Auld Lang Syne

This anxiousness is new. December 31st. The waiting as the hours tick onward, obliviously, obediently, without remorse, into another year. Another January. A year is closing behind us. A year in which my dad existed. For twenty-two days, but still. He breathed. He napped. He spoke. He gummed down low-sodium pulled pork sandwiches delivered on hospital trays.

Ushering in 2019 feels like another loss. My dad’s left us already, but tonight at midnight, we—my family and I—will leave him. We’ll all awake tomorrow morning, the pillowcase damp with drool, the mattress warm, the sheet rucked, the silver sun beneath the shade—and we’ll toast frozen waffles and swirl our coffee with milk. But, a door will have closed in the night, one that he cannot follow us through. Not really. Not in the flesh. And I can’t help but feel like I’m somehow betraying him.  

It’s an odd journey, this calendar of grief, marking time, fighting the distance that you both need and resent, in order to move forward. I was dreading this day more than the holidays, more than the anniversary of his passing just on the horizon. Perhaps it’s the finality of it. I know he isn’t coming back. I’ve known that for a while now. I think I even knew that when he was still alive, but so diminished from disease that he turned to shadow. But, tonight. Tonight is a punctuation mark.

There’s something about reaching the end of the calendar year, sealing all our baggage inside a tidy box and sending it off in the explosion of fireworks, buzz of noisemakers, and showers of confetti. We guzzle Prosecco and recite a 230-year old Scottish poem and drink to times long past, to old friends. We count down from ten and magically our load is lightened. We seduce the coming year with promises of being a better wife, a more patient mother, a more doting daughter. We vow and fantasize and throw out the stale Christmas cookies. We stop cursing for a day and buy yoga pants. We put down our smart phones and read a book. We splurge on flowers in the winter. We light a $38 candle. Because why not? 

We get our tabula rasa. A clear conscience. A new start. Except.
Except for the years when January 1st seems more like an end.

Dad, oh how I wish you could come with us...

Even if just for auld lang syne.
Even if only for twenty-two days. 

Princeton

Dear Dad,

It’s been almost seven months and I rarely think about you sick anymore. Mostly when you come to me now, you are tan, energized, sinew and muscle, your face reflecting one of a myriad of expressions from my youth: Your burst of elation behind a softball fence after Amy or I strike out the clean-up hitter. Your pursed-lip pause, preparing your delivery before you relay a joke. Your singular focus while scooping buttered lima beans up to your mouth or scraping the extra tomato sauce off a pizza. Your engrossed scrutiny of the Bear’s offensive line in the Red zone with that brief flicker of your eyelids as you straighten your glasses above the nose.  

I can conjure up your sounds and smells with wine-glass clarity. Other memories materialize surreptitiously like a bur, adhering to my clothing, attaching to me without my even being aware. Like the morning in the cemetery when you taught me to drive in the portly red cargo van or the afternoon we peered out at the Grand Canyon, dizzy from its magnitude. Each recollection finds me like a lovely accident, a trigger from a time elapsed; a brief hiatus permitting me to wade in wistfulness for a while, leaving me homesick for you to return to us.

I hear the pad of your worn running shoes on the pavement next to me as we jog. Your breath spewing out in forceful gusts, your body consuming, disposing, recycling air. I hear you calling me ‘Emmy’ from the bottom of the stairs at home. You were only person who ever called me that.  I miss it….the sugar-dusted endearment, the soft familiarity of your greeting. I hear the jangle of your laugh as it rumbles out of you with abandon, striking a high note and then dissolving into a cough, like it caught even you off guard. Then the smile, still lingering on your face: an offering of respect to whatever earned your amusement. I haven’t heard that sound in such a long time. You stopped laughing years before you left.  It’s stubborn to access, to really pin it down, but I resurrected it on my walk the other day and it stopped me cold. Reliving your laugh made me sob.

I smell you too. Not the soured medicine scent that sat with you in sickness. That blows past me like some stranger tipping a cigarette out a passing car. What lingers are the smells of my childhood. The warm, stuffy foulness of the single bathroom we all shared down in Marco after you exited clutching the newspaper and whipped on the exhaust. (It was always ill-advised to follow you if reading material was involved.)  I can still smell the bar soap on your skin after a shower, even though you’d be sweating through your shirt five minutes later. I smell ham frying, crackling and sizzling on the kitchen skillet with the Villager’s white lunch paper slapped on the counter, the expiration date several days past. I smell charcoal from the barbeque. Chlorine from the pool. Pert Plus shampoo. Wood dust from the hardware store. The fragrance of old flannel while hugging your neck.

