My Father My Faith: A Daughter's Inspiring True Story of Medical Advocacy and Love’s Ability to Heal.

By Dana Toth Palmer

Alexander Toth was an American cartoonist, born June 25, 1928 in New York, New York. He was known for his animation designs for Hanna-Barbera, as well as a long list of work for DC Comics, Dell Comics, Golden Key Comics, Marvel Comics, Standard Comics and Warren Publishing. He was inducted into the comic book industry's Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1990.

He passed away May 27, 2006 in Burbank, California at his drawing table. He was survived by his four children and seven grandchildren. Written by his oldest daughter, this is the story of their relationship and the last year of his life. When he became ill, she came back into his life after not talking to him for a decade. He hadn't left his house for fifteen years. She became his medical advocate in a broken system, and together they made his final dream come true...to become "family."

It is a story of faith, inspiration, divine intervention and forgiveness.

His artwork, "doodles" and family photographs are integrated into this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667821665

Book preview

A DEDICATION

I would live it all again, just to be able to say that I truly knew you, and that you left this lifetime feeling loved.

TO MY DEAR FATHER

the late, great cartoonist,

Alexander Toth:

We became family, at last, because of you.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

As life presents its truth, the chapters write themselves.

CONTENTS

AN INTRODUCTION

ONE: HOLDING HOPE

TWO: A SIGN

THREE: MY STORY

FOUR: OUR RELATIONSHIP

FIVE: AN IMPROMPTU VISIT

SIX: THE CONVERSATION

SEVEN: A DIVINE INTERVENTION

EIGHT: PRIMUM NON-NOCERE

NINE: UNLIVED DREAMS

TEN: A HOTEL CALLED HOME

ELEVEN: AN OFFER

TWELVE: AN OUTING

THIRTEEN: MIND, BODY & SPIRIT

FOURTEEN: A QUESTION

FIFTEEN: MY FATHER, MY LIFE

SIXTEEN: A CRY FOR HELP

SEVENTEEN: A DATE WITH A DR.

EIGHTEEN: LAST CALL

NINETEEN: TO SEA OR NOT

TWENTY: A FINAL CHAPTER

AN INTRODUCTION

Starry Starry Morning

The day i started to write this book, I woke to a dark sky. It was the morning of my 49th birthday. There was only one star remaining and it was oddly bright. It seemed to dance around the abyss, calling my attention to it, and making it impossible to ignore. Its intensity mesmerized me. I could not take my eyes from it. I felt deeply that it was a connection to my father, almost as if he were trying to tell me something.

He’d passed away only months before, and I’d continued to be aware of his presence in my life. It was unsettling. It almost felt as if he hadn’t yet given into leaving this layer of life for the next. I cried as I watched that star, because it brought something into my consciousness that I’d avoided, which was my regret for all that I was not able to save him from. Despite my awareness, advocacy, and intervening, my father died too young. His body had grown tired and it took a toll. Wayne Dyer once said, Don’t die with your music still in you. And in many ways, my father had.

Still watching that star, I thought about my father’s own remorse. He had allowed it to consume the joy in his life for such a long time. I knew he would never want me to do the same. So at that moment, through many tears, I finally released myself from the burden of what I could not change. My streaming of tears led to a final goodbye, and the star disappeared. I never felt his presence again in that same way. Suddenly, on that dark birthday morning, it seemed as if we were both finally at peace.

What remained in my heart was a thought generated from a line in Shakespeare: When he shall die, cut him out into stars to put up into the sky, so that the world will fall in love with night.

SOLITUDE AND ISOLATION

For most of my father’s life, and all of mine, the focus was always on his work, his gift—his genius. You would imagine that it would have created a magnified and intense satisfaction for him to consistently be acknowledged and admired in this way. But having so many people admire you based on your work does not translate into the same love or belonging as sharing your life with even just one person.

I once heard a famous singer share how lonely she felt after her concerts. Because of the positive energy exchanged during her performances, she left the stage with a feeling of being loved. But by the time she returned to her quiet hotel room, she felt a sense of aloneness once again. I now see that as my father’s experience as well. I believe that with creative genius often comes the need to be in isolation—to have solitude and space—to go inside the mind with all its ideas and workings. But when you come off the stage or out of your studio, if there is no one in the other room to share your life with—it changes everything.

One of my favorite movies is Into the Wild, the true story of Christopher McCandless. After graduating college, he camped alone in an old, abandoned school bus out on a remote Alaskan trail. One of his initial journal entries talks about joy, and how we are wrong if we think it is only found in human relationships, because God has placed it all around us, specifically in nature. However, at the end of his journey, and his life, in one of his final journal entries he concludes: Happiness is only real when shared.

