His life’s work was caring for the people he loved.
Yesterday afternoon, my dad, Erik Dybkaer Andersen, lay sleeping at home in his hospice bed when a calm settled over his body and he drew his last breath. He was 78. For more than a year, we had known that cancer would take him; only the hour was uncertain. But it is still a shock to find him missing from his bedroom, from his family, from the world. It is too early to measure, much less put into writing, all that he meant to us. For now, I want only to read his life into the record, and to get across his essence, above all as a caretaker of those he loved.
My dad’s mother became pregnant with him in Copenhagen, shortly before Allied forces drove the Nazis from that city. He adored her all his life and would want me to note here that during the occupation she carried papers for the Danish underground in his big brother’s stroller. He didn’t talk much about his early years, save for a few unhappy memories. He said that he and his brother accidentally set fire to the family apartment and that his father had once thrown his mother down the stairs. Eventually, she had enough of the abuse, and enough of Denmark. She boarded a ship bound for Canada with her new husband and my dad, who was 10. His brother stayed behind.
They resettled in Ontario, near Lake Superior. The winters were cold. My dad was lonely. The school principal put him in a kindergarten class to learn English. Already tall—he eventually grew to 6 foot 4—he was ashamed of the way that he towered over classmates half his age. Later in life, this same shame would flicker into his voice whenever he recited his self-deprecating riff about never having been much of a student.
He found other ways to adapt. He took up a paper route and made the town cinema his last stop. He’d hop off his bike, walk the day’s news upstairs to the projector room, and on his way back down slip secretly into a matinee. I love to picture him there, awash in the images and the language that he was so desperate to learn.
After he turned 18, he and his folks left Canada forever. Another family of Danish immigrants had made good in California and encouraged them to follow. My dad loved America, immediately and without reservation, especially its music. Merely saying the word Motown made him dance. But he struggled to find a job. Not wanting to be a burden, he enlisted in the Army. Because he still spoke enough German to be useful along Europe’s Cold War border, he was able to avoid Vietnam.
He worked as a mechanic on the helicopter fields outside Frankfurt and fell for a local girl named Helga. Whatever their later troubles, he always remembered the bliss of hearing “My Girl,” by the Temptations, with her, in a Berlin bar. They got married, and after his last tour of duty, he brought her home. The move crushed her spirit. The America that my dad so loved made her feel isolated. They drifted apart and eventually divorced, and good thing, because shortly thereafter, my dad met my mom, Nancy.
My parents never fell out of love. They married in a Las Vegas chapel in 1979, and had two sons, first me, and then Kurt, seven years later. My dad’s personality was by then fully formed. He had adopted the openness of a native Californian. He loved to throw parties. From my childhood bedroom, I could hear his huge laugh explode over the record player and background chatter. He would talk to anyone. In restaurants, I would blush when he invited himself to join strangers’ conversations at neighboring tables by making unsolicited jokes about whatever they were discussing. It betrayed, I thought, a too-naked desire for an audience. (Says the writer.) The women who loved him knew better. They understood it as one of the most beautiful things about him.
When I was young, my dad began working for himself as a house painter. In the early years, he did it alone. He would come home in his whites, still damp with sweat, and scrub himself in the garage with orange pumice soap for what seemed like an eternity. When at last he came inside and collapsed into a chair, sore and spent, his thick, sun-damaged forearms would still be flecked with paint.
He and my mom experienced joy in those years, but they also began to dream of a time when life might soften. It was not to be. Just as the blurry stage of diapers and sleep deprivation drew to a close, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The very same week, a different doctor sat my parents down and delivered more unwelcome news: My 2-year-old brother had type 1 diabetes. Then, just as my mom was beginning treatment, her own mother developed Alzheimer’s. My dad stepped in and moved her into a special residence. When she wandered outside with her underwear over her clothes, he was the one the staff would call.
For a long time, everyone in my dad’s life needed him, all at once and in full. Only a few years earlier, lung cancer had claimed his mother, with whom he had shared an extraordinary closeness and ease of being together. (He would always retreat into himself when reminiscing about their standing after-work coffee date.) I often wonder if losing her prepared him for what was to come.
