This Is Not an Obituary

(There is an old man, reduced to breath and bones and dreams of pain, dying more slowly than he or anyone would like, in a bed in Oak Ridge, the same bed his own mother died in.  He sips some water when awake enough to realize how parched he is.  The only thing he has eaten in days are bare spoonfuls of ice cream.  There is just enough of him left to know he is in pain, but the morphine finally arrived yesterday, so perhaps that will make it easier.  Perhaps his dreams will be more restful.)

On some day in August 2018 (yet to be determined when I begin writing this), David Ward, formerly of Kimper, Kentucky, died at his home in Oak Ridge, Tennessee at the age of 73.  David leaves behind his wife of 53 years, Rhinda, as well as his four children and four grandchildren:  Yancey, who cared for him in his last years and is owed a debt the rest of us can never repay; Rebecca and her husband A.J. and their two children, (the Older with her quiet, cautious internal musings, and  the Younger with her open heart waiting to be broken); Selena and her husband Dan, and their two children (their own Boy with wide eyes and smile, and their Girl with straight back and her love of flowered hats); and Bethany (the promise of second chances) and her husband Tim Hall.  David was preceded in death by his sisters Joyce Williamson and Kay McKinney.  He is survived by his sister Jan Gosser and brother Cecil Ward, and numerous nieces, nephews, cousins and friends (too many people who loved him, and whom he loved, to list here).

David was born June 18, 1945 in Pike County, Kentucky, the son of the late Frennie Ward and Pye Irene Justice, and stepson to Pye’s second husband Arthur “Art” Sutton.  (Unfortunately his parents didn’t follow the tradition of giving a child the mother’s maiden name, as David “Justice” Ward would have been an awesome superhero name, or perhaps the name of a hangin’ judge.  He didn’t have much justice in his life as a kid.  Frennie was a violent drunk, and Pye stayed with him only because at that time, in that place, she had no other choice.)  David spent much of his childhood with Elmo and Pluma Norman in Kimper, after Frennie and Pye moved to Chicago, following the trail to the industrial north that was taken by many Eastern Kentucky hillbillies in the 1940s and 1950s.

David met his future wife, Rhinda, when they were both schoolchildren; Rhinda says that she made up her mind she would marry that Ward boy pretty early on, and set to work making sure it would happen despite her own mother’s best efforts to stop it.  (There was murder between the families, but that probably didn’t have any bearing on the matter.  The killer was a Phillips, the victim my father’s uncle Jarvey.)

David wanted to go to college and be a writer.  But college wasn’t an option after graduating from Johns Creek High School, so David pursued what was the best alternative -- he joined the military, deciding to enlist in the Air Force.  (He would say later it was best to select a branch rather than waiting for the U.S. government to assign you to one where you were more likely to die). 

He learned how to be an electrician in the Air Force, served a couple of years without even coming close to combat, and then returned to Pike County to get married.  Rhinda was seventeen, and turned down her parents’ offer to buy her a car if she would just go to college rather than marry someone with such poor prospects.  (Mom would later tell us that the college degree wasn’t optional for them, but we’ll forgive her for her “do as I say, not as I do” approach on that one.  She went back to college when her two oldest were in high school and got her nursing degree; she made sure the rest of us got the degree first.)  Somewhere along the way, David’s in-laws came to adore him, though Kermit was once known to growl in response to another Ward cousin bragging about how David’s kids took after him, “They’re half Rhinda’s kids, too, you know.”

David and Rhinda left Kentucky for Chicago, where their first child, Yancey, was born in 1966.  Rebecca followed three years later, and David and Rhinda moved to Huntsville, then Oak Ridge, before returning to Pike County where David worked in the coal mines (where he broke his back) and where Selena was born in 1975 and Bethany in 1979.  They raised their kids in a house that David built with his father-in-law, Rhinda’s father Kermit, and other family members, on land next to his sister Joyce (who ran a family boot-legging business and kept her money in her bra).  After a house-fire (inexplicable) in 1988, David and Rhinda and the two younger daughters moved to Oak Ridge (Yancey and I were in Chicago by then), where he remained until his death.

