In the last one of these, I wrote about a couple — Mr. and Mrs. Greene — who lived next to us when I was a kid. In old age, Mr. Greene went hopelessly senile, Mrs. Greene had to dress and feed him, and we and all the folks who knew them were horrified at how as he went, he took her health and financial stability with him. If you didn't read that chapter, please read it before you read this one. If you did read that chapter, it wouldn't hurt to refresh your recollections of it.
Now then…
My father, witnessing it all, was aghast — and being a worrier, he worried about someday being in Mr. Greene's position. He was somewhat older than my mother and certain he'd predecease her. As a Depression-era kid, he grew up with a very firm conviction: There was nothing in this world a man could do that was much worse than not providing for his family. If you went up on a tower with a rifle and began randomly shooting passers-by…well, that might be worse. But as bad as the killing would be that you'd go to prison and not be able to provide for your family.
That sense of duty applied posthumously as much as while that man was still alive. Your duty as a husband and father was to make sure your wife (later, your widow) and your children always had a home, had groceries, had health care, had funds for the necessities in life, etc. My friend/employer Jack Kirby, whom I mention often here, was roughly the same age and had exactly the same conviction. Most of Jack's anger when he was financially wronged, as he was so often in life, was that when you stole from him, you were stealing the money he felt obligated to earn for his wife and kids.
By the time Mr. Greene went hopelessly senile, my father wasn't particularly worried about me having a roof over my head and dinner on the table. I was making more than he was. He and my mother were living off his government pension, which was quite sufficient for their needs. They owned their house outright and he'd wisely signed up for an excellent, couldn't-be-cancelled health insurance policy that would cover both him and my mother until their respective deaths. (One reason I am so militant for the Affordable Care Act and the expansion of Medicare is that I saw how having affordable health insurance saved my mother's life repeatedly in her declining years.)
Still, because of the Greenes, my father's worries reached the stage where he had to do something to alleviate them. In what may well have been the only secret he ever kept from my mother, he arranged to visit the family insurance agent to discuss the matter and he had me go with him. He told my mother we were going out for a simple father-son afternoon of lunch and talk…but I'll bet she guessed he was up to something of this sort. We went to the agent's office where my father told the tale of Mr. Greene to a wizened, almost Rabbinical man who sold insurance policies. Upon its conclusion, my father said, "I need you to reassure me this could never happen to us."
The insurance agent, whose wisdom in this arena seemed beyond question, apologized but he could do no such thing. If my father died a "clean death" (that was the term he used), his widow would be fine. Their savings plus the pension would keep her solvent for a long time. Maybe if she lived into her nineties (she did) and inflation was particularly bad (it was), she'd need some financial assistance from her son (she did). But she was about as protected as she could be. That's if my father died this "clean death."
If however my father was a "lingerer" (again, the term used), all bets were off. This would be true even if — especially if — he went into a nursing home for his final years. Keeping Mr. Greene at home, he said, might not have spared Mrs. Greene some of the physical punishment she endured taking care of him…but it might also have saved a large part of her bank account and it might have made her emotional ordeal worse. "Putting a loved one into a facility," he said, "could be the wisest course for some reasons but it can also create the guilt of abandonment."
My father had hoped he would leave that meeting with some sort of revised insurance policy that would prevent the Mr. Greene situation in our own lives. Instead, he walked out with this lesson, however valid it may be: There is no way to die a long, slow death without harming your loved ones and probably wiping out your savings.
Long after the Greenes were gone, my father would mention them to me often. He shuddered each time and he told me, coming very close to actually using these words, "If I ever get anywhere close to being like Mr. Greene, please do everything possible to kill me before my condition kills your mother." I absolutely understood. I'm not married and I'm not a father but I would sure prefer to go before I wound up like poor Mr. Greene. I don't want my friends and loved ones — assuming I have at least one then — to remember me like that and have to deal with me like that. Life is great but that ain't living.
