I'm back
Your mom shared pictures of your kids - they are growing up so fast, and little V especially looks more and more like you every day, dark-eyed to your blue, true, but the same high intelligent forehead, the same strong rectangular chin.
I’m back for the same reason I was gone - dad died. He was just turned 87. It was not unexpected and it was sudden and it was terrible for everyone especially for mom who was alone with him when it happened. In her traumatized state she tried to clean up the bloodstains after the EMTs and the police and the people from the funeral home cleared out, leaving the neighbor and her sister and brother-in law. I threw away the sheets, she told me when I arrived less than 48 hours later.
Okay, I tell her.
I didn’t want to have to be trying to clean them forever, she said, her voice trailing away. I hug her and tell her it’s good she threw them away. She nods more to herself. than at me. How my heart aches. She is so small, you wouldn’t believe it. But still going to the gym two times a week. It’s been more than a month since dad passed and she decided to start going again. How sad it will be, all those nice people asking her, where is Duane? and mom having to tell them over and over again.
She was so strong at the service, so tiny and resolute standing there greeting all the people who came, and there were a lot, more than a hundred, filling the room and an overflow room even though it was a holiday week and a Monday. They came from every walk of dad’s life, from a playmate in the kindergarten sandbox hunched way way over her cane and a bit hard of hearing but otherwise spry, to the draftsman who worked side by side with him in one of his first jobs, to his business partner, his nephews and niece who sent an enormous flower arrangement. I saw all the couples that once sat with my parents at backyard barbecues and camping outings, friends from the parish now in their eighties. Wasn’t that softball team they played on called Oldtimers? I asked Mrs. D. She patted my arm; her husband P. died more than a decade ago, shortly after mom and dad had moved to the next town over. They stopped getting together every New Year’s Eve after that. We didn’t know what being old was, Mrs. D. laughed. We’re ancient now! Tell your mom to call me, I’m still at the same number. So many people in the room were still at the same number from my childhood; some of them in the same houses they grew up in with families of their own now, much like the people at your service, many of them friends our same age.
I want you to know that the last time he spoke of you, dad said We thought very highly of C, he was a very fine man. It’s hard to believe you are both gone, plus your dad and both of our grandmothers. So many faces missing from the famous annual Christmas family photo taken on Grandma’s long living room “divan”, which of course is also gone - last I saw it, it was sitting silent sentry in the old farmhouse. When my h and I went there to load up furniture, we slept in a tent inside to protect from dust and insects….I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, doing my business at the edge of the cornfield under a bright full moon. Going back inside, I braced myself - if there were ever going to be ghosts in my life, I figured, it would be then - I half expected to see grandma and your dad (I didn’t dare hope for you) sitting on the divan, next to the tent we pitched, but it was only occupied by moonlight and I went to sleep, able to admit to myself I was disappointed in the lack of ghosts.
I can’t see pictures of dad without feeling tearful. He was always cold in the last year, something about his illness but also maybe just the weight loss, he had no fat on him anymore. He wore this every single day, mom said, holding out a jacket I bought for him in 2000 when we first moved to San Francisco - a fleece with the Golden Gate bridge embroidered on it. I thought maybe you’d like it, mom said, and I knew what she was also saying is, it’s too sad for me to see this sweater without your dad in it, please take it. It’s in my suitcase now, it’s been too hot to wear it. My husband at mom’s invitation took some of dad’s tools and in less than 48 hours was using them to fix a plumbing emergency that would have left a houseful of people showerless and toiletless for a whole weekend.
So the jacket of yours I gave up for your son has come back to me. Your mom has already told little V it is waiting for him. Your mom is going to cry and cry, because V looks like he is going to be tall and you-shaped and is going to look cool in it, as you did. How I loved wearing your borrowed cool.
No one ever talks to you about how utterly humbling death is. It’s largely a matter of luck, the ending you get quite often isn’t an ending you’d choose. Though dad came close - he passed at home after a gentle decline that was just turning into a rapid decline though every day still had the same number of caregiver minutes for mom which is to say all of them.
I was in Alaska when I got the news. We were off the grid, our cellular carrier did not reach out to our encampment at mile 20 off Richardson highway - we drove into Valdez every other day to check email and work on wifi at a local cafe. The day after mom’s birthday we drove in and my phone immediately blew up with messages when we came in range of the cell tower within the Valdez city limits. The day was gray and overcast. a light rain falling on and off, the clouds fallen to earth and scudding along the bay, obscuring the boats. Bing bing bing went my phone, meaning someone on Signal had messaged me, the notification was the same thing I heard the morning you died, D. messaging me on Signal, the sound of the notification ejecting me out of sleep and before I even look to see who the message is from I am crying, waking up my h. to say, He’s gone, he died, he’s not in the world anymore.
