The End
My dad Tom died on June 27th 2025 from complications due to liver disease.
The story is that he was exposed to chemicals at work that damaged his liver and so the clock has been ticking since then. I suspect, but can’t say for certain, that he was exposed while working at a factory, but that may not be the case. It’s not such an odd story for working people. Two of his brothers were exposed to cancer causing chemicals and/or radiation at their jobs and died before him, in some part, due to those exposures. All of his siblings (older and younger) died before him.
End stage liver disease harms your brain. You build up too much ammonia in your blood and the ammonia sort of eats your brain. It gives you a form of dementia. At the end, he would wake up after several days of sleeping and remember or be reminded that he was sick and wasn’t going to get better. Rinse and repeat every two or three days. He faced his death with fresh eyes a few times a week.
Before he reached that point, he was on home hospice care. He said he would rather die like the neighbor did, at home, than go to a facility.
The neighbor was an elderly man who fell down his basement stairs, broke his hip and died, probably in agony, after days of laying in his basement alone. That was somehow better to my dad than being cared for in a facility that was literally down the block from his house. A facility his wife had worked for, since I was a child. A facility where we used to eat dinner with her and visit the old people.
Nope, better to die alone, dramatically, in the basement, with only the spiders to witness his passing. To my dad, that sounded like freedom and self determination.
Eventually, he was too much for my mom and sister to care for. He went to the facility. They set him up with bird feeders outside his window and his T.V. shows were always on. They took good care of him. He joked with the staff. He ate better than he was eating at home. They did a great job in his final days. I don’t think he appreciated it, but I definitely do.
My dad was 72 when he died. People tell me that that is too young, but he had a hard life. My parents paid for the good life their children have had, with their bodies. A sacrifice to the future.
The Beginning and Early Years
My dad was born in Flint Michigan in 1953. He was the fourth of five kids. I only know bits and snatches of his early life. His mother was a nurse in the women’s air core in WWII. His father contracted polio and worked various jobs. At some point my grandfather spent time in prison. They lived in Flint, where my dad said, they were desperately poor.
They moved to a farm in Gladwin, Michigan. I get the idea that they were tenant farmers. My grandfather could drive a tractor even without the full use of his legs. My grandmother at some time, was a county health worker who visited homes. He had a pet deer, in a pen, that he had raised from a fawn. Someone drove up to their property and shot it dead. He told me about the deer multiple times so I think it was traumatic for him. Especially, how they were treated by law enforcement when they reported it.
He described having lambs that could be picked off by the local eagles. So that was a concern. He drank milk right from the cows and ate raw hamburger. He seemed to enjoy life on the farm…maybe on multiple farms. At some point I believe the family moved to the McBain area. I had to ask about this because, although we lived in Cadillac where the Finks family had lived and where my grandfather was born, we have funerals in the area of McBain and my grandparents are buried in the vicinity.
That is pretty much what I know about him, other than small side facts, like that his brother once de-gloved his hand with a clothes wringer contraption peeling his skin off. He said his great grandmother Ida Mitchell Finks had long hair that he would brush when he would visit, but that he got in trouble for being around her. He called his grandmother Orvetta Finks “Grandma Abbott” because, that is how he knew her. She married Howard Abbott in 1940. He said she once held his hand to a hot stove for disobeying her.
A lot of my dad’s stories were woven with injustice and sadness, but also dark humor. I like to think that is a family trait.
There is a lot of void space there for me with my dad. I don’t come on the scene consciously until the mid to late 1970’s when he was in his 20’s.
My Perspective
My perspective on all this is a little skewed and makes story telling a bit hard. Exactly because it is from my limited point of view, it will be skewed or maybe even wrong.
I don’t have a conscious memory of my biological parents together. They divorced when I was three and I was a late bloomer for consciousness and memory. In my world, from the beginning, I have four parents. I’ve never had anything else, so I don’t know what it is like to have less parents. I don’t have any idea what their break up was like and no sorrow for their lost love. In my mind, I enter the world fully formed with four parents.
Later on, I’m told there is a difference and I learn to separate biological parents from “adoptive” parents, but in my youth that doesn’t really make sense. Those differentiations were really for the adults in my life. It mattered to them that biological parents had more significance, as a child I was obviously more about accurate labeling.
Parents in my life are more like grandparents. I have to identify them. Like “Grandma”, “Mom” isn’t enough. I had “Grandma Thompson” and “Mom Sue” for instance. Like my “Uncle Dave” I had a “Dad Tom”. I had eight grandparents by the way, right out of the gate.
Sitting here now, I wonder if that made it easier for me to think about genetic and non-genetic family.
The Middle
I’ve been around for the majority of my dad’s adult life. At least from the time he was 20. I met him while he was not done growing. He had to learn everything about being a parent with three other parents watching when a lot of people are in their partying phase.
You may have heard me say that my family clawed its way into the middle class. My parents were part of that movement. Some of my grandparents were illiterate. A few were poor, although a couple of them were born into families with some means and went to school, the majority of the eight were laborers. Several of them knew real hunger. My grandparents afforded my parents an early education and opportunity.
My parents started out working in factories. My dad would bring home boxes of parts from his job to assemble at night for extra money. The majority of my four parents had some post secondary education. Two sets of them started their own businesses later in life. They had ups and downs, success and failure. I always had a roof over my head and heat when it was cold. I never went without food for any length of time. My parents made that happen, when it didn’t always work that way for them.
Life wasn’t meant to be fair for us, it was meant to be better. Their sacrifices ensured that it was.
I was in a presentation on generational learning once, and asked one of the older people in our group if they had flush toilets when they were a kid. They got offended and made it out like I was calling them ancient. The thing is, my parents didn’t all have that luxury growing up. Progress wasn’t the same across the country. Your zip code determines access to resources. Some of my cousins grew up with outhouses in the 1980’s. My parents gave me a life where I always had a toilet, running water and, for the most part, electricity. Eventually both households had cable television!
The middle of my dad’s story, the part that I witnessed in person, is typified by the real struggle to be what today we call “average” and the majority of the world would call “exceptional”. In turn, I was expected to “make something of myself” but I was not expected to start where he started. I don’t get credit for their achievements, but I can honor them and benefit from them.
God willing I’ll be able to pass those benefits on to others.
The fruits of their labor were not just mine. I’ve devoted a lot of time to genetics, but now I need to talk about openness. When my parents were young, one of the neighbors, maybe four years old, walked into their house (door locking was not a thing). He asked them where the cookies were. They showed him the cookie jar and got him some cookies. We laugh about the idea that some kid could enter your house and just expect cookies, but here were young people, my parents, who were open to sharing what they had with children. Even random children from next door.
My dad taught me that kids are a protected class. Kids are supposed to take advantage of your kindness. That is the take away from the middle.
The Future
My youngest son turned eighteen a few days ago. Legally, he’s an adult, but he’ll have a roof over his head, heat, and food while he continues into post-secondary education. These are the things I can give my own kids and the other kids in my life. I can give them a safe place, resources and time to grow. The world they face is hard and it makes hard people, but my wife and I try to make room for quiet kindness and being a soft place to land after you shoot for the stars.
When I look at my kids, I see that my dad isn’t really dead. I see him in their willingness to help, their innate sense of justice and their openness to caring. The love and care and effort of a generation are being transmitted and shared.