Originally published on Story Circle Network‘s Her Stories Substack, in the True Words by Real Women section.
After I made my Saturday trek over to the senior living facility where my parents lived, I found myself in an unexpected conversation with my almost 90-year-old father.
They’d moved into “the Big House” ten years earlier. I’d taken to traveling over there for a weekend visit, often helping with Mom’s “pill-popping party”—dishing her medications into plastic containers after popping them out of their foil cases. A few years into this routine, Mom passed on, leaving Dad alone after sixty-five years together to “wait for the Grim Reaper,” he’d say quietly.
I kept up our breakfast outings after Mom was gone. We always ate at Coco’s in Sun City, just like before—the place that had her favorite, coconut shrimp. I can still feel myself sliding into those booths by the window, an easy glidepath over the red plastic seat covers, unless a crack in the material caught my slacks.
That day in question Saturday, after our breakfast and back in Dad’s living room, something changed in his eyes. He became quiet. A faraway look overtook him, like he was watching a movie only he could see. Maybe he was looking at those endless Nebraska acres, corn tassels whipping in the Great Plains’ wind. Could’ve been Central City, where he was born and raised, or that stretch between there and York, where he met and married Mom.
After sitting quietly for what felt like forever, he just said, “I’ve seen so much.”
“Thinking about nearly 90 years?” I asked, not knowing what else to say—from 1922, raised as a sodbuster, his father a stonecutter, his mother tending his younger sister, the home, and him.
“You know,” he said, “I remember the first car my father brought home.”
Dad always loved to buy cars, right up into his late 80s, when the issue in my home was whether we should take his keys away. Before that first car, I figure they must’ve had a horse and wagon. They needed something to haul the gravestones from his father’s business—W.S. Desch and Sons, the monument company his father started and he inherited, that helped my parents raise seven kids.
It couldn’t have been easy, selling tombstones to bereaved family members all those years. But he carried it well enough, tried to lighten things with jokes like, “Yeah, people are just dying to see me.” Even if his heart wasn’t in it, he’d flash a smile.
“Must’ve been quite a day,” I said, trying to picture those dirt roads before cars and the hours it would take to travel those 39 miles between Central City and York with just a horse and buggy.
“You can’t imagine.” He understood by my expression what I was thinking. “But you know what the most amazing thing was back then?” He stretched out the moment with a long breath. “The thing I’ll never forget?”
I thought about my own fifty-some years, wondering what single moment I’d pick as the most remarkable as a child or an adult.
“What’s that, Dad?”
“It was riding in that car. I was twelve, in the backseat with my parents, heading to York, right after they paved the road.” His face lit up like he was floating down that effortless path right then. “So smooth,” he said, making sure our eyes locked. “Not a single bump! What a day.”
“The things you’ve seen,” I said. “Everything you’ve lived through in almost a century.” That was pushing it, but not by much.
“Huh,” he chuckled softly. His eyelids grew heavy, drooping to half-mast. Those pancakes with syrup had done their work.
He leaned his head back against his Lazy Boy, pushing the recliner all the way back.
“I’d better leave you to your recollections.”
“Um-huh.”
Was that the beginning of his life review, the one they say happens near the end? Six months later, he was gone.
