On Monday I spent several hours at my dad's deathbed visiting with his youngest grandson. I had encouraged the children--well he's a 21-year-old man now, but they are still the kids of the family to me--to come and see their dying grandfather, and Kevin took me up on it, sitting with me beside an old man in the waning days of his life.

Dad was largely incapable of communicating with us. His cheeks had become sharply defined by the bones beneath, his skin the yellow pallor of the dying. His hands were clutched up near his throat, though occasionally they would move slowly about as if searching for something. As I spoke with Kevin, I periodically held dad's hand and stroked his cheek and forehead, soothingly assuring him that he was safe, that it was ok to let go, that he was surrounded by love.

Several times Kevin glanced up from dad, who was constantly coughing with a grim rattle in his chest that hospice nurses had assured me was a normal part of the dying process. The action of coughing seemed to totally deplete him. "This is hard," Kevin said. "Yes," I replied, "it is."

How lovely it was to spend that time with my dad and my nephew, whose own father, my brother Barney, had died when Kevin was very young. I spoke of family history to him, talking of the events that had occurred so long ago, of pains and resentments long burned off and buried. I spoke to him of healing, of love and forgiveness, of his dead father, of his dead grandmother who had loved him so much, had loved all her grandchildren and children, as had my dad.

I found myself awash with admiration for the dying man in the bed, looking back over a life spent serving his country overseas in World War II and then serving his family, working in the aerospace industry for decades, climbing into his car at 6 a.m. to make the long drive from Pomona into Santa Monica so that his children could have what they needed and then some.

His own parents had traveled from Lithuania, escaping the tyranny of the Russians, to seek freedom in a foreign land. My mind boggles at the courage this took, my young grandmother, alone, traveling first to Chicago and then to Youngstown, Ohio, where she met another immigrant and they married and raised a family of three sons in the new country.

According to dad, my grandfather Peter Yorkunas was a socialist in the true sense of the word. Pop told me he would often say, "When the sun comes up in the morning, Brunuslav, it comes up for everyone." But in Lithuania, he was not free. He had been forcibly conscripted into the Czarina's army, selected because he was a strapping tall handsome man. He was made to ride about on a white horse, harassing Lithuanians trying to keep their ethnicity. According to family lore, one day he trampled through a cabbage patch that belonged to my grandmother, his future wife whom he would not meet until he traveled to the United States.

She, in her own defiance of the authorities, was secretly teaching the forbidden Lithuanian language to children in her home, everyone desperately hiding their readers under knitting when the soldiers would ride through to check on them. Her uncle, Jonas Basanavicius, is known as the father of LIthuania for his own revolutionary activities under Russian occupation.

I never knew my grandparents, but I do think often of their strength and sacrifices, of their dreams for their children and grandchildren. How surprised would they have been to know that the first doctor in their son's family would be a woman? Could they ever have imagined the possibilities for a girl child not even born yet that opened up as they made their way across the ocean, through Ellis Island, and over land to the midwest?

I like to think that they would be proud of me. I know my father was. He told me so.

Sometimes I wonder where I get my fighting spirit from. Why don't I just go along with the program like I am supposed to? Why do I speak out against things that seem unfair to me even though it brings such hatred raining down on my head? Why do I refuse to know my place? As I watched my father fighting for life on Monday, struggling to speak, smiling faintly when his grandson and I would throw back our heads and laugh at some delightfully ludicrous irony of life, I glimpsed the source of at least some of that resolve.

"It's ok, dad," I was saying to him as he struggled to cough. "You are being taken care of. You have everything you need. We have lots of people to help us. It's ok to need help."

Upon hearing this last statement, his mouth slowly moved.

"Bullshit."

I could barely hear the word; he could barely speak. It came out as a nearly-silent croak.

"Did you say 'bullshit'?," I asked him, delighted. He nodded.

A man with near complete organ failure, lying helplessly as a baby, unable to walk or see or even swallow, defiantly asserting his independence, refusing to go gentle into that good night. What a stubborn bastard. How full my heart was at that moment, full of admiration for him, full of wonder that we are so alike, that the iron will continues, generation after generation.

Ultimately dad did go gentle. He died in his sleep Wednesday morning at 4 a.m., alone and proud, like the butt-kicker Sergeant Yorkunas that he always was—a “larger-than-life” figure as my cousin David described him to me. He didn’t need his hand held, didn’t want his daughter there to see the last wisps of life escape from his once-imposing form. Instead his final words to me as I left Monday afternoon were “what’s your schedule?” as if everything were perfectly normal. I could barely hear what he said, comprehended him only because he’d said it to me every single time that I had walked out of his house for the last 6 years since I’d returned from Texas and begun the joyous task of taking care of him.

I replied just as I had for all those years, knowing that the answer brought him enormous pleasure and pride. “Well tomorrow I go to USC where I teach, dad, and then I will come back and see you.” He loved that I was a teacher and writer, always asked how it was going so that he could hear me say that I love my job and my students love me and that everything was wonderful. It made him beam.

I hope it brought him pleasure that last time, for I never saw him again.

When I awoke Wednesday morning, I knew. Voices told me loud and clear that he was gone and that it was o.k. I felt a feeling of total and utter peace that has not left me since. When I got up and encountered my husband in the bathroom, the look on his face only confirmed what had already been transmitted to me, somehow, someway, that I will never ever be able to explain. “We got a call,” he said simply. “I know,” I replied. “Dad’s dead.”

So when you think of our veterans this Memorial Day, please include in your prayers of gratitude my dad, Bernard Henry York, born Yorkunas, in Youngstown Ohio in 1925. He was a good man, an ethical man, a disciplined man, a proud American. As I looked through his Honorable Discharge papers yesterday, preparing to take them to the funeral home so that they could order a flag for his grave, a tiny picture fell out. It was my pop, impossibly young and handsome, laughing as he posed in his uniform, going off to fight a war in a land far from home because it was the right thing to do.

Thank you, daddy. For everything. And goodbye.