The death of a "very married man.".

My father died Saturday, December 13, at 4:10 p.m. This most reluctant of emigrants had been born in the back of his family's butcher shop in Rhymney, Monmouthshire, in Wales on April Fool's Day, 1914, and breathed his last, 89 years, eight months and 12 days later on the sixth floor of London's St. Joseph's Hospital, just as the late afternoon sun, shot through with delicate pink and blue streakings, was starting to flood into his room.

Jack often spoke about the most desolate moment of his life as he stood all alone, a 15-year-old kid with a cardboard suitcase, clutching the guardrail of the transatlantic steamer Megantic, as it pulled out of Southampton on an eight-day crossing to Halifax. Dad's family had fallen on hard times and, as the only son, it was his task to go ahead to the new world and make smooth the path for his parents and sister who would follow over in the fall. In exchange for his free passage to Canada, Dad was required to work on a farm--he did not even know where it would be--for a full growing season.

He boarded a trans-Canada train in Montreal and, at every station along the way, a few more British lads would have their names called out, would disembark, and be led away to meet their employers. Jack's name was called in Guelph, where he and a parcel of other very young men were herded into a livestock arena to be inspected by farmers from the surrounding area. The farmers picked out the boys they wanted and took them away as virtual slaves-for-a-season. There were some horrific stories of mistreatment with this scheme but Jack was lucky. In addition to tending livestock on a 300-acre farm, Jack's reading and writing skills made him useful as the farm's official secretary and interpreter.

With the late fall came liberation from farm work and the longed-for reunion with his family. It is probably no coincidence that it was right about then that Jack first encountered the two smells which he would always identify as his favourites in all the world--burning leaves (the Welsh autumn is such a soggy and desultory affair that such conflagrations are not necessary) and a steaming pot of boiling chili sauce.

The reunited family eventually made their way down to London where Jack and his father were able to pick up work in the family trade of butchering, though it would not be until after the Depression in September of 1941 with the prospect of fulltime work at Canada Packers, that Jack felt financially secure enough to marry a London girl with whom he had long been besotted, Verna Geraldine McQuiggan.

But the world was not quite through with horsing Jack around and, in May of 1942, he got drafted into the army; and he spent the rest of World War II undergoing training in northwestern Canada, where he said that all he really did was "learn how to guard pine trees and hose out garbage cans." Given compassionate leave in 1944 when my parents' first child and only daughter, Barbara, died, Jack never saw service overseas.

After 15 years of constant disruption and deprivation, one can understand how it was that when this "very married" man (as my brother Ted called him on Saturday) finally put down roots, he planted them so deeply and securely that you could not pull them up with a fleet of Roto-rooters. The home my parents created for me and my three older brothers was such a bottomless oasis of stability and love that we, in turn, could afford to take just those kinds of chances--with artsy careers and unorthodox living arrangements--that were guaranteed to drive poor old security-seeking Jack crazy.

Carl Jung once postulated a theory that each generation, to some extent at least, is psychologically driven to live out their parents' unlived lives. If each generation unfailingly explores just those facets of experience which their parents were determined or obliged to set aside, then it helps to explain the uniquely explosive dynamics of family life. It also suggests the unique possibility--rarely realized and requiring more hard work than most people today are willing to give--for the family, alone of all human groups, to achieve real psychological balance and wholeness.

I was 27 self-absorbed years old when I decided to interview my parents about their relatives and forbears for a family history which (smugly assuming I was the only Goodden who could write), I would develop into book form and distribute within our family as a Christmas present. The day I was to go over and see them, Jack turned up on my porch instead, dropping off a shopping bag full of prose memoirs--so polished, so funny, so uncannily like what I thought was my very own style--that I could only sit in dumbfounded wonder and weep. Oh. So that's where that came from.

From that day on, I have always been conscious that it is Jack's gift I have been precariously exploiting all these years as a means to earn my crusts. Though he may have doled it out rather sparingly at times, there was no one whose praise meant more to me. And his actions spoke as loudly as his words. Even with badly failing eye sight, having to sit in a pool of direct sunlight with a magnifying glass nearby, he always made sure that he read my columns.