The first thing I saw was my sister’s message Daddy fell and I said Oh boy and my husband said what? what happened? but by then I had read the next message in which my sister calls me by a childhood nickname that no one else uses and it says Daddy passed away, he died this morning. I read it again, and again. I have read it fifty, a hundred times a day since then. There was, is, no getting away from the truth of it. There would be no taking this back, no second last chance to see him again, I who had a visit planned for July 9 just two weeks hence will never see my father again.
My sister had it worse, our brother called her and in that way of his told her, like an alarm going off in her heart: Dad fell, he’s dead.
I called my sister right away and we cried together for a good long while. If you could have seen him at the end, so child-like. It was heartbreaking to see his anxiety and sadness - he knew something was happening to him but was no longer sure what - but when I last saw him he was still essentially himself, telling stories and teasing me. He was even driving, just nine months ago he was fine behind the wheel, competently driving to get the windshield replaced.
You’ve been gone two years now - your mom and I were marveling at how much time has passed, and how fast. Dad’s been gone a month, an amount of time that almost offends me, so quickly did it sneak past. How can I already be fatherless for a whole month?
After many machinations I flew home from Alaska to a place in the cornfields. Walking into their house was so hard - mom was there as usual but knowing dad’s absence is now a forever thing was like walking through one of those invisible spider webs, it can’t be seen but it’s all over everything, the terrible sad fact of your forever goneness.
Us kids didn’t talk about a eulogy or anything. We were all a bit stunned. Father M. came and gave a sermon and a little recollection of dad, having called mom to console her in the days just following. My sister wrote something really nice. Her efforts to hold it together made everyone cry. I could feel her grief like a physical thing. She was the special one, so frail, her future so uncertain. How mom and dad protected her growing up, how dad ached to keep her safe at all times, even I a child could see how vulnerable her surgeries made him.
I had a few words written asking if everyone would join me in one of me and dad’s favorite songs to sing in church side by side. I think dad liked it for the same reasons I like it, How Great Thou Art contains a lot of references to the natural world, where dad was his most natural and relaxed self. I imagined, when coming up with this idea, that I’d be leading a few dozen people at most. I started the song with K. holding my hand and did pretty good. I could hear my voice magnified by the microphone no matter how much I leaned away from it and it did not crack and I hit the high notes that always made dad look over at me in approval. Then I looked up during the second verse and saw all those people singing, every single one of them, and my voice trembled and broke along with my heart and I know it was not my imagination when they sang louder, and some of the voices are professional choir voices and soared like birds and it was beautiful. There was a moment when the last word rang through the room and there was a strong sense that everyone felt united in and by our grief for dad, a fleeting bittersweet moment that stretched out and then faded away. I hiccuped with sobs. Karen squeezed my hand. You did so good, girls, whispered our sister-in-law. My stoic brother said nothing, his eyes shining as we walked down the aisle after dad’s ashes, borne ahead by his brothers-in-law who truly loved him having spent the Christmases and Memorial Days of the last fifty plus years together.
I had the same feeling of awe steal into my stomach that I felt when I saw your urn as when when I saw the urn of dad’s ashes (and will I ever recover from reading the words “cremation rights have been accorded”? I will not) I regretted not seeing him, just as I regretted not seeing you. We went to the place in the cemetery where the ashes will be interred, mom’s space waiting next to him.
How I miss him. How terrible that I’ll never see him again. How grateful I am, to have had him as my father. He was imperfect but it turns out so am I; despite his imperfections and mine, he loved me with all of his heart, and did everything in his power to protect me and give me the opportunity to lead a happy and productive life, which I mostly have thanks mostly to his and mom’s influence. He was unhappy in his last days, the illness stealing his joy in living, but he felt our love right up til the end, I”m sure of that.
How lucky I’ve been, to have had both of you in my life. How I hope to be worthy of both of you. How sad it is, to carry on here without you, all these things I’m doing you’ll never know about, I mean I can hardly believe it myself sometimes. I thank you for giving me a taste for the adventurous life.
I don’t believe in heaven per se but I do like to think about you and your dad and my dad sitting down together somewhere eating a catfish dinner and having some draft beers, ready to scoot over and make room for anyone else who shows up. How great it would be to claim a seat at that table someday.