Since we interred my godlike father’s bonesĪnd mourned and blessed his altars. “The months are spent, the rounding year fulfilled A year later, Aeneas’ wanderings led him back to his father’s burial site, where he hosted elaborate funeral games. I’ll take you on my shoulders, no great weight.”Īs the Trojan refugees sailed the Mediterranean looking for a new homeland, Anchises died and was buried in exile. “Then come, dear father, arms around my neck: To overcome his father’s resistance, Aeneas proposed to carry him out of the burning city on his back, an image memorialized in painting and sculpture. Not to prolong his life or live in exile.” My first wish being to take him to the mountains īut with Troy gone he set his face against it, As the Greeks rampaged through Troy, Aeneas tried to evacuate his family, but his feeble father refused to leave. Only with his father Anchises did Aeneas temper duty with love. He subordinated most relationships to his duty to the state-losing contact with his first wife during the sack of Troy, spurning the love of a queen on his voyages, and brokering a politically expedient marriage in Italy. Throughout the story, Aeneas made the choices that duty required-first to Troy, then to the refugees he led from the Middle East to found a settlement that became an empire.Īeneas is not an exemplary hero. Virgil’s epic The Aeneid, written in the first century BCE, recounts the fall of Troy and the founding of Rome by Aeneas, a Trojan lord. I also reread, for the first time since college, one of the great stories about a son and his father. I spent our last hour together holding his hand on the barbershop floor.Īs I have grieved my father’s death, I have sought stories from old friends about their relationships with their fathers. The facility nurse called me rather than the paramedics. The barber eased him to the ground as he died. The following day he stopped breathing during a haircut. The next day, he paid his bills and balanced his checkbook. The evening my father came home from the hospital, I cut his pills in half to use up medications that his physicians had tapered.
#AENEID FITZGERALD ONLINE FREE#
He declined the procedure after we all agreed that he had the chance to die as physicians so often wish to die-of a sudden cardiac event at an advanced age, cognitively intact, and free of pain. His cardiologist offered him a pacemaker/defibrillator. Although I still maintained my mental grudge list, I began to appreciate all that he still did: how he supported his last wife through her dementia and death how he used his skills as an accountant to help settle her estate how he delighted in instigating political debates in his assisted living facility how, nearly blind from macular degeneration, he sat raptly two feet from the television screen to watch his college football team.Īt 95, my father was hospitalized for syncope from malignant ventricular arrhythmias. When he prefaced a new ache by saying, “You’ll be interested in this…”, I came to recognize that, like so many patients, he was offering me his symptoms as a way to build a relationship.Īs his medical decisions became more complex, I became comfortable with my hybrid role. I began to check up on him more often, although I objectified it as “making rounds”. Since he was between marriages when he needed coronary bypass surgery, I nursed him as he recuperated in my home.
I chose the physicians I most admired to care for my father, and answered his health questions when they arose. I did bring the duties I learned as a physician to my role as a physician-son. When we did talk, I deflected our conversations to neutral topics to avoid issues I could not discuss with him. Although we lived in the same city, my father and I spoke only when he initiated the call. As I learned to be a husband and father, I was guided by an example I did not wish to repeat. My parents separated weeks after I left for college, and my father eventually married five times.
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