Author of Father of the Man Peter L. Colman

That was in November, 2004. Dad returned to the tiny brick apartment near Canal and Merrimack where he and Dottie had lived their last years together, a stone’s throw from my Mom’s apartment on the seventh floor of the old Carpenter Hotel. I remember the day that Dad and Dottie had to vacate their apartment on north Elm in the dead of winter, and my Mom, unaware that Dad had moved so close to her own place, had begun to receive Bob Colman’s mail in her own mailbox downstairs.

Dad lived in that same empty apartment for the next three months, continuing to survive by carrying a chemical bag attached to the side of his abdomen. The hallway from the kitchen to the back bedroom was too narrow to allow Dad to pass, and the strongest chemicals available had been unable to arrest the cancer that had begun in his colon.

It was the middle of February. The winter night in Chicago was typically clear and crisp. A bright blue blanket of fresh snow covered the frozen ground as the plane’s powerful engines routinely propelled its fragile occupants into the forgiving emptiness of a cold sable sky. When the plane reached cruising altitude, and relaxed its gray metallic wings, passengers succumbed to the soft light and quiet flow of air. I reflected upon ageless passages from a couple of my (and my father’s) favorite Psalms:

Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations…You turn men back to dust, saying, return to dust, O sons of men…He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty…If you make the Most High your dwelling –Even the Lord who is my refuge –Then no harm will befall you…




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