You weren’t fancy. I could pick your tatty toothbrush and greased comb out of a lineup with ease. We all could. You didn’t need much for yourself, but you longed to give us everything. And you did. You found mom. Right there, that was everything. You couldn’t have chosen a better mother for us. You couldn’t have gifted us a better life.

You injected us with confidence. You were relentless when it came to practicing sports, but you made sure we reached our plateau. For one brief snippet of time in our little corner of River Forest, I could actually say I was the best at something. You infected us with hunger, the drive to excel. I know with every fiber of my being that had you not gotten sick, Bridget would already be catching with her glove. You would have been blown away by the athletic prowess of your grandsons, pacing proudly on the sidelines of Brady’s soccer games, perched on the bleachers at Jack’s wrestling meets. And 3-year-old Grace, well, you’d chuckle when she’d argue with you over how to grip the t-ball bat. You’d be endlessly amused at her bossiness.

As we tour your University campus, misty with rain, I picture you here, darting under archways, turning corners, hustling to wrestling practice, running laps in the football stadium: A shadow in constant motion at an age younger than me now. Your original self in this place. Before Mom. Before all of us. Before air-conditioned student centers and WiFi. But, I attended your reunions, chubby-cheeked in tiger apparel and then later, lean and awkward in bright orange shorts. The last one I came to, I was pregnant with your granddaughter. Over the years, I detected the pride in your voice. I know you were happy here. Happy enough to pretend to tear up my Stanford tuition checks. I suspect you found your stride: You left home. You made friends. You exceled. You grew into yourself.

I am humbled to walk over this old colonial ground. Many feet have tread here. I wonder if any of our footprints lined up, yours and mine. If I have, at any point today, managed to step, even partially in your big shoes. I have peace that you trust our judgment to leave a bit of you behind in this dirt, a home that once absorbed your salt and your sweat. We leave you in dust to settle where you might, to mingle with the sanctity of this place, its storied history. We leave you to soak into the earth, to grow with the bark of some tree, a blade of grass, a seed of a dandelion. Just as you once grew into a man here.

As we move on and forward as a family, toward September 11^th, your 69^th birthday that will never come, toward holidays without you flanking the dining room table, the firsts will all be tender, skin grafts over a burn. The subsequent years are destined to be less raw. In my grief, I am meanwhile savoring the moments that visit me, sometimes as ephemeral and fleeting as a hummingbird in a garden. Graceful moments that both assault and comfort me at the most random, arbitrary occasions: Embracing the jarring reaction a can of Coke provokes in line at the Jewel, the tears that are triggered by an orange shirt passing up and away by escalator, the heartache of an empty clay baseball diamond at sunset.

I have encountered you on walks, while driving in the car, in my tumbling thoughts before sleep, as I chop vegetables, and while staring out of airplane windows, wondering where you are. Where you went. Distantly aware you are somehow in all these places, everywhere at once, coiled and ready to remind me the next time I smell burnt ham that you are far, but not so far.

Love you, Dad.

Room 14

I let out a scream so savage my children froze. As I hugged my foot, writhing on the floor mat at the base of the stairs, my younger daughter resumed her mermaid play in the next room. When I was finally able to mouth the word “ICE” to my one child capable of empathy, she raced dutifully to the kitchen as if released from a hypnotic spell.  I glared at the rogue toddler boot that precipitated my fall. Black rubber boot on black tile.  It seemed to mock me, motionless and unscathed.

Later, with my mom sandwiched between the two girls on the couch, I hobbled out to my car clutching my dad’s foam-handled quad cane for support. I drove to the ER solemnly, my left foot already numb from the ice.

It was the same drive I made two months before when I had gotten that text from my mom at 11:30am on a Monday morning – Dad is dying. I had flown out the door, one arm threaded through my sagging coat, and shifted the car into reverse. I cut through side-streets and careened through stop signs with the faintest tap of the breaks.  Another text came through. You may not make it. I accelerated and glared at the digital clock as if it were an hourglass - that my stare alone might hold back the trickle of sand.

Eight minutes later, I catapulted into the ER waiting room, flushed and breathless, spitting out my dad’s name at the registration desk. A security guard escorted me through the automatic double doors into a make-shift waiting room. My hands pulsed.  I paced anxiously. Let me be on time. Let me be on time.  Someone finally came to lead me down the far hallway. I have no recollection of who this person was – whether it was a he or a she, a nurse or a custodian. I was solely focused on getting to him.

