My father died in Crystal River, Florida, on April 7, 1999, from a long battle with Parkinsonism. He was just shy of 80. In his eulogy, I called him “the Cary Grant of fathers.” He was quite extraordinary – smart, handsome, successful. I adored him as most little girls love dads who remain in their lives and care for them. My father did that though he left us when I was a teenager. Nonetheless, we remained quite close most of his life, and it was me he called at Christmastime 1998. I picked up the phone and he said, Sandy, I’ve got trouble.

What he meant was he had become so disabled that he had to go into a nearby facility to die. We can call it hospice; we can call a nursing home. He knew it was the beginning of the end, and it was the only time in my life I heard panic in his voice. Throughout his life he was the competent one – driving America with an astonishing sense of direction, fearless it seemed of planes or travel or illness. He was the man dressed well for any occasion with a smile on his face. Movie star handsome early in life, my father had that savoir faire certain men enjoy from their looks and their worldliness. Dad had it in spades, as my mother used to say.

My mother told me once, “He had a certain cussedness. He just didn’t quit. He met everyone and every day of life with the same vibrancy and mettle.” She might have used the word sisu, the Finnish expression for such character. His Finnish mother would have said that too. She would have said, he’s a good boy, my Raymond.

In World War II, dad was stationed on an atoll in the South Pacific called Kwajalein where he liked to swim in the blue lagoon. Ghosts of torpedoed ships hovered in the shadows below. One day he was swimming under water when he glanced up and saw a huge creature above him, then another and another. They were giant manta rays. In a letter to our mother he drew a diagram of the moment: three mantas with wide fins and a man. It read “manta ray,” “manta ray” “manta ray,” and “little Ray! (me).” Though they scared him the first time, he soon swam with them daily without fear. He was a strong swimmer. This anecdote illustrates who he was – funny, fearless, unique.

His sister Marian said of him, “Well, Raymond was different.” He was that. Despite the fact that he was a pragmatist and businessman, he had an ironic fanciful and even mystical side to him that told stories one could believe or not. Dad loved words, it’s true, but he loved best telling stories aloud in a moving car. He loved how stories showed us what life meant.

His job involved plenty of travel, so now and then he brought me along on long trips west, hours and days covering the great flat plains, yellow corn rushing past on both sides of the blue Ford with its white wing tips. Rapt in my father’s banter, mile after mile, I would nod to tales of lost maidens and how towns like Tippecanoe found their names. Once, he said with eyes narrowed mysteriously, I was lost in a storm out there in northern Pennsylvania, Route 6, somewhere, and the car got stuck in a snow drift. I think I bumped my head. When I awoke, a man stood outside the driver’s window. He never spoke as he pulled the car out of the drift with his tractor. Weeks later I returned to thank him, but – dad’s arms swept to exaggerate the moment – there was no trace of farm or farmer could be found. Yes, my father was full of stories.

Something fey about him, my father, something beautiful: his smile cold as a spotlight, turning his head to laugh, to judge his audience, as the great flat fields of America rushed past bathed in a light so dazzling that despite the wreck of childhood during and after my parents’ divorce, these splendid moments are what I remember.

He retired in the early 80’s after his youngest daughter died of leukemia. I think it killed him. He moved back here from St. Louis and bought a sprawling white ranch house on the lakeshore near Maple Springs. All his life he missed the lake, he said, after moving away in 1959. He would say, I still hear the siren call of Chautauqua County. It was there, on the sloped lawn while mowing the grass one July day, that his left leg started to drag awkwardly, and his wife called out, Raymond, what is wrong with your leg? He looked down and saw it there, looking like a disparate part. That’s how he told it.

Other symptoms coincided for a diagnosis of Parkinsonism. Perhaps, the doctors at the Cleveland Clinic said, his brain had suffered some trauma after a childhood sledding accident in 1935 on Barrett Avenue when two of his friends were killed, and he spent months in the hospital recovering. He told me once that just before the boys shot down the hill, his best friend Bob would shout, here we go, Ray, here we go! The boys were fearless though they faced doom.

Or perhaps, doctors said, it was something else. In dad’s case, the disease seemed to freeze him up from the inside out. For years, good medications kept it at bay. I took yoga classes with him four years before he died, and what mettle he had still! This was a man who could walk or move like the old days only in a swimming pool – where the water he so loved buoyed him. In yoga class, he struggled and strained, but he kept going.

Towards the end, the man who had been so dapper and erudite sat silently most of the day in a recliner. Even a trip down the hall was a struggle. At night he sometimes awoke and cried out that he was drowning. But in the daytime, he kept going, though now he was sober faced. Like most people with debilitating illness, he found courage within. He kept going.

When he finally gave up one night in early spring, alone in that nursing home, I like to imagine he was dreaming about swimming with manta rays in the blue lagoon off Kwajalein. I like to imagine he said to himself, with sisu, here we go, Ray, here we go.