WILD ROSE, Wis. – On a spring day that held the threat of snow, Krista Szymborski fed melted ice cream and pureed peaches to her dying father, who had abandoned her and her brothers and sisters so many years ago.
A few days later her mother, Sandra, gently bathed the lifeless body of the man who back then had left her with five children to raise on a nurse's salary.
Forgiveness, they said, comes in many shapes and forms.
Richard Nary, who died of cancer April 14, just 16 months after his unlikely reunion with the family he had fled more than three decades earlier, made terrible mistakes in his life, the women agreed.
"We all forgave," said Szymborski, 39, wearing the simple beaded necklace that Nary had around his neck when he hit his low point, sleeping in a cardboard box behind a gas station near Howe Avenue and Hurley Way in Sacramento.
"That doesn't mean that we forget."
Nary, who moved to this sleepy Midwestern town early last year to live with Szymborski and her husband, Craig, died at age 69 in a room filled with family photographs, a wall decorated with greeting cards and a billfold with $113 inside.
It was far more than he felt he deserved when, nearly two years ago, a stranger rescued him from almost certain death on the streets of Sacramento.
Yet for Szymborski, who was a toddler when her dad left the family, these final months went all too fast. She was still getting to know Nary when she lost him again to illnesses that likely stemmed from his years of alcoholism, chain-smoking and homelessness.
"He was the center of my world for 16 months," she said last week, sitting with her mother in the tidy downstairs bedroom where her father spent his final days. "I don't know what to do without him."
Mother and daughter looked at each other, tears in their eyes, and Sandra Nary shook her head. How in the world had she found herself here, nursing her estranged husband to his death from cancer?
"I didn't do it for him," she said matter-of-factly. "I did it for Krista."
By the time Sandra arrived in Wild Rose in January to help care for Richard, her memories of him were remote, and mostly negative.
"I knew that Krista had been looking for him for awhile," she said. "For a long time, she thought he was dead, and that was OK by me."
But when her youngest daughter called, sobbing, asking her to leave her home in upstate New York to help care for the man who chose alcohol over family some 35 years ago, Sandra agreed.
She was a nurse, after all, "and to me he was just an old man who was very sick," she said. "As far as the past goes, you put things away when you have to, and you just don't dwell on them."
So she packed for Wisconsin, and tried to remember the good times.
A father leaves home
Sandra Nary is 67 years old, with wispy blond hair streaked with gray and legs that are stiff from arthritis and diabetes. But she can remember when she and Richard were strong enough to take long hikes, and energetic enough to jump on his motorcycle and ride at a moment's notice.Richard was charming and thin as a whippet when they met during her nursing training.
"He worked in the laundry," recalled Sandra. "They starched our uniforms."
After work one night, Richard offered to buy her a drink. She accepted, and soon they were going to state parks and fairs. They married in his parents' living room in Olean, the New York town where she still lives.
The early years were good, she recalled, although she noted that drinking was deeply ingrained in Richard's family life. "They partied quite a lot," she said, and enjoyed raucous card games.
Sandra and Richard lived with his parents for awhile before buying a trailer and then a small house. He worked nights for the railroad, while she took day hours.
They had five children: Richard Jr., Robin, Annette, Scott and Krista. But as their family expanded, the couple grew apart.
"We'd never talk; we'd fight," Sandra said. "It got so he was around less and less," drinking heavily, yelling, ignoring family responsibilities. Finally, he left.
Over the years, he called home occasionally but rarely saw the children. Sometimes he would promise to visit but never show up.
Without his financial support, Sandra relied on her parents and government assistance to raise her family. She filled their Easter baskets with butterscotch and other candies she made by hand. At Christmas, the kids shared the Barbie and Evel Knievel dolls that Sandra placed under the tree. Government cheese and powdered milk helped stretch the food budget.
All the while, Richard traveled the country as a truck driver. He enjoyed life on the road, he would say later, but drowned himself in booze after his shifts, in part because of guilt over leaving his family. "I just faded away," he said.
A daughter reaches out
Richard Nary landed in Sacramento and worked with horses for a time at Cal Expo, but hit his low point after he lost that job. For the better part of six years he lived on the city's streets, and his family lost track of him until a stranger stepped into their lives.In the summer of 2009, Todd Reiners, a regular customer at the Buca de Beppo restaurant on Howe Avenue, noticed a grizzled man in dirty clothes living in a cardboard box near the eatery. One day, Reiners offered Nary a room in his home.
Then he tracked down Szymborski, who had been searching for her father for years.
"I think I have your dad," Reiners told her on Facebook. Szymborski was shocked and elated.
"I had to know if he was alive or dead," she said. "Now that I knew he was alive, I wanted him to see my family."
Szymborski began daily phone conversations with Nary. Mostly, he talked about his new friend Reiners and the folks at Buca de Beppo. He steered clear of the past, and so did she, at first. She told him he had 16 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, and sent him pictures.
