Charles Lazarus was a man of few words. When you asked him how he was, he would ask you how you were. Perhaps that forbearance came from being the youngest of 12 children, the younger of twins. Perhaps it was his government training.
He was a very agreeable person,quite content to assenting to the wishes of others. But that conformance should not be confused with weakness. He was strong when he had to be.
The great essayist Susan Sontag wrote
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
We will never know if my father knew his fate. That is immaterial. What matters is that he approached the last year of his life with a quiet dignity.
It was deeply painful to see what illness had done to his body. But he continued on in the hope he would get better and be able to do the things he really enjoyed.
While we knew in January that my father only had a couple of months at most, his death still came as a shock because we had become so accustomed to his resilience. As a young man in his late thirties he had almost succumbed to pneumonia. In his late 60’s he had confronted a mugger with
a gun, by screaming at him and scaring him away.
After we brought him home as a terminal patient in early February, he gave us six wonderful weeks where he often became the engaging person we were accustomed to. Those six weeks were a wonderful gift a second chance to make sure he know how we felt about him. When his life ended on Tuesday morning we were comforted to know he had died peacefully.
It is somewhat symbolic that the last conversation I had with my father on Monday was about sports. He had introduced me to sports at an early age,
interrupting my cartoons with the World Series. Over the years, we always
discussed the latest event. It was comforting to know I could call my father
up at a late hour to discuss that night’s game. My father would quip "You can’t say I’m not a good sport". It would be an omission to not mention my father’s sense of humor. He loved the one-liner and always tried to inject
humor into a situation.
He was a wonderful father, always immensely interested in his children.
He rarely missed an athletic event of mine and when I had my finest athletic
moment of my adult life, he was there to greet me at the finish line of the
marathon. That was my father. He always there.
He extended that love to his grandchildren, although they didn’t always get to see him as his children knew him.
Because I am still in a state of shock, I have not begun to realize the enormity of this loss. It will only be in the next few weeks when I realize he
isn’t there to hear my words and add his will the loss of this man of few words sink in.