He saw my mom through a brutal four-year ordeal with cancer. Its ups and downs echoed, cruelly, through the rest of his life: the body horror of chemotherapy; the relief of remission; the first inkling that the disease had returned, this time in a more vicious form; the introduction of lymph node into one’s vocabulary. He remembered them crying together in the car on the way home from disappointing test results. And yet, I do not recall him ever registering a single complaint at the time, at least not one that he would allow his kids to hear.
In his widowhood, my dad refused to become a tragic figure. He sensed a craving—in us and in himself—for normalcy, and chose forward momentum: He met a woman named Glenna who restored warmth and balance to our family, and married her in our backyard. Their honeymoon in Hawaii began a decade of relative peace. Through it, he kept working hard. He had by then hired a small crew, but even into his 60s, he would still spend long days on a ladder holding a roller at an awkward angle over his head.
My dad could be critical. If he were giving me notes now, he would be scandalized that I have gone on so long without mentioning his love for golf. He took pride in being a natural at the game, despite having picked it up only in middle age. He and Glenna retired to Southern Utah, in part because greens fees were cheaper. Before his diagnosis 14 months ago, he would rarely go more than two days without rising at dawn, packing a sleeve of cold beers into his bag, and setting out for the course.
On average, golfers require 24 years of steady play to stroke a single hole in one. He racked up six, and celebrated by tattooing a running tally on his arm. He would return to the parlor each time to have it updated. He also got a vanity plate: 6HOLSN1. A few months ago, when he felt his strength slipping away, he sold his car—a distressing moment for a man who prized physical competence and always insisted on driving. He consoled himself by keeping the plate. It remained visible at his bedside to his last days.
No one who ever played any kind of game with my dad would be surprised that he’d kept this trophy close. He was relentlessly competitive. After the Army, he went door to door for the electric company in Long Beach, reading meters and dodging rottweilers, and at night, in the local dives, he became something of a pool shark. When I was a kid, he mounted a basketball hoop over our driveway and put a Ping-Pong table in the garage. No matter the game and no matter your age, he wanted to beat you with every atom of his being. Usually, he would. If, in his final weeks, my brother and I had wheeled him outside, against doctor’s orders, for a few farewell games of bocce—perhaps as an underhanded ploy to make our lifetime win-loss records against him more respectable—I wouldn’t have bet against him.
As he grew older, my dad became enchanted with the red-rock vistas of Southern Utah. He had always sought out long horizons. He saw the world from a high perch, after all, and he had exceptional vision. He was the first to spot wildlife in thick brush or pick a golf ball out of a white sky. I visited him and Glenna only a few months after their move and learned that they’d already taken four-hour drives in every cardinal direction, and every ordinal direction, too. It was as though he couldn’t feel at home in that landscape until he could hold a map of its canyons and ranches in mind.
His time with Glenna in the desert was unjustly brief. After only a few years, she, too, fell ill with cancer, and my dad was once again called to become a caretaker. When her appetite waned some years later, he cooked endless variations of her favorite dishes, hoping that one might stir in her a memory of the goodness of food. Her death broke his heart anew, and we all lived too far away to be much help in its repair. He lost himself in golf for a while, before drawing close to Donna, with whom he shared his last years. In the end, she became a caretaker to him, but before all that, they just had fun together, gambling and going to the movies. This time, he understood all of the words.
My dad was blunt, and it sometimes cost him in his relationships. To really know him was to understand that there was a corresponding bluntness to his love. As his cancer progressed, we tried to converge on Utah as a family as often as possible. We compressed a decade’s worth of visits into a year. Not since childhood had we all shared so many long, boring hours together, but also so many meaningful conversations. My dad left nothing unsaid, which is itself a kind of caretaking.
He kept telling my brother and me how much he loved us, and how proud he was of who we’d become. We are even more proud of him. He was a giant of a father, in his physical person, and in every other way that he could be. Lesser men would have collapsed under what he endured. Amid profound grief, he summoned the strength to hold open a tunnel to the future for us. We walked through it, and now his four grandchildren have too. His work is done. I just wish that we had more time.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Rami G Khouri
Mort Laitner
Donald Low
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
Michael Kwet
visit website
