Self Help? No Thanks, I Can Do It Myself

Pain & Suffering is a Powerful Lesson To our great relief, Daddy was released from the hospital and allowed to come home in early April and I think Monie and I were certainly looking forward to life getting back to normal again. The day that Daddy came home, the first thing he wanted to do was to walk around a bit outside. It was a beautiful spring day; with sunshine that was beginning to warm up the earth and I guess the farmer in him craved the smell of the land over that horrible hospital experience. While he was wandering slowly around the yard using his cane for the support he needed, I went across the road to get two pails of water from the neighbors well because we still did not have indoor plumbing. While I was gone, Daddy decided to smoke his pipe and while lighting it, I guess he was still pretty shaky and he dropped the wooden match that he had been lighting his pipe with. As I came across the road with the water, all I could see was Daddy on fire. The grass around him was on fire and so were his clothes. I ran as fast as I could, pushed him down and rolled him over and then threw the two pails of water on him. Finally, with the fire out, I helped him into the car and rushed him to the Doctor. His pants were burned pretty much off and his shoes had melted right into his skin. Needless to say, I was feeling sheer terror and drove to the Doctor’s probably at record speed. What came next still blows my mind to this day. The Doctor got his shoes off of him, peeling the skin from the bottom of his legs and feet right along with them. The Doctor then sprayed him with something that was supposed to numb the pain and then sent him back home with me….me, a damned fourteen year old kid! And what the hell did I know Doctor’s were authority figures and supposedly knew what was best for their patient, so I did as I was told and took him back home with me and made out the best I could. The next day as I was walking over to get something in the kitchen, I saw Daddy sitting on a kitchen chair beside the phone. He was holding onto to his cane and to this day I can still close my eyes and see the look of pain on his face and how purple his hands were because he had such a grip on that cane. He must have been in such incredible pain and what I saw in his hands and in his eyes that day is still indescribable. I called Aunt Thelma, this time in tears, because the situation was so awful. She took matters into her own hands and once again Daddy went into the Hospital. The difference this time was that he was never coming home again. Daddy remained there in Kingston Hospital until he died in July of that same year. We still managed to see him on weekends, but only for a few brief minutes because he was in intensive care. He was on one of those beds where they would put a board over top of him and flip him every once in a while. The doctors attempted skin grafts, but I think that by this time Daddy had given up on life. He suffered more strokes and seemed to be in constant pain and the last time that I saw him for a few minutes, the only thing he said was “John, this is a son of bitching place”! It wasn’t long after that, that the hospital called us and told us to get his suit ready for his funeral. There was a lot of speculation and denial, but we couldn’t dodge the inevitable. I know that I was in total denial. I figured that if his suit wasn’t ready, he wouldn’t die. I quickly learned that death comes, whether we are ready or not. The thought of Daddy never coming back again was probably one of the harshest realities that I have ever had to face. He was waked at the Catholic funeral home in Tweed and we had three days to watch over him and let reality set in. I think that this was the first time that Betty and I were really and truly close. I remember us hugging each other and sharing some of our feelings of loss together. Our brother, Reg was in Algonquin Park camping when Daddy died and we had to get the OPP to find him and tell him. He arrived the day of the funeral and it was a horrible time for him, because he and Daddy had had an argument some time back and had not spoken since. I remember Reg being inconsolable and I’ve often thought that this must be a terrible burden of guilt for him to bear. After the funeral, as is usual to many funerals, there was a gathering at our house. It seemed as though we had all just gotten back to the house, when an argument between my sister Helen and my second oldest brother, Joe started. The heated discussion quickly spread throughout the group and my mind was filled with disbelief that this could be happening. I ran away. I didn’t go far, just to a neighbor’s house, but I refused to go back home again. All I wanted was for Daddy to come back home and everything to be the way it used to be. Once the funeral was over and things started to settle down, there was some discussion around what to do with Monie and I and originally, it was decided that Betty and Lois, who both worked in Belleville would move back home with us until we finished high school. Mona was going into Grade Ten and I was going into Grade Eleven. I guess, that after my refusal to come back home, they looked at other options and Helen had enough room for one so she agreed to take Mona to Oshawa to live with her and finish school. Reg’s wife, Brenda came down to see me and asked if I would consider going to live with them at their home in Oshawa to finish school. I gave it a lot of thought, but really, I don’t think I had much choice in the matter. At any rate the idea did appeal to me and the next thing you know, we were packing our personal stuff and moving to Oshawa. I had been to Oshawa once before and thought it was a really big, big city with its’ fifty one thousand people. It was a General Motors town and after their hiring blitz in the mid nineteen sixties, almost everyone we knew worked there. It was big money with great benefits for a lot of people from small towns like Tweed. My family decided to keep the house that we were renting in Stoco so that we could all come home on weekends, still. I think that they divvied up the forty dollar a month rent and most of us continued to come home from Oshawa and Belleville every weekend. Most of the time, I traveled back and forth with Bill because he worked at Goodyear Tire which was in Bowmanville, just a stone’s throw away from Oshawa. We would go home to Stoco, and every Sunday night before heading back to Oshawa, we would go to his Mom’s for Sunday dinner. They had finally accepted the fact that I might one day be part of their family and Bill’s Dad even made me a hope chest out of cedar that we had begun to fill with necessities. At that time, Texaco gas was giving away glasses and dishes and we made a point out of adding them to the hope chest whenever we could. On one of these trips back to Oshawa, we gave an uncle of Bill’s a ride to Oshawa and dropped him off at the Queen’s Hotel where he was meeting up with and going to stay with some friends. A few years later I learned that the friends that he was meeting were the grandparents of the man that I actually married! Talk about a small world!