If you want to get technical about it (Gooddens are all fairly hopeless at medical details), David John Goodden (known as Jack to all his loved ones except Mom who has always called him John), died of renal failure and had a couple of other systems which were "shutting down" as well. "Old age" is what we're calling it. He rallied quite a bit after a couple of days in the hospital and was doing so well that the nursing staff began devising contingency plans in case he lasted another few months.

Then Friday at noon, he took a sharp turn for the worse; much like he was that last night in his apartment when I had to help him into bed and almost called an ambulance. When he suddenly stopped moaning and fell into a deep sleep, I decided it could wait for next day. Jack hated hospitals like our dog Badger hates visiting the vet. My feeling was, if he had died that night in his own bed at home, then so be it.

I was alone with him last Friday night for about three hours and saw him off into the morphine-drenched sleep from which he never woke. While we had had better and more focussed chats over his previous ten days in the hospital (though his chronic hardness of hearing meant he got to do most of the talking and cruelly limited the subtlety of what we could express to him), I am consoled to know I was the last person in the world to talk with him and do what little I could to make him more comfortable.

A couple weeks before this final crisis hit, Jack told me of a dream in which a sage old man pronounced he would have five more months to life. That would have put him just past his 90th birthday. It has been such a hard slog these last few years (after eight and half decades of pretty rude health) and his quality and enjoyment of life had decreased so much, that a large part of what we are feeling now is relief and numbness, regularly punctuated by shards of grief. All in all he had a good long run, exceptional considering he smoked for all but 16 of those years. He never had to go into a nursing home like Mom and he kept his wit and his phenomenal memory right up until the very last lap.

An hour after dying, his red and veiny nose was all smoothed out, almost an olive tone. The same with his lips. The effect was to make him look suddenly younger. His mouth was open and a little contorted and inside one could only see blackness; emphasizing the sense that this was just his shell, an empty husk he'd left behind. All the brothers and wives and a smattering of kids just sat around for the better part of three hours, staring at him, touching him, crying and laughing and telling stories. It was all terribly sad but it was a good place to be.

Mother was able to visit with him once in the hospital though, with her Alzheimer's, it's hard to know what she will remember of it. Considering that she could not tell you where she has been living two and a half years since we packed up the old family homestead on Wortley Road, one wonders if Jack's death will ever really register on her consciousness. Or will he always be in the next room, fussing with something and about to come through? "What's keeping him, anyway? He should be here by now." The blessings of oblivion, perhaps.

Though he served a couple terms as an elder at Calvary United Church in the 60s, church was something Jack seemed to indulge more for the sake of my Mom than himself. He could feel a pantheistic sort of reverence and awe, was always grateful for the gift of life, and considered Mother Teresa to be a great soul, but I think he was too constitutionally ironic to ever seriously entertain religious belief for himself. So I was glad the end came at St. Joe's--a human-scale hospital with crucifixes on the walls, and windows that can be opened to let in real air. And there were people praying for him (including a convent of nuns, which might have amused him) in Canada, Britain, and Italy.

All four of Jack's sons were born at St. Joe's, as were all three of our kids and, in a lot of ways, this death watch felt like we were preparing for a different sort of birth. Certainly the stresses and pains that gripped him bore a resemblance to labour, as he prepared to deliver himself into another dimension. There was the constant vigilance of his family, huddled at bedside, watching for signs of imminence and for the call to go out that the great event was upon us; all of us anticipating that mind-melting moment when no one would enter or leave the room but the number of people therein would suddenly change.

When our kids visited him for the first time in the hospital, teary-eyed and all, they moved right in as if Jack were a newborn baby, playing with his incredibly fine and wispy white hair, and getting it to stand up Ed Grimley-style. When it was time to go, the two girls leaned in from either side and simultaneously smooched him on the cheeks, making him grin like a loon. I envied their easy bedside manner 

As a general rule, Goodden men are not very touchy-feely types, but thankfully, that rule was out the window during Jack's final days. Whenever my dying father turned over in his bed, putting out his hand for me to hold, I took it, and remembered the 49-year-old photo Jack always kept at his desk. In that picture, taken in front of his brand new 1954 Ford Meteor, I am reaching up to hold the hand of this "very married" man as he stands with the five people who always knew they came first in his world. And I wondered why we ever stopped doing so simple and reassuring a thing while we still had the chance.

Herman Goodden is a professional journalist. He writes from London, Ontario