THE FOOTSTEPS I FOLLOW

In my wedding ceremony, I promised Beloved Wife that I'd love her forever.

That's a lie.

As I have explained to her on several occasions, I consider my obligations fulfilled after 60 years. Yup, after handing her that 720th monthly anniversary rose, I'm leaving her.

Probably for an oxygen tent and a box of Depends (I'll be 92, after all), but still... I'm OUTTA HERE.

Before I leave, though, first I have to live up to what my father accomplished in his marriage, which was extraordinary. My parents were married just shy of 48 years when my mother died, and I figure I'll need the extra 12 years to make up for in duration what he did with sheer guts and devotion.

In 1972, I was 6 years old, and my 48 year-old mother - the vivacious yet diabetic woman who stayed at home, cooked, cleaned, and raised the kids - had a stroke. Not one of those gentle "you'll make a full recovery in a few months" kind of strokes. I'm talking "paralyzed on one side, weak on the other, brain scrambled to the point where you have a tough time remembering your own kids' names and you cry for no reason because you have no control of your emotions" devastatingly ass-kicking kind of strokes.

Which left my 55-year-old factory-worker father with four boys (ages 6, 8, 12, and 15) to raise, a house to keep, and a broken wife to take care of.

A broken wife who was still diabetic and went blind from cataracts shortly afterwards.

To this day, I have no idea how he did it. I was very young, and wasn't privy to all the details. But I do have some memories.

I remember that he took early retirement from the factory, and we lived off his pension (he had 25 years in by this time).

I remember that our house only cost $7500 when they bought it in 1966, which was roughly a year's wages, so the mortgage probably wasn't too big of a burden. I don't know when it was finally paid off.

I remember my father having to go to the county courthouse to sign up for food stamps, and I remember going to the store and buying groceries with those food stamps.

I remember getting those "Thanksgiving boxes of canned goods for poor people" and being very surprised. I thought maybe they had the wrong house. We weren't poor. I had food, clothing, shelter, TV and a library card. How could we be poor? Poor people were dirty, smelly, unshaven, and lived in cardboard boxes. Or so I gathered from TV. Small town Wisconsin didn't have homeless. Although there was that one guy who lived in his car, but we just ignored him.

But even though I don't know how he did the finances, exactly, I DO know how he did other things.

He had supper ready promptly at 5:30 every night. We never once went hungry.

He gave my mother her insulin shots every day.

He did my mother's physical therapy every day - making her walk around a bit, and making her lift a soup can with her bad arm about 20 or 30 times, just to keep the muscles from atrophying. It didn't help her so much as slow the degeneration process, but he attended to it faithfully.

Every night, he'd read to her from the local daily paper. I don't know how much of it she really understood, or if she recognized any of the names, but he did it anyway.

And he still hugged her and kissed her, right in front of the kids (EWWW! Mushy stuff!).

After she went blind, he arranged for her to get special records & tapes of unabridged books. Eavesdropping on this introduced me to the works of James Herriot.

He made sure there were still presents under the Christmas tree every year. Including, in 1982, a $300 brand new Tandy Color Computer (with 4k of RAM!) that gave me a SERIOUS leg up in my computer programming class.

But mostly I remember that he never cried. He never complained. He never gave up. He never stopped loving my mom and taking care of her, as long as he was physically able to do so. Dad wasn't exactly in the best shape himself. He had a bad leg (broken & set wrong in the early 60's, so one leg was shorter than the other. He walked with a bad limp, and he needed to have an extra 1/2 inch of sole on his right shoe. Fortunately, Fort Atkinson was still quaint enough to have a shoe repair shop in town where he could get this done), and he battled the onset of Multiple Sclerosis while in his 60's, so he only got around so-so.

Dad managed to hold things together until all his birdies left the nest. I joined the Navy and left home in 1985, and Blogless Brother Tom (two years older than I), stuck around a few years longer, running errands & such as mom and dad coasted toward sunset. I'll leave the final years for Tom to discuss in the comments, if he wants to, since I wasn't there. I'm a little fuzzy on the dates, but I believe mom took a turn for the worse in '89 or so, and dad couldn't care for her anymore. She died of a heart attack in a nursing home in 1990.

Dad passed away in 1994. Cancer. Fairly quick. Six weeks in the County nursing home. He was tired and just wanted to rest. He was 77, and I understood completely. He was an old farm boy, full of self-sufficient pride, and when he couldn't take care of himself anymore, he just kinda quit.

Dad was never a talker. In my whole life, I swear we'd never passed more than a couple thousand words in total. His view was that words were for transmitting information, and if you don't have something that needs communicating, you don't talk. Chit-chat wasn't worth doing.

But he communicated with his actions. Two important lessons, among others.

Keep your promises.

Do what needs doing.

I watched. I learned. I'm grateful that I was blessed to have this man for a father.

And now that I think about it, I may have to stretch that 60 years out a bit if I want to live up to his example.