Writing my father’s obituary with him revealed a man I never knew - The Boston Globe (2024)

It was a ritual that endured into their old age. Even after Alzheimer’s rendered my mom mostly quiet or confused, my parents would linger, grazing on French bread and the scraps in the salad bowl. My father did most of the talking then — about the latest political outrage, some William Trevor book he was reading, the memory of one of their long-ago adventures to Mackinac Island or Mexico City.

It all came to an abrupt end in 2021. My mother, or at least the smart, empathetic woman we’d known, disappeared. It wasn’t safe for her to be at home anymore. We eventually found, in Holyoke, a pleasant, professionally run place where she is comfortable and well cared for. She enjoys my father’s near-daily visits, even if she isn’t sure who he is.

What’s happened since has been a revelation: I’ve become my mother’s surrogate. While my brothers, both older, are task-oriented — taking our dad to doctor’s appointments, haggling with insurance companies, dealing with car and computer problems — I talk and listen to him. That’s pretty much it. On weekends, we sit in his living room, often for hours, engaged in unhurried conversation — about Mom, my work at the Globe, politics, sports, music, books, movies, you name it. It’s been weird, and also wonderful, to get to know my father better at the end of his life.

My role in this new routine makes sense. When I was a kid, my father used to call me “Chester Chatterbox,” and not always affectionately. Sometimes, to my parents’ annoyance, I’d crash their after-dinner conversations, regaling them with tales — some embellished, some totally fabricated — of my exploits at school. (Once, in third grade, I told them a roadrunner had escaped in class and I’d been the only kid nimble enough to catch it. My parents mentioned this triumph at a teacher conference and were dismayed to learn there’d been no roadrunner on the loose at Florence Grammar School.)

By contrast, my father was not famous in our family for his conviviality. Indeed, he could be stern, even stormy, and he didn’t talk about feelings. I knew he loved me, but not because he ever told me. He was focused on his work. He was a journalist, beginning his career at The Berkshire Eagle in 1961. (One of his memorable assignments was trailing the Berkshire County contingent at the March on Washington, where he stood 6 feet from the Rev. Martin Luther King as he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.) He went on to write for Congressional Quarterly, the Winston-Salem Journal, and the Detroit Free Press before becoming editor, in 1971, of the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, where my mother took a job in public relations at Smith College, her alma mater.

The Gazette was a good paper that became excellent. Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting on Watergate made journalism seem sexy and important, meaning savvy college grads who might have gone to law school got newspaper jobs instead — the prospect of exposing corrupt cops and politicians was suddenly more exciting than making money. But the Gazette also improved because my dad was a keen, uncompromising editor. He believed a newspaper’s No. 1 priority is to keep tabs on people in power, and he pushed his reporters to do that. The aim, he used to say, is to “tie a tin can on the tail of bad guys.” The Gazette won numerous awards, and my father was twice asked to serve on the jury for the Pulitzer Prize.

In retirement, my father began to soften. While my mother worked a succession of demanding jobs — director of admissions at Salem College, director of college guidance at the Loomis Chaffee School — my dad opened a bookstore in Florence, a village of Northampton. It required him to talk to customers and answer the telephone, something he rarely, if ever, did at home. The arrival of five grandchildren also had an effect; my parents even bought a house with an in-ground pool, an uncharacteristic extravagance intended to entice me and my brothers to visit more often with our families.

Over the past two decades, my father and I were both treated for prostate cancer — he in his early 70s and I at just 48 — and the experience brought us closer. For a podcast I made about my ordeal, we talked about the nitty-gritty of our respective treatments, including the effect on sexual function. Suffice it to say, that’s not something my dad and I had been in the habit of talking about.

But it’s the agony of watching my mother slip away that finally cracked my father open. Today, at 88, he is fragile physically, but emotionally, he’s healthier than he once was. He’s not so intense, and it’s easier to make him laugh, something I delight in doing. Yes, he’s sad — he misses my mom terribly — but my father has become a gentler, more benevolent person.

One afternoon last spring, I suggested we move our conversation into his office so I could sit at the computer. I knew he’d started to write a chronology of his life, but typing even a few sentences had proved too taxing, and he’d stopped. I opened the abandoned Google Doc and, over our next few visits, we wrote his obituary together.

Resurrecting memories

It’s not a colorless recitation of schools attended and jobs held. Quite the opposite. Our conversation yielded asides and anecdotes that may be minor but feel meaningful. With just a bit of prompting, my father was able to summon buried memories that gave me a fresh perspective on a guy I thought I knew. He talked about Winston-Salem, where he covered race and urban issues. He mentioned he’d made friends with a few members of the local Black Panther Party. On weekends, they played touch football together in a local park. Occasionally, everyone came back to our place and drank beer on the porch. That probably won’t make it into the obit, but I’m glad to know it.

My parents traveled widely in later years — Ireland, Italy, Hungary, China, Patagonia. He mused about their transatlantic crossing on the Queen Elizabeth 2, a voyage they made because my mom had done it with her mother and father when she was a girl. But my parents also shared an interest in long-distance drives, and my father remembered a few of these road trips: to Needles, Calif., which they wanted to visit because it’s one of the hottest places in the United States; to the Texas Hill Country, where he and my mom had a chance encounter with LBJ’s daughter Luci; to the Blue Ridge Parkway just as the leaves were turning wild colors; and to the Harry Ransom Center, the cultural archive at the University of Texas, where my father recalled perusing the papers of writer William Humphrey — one of his favorites — and stumbling upon a note he’d written to Humphrey years before.

And there were other, more personal stories I’d never heard, about things that shaped my parents’ relationship and our family. For instance, one night in 1970, my father told me, he returned from work to find my mom looking distraught. We were living in Detroit then, and my father was frequently off on an assignment, leaving my mom to contend with three unruly boys under the age of 10. Recalling the look of despair on my mom’s face as she stood in the kitchen, my father began to blink away tears.

I stopped typing.

“She said she was pregnant,” he said. “She said she was done having children. She didn’t want another baby.”

Neither did my father, but that was irrelevant. This was my mother’s decision to make. She was ready to return to work. Two weeks later, he said, she flew alone to New York and had an abortion. Then she flew home.

I didn’t say anything.

“She was so brave,” my dad said, his hands clasped in his lap.

I’m grateful to know this about my mom. I love her even more. And I’m glad my father told me. It’s helped me to appreciate my parents for who they were — people who experienced so much of life together. It’s no surprise they spent all those nights at the dinner table. They had a lot to talk about.

Mark Shanahan can be reached at mark.shanahan@globe.com. Follow him @MarkAShanahan.