(He wasn’t a perfect father -- even though he took the warning of his own father’s drinking and abstained, there was a bit of This Be The Verse in his parenting, much as it is for most of us.  He didn’t have the best example for how to be a parent, and sometimes struggled with how to do and be better.)  David was known for entertaining small children in a way that went far beyond the classic pulling his finger off trick (which he was a master of, not to be confused with the “pull my finger” prank).   Porch swings became spaceships, rabbits could talk. 

He convinced his first two kids that they had an invisible brother named Clyde.  Yancey, it was said, had been found in a tree after being left there by his real father, Elmer Schnuckle.  Rebecca was found under a cabbage leaf.  The tale of how David and Rhinda jointly convinced the two oldest that David had a girlfriend named Gladys (and Rhinda pretended to be Gladys’s sister on the phone, demonstrating a similar sense of humor as her husband) is legendary in the family.  David would kidnap Yancey’s favorite toys for Rebecca to play with while Yancey was at school.  (That Chatty Cathy should have been mine.)  Selena and Bethany were the recipients of stories about sharks in the toilets, the true origins of Smurfs, and house cows.  There was often mooing outside their bedroom window; the house cows, stealthy creatures as they are, were never actually seen. (Selena learned to be skeptical; Bethany, three years younger, believed with the fierce conviction of a four-year-old.)  His efforts to delude his grandchildren were stymied by the fact they lived too far away for them to be regularly exposed to his wild tales.

David liked to have his Pepsis, in glass bottles, frozen in the freezer, and the kids fought over who would get to eat the ice crystals when he popped the bottle open.  He broke his buttermilk biscuits into pieces and mixed them with his fried eggs and sausage gravy before eating them like a stew.  (It tasted better than it looked.)  He loved Rhinda’s homemade peanut butter fudge (made in the cast iron pans I’ve already declared as my desired legacy after my mother goes).  He drank his coffee black as coal (and as bitter as death).

David never met a dog he didn’t like, and that didn’t like him (except Candy, our crazy foster dog, who – like my father – didn’t get the kindness she deserved when she was young).  The dogs were always part of the stories told to the children, and were given dialogue to go along with accounts of their hijinks. Pickles the lab mix; Snoopy the beagle, Red the hound, Goober the terrier mix, Smokey the elkhound, and then the poodles, Spike (a/k/a Homer Aloysius Poindexter), Trixie, and Miss Cup.   (There are only so many times a man’s heart can be broken, though, before he can’t take no more, and Miss Cup was the last.)

David liked to hunt.  In Kentucky, he regularly went squirrel-hunting, and Rhinda made squirrel gravy from the proceeds.  After he moved to Oak Ridge, he took up turkey hunting with his dear friend Hubert Rollen, but there weren’t nearly as many turkey dinners as there were pots of squirrel gravy.  He liked to do math for fun, teaching himself advanced mathematics.  (He could have been an engineer.  Instead, he installed a tv line that brought reliable tv service to the holler in Kimper, did all the local families’ yearly tax returns, and built houses.)  David was a lifelong fan of the University of Kentucky Wildcats, and watched the games with Yancey as often as he could -- but during the yearly playoffs he often had to record the game so Yancey could tell him whether they won or lost before he watched it. 

David cared for his sister Kay, stepfather Art, and (with Rhinda) his mother Pye in their final illnesses.  Rhinda says David never expected to live past his 40s.  He made it into his 70s, and the last few years of his life were not easy for him or for his own caretakers.  He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s (with related dementia and hallucinations as wild or wilder than the stories he once told his children, and late-night escapes from the house).  Earlier in August, in one of his more lucid moments, David decided he was done.  (I spoke with him on his birthday.  It was the last time I told him I loved him, and the only real good-bye he had from me before the end.)  He took to his bed, stopped eating or drinking, and took too long to die. It was not merciful.   

David was an agnostic.  He asked for direct cremation, with no service or prayer, and for his ashes to be scattered in the hills.  His only memorial is his family, and his friends, and what we remember of him.

I don’t believe in a heaven.  There is no reward or punishment.  This time, here, is all we get, the only chance to get it right or wrong. But if there is a heaven, he is there with his dogs, walking the hills.   

You did your best, Daddy.