In 1991, my father had a heart attack which put him into the hospital. He'd had heart attacks before and he'd always managed to make a near-total recovery. This one was different. This one was life-changing. If and when he went home, he would be in a wheelchair.
Immediate concern: Home wasn't built for a wheelchair. The hallways were too narrow and there were steps up to the front and back doors. Someone would have to hurriedly build a ramp of some sort to the front door and make other costly customizations. My mother could not possibly push him up such a ramp so there would have to be caregivers or nurses hired. Or I'd have to be called away from my life and work. I would have been there every second I was needed, of course, but my life and work were the things my father was proudest of in his life and work.
I visited him at least once a day in the hospital, sometimes twice, always assuring him I had the time to do so. My mission seemed to be to get his mind off what it would cost for him to go home, what it would do to my mother to try and take care of him. He was especially depressed that he might never again be able to drive a car. My father loved the independence of driving himself around and he loved the helpfulness of driving others. If you were Bernie Evanier's friend, you didn't dare pay to take a taxi anywhere. You called him and let him drive you or you'd never hear the end of it.
Much time was spent on those visits with me changing the subject…but when I couldn't, we veered time and again into this area: He would ask me for reassurance that I would take care of my mother. I would so reassure him. It was one of the dumber questions he could ask but he needed to hear me say it, over and over.
He would ask me to reassure him that if it came to supporting her, it would not be an undue financial burden on me. Again, I had to say it over and over.
And then one visit, he didn't bring any of that up. Not a word of it. Instead, he told me a couple of jokes he'd written while lying in that hospital bed.
As I'm sure I mentioned here before, in his youth my father had one brief flirtation with the idea of becoming a comedy writer. He and a friend worked up some material and cautiously submitted it to one man — I'm not sure of this man's title — at a local radio station in Hartford. His rejection of it was so total and hurtful that my father never tried again. He never found any possibilities for any other "dream jobs" he may have had and so spent his life doing jobs he didn't want to do and did only for the paycheck.
After he retired, he sometimes announced he wanted to follow in his son's footsteps. He told me he was "working on a few gags" but he wouldn't give me a sample. He had to perfect them to his satisfaction first. He hoped that once he did, I would get them to some professional comedian who'd appreciate and use them. I told him that of course I would, knowing full well he'd never give me anything. For close to fifteen years, he periodically told me he was "working on a few gags." He never shared a word of one but every so often, he'd say he'd seen some new stand-up comic on TV who would be just perfect for his alleged material. The last such one was a gent named Dennis Wolfberg.
So back to that afternoon in his hospital room, the one in which he miraculously didn't ask for reassurance that I would and could take care of my mother after he was gone. Instead, also for the first time ever, he gave me a preview of some of the jokes he'd been working on. They weren't bad, which is not to say I thought anyone would ever utter them on a stage. They were more like amusing observations than jokes. I chuckled more than they deserved and promised him that if he finished polishing them and put them on paper, I would do my darnedest to get them to Dennis Wolfberg — or if he didn't appreciate them, someone who would.
Then I kissed my father, told him "I have a Garfield script I have to get done but I'll see you at least once tomorrow," and left.
I was waiting for the elevator down when a thought hit me. It was not a psychic premonition. I don't believe such things are possible. But it is possible to look at all the story points in your life and thinking like a writer, get a sense of where the plot is heading. You ever sit in a movie and you see this happen and then that happens and then that character says this and that occurs and you suddenly think, "That character's going to get killed in the next scene?"
It was in that vein — and well aware that an unexpected plot twist could well lie ahead, that I thought to myself: That's the last time I'm going to see him.
From a writing standpoint — just from a writing standpoint — it made way too much sense. He had stopped worrying, at least for the moment, that I'd be there to make sure my mother's needs were all met. We had no dangling, outstanding issues in our relationship: No arguments to settle, no confessions to make, nothing of that sort. The doctors would soon be sending him home, which meant we'd have to start building ramps and remodeling the house and finding paid caregivers. He was about to become a genuine, costly burden.
And he'd finally shared a few of the jokes he'd been working on.
