Tag Archives: Sanford Thompson

Hi friends: Had the personal grief and cosmic honor of being present and holding my dad’s hand as, after a six-year journey with prostate cancer, he died at home.

I’m feeling, still, the terrible intimacy of final illness and death— a second infancy out of which, if we’re lucky, we can be midwifed by our loved ones and caregivers.

My dad was my first teacher, someone who was thrilled to learn anything new about the world. One of my first memories is of him passing me his tinted sunglasses on a drive so I could really appreciate the mountainous pileup of the cumulus clouds out the window; in the last month of his life, he couldn’t wait to ask my brother what he’d learned in lab about how a mess spectrometer works. He loved being a parent; he also believed that learning is moral work. He largely turned away from the privileges his Ivy League diploma offered him to instead provide legal aid and safe spaces to GI’s seeking conscientous-objector status; to work for free clinics; to organize medical supplies for victims of our Latin American guerrilla wars; to do mental health work with poor and struggling kids; and to devote thousands of hours to supporting community media. And he took notes on every damn book he read after turning 25, so if– as he urged me ever since I committed myself to liberatory politics– I ever read Marx’s Capital (“especially chapters 24 and 25”) and Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, I’ll have his voice as my teacher.

I’m feeling so much love and gratitude for Kathy, his companion and wife for his last decade and more, who was devoted, imaginative, and tender as a caregiver in the months of 24-7 labor needed as my dad became less and less able. Love too for Charlotte, the caregiver and CNA who was here to give him his last bath and diaper change and sponge of water, and who called us over, as his breathing slowed and thickened, to hold his hands and tell him it was OK, tell him he could go.

After eighteen months and seven days, I’m again mourning a parent, feeling like an adult, feeling like there’s nothing now between myself and the sky.

(My dad’s obituary ran in his hometown paper on November 26; here it is.)

Photos: My dad in his last week; my dad with scowling newborn me; my dad politely enduring the 1940s.