The Dash Between the Years
Don Krumpos · Emotional · Family · Memoir
The last couple of days, Helen and I sat at Dad’s house making a photo board. We spread everything out — shoeboxes, envelopes, loose prints — and just started sorting. That was the best kind of therapy. Not talking about grief, not processing anything on purpose, just looking at photos and telling stories. I made a slideshow for the digital display while she arranged the board. His house still smelled like him.
I’d been living with Dad for the last five weeks, helping with end-of-life. I was between jobs, and the timing of that — which felt terrible at the time — turned out to be a gift. The first couple of weeks he was more awake, and those were nice. We talked. We sat together. I got to watch him wither away into death, which sounds like a hard thing, and it was, but it was also the kind of closure you don’t get if you’re not there for it. I will always remember him as the strong father of my childhood. But I’m grateful I got to be there for the rest of it too.
The funeral was a strange, surreal experience. It was so nice to see everyone — Jason Schaut drove up from Illinois, Linda Gerbers, Jenny Emery, Galen and Teresa and Sarah Martin — and to have them give their condolences and celebrate Dad’s life. He was a great Dad and I told him that many times over the last couple months.
Here is what I said at the funeral:
I feel like I can sum up my Dad’s life through the metaphor of his hands.
This became apparent to me last summer when he took April, Aaron and I through the McDonald’s drive-thru for ice cream. He first asked “who wants to get an ice cream?!” Aaron answered with “I would like some ice cream.” April and I understood that the obvious answer to his rhetorical question was yes, we’re doing this. I felt like a kid again and Dad even said he would spring for the 99 cents. As he was getting the coins to pay, I was watching his hands and was struck with a wave of nostalgia — a feeling of déjà vu that hits you right in the chest and the tingles go up your spine. My Dad’s hands became so familiar to me again for that moment, something that I knew very well in times past. All the memories came flooding back and a fuzzy vision flashed through my mind of me as a toddler looking up to hold my Dad’s hand as we would walk together or catch me at the bottom of a slide. I was captivated by these same hands as a child. Back then I thought of my Dad’s hands as extraordinarily big and I thought he was the strongest man in the world.
I hadn’t thought about this for the past 30 years or so, being distracted by GI Joe figures or girls in between then and now, but the strength of my father was once something that dominated my early life’s thoughts. I have a lot of little memories like this — such as him reaching around me to help me learn how to hold and swing a baseball bat, how big his hands were next to mine.
Now looking at these hands in the drive-thru, they were the exact same hands to me, but disguised through layers of the side effects of his cancer. They were the same big hands, which I knew every knuckle and bump intimately through the times holding onto them when he was trying to sip tea while playing Sheepshead with family friends past my bedtime, or observing them do impossible feats on the farm, but the same hands were now bruised and beaten by his disease. At this moment, as he passed out the ice cream cones, I was overwhelmed with a childhood adoration of my Dad.
What I also think is important, and what I didn’t realize enough as a child, was how hard he worked. Dad always liked to be working with his hands, whether it be at his job in the factory, at home on the farm, or any of his other projects he had going on. He still had time to build a scale replica of our family barn for me to play with my toy tractors or facilitating our jumping from rope swings into the hay mow from stories above by leaving huge piles of hay. Behind the scenes, these hands were working to keep me safe and fed. While I was sleeping, he would be working the night shift to make sure his family would be taken care of.
I remember the bruises and cuts he would get from working on farm projects and how worried we would get about how hard he worked. Even when he was getting more sick recently he liked to keep busy with projects in his house and yard. When he wasn’t able to do a lot of the work anymore, I would come over and help and he would still get delighted when we would get finished. He would tell me how happy he was. I think one of the most frustrating things to him was being forced to slow down and not be able to work on things. My Dad, who was invincible and could make or fix anything, had to stop.
With the hard life Dad has had, I look back to all that he has done with his hands, from being the first to hold his children when we were born to holding his water swab to wet his mouth in his hospice bed, but I always want to remember the legacy that he will leave with his hands.
One of the last good conversations me and Dad had was a few weeks ago, when he suddenly got sentimental — those of you who know my Dad know that he tries very hard not to show sentimentality — and I told him much of the aforementioned and of all the good memories that he gave me and what a good and happy life he made for me, and he thanked me for giving him a happy life too. At that moment I knew everything was finally okay and complete between us.
A good friend told me an interesting thing about the years that are on one’s gravestone: one is the year you are born, and one is the year you die, and the mark that really matters is the dash in-between the years. It is that insignificant mark that matters most, and it is up to you as to what you are going to do with that little dash. I know what my Dad did with it. I am proud to be part of the dash and I know Helen and April and Aaron are proud too; and I hope to pay tribute to it with much of what I do. I want to continue to make things with my hands and create new memories with my loved ones just as he has.