Life doesn't always work out the way a writer would plot it but sometimes, it does…so it wasn't like I was certain I'd seen the last of him. I was only about as sure as you can be when you see a movie and you think you know where it's going. That evening, my mother phoned and said, "I just spoke to Dad at the hospital. He'd like it, when you come tomorrow, if you'd bring him a box of unsalted saltine crackers." And so later that night when I made a 1 AM run to Ralphs for groceries, I picked up a box.
I saw my father that last time on a Monday. On Wednesday, I was directing a voice session for Garfield and Friends to record scripts I'd written…and I had to spend Tuesday writing the last script. The day was a swirl of phone calls, some of them from the hospital, and it wasn't until around 4 PM that things seemed clear and I could commence Garfielding. Those scripts usually took 4-6 hours to write once I had the idea and I had one…so I figured I'd put in three hours, go see my father and take him his crackers at 7, get back home around 8:30 and finish in plenty o' time to be in bed by 1 AM. The recording session the next day started at 9.
I'd gotten as far as typing the title page and "FADE IN:" when I was interrupted by a phone call from my friend, Adam Rodman with a computer question. While I was talking to Adam, I had a call waiting beep. I excused myself, put him on hold, went over to the other call and heard my mother say, "Mark…the hospital just called. Dad died." Another heart attack.
I said, "I'll be right over," got rid of Adam, dashed to my mother's house, picked her up, took her to the hospital, and waited outside while she went into the room to say goodbye. I didn't want to see my father dead but she wanted that moment alone with him. Then I signed eighty thousand forms and made arrangements and finally took my mother home and stayed with her, just talking and talking, until she thought she could sleep.
Around 1:30 AM, I got back to my place, ate a sandwich and started writing that Garfield script. I finished it in time for the session but not in time to get any sleep…so I was a bit wobbly and prone to emotion. I only broke down twice that day. The first was when I walked into the recording session thinking, "As long as I don't think about my father, I can get through this." My father had sometimes come to sit on those recordings so as soon as I arrived, one of our voice actresses — the wondrous Julie Payne — said, "Oh, hi Mark. Is your father coming today?"
Well, that did it. I told her and the other actors present and we all cried for a few minutes, then went in and recorded episodes. Something I've learned: When tragedy strikes, sobbing doesn't do a damn thing to undo the tragedy. The best thing for me is to normalize my life as much as possible and keep on going. It helps to remember that phrase people always use about the deceased: "This is what he [or she] would have wanted." Well, my father wanted me to be happy in life and in my career so I did my best. The rest of the recording session was surprisingly normal except for the parts when I had to stop and take phone calls from the mortuary.
The other time I got emotional came when I finally got home. As I unloaded my gear and script files, I noticed a paper bag sitting on my kitchen counter and for a moment, couldn't recall what was in it. Then I went over, looked in it and found one (1) box of Premium brand Saltines…the unsalted kind.
Oh, yeah. That.
In times of grief, we grasp for silver linings: Find something positive, however infinitesimal, in the loss. I didn't require a microscope. My father desperately did not want to be an invalid who had to be driven-around and dressed, and whose continued endurance would have been a drain on my mother's health. He especially didn't want to diminish the bank account he was proud to be able to leave her. His savings were not vast but that money plus his pension would have kept her in groceries for at least another ten years.
And if she lived past that — which she did — he had that covered, too. He had me.
If there was any sort of chance he could have become whole again — if he could have walked out of that hospital, driven home and then walked into his house — he would have resisted death with every atom of his being. But that was not going to happen and he knew it.
I am not suggesting my father willed himself to die, not exactly. I think it was more a decision that it would be better for my mother — and therefore for him — if he just didn't fight it any longer. It was better for her because she wouldn't have to take care of him. And it would be better for him because he would at long last be free from pain and worry. The worry, of course, was mostly about winding up like Mr. Greene. As my father said to me on several occasions when we talked about the couple next door their last few years, "It's just so awful to do that to the person you love."