Next, they made plans to meet. Spotting him at the Sacramento airport in January 2010, she saw a shaggy and broken man. But when she looked closer, "I saw a Nary," she said.
By the time she and Craig were ready to go back to Wild Rose, a small town about an hour north of Madison, Wis., her father was ready to move with them.
Her mother and siblings were wary. "Oh boy," said Sandra Nary. "Some of my kids were upset. But Krista really wanted to do this."
Richard Nary boarded the plane with a grocery bag of belongings. He blanched at the cold Midwestern weather, and complained about the isolation of a small town.
But during the next few months he spent time with all of his children, even the two who refused to call him dad. Szymborski introduced him to her daughter, Jalissa Carter, and Carter's son, Gaje, who would bury his small face in Nary's beard and giggle.
At home, Nary spent long summer days outside by the hot tub, admiring the blue skies and listening to the robins chirp.
There were bumps. Nary resented Szymborski for limiting him to three beers a day. He frequently threatened to "get a cab" and head back to Sacramento. He smoked in the house in violation of the rules. He talked too loud in stores and told lewd jokes.
Szymborski let most of his indiscretions slide. His presence had closed a hole in her life.
"He was stubborn as hell, but we made it work," she said with a smile. "I had my dad back, and that was the most important thing."
Tender ministry
Nary had a nagging cough, sparse teeth and an unsteady gait when came to live with the Szymborskis.But he flatly refused to see a doctor until he began having "fainting spells" a few months ago. After one particularly scary incident, Szymborski called an ambulance.
"Get me the hell out of here!" Nary raged once he got to the hospital. "I want to go home!"
Doctors diagnosed him first with pneumonia, and later with cancer of the throat and esophagus.
His health deteriorated rapidly after the diagnosis, and he declined intensive treatment. He began having trouble eating, and his already thin body began to waste away.
By January, with the trees bare of leaves and the stairs to the hot tub covered in snow and ice, Nary was skin and bones and it was clear that his time was short.
Hospice workers came to the house once each week to check on him. But his care fell mostly to his youngest daughter and former wife, whom Nary came to call "Ma."
Sandra kept an eye on her former husband during the day, while Krista was working at a chiropractic center and Craig as a driver for FedEx. The Szymborskis took over at night, with Krista sleeping on a sofa near Nary's room at times to make sure he was safe.
"I have no clue how he is doing it or how he is surviving but he is," she wrote in a Facebook post one day. "The hospice nurse told me when they hold on like this, they are waiting for something or someone. That he has something more to do before he lets go."
Toward the end, when Nary no longer could navigate the steps, his family moved him from his upstairs bedroom to Jalissa's old bedroom off the kitchen. Szymborski decorated it with pictures of horses, and set his two non-working watches on the bedside table. On the floor was a single grocery bag of belongings, including a weathered A's hat and a tattered flannel shirt, that he had brought with him from Sacramento.
Every morning, she and her mother crushed his pain and seizure medications into ginger ale. They cooked his favorite foods and fed him. As he got weaker, they bathed and dressed him, cleaned up his messes and suctioned his throat when he began to choke from the tumors growing inside. They swatted imaginary bugs that he believed had invaded his room.
One day, all of Nary's children arrived in Wild Rose, and his sons carried him to the couch for a family portrait. "Am I dying or what?" Nary quipped.
"Oh, Dad," Szymborski said in the bemused manner in which she typically addressed him. "Come on."
But she knew it was true.
Letting go
As her father lay in bed one chilly spring night, Szymborski sat beside him and asked him a long list of written questions.Who was his first girlfriend? What was his favorite car? Where was the best place he ever lived?
Finally, she asked whether he had any regrets. A stolen bottle of soda? A bar fight? Harsh words to a friend?
At first Nary shook his head, No. But after a few moments, he reconsidered.
"I regret leaving you kids and never calling you," Nary said softly, every word a struggle.
"No regrets, dad," Szymborski told him. "Your family loves you."
He died with his hand on the family portrait.
"I think at that point, he finally got what he wanted," said Szymborski. "In his mind and heart all those years, he wanted his family. He just didn't know how to do it after he left us."
By the time he died, she said, all of Nary's children were able to call him Dad. The family cat, Pixie, who slept on his bed, now wanders aimlessly in and out of his room. Gaje looks for his great-grandfather during his daily visits, and points to his image in photographs.
"He may not remember much about my dad, but he recognizes his Papa and he loves him, and that makes me very happy," Szymborski said.
As of last week, Szymborski had yet to pick up Nary's ashes from the funeral home. Once she musters the courage, she said, she knows what she will do with her father's remains.
She plans to sprinkle them in three special places: upstate New York, where Nary began his family; Boston, which he called his favorite city to visit; and Sacramento, where – in Reiners – he made the best friend of his life.
She has a feeling her father would approve.
"He wouldn't have wanted a big memorial service," she said. "But he definitely wouldn't want to be kept in a box, either. My dad was a free spirit. So I am going to set him free."
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