My dad, Dick Allen passed suddenly one year ago today near his home at Paradise Valley Estates in Fairfield, CA.

During the months following the death of my mother Joyce in January 2015, dad’s health improved slowly (he caught pneumonia when mom entered the hospital for the last time), but his depression would not lift.  He had lost his partner and companion of 65 years and seemed lost, incomplete.  I stayed with him off and on during this time, encouraging him to eat, taking him shopping and out to the occasional movie. We talked about many things, subjects neither one of us had time or the inclination to discuss before.  We talked about death, his only concern that he would go quickly, no lingering hospital stay for him.  He told me, for the first time, about his experience in Vietnam.  I told him, for the first time, about my time in Vietnam.  Strangely, even though this was a shared experience separated by only 7 years, we had never told each other the stories, the kind of war hyperbole only buddies share.

Over the course of a few months, dad got to know what it was to be alone, save for his devoted dog Kami.  And while we never had even one conversation about what would happen to Kami if he were to pass on, he told me repeatedly that he didn’t know what he would do if she were to leave him.  He loved that dog dearly and fed her from his plate at the table to prove it.  He never imagined she would be the one left behind.

I was constantly after my father in the spring of 2015 to get some more exercise.  I told him about the pool in his community that had a daily exercise class for men.  More of a stretching class than anything else, only a block and a half from his house.  He of course didn’t walk to the community center, he took the Lincoln.

But not to the pool class.  Turns out my hero, fighter pilot dad doesn’t like the pool.  Didn’t say he was afraid, just didn’t like it.  Then he told me the story of the Delbert Dunker.  When he was in flight training in Pensacola, Florida, one of the training exercises included a ride on the Delbert Dunker into the pool.  This device simulated a fighter aircraft cockpit and with the student pilot strapped in would hurtle down a set of rails upside down into the pool.  The student pilot was left on his own to unstrap and make his way to the surface.  While my father became a Naval Aviator and flew a number of fighters on and off aircraft carriers, he never got over his distaste for the Delbert Dunker and of course, the pool.

One day in June as I got into his Lincoln for a weekly grocery trip, I noted a pair of swim trunks on the seat between us.  “Going for a swim?”, I wisecracked.  He sheepishly mumbled that he was thinking about it, but don’t rush me.

On June 23^rd, I got a call from the facility manager at Paradise Valley Estates.  Dad was attending his first pool exercise class that day.  On entering the pool, before even one tentative stretch, he walked immediately to the side and sat on a bench and died instantly from a massive coronary.  He was gone before they got to him. Dad got his wish as he had described it,  a lightning quick end to a beautiful life.

But dad is still here with me, right over there, big grin on his face as he patiently explains, “I told you I don’t like the pool.”  He outlived his wife Joyce by less than five months.