Opinion Talk

By Mike King

Last Thursday night, we shared what’s likely to be our last meal together in that house — that kitchen — in Jeffersonville, Ind. And we did it in typical King family fashion.

My sister brought a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken to eat with my dad at his home. I got in from Atlanta after they had finished. I had a drumstick and a few bites of cold baked beans and mashed potatoes. My brother didn’t arrive until later in the evening from his monastery 75 miles away in southern Indiana. We all had ice cream bars that my dad had stowed away in his nearly barren refrigerator.

It was always like that, it seems, in our house. We ate in shifts. Rarely did the five of us sit down together for the same meal.

My brother was off to the seminary at age 13, so we only saw him during summers. On many nights, my mother would warm up some leftovers from the school cafeteria where she worked and then head off to choir practice or some other church activity. Since my dad owned a business in the west end of Louisville, Ky., across the river, he got home in time for dinner with the rest of us once or twice a week. Some nights he’d be at an Optimist Club meeting or maybe at the Knights of Columbus.

Since my mother died nearly seven years ago, my siblings and I have known the day would come when my dad would no longer be able to stay in the house he had built for us 50 years ago. So, we gathered to help James Patrick King (Jimmy, as his older relatives always called him), 84, move decades of memories into an assisted living facility.

The frustrations, the fear of living alone and the loss of companionship had overwhelmed him. Over the last year or so — especially in the last two months — he had turned inward, afraid of becoming an invalid. At times, he was unfriendly. Anyone who knows Jimmy King knows that’s not him.

When mom got sick, it shook his world deeply. The center collapsed for him when she died, at home, after a long bout with cancer. It’s no coincidence that his worst days since then have come every February — the month they celebrated her birthday (she would have been 81) and their anniversary (61 years, had she lived).

Even now, he guards her dreams.

When I was going through the house over the weekend, I found the rosary I had as a child. “Your mother saved it for you,” he said. “I figured you didn’t have one.” (He was right.)

I also found some black-and-white pictures of us that were taken about the time we moved into the house.

That’s my sister and me in our Easter outfits; the big-finned, blue-and-white Chevrolet Bel-Air in the driveway parked in front of the “carport” of the house (which, I swear, hardly ever sheltered a car); and the big side yard where he could never get grass to grow because of the bare spots we wore in it every summer.

We were — and remain — an inordinately happy and stable family. That’s largely due to his influence — his loyalty, his fidelity, his love.

The Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, the former president of Notre Dame, once said: “The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.” For my father, paternal success was always that simple.

Now, my dad had wrung every bit of secure living he could get out of the little, three-bedroom, one-bath ranch in the prototypical 1950s American subdivision. He never really said he was proud of that house. He’s not the kind of man to put emotional value on objects.

But I know that the house sustained us in good times and bad. “Bad” meaning those times when he mortgaged and remortgaged it to keep his business afloat, and later, when my mom spent her final days there, tended by hospice nurses. “Good” meaning … well, just about every other waking moment of our lives while we dwelled in it.

I also know we are immensely proud of what he worked so hard to accomplish — of how comfortable and safe and happy we were. I am grateful for the ways in which his acts of fatherhood have stood up for me, and influenced me, over the years.

Now, my father enters a new phase of his life. The assisted living facility looks to be a great place — exactly what he needs right now. He’s a gregarious man who needs to be around people, a born entertainer, a man who expects to be the focal point when he enters a room.The elderly ladies at the center could benefit from his charm — and he their attention.

As I turned the thermostat down and locked the door, I realized it was never really about the house or about us sitting down together for dinner. It was about him and how he had always adhered to Hesburgh’s counsel. He deserves a chance to be happy and free of fear the way we were when we were children.

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