Nobody in the church actually calls it “the last rites,” you know, although nobody had any doubt what it was when the Pope received it. The sacrament is most commonly called the Anointing of the Sick, and it’s performed in many cases of serious illness that incur the danger of death, not just terminal conditions. It’s a ritual of enlightenment, comfort and cleansing, not a funeral rite. My father received his Anointing while he could still walk and feed himself.
Maria brought it to my attention some time ago that I tend to assume everybody knows the story of my family in the early part of the last decade, when in fact I know a lot of you only through the interweb, and I’ve never actually written it up here. I’m correcting that omission today. I’m not entirely sure about all these dates, but I’ll change them if I’m wrong.
My dad, Ivan Wayne Adkins, was born on January 4th, 1950. He joined the Navy after high school, and was an engineer; he served and worked on both cruise ships and nuclear submarines, and was a noncombatant in the Vietnam War (his service was mostly in the Mediterranean). He and my mom went to antiwar rallies together during his shore leave.
When his time in the service ended, he earned a technical degree in engineering at DeVry University. He and my mom were married in August of 1975, and they moved to Georgetown, Kentucky, in 1978. I was born in May of 1981, my brother Ian in October of 1982, and my sister Caitlan in August of 1984.
The house we lived in was called Ivangrad, pronounced like a Russian city (although everybody called my dad “Wayne”). It was a big old place with an ancient well on one side, lots of stovepipes and no working chimneys. It was falling apart when they bought it; my extended family rebuilt it from the inside out before and during my childhood. Some of my earliest visual memories are of heat shimmering off the paint strippers held by my uncles and aunts, and of watching my toy cars disappear as Ben McBrayer and I dropped them between the studs where the drywall was missing.
In 1987, my dad was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He pursued several avenues of treatment, including both traditional and holistic medicine. I think it was also around this time that he became a vegetarian. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware that Dad was sick, nor do I remember any particular disambiguation on the subject, so I assume that my parents told me from the start what was happening–not that I, at six, had any solid grasp on the concept of metastatic cancer.
We moved to Richmond in the fall of 1989, in part because it meant a shorter commute to Dad’s job at the Lexington-Bluegrass Army Depot, in part because it was also a shorter trip to the hospital where he was undergoing outpatient chemotherapy, and in part because my parents wanted a newer home where my allergies to dust and mold wouldn’t be as much of a problem. The new house was called Two Trees. It was the only house with any trees at all in our subdivision–a huge, beautiful sycamore and a smaller catalpa.
Dad joined the RCIA program at St. Mark parish not long after we moved, and was confirmed Catholic at the Easter Vigil mass in 1990 (he’d already been attending Mass for years). He received his Anointing of the Sick near the end of 1992, on his feet, at the university’s Newman Center in Richmond–none of us can remember why it was there instead of at St. Mark, but we’re sure of that.
He entered St. Joseph hospital in Lexington as an inpatient in January of 1993, where his condition steadily declined. He’d been bald for some time by that point, but his facial hair was growing back, which seemed to bother him. He wasn’t allowed to shave, of course; the chemo kept his red cell count very low, so any nick would have been dangerous. He had my grandfather sneak him an electric razor, so he could surprise us with a smooth face. It worked, but his skin was so tender that he cut himself anyway.
He lost the ability to feed himself, and to speak clearly. He was always hot and thirsty. There was a cup of chipped ice next to his bed, and when I came in to sit with him I’d feed him from it with a plastic spoon. My mother taught me how to let it melt a little first. One chip at a time, she’d tell me. Be careful. Go slow.
It’s little surprise to anyone, I think, how much my siblings and I hate the smell of hospitals.
My father is very large in all my memories. He was quiet, and spoke most often with his great strong hands, which knew perfectly how to hold tools and keyboards and children. It must have been heavy irony to see me, small even for eleven, feeding him with a spoon he couldn’t lift anymore. I wasn’t conscious of it.
Dad died on February 17, 1993. Other than the normal blankness, I don’t remember any strong symptoms of denial, though I certainly made my share of mental bargains. My sister, more classically, spent some time after his death believing that Dad was a heroic covert agent, undercover and far away, on secret missions. She was eight. It’s not hard to guess that she’s always been a person of tremendous faith.
I’ve only ever had three dreams about him that I remember: one in high school, one in college, and one a couple of months ago. The first two times I was suspicious of him, untrusting; I knew he was an impostor.
I had a comic-book biography of the John Paul II when I was younger. Its most affecting part was its description of his life during and after the second World War. He had a great deal of contact with the Jewish community-turned-ghetto in Krakow, and he worked with underground resistance to the German occupation.
Hitler wanted badly to eliminate the literate and cultural power of Krakow. He failed. I didn’t understand the symbolism of this image when I read the biography, and I’m sure now that it’s not literal. It’s remained with me anyway: Karol Wojtyla, postulant priest, stealing into a bombed-out library to pull books from the rubble. Covert. A hero.
