or extroverted, he wasn’t the kind of man who went out into the world and made a lot of friends, but everyone who knew him liked him.

He was honest and hard working. I think he loved the dignity and meaning of work.

He was sensitive and empathetic. He felt other people’s happiness as well as their pain.

He was shy. I understood that side of him because I’m shy myself.

He was positive. He never complained, despite the pain or distress or disappointment he might have been feeling.

He was never angry, never critical or mean-spirited.

He didn’t do or say funny things, but he loved to laugh and he loved a good joke.

He respected me, and allowed me the freedom and independence to travel, to make mistakes, to learn about the world on my own terms. When I was older, a grown-up man finally, he always treated me as an adult, respected my opinions and choices, remained curious and interested in my life.

Dad was a curious man. He was curious about the world and how it worked. In a different life he might have been a scientist, measuring and probing the world, trying to make things fit in a logical coherent fashion. When he made coffee, he always measured the water first in a measuring cup.

Dad was a loving man. He loved his wife for more than 60 years year. He loved his children and the larger family beyond. And he expressed that love through his actions as much as through his words.

When I was a kid, I never had to look for my father, because he was always there.

In the 1950s, Jackie and I have wonderful memories our camping trips across the US and Canada, don’t we? I remember dad at the wheel of the car, driving mile after mile and arriving at a campground after dark, and the three of us holding flashlights while dad, muttering under his breath, struggled to raise the tent.

He was always there to help me, with homework or school projects. He encouraged me to read and bought me books and encyclopedias.

In the 1960s, we spent summers at our cottage, swimming, boating, spending lots of time together as a family. I remember the day he came home from work and announced he’d bought a sailboat. Dad was not an impulsive man. I was so excited I could barely sleep. I bought a book and sailing and together we taught each other how to sail.

Later I remember coming home with my first guitar in Grade 11, I practiced hours every day, trying to play Classical Gas by Mason Williams and a Bach fugue, driving everyone in the house nuts. Sadly we’re not a very musical family, ask any Gauer. Dad offered nothing but encouragement, advising me to stick with it, and today, 30 years later, I’m still playing badly.

In the 1970s I left home, to travel, wander, work in other parts of the country. Sometimes I would call home and ask for advice. Dad never told me what to do. He’d usually say, Wait, sleep on your decision and you’ll make a better decision tomorrow. I think that’s a great compliment for a child, a grown child, to pay a parent, actually asking for advice.

Once, I was far away and needed money. Dad yes, without hesitating.

Another story from the 1970s … the time dad and mom were traveling in Portugal. They were walking along the beach when my mom saw a group of fishermen crowded around a boat. The fishermen were trying to start a new outboard motor. Mom said to dad, why don’t you go help them? He went over, saw that it was a 10 hp Johnson outboard, pulled the choke, squeezed the fuel line and started the motor, to great cheers from the fishermen.

Later, in the 1980s, I came back to Toronto and we went to movies together. The movies dad and I liked were usually historical or political or war movies, the kind with clearly defined heroes, the kind that starred actors like Harrison Ford or Clint Eastwood. I still refer to these kinds of movie as “Harold movies” and Judith knows exactly what I mean, don’t you?

The last five years have been very hard for dad and for us, as his health declined and his world shrank down to a room in a nursing home. It was so very hard to watch someone who had once been so strong and so healthy, slowly become diminished the way dad did.

That’s why it’s so important today to remember dad at his best, as a kind and caring man who loved and cherished his family, who loved nothing better than being in a room full of all of us, children, wife, brother and sisters, cousins, nephew and nieces.

I like to think that dad helped shape and nurture the better parts of my often contradictory personality, that any goodness and kindness and honesty in me come directly from him. Thank you dad.