Arnold John DiCola - In Memoriam

Dad died a week ago.

Some days it feels like it was just yesterday; others like it happened several months in the past. So much water under the bridge in so short a time and it all flows through my mind like those news clips of the flooding Saguenay River – a foaming torrent shot full of the debris of so many things that we pulled together in so short a time to say goodbye.

Sunday December 4 started early with a call from the Great War Memorial Hospital in Perth that Dad had requested an ambulance to take him to emergency admitting from his residence at the Perth Community Care Centre (PCCC), the nursing home where he had been living since April. He was struggling to catch his breath – more so than usual. “Usual” was hard enough; he was being fed oxygen at a flow rate of 6L per minute 24 hours a day.

(I learned early on that this was an extraordinarily high flow rate, but Dad’s lungs had been hopelessly frail for months. Calling for 6L / minute was easily managed while he was connected to the oxygen generator in his room, but it severely limited the time a portable supply could deliver him the flow he needed before running dry. Although it only happened a couple times, when his portable supply ran out during meals, staff had had to rush him back to his room. Unfortunately, that was all it took to make him routinely apprehensive forever after about being away from the generator in his room.)

I phoned the Perth emergency admitting department and the phone was answered by a person sitting right beside Dad’s stretcher – another much appreciated characteristic of small town Ontario. You don’t have to pass through screens of recorded messages to reach an actual person and, once you do, that actual person won’t demand everything up to a blood sample to verify your identity before giving you any personal information about a patient. The word I got was quite positive – Dad was stabilized, and likely would be in line after a couple hours’ monitoring for a return to his room at the PCCC.

Leslie and I drove to Perth to visit him that afternoon and although he seemed a little tired, his mind was sharp as a tack and his breathing seemed to us no worse than it had been for the past many weeks.

After about an hour, he was clearly getting droopy-eyed and we said good-bye, leaving him to his customary afternoon nap before supper.

We hadn’t been back in Ottawa for more than a couple hours when the phone rang again – the call identification window showed 613-267-xxxx – indicating a Perth number. This time it was the nursing director at the second floor nursing station (Dad’s room was on the second floor) who told me in devastatingly succinct sentences that Dad had suffered a catastrophic turn and would be hard-pressed to live past 11 pm. (It was already about 8:30.) She told me he was calmed – the result of morphine injections and while he would likely be unresponsive when I arrived, he would hear what anyone said to him so long as he remained alive.

Two very fast drives later – me from Ottawa and my brother, Steve, from Ingleside (just outside Cornwall) brought us together at Dad’s bedside. I got there first and leaned in close, saying so many things I had actually rehearsed during the whirling run from Ottawa. After about ten minutes, I ran a quick mental checklist to ensure I had said it all, then sat back, watching, holding his hand. His breaths were shallow, but consistently spaced.

A few minutes later, my brother arrived, with an astonishing tale of having been delayed by stopping to determine no one was inside a “fully engulfed” van that was afire at the road’s edge somewhere between Cornwall and Ottawa. (He recently retired from the RCMP, but acknowledged even his rescue training would not have helped, so fiercely was the van burning when he got to it. He left only after multiple rescue units from area police, fire and ambulance appeared just minutes after he had. Next day, the news brought no notice of any highway fatalities or victims of a van destroyed by fire. But he arrived at the PCCC with that on his mind on top of everything else.)

Steve had his own time alone with Dad and after I rejoined him, we sat and chatted quietly at his bedside, all the while never letting our eyes leave his steadily rising and falling chest.

At precisely 10:55 (remember the duty nurse told me he probably would not live past 11), the gap between one breath and the next seemed longer, then longer, then infinite... the “next” never came. I quickly stepped out in the hall and waved a hand to the nurse – a deeply compassionate woman named Margaret. She must have been waiting for some signal from me because she came immediately to Dad’s bedside and pressed a stethoscope to his chest. She asked for the oxygen machine to be stopped momentarily because even its faint but steady sound was overpowering the stethoscope’s sound channels. She confirmed a very faint heartbeat, but looked at both my brother and me and said simply, “Soon”.

Usually at this time in medical dramas on TV, a crash cart will be rushed into the room, paddles applied to a bare chest, a shout of “Clear!” and a whacking, brutal surge of electricity applied in an effort to jolt the body back to life. But in real life, when the patient has pre-signed a “Do Not Resuscitate” order and specified no heroic efforts at life maintenance when it is clear the only “life” as such that would be drawn forward would be solely machine-supplied – the room remains utterly silent. The nurse stood back a half pace or so. I have no idea what she saw that was any different from what my brother and I were seeing, but she watched Dad intently and in mere seconds she quietly spoke only the word, “There”, and Dad was gone.

She gently turned the bed angle back so he was fully horizontal (he had been partially elevated to a slightly inclined position, not quite fully sitting up) and he, heartbreakingly, looked precisely like an old man sound asleep.

My brother and I sat with him for a few minutes longer – I remember the nurse giving me a couple quiet bits of necessary administrative information – the need for a physician to officially “pronounce” before Dad’s body could be released to the local funeral director... I’m sure I replied but I will be damned if I can remember a single one of the many “next few steps” we touched on.

Steve and I went back to the house that had been our Perth family home since about 1970 and chatted long into the night. Ever since Dad had become a PCCC resident, Steve had been gradually transforming the house into a warehouse as he has slowly consolidated Mom and Dad’s “effects” (God, I hate that word!) into the few deeply sentimental pieces each of us wanted to keep, the larger number that various family members had requested – mostly his grown kids who are all gradually building their own first homes, and which we knew Mom and Dad would happily have given... and the rest to go into an eventual small town house contents sale, probably at auction.

