Kathleen Parker: ‘I learned that men are capable of honor, valor, compassion and courage’
"Each day after school, I joined [my father] at his law office where I did my homework until he finished up. Once home, we convened in the kitchen where he cooked while I perched on a wooden stool peeling potatoes. We talked.
"In that ritualized communion, I learned many useful lessons about the opposite sex. I learned that men like to talk while doing something else...I learned that fathers adore their children and will sacrifice anything to help them succeed.
"I learned that fathers will lay their lives down for their children. I learned that men are capable of honor, valor, compassion and courage and that they are essential to instilling those virtues in their sons and daughters."--Kathleen Parker, on her father, Hal ConnorÂ
Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, author of Save the Males, was raised by a single father after her mother died when she was an infant. Twelve years ago Parker wrote a heart-wrenching column about her father's death--it is reprinted below.
Will our sons and daughters remember us so fondly?
I Have My Father's Hands
By Kathleen Parker
October, 1996
I have my father's hands.
I've always known that, of course, in the way that people always know they have their aunt's eyes or their great-grandmother's auburn hair.
Yet I'm startled to see his hands moving across the keyboard as I write. If I were not my father's daughter, I might weep. He would frown upon such self-indulgence, peering askance over the rim of his half-moon glasses, and say something to make me laugh instead.
He was not one to feel sorry for himself or to abide self-pity in others. He never wavered from that position, even as he spent the last two weeks of his life enduring the unendurable, fighting the inescapable in an intensive care unit in a hospital far from home.
My dad, J. Hal Connor, whom I unembarrassedly confess I called "Popsie," died a few days ago. He had been in the North Carolina mountains, breathing the Fall air he so loved, when things suddenly went bad. The local hospital, ill-equipped to handle his condition, sent him by ambulance to Emory University's Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta.
It turns out the heart medicine he'd been taking for years had destroyed his liver. Suffice to say, the liver is a mean master. There's no easy way out, no quick exit. So I held my father's hands those two weeks, toughing it out with him as he would have for me. He knew me when I arrived, but became confused as the days passed.
One day he thought I was his mother, another his sister. One day when the doctor asked who I was, he shrugged and said, "I have no idea; some human."
I took his hand and said, "I don't care who you say I am just so long as you pick people you like."
Toward the end, he rarely opened his eyes and seemed to be in some faraway place. Then unexpectedly, he'd give a sign he was still paying attention. Once I told my sister and stepmother we probably should leave his room for a while so he wouldn't feel compelled to entertain us. I said he was probably thinking to himself, "I wish these people would bug off." He smiled.
Not once did he complain. Not once did he voluntarily express pain or annoyance, though his face sometimes betrayed the hurt inside. As I said, there was no easy out for this man, no quick fix. I don't know that he would have had it otherwise. He was above all a fighter. (more...)
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