© 2010 Manuel Erickson
I hope you live into the Twenty-first Century, Dad, I often wished to myself. Not only would it have made me proud to have had a father who lived that long, it would say something about my own longevity. Long life is in the genes, but genes do strange things. They can jump over the next generation and benefit only the one after, so I have no guarantee that I’ll live to my father’s age. Many people have lived to one hundred and beyond; but ninety-five years of life is pretty good.
I heard about my father’s death directly from my brother, Wilf. It was just after seven in the morning on Monday, October the twenty-seventh and Martha was almost ready to leave for her high school teaching job. I was in the bathroom and thought I heard a voice on the answering machine, so I went to the kitchen to monitor the call.
“It was very peaceful for him,” I heard Wilf saying. My hand flew to the phone, then hesitated; I didn’t want to break down over the phone. Wilf continued, “The lady in the next bed said he didn’t suffer.” My hand rested on the phone, but didn’t pick it up. I trembled. Wilf’s voice changed from a reporting tone to a deeply personal, concerned one. “I hope this news doesn’t upset you too much, Manuel.” Then he was gone.
Martha came into the kitchen, smiling. “Oh, here you are! I thought you were in the bathroom.”
“My father died.”
“Oh, Manuel!” and her arms were suddenly tight about me, holding me, protecting me, soothing, loving. “Oh! I didn’t know! Oh, Manuel!” she sobbed.
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s all right; don’t cry… He lived a long life…” I hugged her back, kissed her lightly on the neck and stroked her hair. It was not a good way to start her day, but in a few minutes she drove off to school.
The last thing I said to my father before he died in 1997 was not vocalized, but written. I had sent him a birthday card with a verse I wrote that spoke not about love, but about how much easier it was to write my own message for him than to search for a suitable one in a commercial shop.
I don’t know if doing that, or if searching in a shop until my feet ached, would have been the greater act of love. Was the easy way -- doing it on my computer -- a loving act? The card did have my handwriting on it and a hand-drawn heart, but I didn’t really know if I meant it when I typed “All our love, Dad, on your 95th birthday!” Now that he had died, I felt a sense of profound loss, not just because he was my father, a personal link between me and the larger family, but also that a connection I had had with the Twentieth Century -- from the Wright Brothers to the threshold of a new millenium -- was severed.
My father’s death wasn’t unexpected. Daily, he had been getting more frail. Afterwards, the doctors discovered the reason for the progressive frailty (like shutting the barn door after the horses have bolted): liquid had been leaking into the region around his heart for some time, perhaps for years, making it difficult for the organ to pump. Finally, it simply stopped.
Strange, isn’t it? My father believed that if he ate healthfully and exercised regularly, he would live to at least ninety. Soon after his ninetieth birthday, however, degeneration seemed to take hold. It became a chore for him to walk. Over the next few years he became short of breath after only a few steps. His memory, which showed signs of deterioration after Mom’s death thirteen years before, became weaker. Dad was becoming a wisp of what he had been -- physically strong, quick-witted, temper-ridden and argumentative.
Four days before he died, my father apparently decided to phone for an ambulance because he was not feeling well. He went to the Toronto Western Hospital where the staff knew him from previous visits. They placed him in a room with an older female patient who told Wilf what happened. The day before he died he sat up in bed, making strange movements.
“What are you doing, Mr. Erickson?”
Dad smiled at her. “My exercises,” he answered as he slowly extended his arms straight out from his chest, then swung them sideways.
Wilf told me that the following day the other patient and my father were talking animatedly, when he grew quiet.
“Mr. Erickson?” No answer. “Mr. Erickson!” Wilf said that she looked at his monitor and saw the horizontal line across the screen. Almost instinctively, she pressed the help button. Dad’s head lay on the pillow along his shoulder. No family member had been present. He died alone, exemplifying what he thought was his lack of friends and his family’s nonchalant attitude. All his siblings had died, so he was the last of his family’s generation.
