My grandfather lived to be 94, as did my uncle, so it seemed reasonable to assume that my father would live to be 94 also. He almost made it.
Except for bypass surgery in 2004, when he was 73, my father maintained good health until he was whacked by COVID in 2022. After that, he lost most of his strength and could not get around on his own. He went through a rehab program at Bridgepoint Hospital in Toronto and was able to return home. Things returned to normal and I hoped, possibly naively, that this would continue for quite some time.
My parents and I used to communicate regularly by video call. At the start of 2025, my father seemed to be his usual self, but I found out later that my father made an effort to be at his best for my calls. I didn't realize that he was starting to have various health difficulties and that my mother was very worried about him. Then, my mother phoned me: my father had fallen over and couldn't get up. The paramedics came and got him, and he was sent to Michael Garron Hospital in Toronto.
He could have gone through rehab again but my father decided that he had had enough. After being admitted to the hospital in March of 2025, he declined fairly quickly. Near the end, he couldn't feed himself - I did it a couple of times, my sisters did it more often, and mostly the nurses did it. Eventually, he couldn't even roll over in bed; once, when I was visiting, he became frustrated with himself and turned to me and asked, didn't I have something better I could be doing with my time right now? The answer, I thought to myself, was no.
The second-last time I saw him, he was lucid enough that I had a good conversation with him. I told him that I was proud to be his son, which was the one bit of unfinished business I felt I had with him. We were never going to have a deep and meaningful father-and-son conversation; neither of us were comfortable with that sort of thing. We had a couple of inside jokes and a standard greeting ritual that we shared; we did that one last time.
The last time I saw him was the day that he died. By random chance, I was the relative who was there when it happened - my sisters visited more often than I did. On that day, he lost the ability to communicate - he would talk but I couldn't understand him. He could respond to questions, and he brightened up noticeably when his doctor came in and told my father that he had gone past the statue of him in front of the MaRS building in Toronto. Shortly after that, it occurred to me to play music for him - during the pandemic, he had created a playlist of his favourite songs, and I put it on for him to listen to. I broke down when I heard Ian and Sylvia's "Four Strong Winds".
This was on the Sunday of the Victoria Day weekend. I had planned to stay for the afternoon and then go with my wife to a party to which we had been invited. At about 3:00 that afternoon, I was drifting off to sleep, wondering whether it was okay to sit in one visitor chair and put my feet in another, and listening to the sound of his breathing. It was quite loud; I don't think it was a death rattle but it might have been. He had been given medication to try to make his breathing easier; when the breathing noise stopped, at first I thought that the medication might have taken effect. Then I realized what had happened.
I had never seen a dead body before. I called my mother, my wife, and my sisters and then sat there for a moment with him. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do. (The answer, I later learned, was to wait for the doctor to show up. You also had to sign a form confirming that you have collected the deceased's valuables from his room. Then, grieving relatives can sit with the deceased for as long as they want.) Eventually, I pulled a sheet over my father's head and sat and waited for my family members to arrive. I didn't go to the party.
The grieving process has been slow for me. For one thing, I was my father's executor, so there was paperwork that had to be done and had to be done right away. Various financial institutions needed to be contacted, which meant a number of meetings with assorted bank persons and dealing with fussy bits of bank protocol paperwork. It's only now, nearly a year later, that I can contemplate listening to recordings of my father's voice or watching video of him.
I'm just now starting to go through his papers; he kept everything, so I have a lot of photographs and memorabilia to remember him by. And I'm now curling in the same day curling league that my father was in until 2019, so I have met many older men who have memories of him. I am always glad to talk about him and honour his memory - as I told him, I am proud to be his son.