I read a heartfelt letter that my father wrote to my mother when he was forty years old. They were separated at the time, and I was just ten. He spoke gently and kindly. I did not remember ever being shown this letter before, nor did I feel I knew the man who wrote it. My father thanked my mother for a letter she’d written to him, but shared that he was confused. He went on to say that each time they separated, she would get better, stronger, and find herself, but that he did not do the same. He talked about how much he loved my siblings and me, and that financially supporting us was his only inspiration at that time. He wanted to feel more connected to his work, but did not. He’d grown tired and uninspired...perhaps, he said, because he had to start working at such a young age. There were other letters that followed, where he’d talked about visits with us, and having to leave because he didn’t feel connected or a part of us—there was a sadness in him.

Somewhere inside, my father knew early on that his talent, paired with his integrity, could and would produce work at an uncompromising level. As he got older, he continued to create revered bodies of work, including his opus, Bravo for Adventure. But the periods during which he wrote those letters to my mother were the times in his life when being alone, without the light of our family, created a sadness that shadowed all else.

The last year that my father and I spent together, and all that occurred, brought the love he yearned for back into his life. In this way, he was finally granted his heart’s biggest wish. That love, connected with the spirit he possessed, brought him to a place of truly wanting to live, when just weeks before he’d resigned himself to dying. And in the end, when it was his time, he left this world with the feeling of being seen, being known, and most importantly, loving and being loved.

My relationship with my father was not one that anybody would have admired from the outside. But we finally became close in the last year of his life, and that experience was well worth whatever I went through. Whether or not it was worth some of what my father went through, I cannot know. I will save that for a conversation in Heaven.

What my father endured in the medical system was a gross neglect that caught my siblings and me off guard and ill-prepared. Because of the repeated errors made in his medical care, in the end, his struggling body was put through more than his determined spirit could overcome. While I continue to reframe this piece of our experience together, I declare it as one of the heaviest stones I still work to lift from my heart.

I empathize with the dedicated doctors who function within our medical system, experiencing and having to work with its inadequacies. And I respect the strong, knowledgeable nurses who love what they do; you can recognize them within the first five minutes after they’ve entered a room.

This is our story. It’s a story about a father and a daughter. It’s a story about letting go. It’s a story about medical advocacy in a broken system. It’s a story about the difference between solitude and isolation. And ultimately, it’s a story about faith, the power of love and forgiveness, and their ability to overcome all odds, diagnoses, statistics, and fear.

The miracles that happen even in the midst of challenges are the silver linings. They are always there to be seen if we choose. Opening ourselves up to them sheds light on every obstacle and hardship, and offers a gift that could otherwise be missed. Being present and willing to advocate for a loved one has the potential to change both lives. It certainly did my father’s and mine.

ONE: HOLDING HOPE

You can hold someone’s hope for a moment, until they are ready for you to pass it back to them.

I am of the belief that every interaction and relationship is fate-filled. No matter how brief, it was presented to teach us something. To embrace that, means viewing the people in our lives and those that cross our paths as potentially bringing us a lesson, an opportunity, or both.

Throughout my lifetime, my failed relationships with men echoed my greatest fear: that I would end up alone just like my father. My partners often chose those exact final parting words for me as they walked out the door. I would stumble most of my life with little clarity about how and why I was like my father, blinded by my intense effort not to repeat the same mistakes. What I would come to realize, however, is that some of his lessons were also mine, as was the opportunity to heal and learn from them.

I have come to see my father not as the paper trail of his failed relationships, but rather as his heart’s deepest desire to lean into love. His struggle with how to do that caused him great pain and loss. He used to say that he wanted to be in love one last time, but wouldn’t do that to anyone. He and I made light of his comment each time he said it, but both of us also knew there was some truth to it.

God presented us both with an opportunity to finally know one another—to apologize, accept, and forgive. While it brought my father what he craved, it also brought me something I never expected: to know and love him from a deeper place. I believe with all of who I am that this never would have happened any other way than as it did. It was as if God knew that this genius of a man was going to leave the earth too soon, and He presented us with our chance. Life would be invited to come full circle, and we would embrace it together.

After a decade of not speaking to one another, and after my father hadn’t left his house for fifteen years, I re-entered his life to care for him. And he allowed it.

I believe that you can hold someone’s hope for a moment until they are ready for you to pass it back to them. Sometimes we all lose sight of the light at the end of our tunnel. It is not because we are lazy, but we simply cannot see through our pain. We are tired. If someone loves us enough to hold hope for us while we walk through our darkness, then even the tiniest glimmer of light can restore us with enough strength for the rest of our journey.

My father used to sing his favorite song, Nature Boy, lyrics by eden ahbez (recorded by Nat King Cole), in his mellow, soothing tone. I never realized it at the time, but now find it ironic that the closing lyrics are the following:

The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love, and be loved in return.

(As a footnote, eden ahbez insisted his name never be capitalized. He was quoted as saying: Only God, Infinity and Love were worthy of being capitalized. I find that a beautiful and interesting perspective, and one that reminds me that in this grand universe I am small.)