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Arnold John DiCola was born May 21, 1930, the youngest of ten children (of whom nine survived into ripe old age; the tenth dying in infancy) and was extraordinary only in that his life was a typical documentary of so many of his generation, in other words, un-extraordinary.

He held some memories of childhood during the depression – mainly pride in how well his family was able to pull together to eat reasonably well, their modest collective income buttressed by the output of a huge family garden and a mother who knew everything that was knowable about preserving food in that decade. His high schooling coincided with the outbreak of WWII. The enlistment of no fewer than four of his siblings into the armed forces – three in the air force and one in the army nursing corps – was probably a major contributing factor to his having to leave high school to start work in order to provide one more income to help the family.

That became a lifelong regret of his, and the degree to which it would nag him was sometimes saddening – that he never got any farther in getting a “formal” education. I still remember on more than one occasion when several family members – usually after a massive dinner and lots of wine – would be in a swirling debate around the family room about some local or national or even international bit of political stupidity (a favourite topic of debate) and he would suddenly find himself grasping for the precise words he wanted to use to make his point and would blurt out, “I just wish I wasn’t so stupid!”

This was a man who himself enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1948 and went on to master most of the vital mechanical airframe and engine components of pretty much every aircraft in the inventory of the day, from Vampire to Voodoo, Dakota, “Clunk” (the CF-100 Canuck), “Widowmaker” (the CF-104 Starfighter), T-33 and Sabre.

Along the way, he became a classroom instructor and trained jet pilots how to use their survival tool of last resort – the ejector seat. (He used to shock us with his aside of how he was present one day in a hangar in Trenton when a ground mechanic working in a jet’s cockpit accidentally tripped the mechanism and died instantly when he blew himself right through the hangar roof.) I like to think his training instruction perhaps saved a few pilots’ lives along the way – hardly the education of a “stupid” man.

In the photo, Corporal Arnold DiCola (right) is receiving the Canadian Forces Decoration (CD) in 1960, which after you’ve read this post will hardly surprise you to learn is presented in recognition of completing 12 years of service, the last eight in good conduct. He is wearing the uniform of an RCAF bandsman, the traditional blue fabric set off by gold leg stripes, gold cord epaulettes on the shoulders, gold fabric belt and the crossed bugles sleeve badge. His Corporal’s insignia are also reversed on the cuff instead of the usual chevron position above the elbow.

He also developed an unbelievably thorough knowledge of just about every device required to make a car run, and a house to be heated, fed water and supplied with electricity.

This led him through three separate post Air Force careers – in home heating while working with his brother, my Uncle Frank, for DiCola Fuels in Perth; a brief stint in retail working knowledgeably among the towers of hardware at the large Canadian Tire store on No.7 Highway in Perth; eventually completing his working-for-money life as a stationary engineer in Perth’s Great War Memorial Hospital, a link he forged even more strongly when he followed it with more than 15 years working there as a dedicated volunteer.

He was my personal mechanic – and happily so – until cars became so heavily computerized that nothing was ever “fixed” any more. Most flawed parts now are simply yanked from their hot-wired mountings and replaced. I also learned countless basic Do-It-Yourself tips from him and to this day have no fear of switching on any of the myriad of power hand tools in my workshop. (Whether the end result is “good” is a frequent point of domestic discussion, but I digress.)

At Dad’s funeral, I lurched through a few words and I am pretty sure I found what I still think is his greatest legacy. The night he died, my brother and I saw several of the PCCC staff, all of whom clearly knew what was happening and were making a point of saying goodbye – ostensibly because their shift was changing but I have no doubt their goodbyes went to far deeper places than, “See you on Tuesday”. But without exception, each took a quiet moment to tell Steve and me just how wonderful a resident Dad was – a “perfect gentleman”, more often concerned about their needs than his own. He routinely made a point, for example, of telling them to drive home carefully when the weather was anything less than perfect. (Don’t I know it? I got the same message at the end of each of our weekend visits if the day was anything but dry and sunny.)

At the funeral, I spoke about how Leslie and I have many times lamented just how angry the world is becoming these days – you see it especially in the public exchanges between politicians, but also regularly on newscasts where the inevitable first response to a tragedy is speculation about the size of lawsuit to come, and on the “reality shows” that consume so much of what passes for “entertainment” on TV and which seem to feed on a constant stream of hatred, anger, rage, betrayal and just all-round bitchiness. But even more broadly in the wider world, people more often just seem to be blunter, less kind and more prone to anger in even the most innocuous of situations.

And of Dad, I concluded at his funeral as I will here by saying that for all his many jobs, if his most prominent memory in people’s minds is that he was a wonderful gentleman, well there are worse legacies.

I ended by choking out a sonnet I greatly enjoy – and which often serves as a memorial to air force service in much the way as “In Flanders Fields” does for the army. It conveys the unfettered joy expressed by a young Spitfire pilot in WWII whenever he soared among the clouds with his nimble partner. I like to think that in his final minutes, Dad’s spirit left his devastated body behind in the enshrouding warmth of his PCCC bed and carried him far aloft to precisely the same place Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee was when he wrote, “High Flight”. In fact, we are having the first line engraved on the headstone marking his and mom’s side-by-side graves in Perth’s St. John’s Parish Cemetery:

“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air. Up, up the long delirious, burning blue, I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace Where never lark, or even eagle flew – And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand and touched the face of God.”

(Source: Flightglobal Image Store)

Goodbye Dad. You were one of the smartest people I have ever known. Everything good and wonderful about you that you passed on to your sons will continue to be passed on through us to your grandchildren.