Standing in front of Room 14, I bit my lip and pulled back the grey curtain. He was lying there, unconscious, but still breathing.  Audible and strained. His mouth was agape, eyes closed. My mom turned her head toward me, tear-streaked and tender. We touched and folded over dad as if sealing an envelope.  

This visit was different, of course. I ambled into the ER waiting room, hopping on one foot like a deranged kangaroo. Even the crazies looked up. I settled into a vinyl chair with a puddle of coffee spilled underneath and read my book. After a half hour, I pulled the ice pack out from under my sock and placed it down on the seat next to me.  When they finally called me, I was wheeled down the main hall and over to the left. I inhaled sharply.  I knew what room lie just ahead.  

They apologized. All beds were full - I’d have to settle for a gurney in the hallway. I crawled onto the cot, my back square to Room 14, the 100-square-foot windowless void where they take patients with a DNR to die. It is a room that doesn’t require a view.

I twisted my torso, my neck craning to steal a glance behind me. Dimness pooled underneath the drawn curtain. Behind it, my dad’s last breath had commingled with the air, dispersing molecules and microbes onto the safety rail, the monitors, the tile floor, onto that very curtain.

An X-Ray technician arrived soon after to take images of my foot. When she deposited me back to my hallway, I asked her to pivot the gurney around. She eyed me strangely, but I didn’t explain. Room 14 was both a beacon and a betrayal. The thick industrial curtain, rippling along its track, entranced me. My dad had been behind it.  Alive. Just 50 some days before.  I couldn’t tear away my gaze. Its proximity was all-consuming, stripping my sadness down to the studs, demanding intensity like staring a cobra in the eye.  I was raw. I was broken. I was simultaneously healing.

A radiologist walked toward me and cleared her throat. Hairline fracture. Six weeks in a boot. I watched her mouth move. Working on your discharge papers. Discharge.  The nurse fitted me into a walking cast and placed crutches under my arms. When it was time to leave, I glanced at the room and my legs twitched as if snared on a fish hook.  I was leaving him again. Like I did in January, when we finally willed ourselves to gather our coats, our purses, our tissues and open the curtain – his body still warm, his face already sallow.  I exited down the ramp on crutches and steered my car out of the parking lot before I had to pull over and sob. A $250 co-pay and I was going home. My dad never made it out.  

The morning after I wrote my dad’s eulogy, my wise and wonderful friend in St. Louis gave me permission to go on eulogizing him. That I didn’t have to encapsulate my grief or say goodbye with one succinct memorial.  A week after. A month after. A year after. They would all be different.  What I didn’t expect was that I would keep knowing him.  That I would continue to learn things after his absence. I considered him already summarized in my head, a tapestry of childhood anecdotes and memories that for whatever reason were the moments I retained.

    

And yet, I am discovering him in artifacts. In stories shared by those who knew him even longer than me. I am excavating him in basement boxes of souvenirs and old papers. In class rings and certificates. Amidst his keepsakes, my mom discovered a letter, dated 1970, from a New York modeling agency who had seen my dad’s football picture and wanted to photograph him. He never pursued it or told anyone, but here was that letter, saved amongst his treasures, a secret that likely amused and emboldened him. I found myself wishing I could tease him.

In another pile, I came across a hand-written note on the back of a white envelope, scrawled by his mother when my dad was in high school: “You must be hungry after practice. There are strawberries for you in the kitchen. Love, Mother.”  I never knew my grandmother or had glimpsed her handwriting. She died before I was born. I traced my fingers over the long, loopy curves of her penmanship.  It was a simple note. Why he kept it, I’ll never know, but those strawberries seized me. They were his favorites. Not the winter ones with their hollowed cores, but the ones that drip sweetness when you take your first bite. I would often bring a Tupperware full to the hospital, sliced and dusted in sugar to disguise their off-season tartness. Even when his appetite had waned toward the end, he would eat every one. His mother knew. 

Since my accident, I put on my compression sock each morning and fasten my broken foot into a bulky black boot. It is meant to contain it, to keep it stagnant, in place. But, every night, I feel its throbbing ache.  And so, I settle myself in our living room chair, prop my foot up on the ottoman and unravel my bandages. Sometimes I read. Sometimes I sit and listen to the creaks in the house, the chatter of my girls upstairs. My dad’s cane waits loyally by my side. I wonder if I will miss it after I heal.  For now, I stretch my foot out and wait. It seems all it wants is some time to breathe.

