West Coast Dad
To Doug, With Love
When Sam and I moved from the East Coast to the West, I missed my parents like crazy. Then, I got a job as an assistant in the Western Regional Office of the Association of Yale Alumni. Barbara, my boss, literally, on day one, became my combo closest friend, mentor, and West Coast mom. Her husband, Doug, was my West Coast dad. He was a law professor, academic, soft-spoken and quirkily brilliant. Politically, he identified as Socialist, yet instructed me and Sam to put our paltry savings in mutual funds and money markets. He loved history books, the stock market, and terrible lyrics to country songs. When Barbara and I signed up for yoga, he came along. Turns out, he could do a perfect headstand.
Forty years later, and Doug is dying. He is in hospice care, beset by twin demons: Alzheimer’s and cancer. Barbara made the agonizing but best decision to take out his feeding tube. He is mostly unconscious in a room at a care facility in Palo Alto, his favorite poster of Paris over his hospital bed and Joan Baez and Judy Collins playing on a CD player in the background. Barbara, as always, is there, too.
We Zoomed yesterday and I tried to hold it together when I said goodbye. He can’t talk, but he opened his mouth when I said his name before thanking him for 39 years of kindness, during which I watched him play sous chef to Barbara as they put together five-course meals from their teeny galley kitchen. There were trips to Yosemite with Doug behind the wheel, every bend in the road causing Barbara to put her hand on his shoulder and say, “Ease up, Douglas.”
Before Doug right now is the final bend in the road, and Barbara, contrary to her cautious nature, has let down the guard rails. No need to ease up, Douglas. Barbara is by your side; what I’m wishing for you, gentlest of men, is to go gentle.