Essay

My Dad's Stuff

By: Felicity Pool, 12/15/2018

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Between his 88th birthday and his death at 94, my father traveled toward senility. On past trips – the ones on which he’d planned – he went to South America, Africa and Europe. He made his way to the top of the world, the Arctic, and to the top of squash racquets rankings as American champion.
His last voyage began when he drove his small blue car into the path of an 18-wheel UPS truck. He and my mother were on their way to a lunch party and my dad drove past the needed turnoff. My mother exclaimed, he argued for another route, she persuaded him that there was none, and apparently without looking around, he made a U-turn. Four and a half tons of UPS truck smashed the little car. Some of my mom’s ribs broke. Bones in my dad’s leg snapped.
My father, who had driven accident-free for more than half a century, had shown himself unable to simultaneously talk, think, and safely steer a car. It was a signal that I missed.
On weekend visits over the next year or so, I watched as six inches of paper settled onto the surface of my father’s desk. My mother mentioned that a check my dad had sent to pay the property tax was returned: he hadn’t signed it. My parents’ insurance representative phoned to say their policy had lapsed.
And still I did not think to check on bank balances or overdue bills. Business matters were my dad’s stuff. In my parents’ household, He managed the assets, made all financial decisions and paid the large bills – taxes, insurance, school tuitions, vacations; She took care of the month-to-month expenses and managed the house and children. That’s how it was, was supposed to be, had been all my life.
Except, my dad’s stuff suddenly became mine, on an ordinary day when I had driven over to have lunch with my parents. At noon on April 15, seventeen and one half months after the collision between the little blue car and the large brown truck, my father came into the kitchen where my mother sat at the table eating an avocado. I leaned against the stove, stirring soup, watching him arrive.
He had been in his study, working on tax forms. In his right hand were papers of no particular significance, as I would soon discover, and with his left hand he leaned on his metal walking stick. “I can’t do this,” is what he said. And although in that sunny noontime kitchen “this” meant collect the papers for filing the tax returns, due that very day and now irrevocably late, what it turned out to mean was, “I can no longer take care of business.”
In that instant, the full weight of family finances passed not to my mother but to me.
My father had kept track of their money in a 6-inch x 8-inch black-vinyl-covered notebook. On a spring day following my mother’s avocado-for-lunch and the unpaid taxes, the Black Book came to me, some pages yellowed, edges softened by frequent turning. My dad had recorded important transactions going back almost seven decades to the day he married.
After dropping it for the third time, I decided to weigh the book: six and one half ounces on my bathroom scale. At the gym, I bench press 50 pounds, but to heft The Black Book was to struggle with a weight far heavier than any I would choose to lift. It was the weight of termination, the ending of my father’s life journey as traveler and champion. He could no longer take care of business.

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