Weight

It is a hair shy of nine pounds. I don’t know why I felt compelled to weigh it. But there it is, the bar hovering in mid-air on my parent’s beam scale. When the funeral director first handed the box to me, the density of it surprised me. How much should ash weigh?  He asked if I needed help bringing the box out to the car - like they do at a grocery store when an old lady is leaning on her cane or a frenzied mom is juggling three kids and a cart full of frozen pizzas.  It seemed a bit excessive, but I suppose I had my own impediment.  He had seen my tears at the funeral.

I shrugged him off politely and carried my dad out into the cold.  It didn’t feel right putting him on the floor mat. I scanned my back seat and placed him in my daughter’s booster chair. After a moment of hesitation, I decided to pull the shoulder buckle around and click him in. 

I drove the half mile to my parents’ house, soberly, carefully, with tears blotting my eyes.  My dad had left on a stretcher exactly two weeks before - carried out the front door into an ambulance and now I was carrying him back in.  When he was discharged from the hospital, bound for the nursing home, my mom had the sagacity to have the medical transport detour past their house. I wonder if my dad knew then as he looked out the window. I am consumed with the hope that his final glance of their red brick English Tudor offered him something profound.

I am in my parents’ house alone now and I’m not sure where to put him. Later this spring when the ground is mossy green and the warm wind flips up our hair, our family will pick a weekend.  We will fly out east and scatter his ashes in his Elysian Fields, his college campus that marked the pinnacle of his athletic success. We will find a robust, patriarchal tree with branches as thick as elephant limbs - one that is worthy of him and we will lay him to rest.  His fragments of bone, his dust, his DNA.  I am at ease with leaving him there in the earth’s care.

But, for now he needs a sojourn. Perhaps in the living room where he sat and read the sports section before he stopped being able to concentrate on the words?  Or my old bedroom, where he spent his final year, shifting from the chair to his bed with his diaper between his legs and his knees wobbling beneath him?  Or even the basement, where his shelved athletic trophies overlook sofa cushions greased with the oil from his hair.  I consider the rooms carefully, anxious of what he might approve - as if he still has a say. As if he might claim his own vantage point from which to watch life unfold in this house. My mom coming down in her robe to brew the morning coffee. The grandkids setting up the toy train tracks.  Blake basting a ham in the oven for Easter brunch.

I lean against my parents’ sliding back door. The glass is cold and shocking against my cheek. I peer beyond the garage at the house on the adjacent block where my dad grew up. It remained in my dad’s family for decades, passing through his parents, to one brother and then the next.  When my parents bought the house saddled up right behind it in 1980 it seemed almost kismet.  A looming 6-foot privacy fence now surrounds the underground pool where my dad taught us to swim.  I marvel at how I never noticed how small my dad’s circumference was.  Even when he was healthy, most of his life: his home, his work and his history were confined to four neighborhood blocks.   

The scale of it saddens me. I wonder if he had regrets. I wonder if the human life span might just be long enough to disguise its brevity until it smacks us in the face.

The truth is we are lucky if we get to watch our parents die. Give their eulogy. Hold them in a box.   Mourn their absence. I can only hope my daughters will do the same for me someday.  It is the natural order of things.  The alternative is inconceivable.

I think of my girls and wonder if I handled it right. The way I told them, poised like dolls on the love seat, quiet hands at their sides, sensing my heaviness. I tried to keep it simple. Grandpa was old. Grandpa’s heart was sick. Grandpa died and he is not coming back.  Perhaps I should have googled in the driveway how to articulate death to kids. My three-year-old wept. The older one asked questions and later cried when I tucked her into bed.  I have a sense that they are okay.

A few days after the funeral, I dropped off my youngest at day care.  The teacher opened the door and my daughter chirped matter-of-factly, “My grandpa died like our goldfish died.”  I shrugged and took a deep breath. Devoid of emotion, that is pretty much the gist of it. 

I pull my face away from the glass and carry the box through the empty house, room by room, waiting for what feels right - not wanting to put him down.  I am used to the weight of it now and somehow, it begins to feel impossibly light. I’m trying to comprehend how the strongest, most solid man I knew could be reduced to fit into a container the size of a tissue box.  How a heavy weight wrestling champion could disintegrate into matter that doesn’t tip nine pounds.

I envision how my dad must have cradled me thirty-seven years ago in that hospital room, his firstborn daughter, a squirming pink-faced infant curled up like a snail in his tan September arms.  I must have felt so impossibly small to him.  An 8lbs 15oz gift that instantly made him a dad. 

