The Blessing of a Song Briefly Banishes the Curse of Age

When I was a little kid getting tucked in for the night, Dad would sometimes lie in bed and sing to me. He had a soothing Perry Como kind of voice that quickly anesthetized me from all cares and delivered me happily into dreamland. His favorite song was “The White Cliffs of Dover,” a World War II-vintage song but which had no context for me other than the assurance that all was well.

There’ll be bluebirds over

The white cliffs of Dover

Tomorrow, just you wait and see.

There’ll be love and laughter

And peace ever after

Tomorrow, when the world is free.

Strange, isn’t it, how the memory of things that soothed you so much as a child can make you hurt as an adult.

I just got back from a long weekend visit with my parents in Colorado, one of those trips that leaves you simultaneously looking lovingly backward on the family history and peering anxiously into its future, afraid of what you’ll see. The driving force for that is my father’s health, or lack of it. He’s in the advanced stages of heart and kidney disease, with the past weekend being a jolting acknowledgment that, let’s face it, none of us is going to live forever.

Those of us lucky enough to have our parents live into old age (Dad is 69) also endure the flip side--which is that it’s hard to watch them slide into infirmity. Dad’s diseases are particularly cruel in that they incapacitate him to the point that even doing medium chores is taxing and, at the worst moments, render him too weak to do much of anything on his own.

So you go home as a grown-up son, supposedly with life’s vicissitudes figured out, confident that this time you’ll be able to deal with your father’s demise.

It’s hard because you can still see clearly enough into the past to remember him as the Golden Boy in his 30s and 40s--young and vigorous and, on his best days, utterly undaunted by life. You remember him standing in front of the mirror while shaving and saying to himself, “Buddy boy, you are a good-looking son-of-a-gun!”

I don’t expect him to talk like that now, but neither am I ever ready for him to spend the entire weekend in bed, just too pooped to do anything but his dialysis treatment and eat a few bites of food.

Mom and I were watching TV Saturday night when he called us from his bed. His stomach felt awful, he said, and he thought he was going to pass out. He feared it was the onset of some dire problem that he knows is always lurking outside his door.

Luckily, he just had to do some serious throwing up.

Minutes later, with us trying to comfort his fragile body and psyche, he said something no son ever wants to hear his once-indomitable father say.

“I’m just no good anymore,” he said. Tears welled up in my eyes as soon as the words came out.

Mom was holding his hand and I was massaging his back. I guess being married for 48 years prepares you for how to answer. “Sure, you are,” Mom said. “You’re just having a bad day. You’ll feel better tomorrow.”

“I just feel like I could start bawling,” he said.

“Go ahead, if it’ll make you feel better,” Mom said.

She handed him a tissue and he started to cry softly. I had been determined to be the pillar of strength, to rescue Mom should just such a moment arise, but at the moment of truth was reduced to tears myself. He couldn’t see me behind him, and my quick prayer not to have him hear me was answered.

“What’s got you feeling this way?” Mom said to him.

Then he said an amazing thing. “I wish I’d treated Dad better.”

It was almost comic in its poignancy, in that Grandpa died in 1978. “You were good to your father,” Mom said.

“I know, I just wish I’d been better to him.”

“We all wish we’d treated our parents better,” Mom said. “We just do the best we can with whatever time we have.”

“Do you have to put it like that?” Dad said, making us laugh at his gallows humor.

We tucked him in. Eventually, he fell into his usual fitful sleep.

Treat our parents better. I wonder how many times since the dawn of history that slogan has been mouthed and then forgotten. But you see your father hunched over in bed, down to 132 pounds, saying he’s too tired to reach for one of his heart pills, wondering for real this time if you’ll ever see him again . . . and you tell yourself not to forget it the next time you say it.

The postscript to all this is that Dad is wrong when he says he’s no good anymore.

You ask God or whoever why life has to be so cruel to people, why someone has to walk their final paces on this Earth in such heavy shoes, and then Dad answers the question for me.

On Monday, the day I was flying back here, my brother’s wife came over with their 2 1/2-year-old son, Jared. It was 4 in the afternoon and Dad was still in bed. Jared tiptoed into his room and climbed up into bed next to him. “Be gentle with Grandpa,” I said.

“He likes to lay in bed and have your Dad sing to him,” sister-in-law Lorri said.

And from the living room, I could hear the frail but still on-key voice from the bedroom:

There’ll be bluebirds over

The white cliffs of Dover

Tomorrow, just you wait and see....

And little Jared, full of gaiety and innocence and wonderment as he begins his own journey through life, seemed reassured as he lay there very still next to his Grandpa.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.