Francis Rhoades died in 1993. He was my Dad. It was a good death, as deaths go. He had been on the cancer roller coaster for a while, making gains and ceding ground. But when it got to his liver, we were told it would spread quickly, and it did.
Somewhere in there we were told he had between six months and a year before we'd lose him. He lasted smack in the middle of that range, nine months. I was 23 years old when Dad got sick, 25 when we got the six-months-to-a-year timeline, 26 when he passed. I'm not proud of it, but I spent most of those first 25 years avoiding the guy.
See, my Dad was bigger than life, at least to me. He was large, loud, quick to laugh and quick to anger. Unless you wanted to get smacked with a fire-and-brimstone tirade you avoided certain topics -- politics, religion, sex, drugs and rock and roll. The idea was to keep it light. "How about those Tigers?" Or get him telling one of the same ten stories we heard all our lives that would make him laugh so hard his eyes got swallowed up by his cheeks, leaving little creases that seeped giddy tears down his face. Sure, we knew the stories by heart, but it was safe territory, and I was keen on keeping our interactions safe.
But then cancer put our relationship on a clock. This was my last chance to get to know this guy who had dominated my life for as long as I could remember.
While I didn't know it at the time, what I embarked on over the next several visits was an ad hoc life review or oral history. And the stories were amazing.
I'll share some of those stories in another post. In the meantime, I'd be interested to hear if others have had similar experiences with their own parents or grandparents. It's odd how sometimes death, when it's not sudden or unexpected, is a kind of gift. Cancer brought my Dad and me closer. Anyone else?
Jimmy Rhoades
Co-Founder
The Legacies Project
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