We have changed places in perfect symmetry. I see that it is my turn to do the carrying.  

Dad

One of my dad’s favorite movies was Lawrence of Arabia, which won Best Picture in 1963. I always loved watching the Academy Awards with him. He was a movie buff and could rattle off the actors’ names in the In Memoriam segment faster than the producers could identify them on the screen.  As I was composing my thoughts last night, I hid in my home office and lit a candle.  I was reminded of his favorite line in that movie when Peter O’Toole extinguishes the match between his thumb and finger.

“Of course it hurts,” O’Toole says. “The trick is not minding that it hurts.” I smiled thinking of all the times he had impressed us with that maneuver when we were growing up. He was the strongest man I knew. 

After my dad passed away yesterday, our family sat around him, sorting through all the memories that encompassed who he was. The good stuff: before the depression, mania, electric shock therapy, and heart failure. The times before overflowing pill boxes and the embarrassment he felt while eating in front of others because the Parkinson’s made his hands shake.  

We recalled the many hours Amy and I spent pitching to him in our driveway - him suited up in full catcher’s gear and perched on a painter’s bucket.  We remembered the time he literally leapt from the stands in jubilation when Blake qualified for state at a high school wrestling meet.  We were reminded of that family trip we took to Mexico - how he and Tony Navilio belted out country western songs while riding these scrawny, geriatric horses down the beach.  And we thought of him, marching proudly in the Princeton alumni parade, sporting that ostentatious, striped orange jacket. We can see him so clearly, lacing up his beat-up running shoes that he’d tape together out of frugality or piling his plate with peeled shrimp at an all-you-can-eat-buffet, determined the restaurant would lose money on him.

I thought about how strong his back was.  How large and looming it was to me as a child.  I envisioned him scaling the rope in our backyard and lifting us up in the swimming pool with his arms outstretched.

I used to love to sniff the collar of his flannel shirt when he came home from the hardware store at 6 o’clock every night.  He’d give me a hug and I’d breathe it in.  It was really just wood dust, plastic hoses and peat moss, but to me it was dad.   Years later, when I found myself homesick while studying abroad in Australia, I’d frequent an old local hardware store down the street from my house.  I’d wander the aisles, sometimes finding something small to buy.  I was on the other side of the planet, but the smell was the same.  It instantly transported me home.

Amy asked my mom when she thought dad had been the happiest. She told us it was probably when we were growing up.  When he was coaching us or driving us to practice or watching proudly from the sidelines.  He was our most devoted fan. 

My dad drew a short straw in the twilight of his life.  Chicago’s 1967 Athlete of the Year wouldn’t ultimately get to be the grandpa who’d teach his granddaughters how to hit off a tee or model how to perform the perfect half nelson to his grandsons.  Yet, they loved him as ‘grandpa’ without judgment, accepting that even the strong can become frail.

Two years ago he was in the ICU on Christmas Eve and the staff told us that he would likely not make through the night. We reflected on how he had been slowly leaving for us for a while – how the quality of his life had been dissipating like the air from a carbonated can.

Yesterday as he took his final breaths, my mom gave him permission to go…to be free of affliction, free of suffering, free of the physical demands that had become too much for his body. He was unconscious, but it was as if he heard her and listened.   

We were all with him through the afternoon after he passed. We sat around my dad in the dim, our own continued vigil in room 14 - One of us occasionally pulling back the curtain to enter the glare and commotion of the hospital to make a call outside, to make preparations.  At one point, we paused to listen to a woman in an adjacent room singing a hymn. With us going in and out, he was still a part of it all.  A part of our family unit.  It took us a few hours to feel ready to leave him.  And as I stood there, the sheer finality of the moment seized me–it would be the last time we would all be alone together.

It’s heartbreaking the things that make you laugh in the most bewildering circumstances. As we were planning the funeral gathering, we contemplated the idea of buying some flowers to beautify the space. We quickly discounted the idea, knowing that my dad would have hated spending the money on arrangements.  I said, “Actually what dad probably would have approved of, is a bouquet of dandelions.” Being a hardware man who sold weed killer, he always teased that they were his favorite flower.

I will think of him in the summer when I see those yellow faces persevering in the most unlikely of places - Darting up through the sidewalk cracks and skirting chain-link fences.  I may even encourage my girls to blow on them when they turn to seed, scattering them to the wind.  Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes. They are the strongest flowers I know.

Dad, I want to say that it hurts. I’m trying not to mind that it hurts, but it’s not just a simple match.  A much grander light was extinguished…and it hurts.