BOTH SIDES OF A COIN

Some who knew my father experienced a side of him that was kind and gregarious, but he also had a reputation for his harsh words. He had an unspoken standard by which he measured those around him. If you missed the mark, you risked being pushed out of his life in an instant; there was no negotiation and no conversation. To be at the other end of that interaction could be painful and crushing. Both polarized sides existed and made closeness with him something difficult to trust.

My father had soft spots for certain people, and he could be gracious while critiquing another artist’s work. But he could be cruel as well. His honesty came without hesitation, and while it’s one of the things everyone respected about him, it had the power to cut you to your core. As much as my father often behaved this way due to his own vulnerability, he also triggered a sense of vulnerability in the rest of us. Some of us who felt unfairly attacked were unable to have him in our lives. And yet others found a way to navigate his challenging qualities out of respect for his enormous talent.

Even though my father experienced great success in his career, I believe that no matter what we achieve, or how many admiring people surround us, if we have unexpressed dreams and desires, we will feel alone.

Dreams and desires come in many forms. In a podcast, I heard the famous Life Coach, Tony Robbins once speak about the blueprint of our lives (the idea we have of the way our life ideally would look), compared to the life we are actually living. He suggested that if there is a significant gap between the two, we will experience pain. He then suggests that we either adjust the blueprint, or life itself—more typically a little of both. During a discussion on this topic, my mentor went further to point out that the space that lives in the gap between those two things can be experienced and defined as loss. In reality, there are some things we may never get a second chance at. The older we get, the fewer opportunities there can be to remake or rework our lives to fulfill our dreams. For my father, while his career brought him a level of success that he probably never dared to hope for, the gap he grieved was a lost vision for family. It seemed to me to be the greatest loss of all for him, and at some point, it shadowed everything else.

Our past experiences and our childhood can leave us with or without certain tools. In my father’s case, what he desired most seemed to be the one thing he had no idea how to create.

TWO: A SIGN

On Father’s Day, June 21, 2020, fate intervened.

I’d imagined completing this manuscript many times throughout the years. Driving through the countryside, waiting for a plane, walking down a supermarket aisle. The emotion would surge, followed by words that came to my mind without hesitation, lining up in a subtly different way each time. They wound like poems around their topic, in forms that varied with my mood. But the sadness that was stored in a million tiny boxes in my heart competed with my desire to finish telling our story. And those two things would be at odds until Father’s Day, 2020.

Ironically, only after my father’s passing, did I ever see a Father’s Day card that seemed a fit for us. All those years I stood in front of the greeting cards, visually scanning through them, and feeling as if no one else had a father like mine. I often created homemade cards for my father, but still never knew how to tap into something heartfelt that was also honest. There was a hole in my young heart, and also in his. The simple and superficial things I knew about him made me feel lonely. He liked mints, cameras, trains, planes, and automobiles. The front of the ready-made cards depicted leather chairs, pipes, fishing rods, golf clubs, and hand-holding. None of them showed a drawing table, a cigarette, a cup of coffee, and a balloon caption talking about comic books and animation. And more importantly, most of the sentiments weren’t anything I’d remembered experiencing with him until the last year we spent together. Then a world of greeting cards opened up to me. But it was too late.

For such a long while, my father and I missed out on the kind of relationship each of us wanted, because neither of us knew how to get there. When I was six, that wasn’t my job, but I ebbed and flowed in our relationship even as an adult, self-protecting against the side of him that I didn’t understand and that hurt me. As children, we are only focused on our unmet needs. As adults, we have the freedom to meet our own needs, allowing us to embrace the way someone is able to love us. In the last year of my father’s life, I went from relating to my father with the expectations of a frustrated child, to being able to see and accept his love as an adult. I believe that because of the fragile place he was in at the end of his life, we both opened our hearts to the humility it took to love one another in a new way.

I paused the writing of this book twelve years ago because it was too difficult to relive parts of our story. I experienced six months of feeling profoundly numb after losing my father. Ironically, my fiancé and I ended our relationship years later on the anniversary of his passing. (No doubt a therapist would have something to say about that.) The losses in my life were strung together too close to process individually, therefore triggering one another for years.

When I started to write about my father in the year following his passing, I submitted the first chapter of our story to a literary agent on Fifth Avenue in New York. I believe that besides considering the genres he worked with, I selected that particular agent, because it was like some version of a Woody Allen movie in my mind. I was living in Michigan, and my desk faced a small lake that froze over in winter. I pictured myself drinking coffee in the morning and wine at night, while writing all day at that window. Finding an agent interested in my work at that address created a picture that I could lean into and gain confidence from. I intuitively suspected it wasn’t yet time, but if I garnered enough energy from outside myself, perhaps it would propel me forward. The agent responded with a personal note saying that it was an interesting story, and that I had a curious writing style. (I’m still not sure if that was a compliment of sorts, but it makes me laugh to think of.) His final comment to me was that I needed to develop more of the story about my childhood with my father and then resubmit. When I read that, I knew that I could not