I didn’t want either of my parents to die alone, any more than I want to. But they did, both of them. My mother’s immediate family and circle of friends was large, but they all pre-deceased her, so she died alone. Dad felt that he had few, if any, friends. His lonely death seemed to prove his point.
How forlorn I felt for him -- for both of them! Dad had lived in Toronto, the central city of the far-flung metropolises that housed his three sons: Ottawa, London and Vancouver. I was the farthest away.
My wretchedness and guilt were pervasive. I didn’t realize Dad was in the hospital or the seriousness of his illness. Had I known, would I have gone to see him? Probably, but now I’ll never know.
*
One of my earliest memories of Dad, when I was a pre-teen and he was arguing with my mother, was his grief-filled cry that he made friends with painful difficulty. Despite that, he would often divest himself of friendship when it did come his way. An example was Brian MacConnell.
A retired gentleman of about sixty-five or seventy, Brian lived with his wife, Emily, on Glenholme Avenue, a short walk from Dad’s house on Lauder Avenue. Since Dad had trouble walking, Brian visited him. They would sit on the verandah and chat about science, politics and history. Wilf told me the story.
One day Brian said, “You know, Harry, I’m worried about you.”
Knowing Dad, his ears probably picked up like a cat’s. “Oh? Why?”
“Well,” Brian explained, “here you are living alone in a two-storey house. What if something happened to you? Suppose you fell down the stairs? Who could come over and help you?”
“Well, I don’t know… There’s the Piazzas across the street, but they don’t have a key.”
“Exactly, Harry. No one has a key to your house. I think you should give me a key so I can come in and help you if you need it. I would only do that if I couldn’t get hold of you.”
Unsmiling, Dad looked at him. His eyes narrowed. “I’ll think about it.” With that, he got up, went into the house and shut the door, leaving Brian alone on the verandah.
Shortly after, he had all the locks changed, and Dad’s relationship with Brian was severed.
If my father had not been so distrustful and secretive he might have made many friends. With only a grade eight education, he set about learning a trade and how to run a business. At first he worked alone, but as his reputation for quality spread and his business grew, he took on help and moved into a building that he had had constructed and which, in later years, he doubled in size. Dad was, in effect, a self-made businessman. By itself, the experience would have been enough so that others would have found him interesting, but he told me that he felt he lacked the formal education to attract friends. So he started to read. He read voraciously in the field in which he was mainly interested -- socialism. I often perused his bookcase, where he kept a many-volumed collection of the works of Karl Marx, published in English in Moscow. Reams of books on his favourite topics -- socialism and science -- added unusual weight to the bookcase. Sometimes I would suggest to my father that he was a self-educated person who knew more about his field than most people, and that he likely had the equivalent of a B.A. if not a Masters degree. In answer, he would suppress a smile, manufacture a frown and pretend to scoff. He did not accept praise easily, a trait I learned from him.
Many people came to my father’s funeral. Most were from Toronto and its immediate surroundings, but some came from as far as Chicago, Calgary and Vancouver. Dad felt he had few friends, but the forty or so at his funeral put the lie to that.
Again, it was Brian MacConnell who so humorously illustrated Dad’s bastion of secrecy. After Wilf, David and I and our spouses arrived for the eleven o’clock graveside ceremony, the rabbi, before conducting the service, gathered us together in my cousin’s minivan. There, we spoke in soft voices with the rabbi. He asked many probing questions about the history of our family, Dad’s upholstery business and, not least important, the relationships of the family members. Reminiscences flowed, eyes misted and sobs were choked off.
Before it ended, Brian arrived. He asked someone when the ceremony would begin and someone said, “After the rabbi has finished speaking with the family.”
“Rabbi? Why is a rabbi here? Come to think of it, why are we in a Jewish cemetery?”
“Because Harry was Jewish.”
“Jewish? I never knew that.”
