During the last six months of my father’s life, reaching him by telephone became difficult. His cell phone tended to confuse him, and he would turn off the volume or let the battery die. Although he had a landline, he rarely answered it — sometimes because he was socializing in the card room or lobby of his southern Florida assisted living facility, or sometimes because the television in his apartment was too loud for him to hear the phone ring.
When I was able to speak to him, both the length and the quality of our conversations varied. It was always better to catch him mid-morning — once late afternoon rolled around, his patience and cognitive capacity dwindled. By evening, he’d forgotten the day of the week, what he’d eaten for dinner, or whether the nurse had seen him that morning. Sometimes he wanted to talk, but in his last weeks, he sounded increasingly exhausted.
A few days before he died, however, we had a particularly lively chat. It would end up being our penultimate conversation, and in the weeks that followed, I found myself replaying it in my mind — not because my father offered any exceptional words of wisdom or thoughtful end-of-life advice (none of us knew he was about to die), but because it was so quintessentially him.
My father was 86 years old, and in his last few years, he couldn’t cross a room without the help of an aluminum walker. He couldn’t get into a car, dress himself, or take a shower without assistance. Although he’d been a lifelong reader, he had lost the ability to focus on stories. His world had become agonizingly small, and it was difficult to recognize him sometimes behind the pale veneer of old age.
But on the day of our chat, there was a familiar, mischievous glee in his voice. He’d been to the urologist that day, and though the doctor hadn’t removed the plastic catheter that had become the bane of my father’s existence, something far more exciting had happened.
“You’re not going to believe who I saw today,” he said. “At the doctor. You won’t believe it.” My father then went on to tell me that he’d spotted an old girlfriend — the first woman he dated after my mother died, more than 16 years ago.
“I was going into the office and she was coming out of it, and when we passed each other in the hallway, we looked right at each other,” he said.
“Did you speak to her?” I wanted to know.
He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I didn’t say a word,” he said. “And she didn’t say anything to me. But I know she saw me,” he insisted. “She definitely saw me.”
My father relished recounting the dramatic nature of his encounter. He’d dated this woman for four years, and in the end, they’d had an unpleasant break-up. They hadn’t spoken for a decade, but my father still had strong feelings about the time the two of them spent together and their eventual parting. When he described this chance meeting, he sounded more like an animated teenager than an octogenarian with an enlarged prostate. He sounded like a man who suddenly remembered a part of his life he’d almost forgotten.
In the 16 years after my mother died, my father was no stranger to romantic intrigue. He began dating one year after the funeral and still played golf and tennis weekly. He had a full head of dark-ish hair. In a place where compatibility doesn’t matter as much as whether one can still drive at night, he was, by all accounts, a “catch.”
My brother and I encouraged him to date — our mother had always been the one to plan their social outings, and we knew he needed companionship. In addition to several short-lived romances, he had three long-term girlfriends in the 14 years between our mother’s death and his move to assisted living.
During that time, my brother and I rode the roller coaster of our father’s love life. At first, we were optimistic and accommodating, but many times, it was difficult. Our father liked being told what to do and the women he found were happy to oblige him. He got caught up in the families of his girlfriends and tended to forget about his own. He would cancel dinners with my brother on a moment’s notice. He brought a girlfriend’s granddaughter on a trip to New York when he was supposed to be visiting my children. He didn’t call my kids on their birthdays, but he’d keep me on the phone for over an hour to tell me what a great soccer player someone else’s grandchild was. When one girlfriend’s grandson was accepted to podiatry college, he went on forever about the young man’s brilliance. Your grandchildren are brilliant, too, I wanted to say. But to avoid conflict, I held my tongue.
When my father was between companions, he would become interested in his own family again. And then, when his last girlfriend — a woman he dated for more than five years — abruptly ended things after a bad fall left him hospitalized, he became more interested in us than ever. I flew to Florida to see him. When it became clear that he couldn’t live alone or handle daily tasks by himself, my brother and I stepped in to help. We took over the paperwork that plagued him. We consulted with all of his doctors. We navigated the maze of home health aides and toured assisted living facilities. I bought him new pants and took him shopping for shoes to fit his swollen feet.
In the beginning, I was bitter. I didn’t like traveling to Florida during Covid, and organizing his life was no easy task. At one point, I made an unkind remark about how he had ignored his own family for a woman who ultimately wasn’t willing to take care of him.
“I know, but what can I do?” he said. “I can’t help it. That’s my nature.”
It was a terrible excuse — barely an apology — but it was also the truth. My father hated being alone. It didn’t mean he’d stopped loving my mother; in fact, in some ways, it was a sign of just how much he loved her still. Her passing had left a hole so deep that he would spend the rest of his independent years trying any way he could to fill it.
The last time I spoke with my father, just two days before he died, he was back to sounding fatigued. We chatted only briefly, and he couldn’t remember the day of the week or when he was supposed to see the urologist again. Now that he’s gone, I keep hearing his voice — not the drained and weary version, but the version I heard when he spoke about his ex-girlfriend; the version that sounded so delightfully alive, so ridiculously catty, so marvelously human.
For me, my father’s post-marital love life is a maze of conflicting emotions. Over the years, I’ve been happy that he had companionship. I’ve been grateful for the ways in which some of his girlfriends enriched his life and cared for him. I’ve been angry at him for overlooking his family, for forgetting my birthday only days after asking for advice on a gift for his most recent girlfriend. I’ve been guilt-ridden for not doing more to ease the loneliness that plagued him. Most of all, I have yearned for my mother’s advice to help me navigate it all.
When the people we love grow old and weaken, it is easy to forget the three-dimensionality of who they once were — to forget their bright virtues and vivid flaws and to see them only as colorless outlines. It is easy to believe that their present lives are devoid of passion and yearning.
The woman my father saw at the doctor’s office was by no means my favorite of his many companions. She was the first in a long line of girlfriends who represent painful moments for me: uncomfortable celebrations, awkward holiday dinners, hard-earned vacation time spent in the company of strangers I never wanted to know. Despite that, I can’t help but appreciate her now because of her chance meeting with my father and the spirited phone call that followed.
For at least a few minutes during our chat, my father sounded like himself again. The call was a reminder of who he used to be and, in many ways, who he still was — a man who, at 86 years old, still yearned for an amorous relationship; a man who still enjoyed the comedy and tragedy of romantic entanglements; a man who still reveled in the fuss and the spectacle that such things entail.
Even at the end, that was his nature.
Lynda Cohen Loigman graduated from Harvard College and Columbia Law School. She is the USA Today bestselling author of The Two-Family House, The Wartime Sisters, The Matchmaker’s Gift, and her recently published novel The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern, which was a Book of the Month pick, a People Magazine Book of the Week, and a WCBS Book Club Readers’ Choice pick.
