Sunday, November 24, 1963: At 11:21am CST, as live television cameras covered Lee Harvey Oswald being moved through the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters, after he had been charged with the assassination of President Kennedy, Oswald was shot by Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby. Like Kennedy, Oswald was taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where he soon died… Housewives watching their afternoon soap operas saw the shooting happen on live TV when the networks cut to Dallas as the news of the transfer came across…
Thursday, November 24, 1983: Thanksgiving Day – We received a phone call from the hospital that morning. The doctor was telling my mother that they were taking my dad into emergency surgery. We knew it had to be very serious for them to be performing surgery on Thanksgiving Day. The doctor said he would call us once my dad came out.
I cannot tell you why we weren’t at the hospital waiting. He was at Doctors Hospital just down the street from where we lived – just over a 3-block walk. I guess we felt that, because it was so close, we could wait at home just as easily as we could have waited there.
I don’t recall exactly what time it was – 10:30? 11-11:30? The phone rang, and my mother answered it. Obviously, I could only hear her side of the conversation as I stood next to her between my dad’s chair and where she was talking on the old rotary dial wall phone.
It was the doctor calling, as he had promised. I watched my mother’s face as she listened to his words. Suddenly, my mother said into the phone, “What’s that? Say that again?” The doctor repeated what he had just told her.
“We lost him. He expired.”
My father’s appendix had torn, not ruptured or fully burst – hence the oddness of the symptoms he had been having and his pains. He wasn’t even feeling them on the side where the appendix is located. It was not classic appendicitis. The doctor explained to my mother that they removed it and “cleaned him out” as some of the contents had already entered his system and could have caused peritonitis. They had given him general anesthesia, all the while knowing that he had a slight respiratory issue. However, the doctor told my mother that my dad came out of the anesthesia and was in the recovery room “joking and laughing with the nurses”.
But then, he added, “Something went very wrong inside him.” His temperature rose and his blood pressure dropped, and his lungs were no longer expanding.
Once my mother reacted to what the doctor told her, obviously she lost it. I don’t even remember her hanging up the phone, but she somehow struggled to get the words out that my father had died.
I remember grabbing her arm and screaming “No!” And then saying to myself over and over again, “It can’t be true – no, it can’t be true.” I remember sinking to my knees in front of his chair, grasping the sides of it with my hands. No – this can’t be true. He can’t be gone.
I heard my mother saying repeatedly, “Carol, what am I going to do? What am I going to do??” At some point, I arose from my father’s chair and walked into my room. There was a crucifix hanging above the doorway between my room and my parents’ room. I am not proud of this recollection, but I looked up at that crucifix and screamed out, “damn you”…
Somehow, my mother and I made our way out of the house and down those few blocks to the hospital in a misty rain. We met with the doctor, as well as the anesthesiologist – who was crying. They were devastated that they had lost such a young man. My dad was just 56 years old…
I remember them handing my mother a large manila envelope containing my father’s personal effects: his wallet, reading glasses, wedding ring…
Forty years ago – FORTY YEARS – Thanksgiving Day 1983 and my father was gone from my life. I was just 22 years old. My mother was a widow, just about a month away from her 51st birthday…
I remember my mother’s brother and his wife, my Uncle Steve and Aunt Margaret, rushing over that night from their house in the Bronx after getting our phone call. I don’t remember who else we called that evening, but word spread quickly throughout our church community. Suddenly our parish priest, Father Emeric, was at our apartment building, ringing the downstairs bell. I buzzed him in and vividly remember watching him through our 5th floor landing, bounding up the four flights of stairs, almost two by two – his young aide right behind him, trying to keep up.
I don’t remember what other phone calls were made that night, but there was one person that we desperately needed to get in touch with, and I had no idea how I was going to accomplish that. It was my one and only sibling, my older brother Emery. He had been estranged from our family for just over 9 years, and at that point in time, I had no phone number for him…
It was Thanksgiving night, 1983. And my world had been turned asunder and would never ever be the same…
Oddly Enough 