‘Dad’s really sick!’ I exclaimed. ‘We need your help!’
Phil was a teacher, so he was already dressed for work. He ran back to the house with me, and we both charged upstairs. My father was in bed, half-asleep, his breath shallow between weak coughs.
‘Dad. Dad! Can you hear me? Everything’s going to be okay,’ Phil said.
Dad didn’t respond. We were losing him.
‘Goddammit,’ Phil was yelling. ‘Derek, go get the doctor!’
The doctor lived about a hundred yards down the street. I was a good runner, but I think I broke speed records that morning. I banged on the door and, even though it was before 7am, the doc opened it.
‘Please, help us!’ I shouted. ‘My father’s really sick! He can hardly breathe!’
The doctor told us he’d grab what he needed and come right over. I turned around and was sprinting back to the house before he’d closed the door. By the time I got back upstairs, my father was in bed, gurgling. Phlegm and foamy spit dripped from his mouth down his chin. I couldn’t believe my active, smiling father, who was rich with love and kindness, had turned into this shell of a man. Any previous resentment that we never had enough money or that he dipped into the emergency money jar to go drinking with his mates or pay off gambling debts immediately vaporized. He had flaws, but his zeal and oversized personality usually overcame his weaknesses.
I looked over at my dad, whose breath had slowed to a mechanical rattle. His eyes rolled up and he shat himself.
The doctor arrived a couple of minutes later. Dad had stopped breathing. Phil had been holding him up in bed. He laid him back down and the doctor wiped off my father’s mouth and performed CPR twice, but he was way too late. Dad was already blue and had no pulse. He had suffered a massive heart attack while he was setting the coal fire and was already dying by the time he got into bed. Even if the doctor had been there when it happened, he probably wouldn’t have been able to help.
‘What can we do?’ I asked. ‘Should we get him to hospital?’
The doctor looked me in the eyes. ‘Your father’s dead,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘There’s nothing anyone can do.’
We were all in shock. Dad had seemed perfectly fine the night before. And this morning when he came downstairs, he wasn’t clutching his chest or anything. He was just coughing. I thought he might have pneumonia or bronchitis. I never imagined he was having a heart attack, or that, not ten minutes later, I would watch him die just inches from where I stood.
I ran out back to the garden, where my mother had planted tulips, and shouted at the top of my lungs. All the sorrow, pain, and fear in my heart echoed in that scream. Then I screamed again. Rivulets of tears ran down my cheeks and watered the flowers. The screaming calmed me a bit and relieved some of the terror. Soon, the raw, seething anger was replaced with a cold emptiness. I could still feel and think, but my body was numb.
Mom was crying when I got back in. Terry and Ray sat like statues. Phil stayed in the house, comforting our mom. We didn’t have a phone, so the doctor reported the death, and the local morgue sent a hearse to the house to remove Dad’s body. About an hour or so after his heart attack, reality sank in. My father was gone, and we had to move on.
Jewish law requires corpses to be buried within twenty-four hours, since they can’t be embalmed or otherwise preserved. The rule comes from the Torah—the first five books of Moses—which states, ‘You shall bury him the same day. …His body should not remain all night.’ These days, most Jewish burials take place within three days of death. Autopsies are allowed but are discouraged unless the death is suspicious or the procedure could help protect the lives of others. There was nothing suspicious about my dad’s death, so he didn’t need an autopsy.
The Jewish community in Portsmouth was very small—about two hundred families in a town of a quarter of a million people—so we sought what comfort we could from them and tried to do everything according to principle. A select group of Jews, the Chevra Kadisha, washed my dad’s body in a process called Tahara and then dressed him in a plain burial shroud. When he was alive, my dad had been a member of that group and had helped prepare other people for burial. He didn’t buy into Judaism as a religion, but he believed in the traditions. I have followed his lead and still consider myself a cultural Jew. I often went to Shabbat services as a kid, and I learned Hebrew. That was part of the tradition of being a Jew. As an adult, I have rarely gone to religious services aside from bar and bat mitzvahs, weddings, and funerals.
My mother was devastated by my father’s death. Even though he was often away from the house with his band and drank, smoked, and was a bit of a philanderer, she loved him. Odd though it was, their partnership was real. My mother took care of us, cooked for us, and made sure we went to school and did our homework. My dad went out with the band and made enough money for us to survive. Now, she was alone, and while she was always a pillar of strength, she suddenly had a far greater weight to support. She was a single mother in a home full of kids. My sister Evelyn (who we called Eve) was living with her husband, John King, in Portsmouth, but she came back to the house for a while to help out. Still, my mom did most of the heavy lifting. She wouldn’t have it any other way.
Before the funeral, my mom’s brother, Chaim, the one who had introduced my parents decades earlier, came over to help with the preparations and be there for the family. He had been my dad’s best friend since childhood, when they both lived in Glasgow. He and my dad both left school when they were eleven years old to work and help support their families. They had a long history and had endured plenty of hardships together, so Uncle Chaim was crushed when we told him Dad had died. Even though Chaim wasn’t part of our community’s Chevra Kadisha, he insisted on taking part in washing my father’s body and wrapping him in burial cloths. The community welcomed his help, and being with my father in his last moments before burial provided Chaim with some comfort and closure.
Since we didn’t have much money for the service, the coffin, or the burial, the community rallied around us and paid for everything they felt a good Jewish man should be entitled to after he dies, whether or not he had money. Even in my numb state, I thought that was nice. The synagogue was small and the congregation orthodox, so the men all sat together on one side of the temple, and the women sat separated from their husbands and sons. The rabbi gave the sermon and talked a little bit about my father. After the service, we went to the cemetery, which was half a mile away. Since Phil was the oldest son, the rabbi asked him to say the Kaddish, which is the Jewish prayer for the dead.
Before my father was buried, Chaim and some of Dad’s friends spoke to the small crowd. As my dad’s best friend, my uncle knew that out of his four sons, I had the most contact with him, so he asked me to say the Kaddish at temple every week for a year. I half-sleepwalked through the funeral. I went through the motions and even scooped a shovelful of dirt from a pile and dumped it on my dad’s coffin, where it fell with a muffled thump. I felt like all the air had been sucked from my lungs and I hoped I would wake up at any moment, breathless from the nightmare and I would hear my dad softly coughing downstairs. But I knew I was awake. I could speak; I just didn’t want to. Nothing I could say would have any meaning after what had happened. Nonetheless, my mother sent us all to school the next morning.
‘Staying around the house won’t change anything, and you’ll fall behind in your studies,’ she said. ‘That’s not what your father would have wanted.’