A few days before my father died, I was walking with him through the hospital corridors. He had cancer. At 76 years old, he weighed 120 pounds and stood barely 5 feet tall. He had always been a small, thin man -- shy, kind, and, as I came to realize over the years, deeply sensitive. So sensitive in fact that as a soldier fighting on the front lines in World War II, he couldn't bear the pain and killing he saw, even when the victims were German. The war destroyed him, my mother once confessed. It changed him, took an outgoing, upbeat young man and left a quiet, shattered warrior.
But one thing my father always loved was music and dance. Of course, he couldn't hum a tune and was cursed with two left feet. While my mother was the one who always knew the dance steps and had natural rhythm, my father, though at times embarrassingly clumsy, had heart. At my 30th birthday party in a big loft in lower Manhattan, it was my father who got down on his hands and knees on the dusty wooden floor and tried break dancing with some black teenagers.
Walking down the hospital corridor this particular day, he told me he was feeling surprisingly strong. I still had to guide his elbow for balance. But with a bright smile, he called out to the busy nurses, "Look at me today, I can dance!" Shaking off my arm, he proceeded to do a funny little jig. The nurses laughed. I fought back tears.
The day my father died, my best friend and I helped him stand up for the last time. He was weaker now and needed two of us to get him to his feet. With the quiet nobility of a prince, he gazed around the sparse, white room as if he were scanning a mountain range for the very last time. Then he nodded to us, and we gently laid him down on the bed. That night he died.
My mother had ordered a small gravestone (my family didn't have much money). So there wasn't room for anything other than the basic facts: name, date of birth, and death. To my surprise, however, my mother called a few days later to say, "There's space for four more words. You're the writer. Come up with something."
Four words. To be permanently engraved in stone. Four words about a man I called daddy for nearly 35 years. Four words about a three-quarters-of-a-century-old immigrant from Poland. Four words about a brave soldier named Rubin. I thought long and hard. I struggled. Then I remembered that precious day in the hospital corridor when he had entertained the nurses with his attempt to rock 'n' roll. The four words landed softly on my blank sheet of paper: "Dancing in the light." That's what's on his gravestone. In a New Jersey cemetery crowded with literally thousands of "Here Lies" epitaphs, my father's memorial, etched forever in stone, is "dancing in the light." That's what I remember most about him. That's what I hope he's still doing.
Happy Father's Day, Daddy. Dance your heart out.