The truth is that my father was an anti-Semite, an attitude which began, he told me, when he had a disagreement with his father, Philip Isaacson. My father, then a young, working teenager, entered the living room where Philip was reading the Toronto Telegram, a newspaper known even then as a right-wing publication. (When it shut down, it morphed as the Toronto Sun.)
Perhaps because of a story he had just read, my grandfather commented, “This paper, the Telegram, is on the side of the workers.”
My father was aghast. “On the side of the workers? It most certainly is not! It’s an evil, capitalist paper!”
Enraged, Grandfather ordered Dad to sit and to extend his hands palms down. He took a ruler, stood up and struck my father hard across the knuckles of both hands. Needless to say, his action ended any possibilities for discussion between him and his growing, social activist-thinking son.
As my father gained work experience and trained as an upholsterer over the years, he listened to and watched the members of Toronto’s Jewish community, including his own siblings. He concluded that most of them did not care about real social change, and that they despised Soviet communism which he championed. After marrying, he attended Holy Blossom Temple synagogue services only to appease my mother’s desire for her sons to have a “Jewish” education. He listened to the rabbi and conversed with other members of the synagogue, but felt that most of Toronto’s Jews were of the same ilk as his father and siblings: against social change and despising Soviet communism. He began to dislike these Jews and applied the same tarnish to Jews around the world.
Yet, Dad knew that some Jews were different. Joseph Salsberg led the Canadian Communist Party for many years, a fact that he ignored. Emil Gartner, a distinguished Canadian musician and conductor of the Toronto Jewish Folk Choir, was once barred by my father from visiting us at home because the maestro was, in fact, a communist.
How did he rectify his treatment of these two community leaders with his championing of Soviet communism? By then, Dad was running an upholstery business from the basement of our house. He did not want the business to suffer because of possible rumors that a communist had visited us; being Jewish was hard enough. It was a double standard, of course, but Dad either didn’t recognize it or chose to ignore it.
Dad told me that when he started his upholstery business, he wanted his older brother, Wilf, to help financially. Uncle Wilf was a pharmacist and a successful drug store owner who, in later years, merged with another drug store. The merger eventually became Shoppers Drug Mart. My father didn’t say why, but he was unsuccessful with Uncle Wilf. So he approached his younger brothers, Nathan and Sam, neither of whom would buy into Dad’s business, perhaps because their incomes were so small. Upset and feeling let down, Dad harbored a grudge against his brothers for the rest of his life.
The first nation to recognize Israel upon its founding in 1948 was the Soviet Union. My father could not help showing his pleasure. Here were two socialist states, the older one helping out the newborn. It did not matter to him that David ben Gurion had been a member of the Palmach (a group fighting for independence against the British Mandate) and Menachem Begin the leader of the terrorist Stern Gang, or that the USSR’s main interest was to gain a toe-hold in the Middle East.
In 1956, at age twenty-two, I decided to live in Israel for at least a year to determine if I wanted to “make aliyah”: to emigrate there. By then the United States had become Israel’s closest ally, and the Soviet Union one of its fiercest critics. Diplomatic relations with the Soviets had broken off. Not surprisingly, Dad became anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and even more anti-Jewish.
My decision to go to Israel just after the 1956 war was probably the first of many disappointments my father experienced with me. He advised me to stay home, get a good-paying job and save to buy a home. My only interest at the time was to answer what I thought was a call to visit that land of profound history that meant so much to the West in terms of its religions and civilization -- the land that bore the Jews who had had a disproportionately large influence on world affairs (and still do), the land which both Arabs and Jews claim as their own. I knew my journey would also take me to places I had read and studied about: Barcelona, Milan, the Corinth Canal, Venice, Crete. I couldn’t stay home and get a job -- I had to go!
The day before I left, encouraged by my mother (“Gieb’m, Harry, gieb’m! -- Give to him, Harry!”), Dad doubled the amount of money I took with me. I had the wonderful sum of five hundred dollars for a year’s journey. I don’t think he ever forgave Israel for stealing my heart.
~ © 2010 Manuel Erickson
