Dad died ten Thanksgivings ago. I miss you dad.

In 1997, dad got a heart transplant. This was after more than a couple of heart attacks and his heart was a mess. He and mom had gone down to Salt Lake to see if they could help him, but he was turned away. I don’t know all the reasons but I think it was mostly about money – how to pay for his treatment. The next place they tried was the Medical School at Seattle, which did agree to help, so that is where they went.

Going to Seattle turned out to be the perfect situation, at least as perfect as going somewhere to wait for a heart transplant could be. I was living in Seattle at the time, in the middle of grad school, so while dad lay in his oh-so-comfortable hospital bed, mom could stay with me. I lived in suburbia and had a few roommates. I gave mom my bedroom and I slept on a mattress in the living room. I know it must have been frustrating for my roommates to have an extra housemate and for me to be treating the living room as my bedroom, but they were patient enough with us. Most days, I’d drive mom down to the hospital where she would spend the day with dad and the multitude of doctors consulting and treating him while I worked on my research, trying to understand defects in silicon. At the end of each day, I’d swing by to spend some time with dad before taking mom “home.”

Dad lay in that bed for about three months. He had a catheter that went up his leg and pumped a balloon in his heart – that little balloon kept him alive for those three months. But because the catheter was critical to keeping him alive, he couldn’t bend that leg. I don’t think he got out of that bed until the day he had his surgery. We had waited quite a long time, and gone through a few scares – more than once, dad got an infection that not only threatened his life, but prevented any surgery as he had to be as close to perfectly healthy as he could be to accept a new heart. Everyone was tired, especially mom and dad. At one point the doctor said “It’s spring and the motorcycles are coming out – we’ll get a heart soon.” And they did, though it was because of a car crash, not a motorcycle…

Even after his surgery and after he was discharged, dad still had lots of doctor appointments. At the beginning, he’d have to come back up to Seattle every three months or so. So, we shifted the arrangement. Mom typically stayed home in Idaho while dad would drive up to see his doctors. He’d either crash at my place or with my aunt in Gig Harbor. I’ve probably never cooked as much as I did during dad’s visits. We’d try to have some Basque friends over that I had made through the Seattle Basque Club and make various dishes, such as leek and potato soup or dad’s specialty, tortilla.

Eventually, things got more difficult financially and dad had to spend more time in Washington. For a while, he lived halftime with me and my high school buddy Dan, spending two weeks with us and two weeks in Idaho, but eventually that had to change, partially because I finally graduated. My aunt fixed up a space over their garage and that became dad’s apartment.

As I’ve written before, dad didn’t have many hobbies so staying with me was a bit rough for him. He was alone much of the day when he wasn’t with his doctors and didn’t have much to do. I expect he watched a lot of TV, but he also spent time just sitting in the front yard. In a few months, he got to know the neighbors infinitely better than I ever did over five years! He would also go across the street and pick plums off the neighbor’s tree. I always found that weird, that they weren’t ours and we didn’t have any permission to take them, but he would just say that they were falling on the ground and rotting, so why not take them and do something with them? He was always practical like that. For him, it was a bigger “crime” to let the food go to waste than to offend the neighbor. But, the neighbors never complained, as far as I knew. And we had some excellent plums.

As a grad student, things were tight and so it was a crowded house – I got another roommate, Gontzal, to try to reduce costs. But it all worked out in the end and I got to know dad a little better. And help him out some. He had to take insulin as all of the medication he was on – he had pills to stop his body from rejecting his heart and other medicine to fight infections his body could then no longer fight on its own – messed up pretty much everything with his body, and sometimes I’d help give him his shots. The pills also contributed to dad getting gout, which was the most painful thing he ever had to deal with.

With the encouragement of my then-girlfriend (and now wife) Lisa, I got a few stories out of him. I got to know a little bit more about the life he had before I came along, both in the Basque Country and in the United States. I would put my little recorder on the table or dash in front of him and he would complain to turn it off, he didn’t want to be recorded. But, I just left it on and recorded as much as I could. I could have done more, learned more, with this golden opportunity, but as happens all-too-often, I got distracted by my own things and just life in general. But, I did learn some and that’s more than I had before.

Thanks to Lisa Van De Graaff for encouraging me to record dad and his stories when I could. Lisa took some of the photos featured on this post.